This reminds me of the outsourcing panic, many years ago. Hiring cheaper talent overseas seemed like a no brainer, so everyone's job was in danger. Of course, it turned out that it was not as simple, it came with its own costs, and somehow the whole thing just settled. I wonder if the same will happen here. In this line of work, it's almost as when you know exactly what you want to build, you are 90% there. AI helps you with the rest.
Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
501–510 of 886 posts
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think also a critical weakness is that LLMs are trained on the code people write ... and our code doesn't annotate what was written by a human and what was suggested by a tool. In your analogy, this would be like if your sat nav system suggests that you turn right where other people have turned right ... because they were directed to turn by their sat nav.
In fact, I'm pretty sure this already happens and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Some of the "alternate routes" Google Maps has suggested for me in the past are almost certainly due to other people making unscheduled detours for gas or whatever, and the algorithm thinks "oh this random loop on a side street is popular, let's suggest it". And then anyone silly enough to follow the suggestion just adds more…
Long before any use of LLMs, OsmAnd would direct you, if you were driving past Palo Alto, to take a congested offramp to the onramp that faced it across the street. There is no earthly reason to do that; just staying on the freeway is faster and safer.
So it's not obvious to me that patently crazy directions must come from watching people's behavior. Something else is going on.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#503What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.
There is little evidence that AI is replacing engineers, but there is a whole lot of evidence that shareholders and execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.
> execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.
reminds me of the offshoring hype in the early 2000's. Where it worked, it worked well but it wasn't the final solution for all of software development that many CEOs wanted it to be.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#504Agreed - AI agents are simply a form of outsourcing and companies that go all in on that premise will get bonked hard. Getting into cyber security might be a gold mine in spite of all the AI generated code that is going to be churned out in this transition period.
Name one successful company that doesn’t outsource developer labor outside America.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though? Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory. Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software…
LLMs are a much bigger jump in productivity than moving to a high level language.
At least for the type of coding I do, if someone gave me the choice between continuing to work in a modern high-level language (such as C#) without LLM assistance, or switching to a low-level language like C with LLM assistance, I know which one I would choose.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#506I agree with the statement in the title.
Using AI to write code does two things:
1. Everything seems to go faster at first until you have to debug it because the AI can't seem to be able to fix the issue... It's hard enough to debug code you wrote yourself. However, if you work with code written by others (team environment) then maybe you're used to this, but not being able to quickly debug code you're responsible for will shoot you in the foot.
2. You brain neurons in charge of code production will be naturally re-assigned for other cognitive tasks. It's not like riding a bicycle or swimming which once learned is never forgotten. It's more like advanced math, which if you don't practice you can forget.
Short term gain; long term pain.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#507> The result? We’ll have a whole wave of programmers who are more like AI operators than real engineers.
I was a developer for over a decade, and pretty much what I did day-to-day was plumb together existing front end libraries, and write a little bit of job-specific code that today's LLMs could certainly have helped me with, if they'd existed at the time. I agree that the really complicated stuff can't yet be done by AI, but how sure are we that that'll always be true? And the idea that a mediocre programmer can't debug code written by another entity is also false, I did it all the time. In any case, I don't resonate with the idea that the bottom 90% of programmers are doing important, novel, challenging programming that only a special genius can do. They paid us $180k a year to download NPM packages because they didn't have AI. Now they have AI, and the future is uncertain with respect to just how high programmers will be flying ten years from now.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It wa…
> Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? I feel like it's a bit different this time because LLMs aren't just an abstraction. To make an analogy: Ruby on Rails serves a similar role as highways—it's a quick path to get where you're going, but once you learn the major highways in a metro area you can very easily break out and explore and learn the surface streets. LLMs are a G…
The problem is now that the LLM GPS will lead you to the wrong place once a day on average, and then you still need either open the map and study where you are and figure out the route, or refine the destination address and pray it will bring you to the correct place. Such a great analogy!
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are skating where bleachers full of hype men are screaming that the puck will go.
I think the common theme is that a lot of people: meaning both people in the community, like here on HN, and people making decisions in industry, are treating AI today as if it's what they hope it will be in five years. That's a very leveraged bet, which isn't always the wrong call, but I'm not convinced they are aware that that's what they're doing. I think this is different from the usual hype cycle.
It's not very different from people using all their retirement money to buy a monkey NFT. Or pushing everybody else's retirement money into houses sold at prices people clearly can not pay.
Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think my comment read as snarky but I was surprised to see the immediate downvote which presumably came from you so I only added the last sentence. I can't downvote you because you are downthread of me. HN shadow-disables downvotes on all child and grandchild comments. I'm the one who upvoted you to counteract the downvote. :)
And then they hugged and became lifelong friends :)
You never know - one moment arguing on HN and the second moment you know, drinking at the bar lamenting on how AI is gonna replace us :)