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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#591

Post by bgoated01 »

lolinder wrote: post #381
hombre_fatal wrote: post #303

Earlier 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…

I'm the kind of guy who decently likes maps, and I pay attention to where I'm going and also to the map before, during, and after using a GPS (Google maps). I do benefit from Google maps in learning my way around a place. It depends on how you use it. So if people use LLMs to code without trying to learn from it and just copy and paste, then yeah, they're not going to learn the skills themselves. But if they are paying attention to the answers they are getting from the LLMs, adjusting things themselves, etc. then they should be able to learn from that as well as they can from online code snippets, modulus the (however occasional) bad examples from the LLM.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#592

Post by chubot »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #443
supergarfield wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's all fun and games until you realise you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. If the issue is that the AI can't code, then yes you shouldn't replace the programmers: not because they're good consumers, just because you still need programmers. But if the AI can replace programmers, then it's strange to argue that programmers should still get employed just so they can get money to consume, even though…

The natural conclusion I see is dropping the delusion that every human must work to live. If automation progresses to a point that machines and AI can do 99% of useful work, there's an argument to be made for letting humanity finally stop toiling, and letting the perhaps 10% of people who really want to do the work do the work. The idea that "everybody must work" keeps harmful industries alive in the name of jobs. It…

The problem is that such a conclusion is not stable

We could decide this one minute, and the next minute it will be UN-decided

There is no "global world order", no global authority -- it is a shifting balance of power

---

A more likely situation is that the things AI can't do will increase in value.

Put another way, the COMPLEMENTS to AI will increase in value.

One big example is things that exist in the physical world -- construction, repair, in-person service like restaurants and hotels, live events like sports and music (see all the ticket prices going up), mining and drilling, electric power, building data centers, manufacturing, etc.

Take self-driving cars vs. LLMs.

The thing people were surprised by is that the self-driving hype came first, and died first -- likely because it requires near perfect reliability in the physical world. AI isn't good at that

LLMs came later, but had more commercial appeal, because they don't have to deal with the physical world, or be reliable

So there are are still going to many domains of WORK that AI can't touch. But it just may not be the things that you or I are good at :)

---

The world changes -- there is never going to be some final decision of "humans don't have to work"

Work will still need to be done -- just different kinds of work. I would say that a lot of knowledge work is in the form of "bullshit jobs" [1]

In fact a reliable test of a "bullshit job" might be how much of it can be done by an LLM

So it might be time for the money and reward to shift back to people who accomplish things in the physical world!

Or maybe even the social world. I imagine that in-person sales will become more valuable too. The more people converse with LLMs, I think the more they will cherish the experience of conversing with a real person! Even if it's a sales call lol

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#593

Post by zozbot234 »

sophacles wrote: post #574
zozbot234 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Boring" tech stacks tend to be highly scalable in their own right - certainly more so than the average of trendy newfangled tech. So what's a lot more likely is that the trendy newfangled tech will fail to meet your needs and you'll be moving to some even newer and trendier tech, at surprisingly high cost. The point of picking the "boring" choice is that it keeps you off that treadmill.

I'm not disagreeing with anything you said here - reread my comment. Sometimes you want to use the sophisticated shiny new tech because you actually need it. Here's a recent example from a real situation: The linux kernel (a boring tech these days) has a great networking stack. It's choking on packets that need to be forwarded, and you've already tuned all the queues and the cpu affinities and timers and polling. Do…

None of these seem all that 'trendy' to me. The real trendy approach would be something like leaping directly to a hybrid userspace-kernelspace solution using something like https://github.com/CloudNativeDataPlane/cndp and/or the https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/af_xdp.htm... addressing that the former is built on. Very interesting stuff, don't get me wrong there - but hardly something that can be said to have 'stood the test of time' like most boring tech has. (And I would include things like eBPF in that by now.)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#594

Post by Macha »

Zealotux wrote: post #53
adamors wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is essentially losing money even with a bare bones staff https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit... It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.

It's not related to engineering issues but rather the ideological shift and the fact that it became a blatant propaganda machine for its new overlord.

Ehh, as a propaganda tool it would be more useful to not have a hard login wall, which was allegedly implemented due to engineering challenges continuing to operate Twitter at its former scale. So the engineering issues are even limiting its new goals.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#595

Post by zoogeny »

I'm not sure why people are so sure one way or the other. I mean, we're going to find out. Why pretend you have a crystal ball and can see the future?

A lot of articles like this just want to believe something is true and so they create an elaborate argument as to why that thing is true.

You can wrap yourself up in rationalizations all you want. There is a chance firing all the programmers will work. Evidence beats argument. In 5 years we'll look back and know.

It is actually probably a good idea to hedge your bets either way. Use this moment to trim some fat, force your existing programmers to work in a slightly leaner environment. It doesn't feel nice to be a programmer cut in such an environment but I can see why companies might be using this opportunity.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#596

Post by just-another-se »

Though I disagree to most of things said here, I do agree that the new fleet of software engineers won't be that technically adapt. But what if they don't need to? Like how most programmers today don't need to know the machine level instructions to build something useful.

I feel there will be a paradgym shift about what programming would be altogether. I think, programmers will more be like artists, painters who would conceptualize an idea and communicate those ideas to AI to implement (not end to end though; in bits and pieces, we'd still need engineers to fit these bits and peices together - think of a new programming language but instead of syntax, there will be natural language prompting).

I've tried to pen down this exact thoughts here: https://suyogdahal.com.np/posts/engineering-hacking-and-ai/

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#597

Post by deeviant »

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…

The huge disconnect is that the skill set to use LLMs for code effectively is not the same skill set of standard software engineering. There is a very heavy intersection and I would say you cannot be effective at LLM software development without being an effective software engineer, but being an effective software engineer does not by any means make somebody good at LLM development.

Very talented engineers, coworkers, that I would place above myself in skill, seemed stumped by it, while I have realized at least a 10x productively gain.

The claim that LLMs are not being applied in mature, complex code-bases is pure fantasy, example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06972. Here Google is using LLMs to accelerate the migration of mature, complex production systems.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#598

Post by agentultra »

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…

I’m more keen on formal methods to do this than LLMs. I take the view that we need more precise languages that require us to write less code that obviously has no errors in it. LLMs are primed to generate more code using less precise specifications; resulting in code that has no obvious errors in it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#599

Post by insane_dreamer »

arrowsmith wrote: post #291
Workaccount2 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually know a professional translator and while a year ago he was full of worry, he now is much more relaxed about it. It turns out that like art, many people just want a human doing the translation. There is a strong romantic element to it, and it seems humans just have a strong natural inclination to only want other humans facilitating communication.

How do they know that a human is doing the translation? What's to stop someone from just c&ping the text into an LLM, giving it a quick proofread, then sending it back to the client and saying "I translated this"? Sounds like easy money, maybe I should get into the translation business.

1) almost all clients hire a translation agency who then farms then work out to freelance translators; payment is on a per-source-word basis.

2) the agency encourages translation tools, so long as the final content is okay (proofread by the translator), because they can then pay less (based on the assumption that it should take you less time). I’ve see rates drop in half because of it.

3) the client doesn’t know who did the translation and doesn’t care - with the exception of literary pieces where the translator might be credited on the book. (Those cases typically won’t go through an agency)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#600

Post by jvanderbot »

chubot wrote: post #592
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The natural conclusion I see is dropping the delusion that every human must work to live. If automation progresses to a point that machines and AI can do 99% of useful work, there's an argument to be made for letting humanity finally stop toiling, and letting the perhaps 10% of people who really want to do the work do the work. The idea that "everybody must work" keeps harmful industries alive in the name of jobs. It…

The problem is that such a conclusion is not stable We could decide this one minute, and the next minute it will be UN-decided There is no "global world order", no global authority -- it is a shifting balance of power --- A more likely situation is that the things AI can't do will increase in value. Put another way, the COMPLEMENTS to AI will increase in value. One big example is things that exist in the physical wor…

To say that self driving cars (a decade later with several real products rolling out) has the same, or lesser, commercial appeal than LLMs now (a year/two in, with mostly VC hype) is a bit incorrect.

Early on in AV cycles there was enormous hype for AVs, akin to LLMs. We thought truck drivers were done for. We thought accidents were a thing of the past. It kicked off a similar panic among tangential fields. Small AV startups were everywhere, and folks were selling their company to go start a new one then sell that company for enormous wealth gains. Yet 5 years later none of the "level 5" promises they made were coming true.

In hindsight, as you say, it was obvious. But it sure tarnished the CEO prediction record a bit, don't you think? It's just hard to believe that this time is different.

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