Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

defragzone.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 886 posts

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#511

Post by NicuCalcea »

Workers in various industries have pled for their jobs and programmers said "no, my code can replace you". Now that automation is coming for them, it's suddenly "the dumbest mistake".

Tech has "disrupted" many industries, leaving some better, but many worse. Now that "disruption" is pointed inwards.

Programmers will have to adapt to the new market conditions like everyone else. There will either be fewer jobs to go around (like what happened to assembly line workers), or they will have to switch to doing other tasks that are not as easy to replace yet (like bank tellers).

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#512

Post by tgv »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

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…

> And then they backfill their knowledge over time.

If only. There are too many devs who've learnt to write JS or Python, and simply won't change. I've seen one case where someone ported an existing 20k C++ app to a browser app in the most unsuitable way with emscripten, where a 1100 lines of typescript do a much better job.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#513

Post by britzkopf »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

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…

Who the hell, in today's market, is going to hire an engineer with a tenuous grasp on foundational technological systems, with the hope that one day they will backfill?!

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#514

Post by fragmede »

ssimpson wrote: post #404
nerder92 wrote: post #155

This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions: 1. AI code ability will be the same as is today 2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change…

I tend to agree with you. The general pattern behind "x tool came along that made work easier" isn't to fire a bunch of folks, its to make the people that are there work whatever increment of ease of work more. ie, if the tool cuts work in half, you'd be expected to do 2x more work. Automation and tools almost never "makes our lives easier", it just removes some of the lower value added work. It would be nice to live…

> but our overlords won't let that happen

If you have a job, working for a boss, you're trading your time for money. If you're a contractor and negotiate being paid by the project, you're being paid for results. Trading your time for money is the underlying contract. That's the fundamental nature of a job working for somebody else. You can escape that rat race if you want to.

Someone I know builds websites for clients on a contract basis, and did so without LLMs. Within his market, he knows what a $X,000 website build entails. His clients were paying that rate for a website build out prior to AI-augmented programming, and it would take a week to do that job. With help from LLMs, that same job now takes half as much time. So now he can choose to take on more clients and take home more pay, or not, and be able to take it easy.

So that option is out there, if you can make that leap. (I haven't)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#515

Post by Retr0id »

natch wrote: post #278
Retr0id wrote: post #20

I don't have anything against this style of writing in particular, but it's a shame it makes me assume it was written by an LLM

It was.

My first impressions prevented me from reading more than the first sentence, so I didn't want to state it so confidently ;)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#516

Post by fiso64 »

bwfan123 wrote: post #265
dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

A "causal model" is needed to fix bugs ie, to "root-cause" a bug. LLMs yet dont have the idea of a causal-model of how something works built-in. What they do have is pattern matching from a large index and generation of plausible answers from that index. (aside: the plausible snippets are of questionable licensing lineage as the indexes could contain public code with restrictive licensing) Causal models require machi…

>Causal models require machinery which is symbolic, which is able to generate hypotheses and test and prove statements about a world. LLMs are not yet capable of this and the fundamental architecture of the llm machine is not built for it.

Prove that the human brain does symbolic computation.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#518

Post by helge9210 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #357
neom wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that you brought no-code tools into this because I think it's interesting it never worked correctly. My guess is: on one side, things like squarespace and wix get super super good for building sites that don't feel like squarespace and wix, (I'm not sure I'd want to be a pure "website dev" right now - although I think squarespace squashed a lot of that long ago) - and then very very nice tooling for "real engi…

Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it. Of course, sometimes it tampers with your data in horrifying ways because something you entered (or imported into the system from elsewhere) just happened to look kinda like a date, even though it was intended to be something completely different. So there's that.

Excel is a programming system with pure functions, imperative code (VBA/Python recently), database (cell grid, sheets etc.) and visualization tools.

So, not really "no-code".

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#519

Post by selfmodruntime »

NicuCalcea wrote: post #511

Workers in various industries have pled for their jobs and programmers said "no, my code can replace you". Now that automation is coming for them, it's suddenly "the dumbest mistake". Tech has "disrupted" many industries, leaving some better, but many worse. Now that "disruption" is pointed inwards. Programmers will have to adapt to the new market conditions like everyone else. There will either be fewer jobs to go a…

The real funny thing is that now we‘re replacers and the replaced at the same time. We plead to ourselves.

The wings have begun melting and nothing will stop it. Finally, Icarus has flown too close to the sun.

Post reply on HN