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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#631

Post by falcor84 »

Finnucane wrote: post #309
falcor84 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, that's what you're going with, arguing against the business acumen of the world's second richest person, and the only one at that scale with individual majority control over their company? As for the Metaverse, it was always intended as a very long-term play which is very early to be judged, but as an owner of a Quest headset, it's already going great for me.

The Metaverse is actually still a thing? With, like, people in it and stuff? Who knew?

Well, we aren't yet "in it", but there's a lot of fun to be had with VR (and especially AR) activities. For example, I love how Eleven Table Tennis allows me to play ping pong with another person online, such that the table and their avatar appear to be in my living room. I don't know if this is "the future", but I'm pretty confident that these sorts of interactions will get more and more common, and I think that Meta is well positioned to take advantage of this.

My big vision for this space is the integration of GenAI for creating 3d objects and full spaces in realtime, allowing the equivalent of The Magic School Bus, where a teacher could guide students on a virtual experience that is fully responsive and adjustable on the fly based on student questions. Similarly, playing D&D in such a virtual space could be amazing.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#632

Post by penjelly »

I've switched sides on this issue. I do think LLMs will reduce headcount across tech. Smaller teams will take on more features and less code will be written by hand. It'll be easier to run a startup, freelance or experiment with projects.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#633

Post by elif »

You don't fire developers and replace them with AI. This trope is often repeated and causing people to miss the actual picture of what's going on.

You use AI to disrupt a market, and that market forces the startup employing the devs to go bankrupt.

It's not a "this quarter we made a decision" thing.

It's a thing that's happening right now all over the place and snowballing.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#634

Post by snackbroken »

franktankbank wrote: post #615
snackbroken wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I probably made too many unstated leaps of logic. What I meant was: Runaway self-improving AI will almost certainly involve self-replication at some point in the early stages since "make a copy of myself with some tweaks to the model structure/training method/etc. and observe if my hunch results in improved performance" is an obvious avenue to self-improvement. After all, that's how the silly fleshbags made im…

You seem to be imagining a sentience that is still confined to the prime directive of "self-improving" where that no longer is well defined at it's scale.

No, I was just taking "runaway self-improving" as a premise because that's what the comment I was responding to did. I fully expect that at some point "self-improving" would be cast aside at the altar of "self-replicating".

That is actually the biggest long-term threat I see from an alignment perspective; As we make AI more and more capable, more and more general and more and more efficient, it's going to get harder and harder to keep it from (self-)replicating. Especially since as it gets more and more useful, everyone will want to have more and more copies doing their bidding. Eventually, a little bit of carelessness is all it'll take.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#636

Post by johnnyanmac »

RivieraKid wrote: post #307
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 surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here. AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this y…

It's the opposite. I don't think it'll replace programmers legitimately within a decade. I DO think that companies will try a lot in the months and years anyway and that programmers will be the only ones suffering the consequences of such actions.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#637

Post by cejast »

RivieraKid wrote: post #307
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 surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here. AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this y…

Nobody can tell you whether progress will continue at current, faster or slower rates - humans have a pretty terrible track record at extrapolating current events into the future. It's like how movies in the 80's made predictions about where we'll be in 30 years time. Back to the Future promised me hoverboards in 2015 - I'm still waiting!

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#638

Post by itronitron »

zozbot234 wrote: post #347
thechao wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.

> more sophisticated tech stacks Please don't do this, pick more boring tech stacks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 instead. "Sophisticated" tech stacks are a huge waste, so please save the sophisticated stuff for the 0.1% of the time where you actually need it.

Today I learned that some tech stacks are sophisticated, I suppose those are for the discerning developer.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#639

Post by bwfan123 »

fiso64 wrote: post #516
bwfan123 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We dont know what the human brain does, but we know it can produce symbolic theories or models of abstract worlds (in the case of math) or real worlds (in the case of science). It can also produce the "symbolic" turing machine which serves as an abstraction for all computation we use (cpu/gpu/etc)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#640

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> LLMs are a GPS, not a highway. They tell you what to do and where to go

It still gives you code you can inspect. There is no black box. Curious people will continue being curious.

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