61–70 of 886 posts
Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against th…
Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.
There are plenty of extinct hominids to consider.
"Let AI replace programmers" is the new "Let’s outsource everything to ." Short-term cost savings, long-term disaster.
Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?). They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting. I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without I…
What is the actual engineering discipline that goes into creating prompts? Other than providing more context, hacking the data with keywords like "please", etc?
I have learned to create a text file, and develop my questions as detailed documents, with a context establishing preamble, a goal-oriented body, and a specific result request conclusion. I submit the document as a whole, to initiate the interaction.
That usually gets me 90% of the way, and a few follow-up questions get me where I want.
But I still need to carefully consider the output, and do the work to understand and adapt it (just like with StackOverflow).
One example is from a couple of days ago. I’m writing a companion Watch app, for one of my phone apps. Watch programming is done, using SwiftUI, which has really bad documentation. I’m still very much in the learning phase for it. I encountered one of those places, where I could “kludge” something, but it doesn’t “feel” right, and there are almost no useful heuristics for it, so I asked ChatGPT. It gave me specific guidance, applying the correct concept, but using a deprecated API.
I responded, saying something like “Unfortunately, your solution is deprecated.” It then said “You’re right. As of WatchOS 10, the correct approach is…”.
Anyone with experience using SO, will understand how valuable that interaction is.
You can also ask it to explain why it recommends an approach, and it will actually tell you, as opposed to brushing you off with a veiled insult.
Many people are missing the point. The strategy for AI usage is not a long-term strategy to make the world more productive. If companies can save a buck this year, companies will do it. Period. The average manager has short-term goals that needs to fulfill, and if they can use AI to fulfill them they will do it, future be damned. To reign in on long-term consequences has always been part of government and regulations…
What Software ENGINEERING needs is standards and regulations, like any other engineering discipline. If you accept that software has become a significant enough component in society that the consequences of it breaking etc are bad, then serious software needs standards to adhere to, and people who are certified for them.
Once you have standards, the bar to actually replace certified engineers is higher and has legal risk. That way, how good AI needs to be has a higher (and safer) bar, which can properly optimise for the long term consequences.
If the software is not critical or important enough to be standardised, then let AI take over the creation. At that point, it’s not really any different to any other learning or creative endeavour.
Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against th…
Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.
You take these strange dystopian science-fiction stories that AI bros invent to scam investors for their money far too seriously.
Take banking for example.
ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking."
Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer.
Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.
It's actually shocking how little network enabled PCs impacted administrative employment. Universities, for example, employ far more administrative staff than they did before PC automated many of their tasks.
At one point (during and after dotcom), PayPal and suchlike were threatening to "turn billion dollar businesses into million dollar businesses." Reality went in the opposite direction.
We need to stop analogizing everything in the economy to manufacturing. Manufacturing is unique in its long term tendency to efficiency.other industries don't work that way.
Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against th…
> it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?
These two statements seem contradictory. These kinds of propositions always left me wondering where they come from. Viewing the universe as deterministic, yeah, I see how "preventing what is to come is not within our control" could be a true statement. But who's to say what is inevitable and what is negotiable in the first place? Is the future written in stone, or are we able to as a society negotiate what arrangements we desire?
Firing developers to replace by AI, how does that realistically work? Okay I fired half of our engineers. Now what? I hire non engineers to use AI to randomly paste code around hoping for the best? What if the AI makes the wrong assumptions about the requirement input by the non technical team, introducing subtle mistakes? What if I have an error and AI, as it often does, circles around not managing to find the prope…
I am somewhat confident in dev job prospects, but I am not confident in the qualifications of managers who sing the "AI will replace programmers" gospel.
Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?). They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting. I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without I…
We also managed to get rid of JavaScript like 15 years ago, with major backend technologies providing their own compile-to-js frameworks. But JS outlived them, because it's the whole write-run-read-debug cycle, whereas the frameworks only gave you write-run.
But JS/TypeScript is now an enterprise language (a statement that I never thought I’d say), with a huge base of expert, disciplined, and experienced programmers.