511–520 of 809 posts
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Commenting on Hacker News?
For those who claim to be developers who code no more than 5% of their time and resort to arguments like "we're already not writing machine code by hand for 50 years, how is AI different from a higher level language?", it's not commenting, it's shilling for the AI corpocracy on HN.
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This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API. OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to ge…
This is far more true for junior and perhaps mid-career engineers, unless you're working in an extremely well-defined problem space (* see below). When working as a SWE, the longer I did it (~30 years) more of my time was spent understanding the problem, the edge cases, how to handle the edge cases, how to do all of it affordable, on time, and within budget. That's engineering. What you're describing is "writing code…
got an email address in my profile if you'd be interested in talking at some point about something, or even talking about nothing in particular. (i don't normally do this sort of HN networking stuff, i find it super cringe. but there we go).
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No, I never believed in fully automated tale by Tesla, but as the LLMs improve my personal estimate for the date of human-level AGI is rapidly moving to "present". Before GPT-2 I had it somewhere in 2100, at GPT-2 I thought maybe by 2060 if we are lucky. Now I think it is 2035 or maybe even sooner.
I like to see the optimism, even if I don't share it. I think it's incredible hubris that humans think we are about to reinvent our own level of intelligence, just because we made a machine that talks pretty.
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This is an interesting answer for questions about human agency and accountability/personhood questions but I don't see how it leads to increased confidence in the role of human as SWE. If LLMs get good enough, one might be tempted to ask so what if most humans can't understand the output? Human civilization has by and large been a constant exercise in us collectively accomplishing more and more while individually com…
Do you really want to live in a world when nobody understand software that manages nuclear power plant? Or medical devices? Or financial software? Or radio transceivers firmware? Even something so boring like databases not understood could lead to disastrous effects if this would be the government database for managing people IDS. Hmm even if this would be working fine for years what would happen if bad actor would i…
Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…
Now those juniors whose job is to implement those solutions, they will have a hard time.
On my 50s, I also don't write as much code as I used to, even less nowadays with serverless, managed services, low code/no code tools, agent orchestration workflows, and with it I keep seeing development teams getting smaller.
Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ e…
I think that is significantly overlooked when people ask "where are the 50+ engineers?".
Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…
I agree in principle, but I think the 2-5% estimate is extremely low. I could be sold on most developers spending ~25%, up to 40% of their time on code. But very few people are spending 2% of their time on it. Unless you're some sort of super senior staff / advisor to the CTO at a gigantic company, which has already placed you on rare terrain.
I interviewed a ton of people in my career and when I ask "how much time writing code on your last job?". The more junior the person the more they would overestimate the time writing code (Some would say 90%!). Once they joined I was able to see how much time they really wrote code and it is almost never more than 30%.
Mostly because the code is only the final output. You spend most of your time doing research, talking to people. Working on Quarterly OKRs, going to meetings etc.
If you just write code you are either an extremely junior person that works on things trivial enough to not have to research or your are disillusioned and you don't realize you spend most of your time doing other things
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I agree in principle, but I think the 2-5% estimate is extremely low. I could be sold on most developers spending ~25%, up to 40% of their time on code. But very few people are spending 2% of their time on it. Unless you're some sort of super senior staff / advisor to the CTO at a gigantic company, which has already placed you on rare terrain.
might be closer to accurate if the 2-5% is his estimate of the physical time spent making key-strokes
But we would like to convince ourselves we don't.
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These days nobody bangs their heads over typos. LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation. Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.
LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task. It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear…
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The word “incorporate” is doing some very heavy lifting in your assertion. These LLMs already have access to the whole corpus of architectural knowledge and software best practices, and yet they’re unable to reliably implement those best practices. Why not? Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions, even when repeatedly prompted to ask clarifying questions?
> Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions Most likely because you haven't constrained their behavior in your prompt. You're making the assumption that they "understand" that using best practices is what you want. You have to tell them that, and tell them which practices they should use.