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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#651

Post by cejast »

tmnvdb wrote: post #645
cejast wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Compute power increases and algorithmic efficiency improvements have been rapid and regular. I'm not sure why you thought that Back to the Future was a documentary film.

Unless you have a crystal ball there is nothing that can give you certainty that will continue at the same or better rate. I’m not sure why you took the second half of the comment more seriously than the first.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#652

Post by tmnvdb »

layer8 wrote: post #365
RivieraKid wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I see stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994610 (continued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996895 ), I think the field still has fundamental hurdles to overcome.

Why do you think this is a fundamental hurdle, rather than just one more problem that can be solved? I dont have strong evidence either way, but I've seen a lot of 'fundamental unsurmountable problems' fall by the wayside over the past few years. So I'm not sure we can be that confident that a problem like this, for which we have very good classic algorithms, is a fundamental issue.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#653

Post by monsieurbanana »

kypro wrote: post #605
penetrarthur wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still implies that the person who is currently paying freelance programmers is 1) good with LLMs 2) knows some html and js 3) can deploy the updated website.

You're probably right that these people still need some baseline technical skills currently, but I'm really not assuming anything here – this is something we've seen multiple of our clients do in recent months. It's funny you say they need to be able to deploy the update to be honest because we had a client just last week email a collect of code snippets to us which they created with the help of AI. This is the probl…

Sounds liked programming with extra steps. And I don't like it when the extra steps involving mailing snippets of code

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#654

Post by Aiguru31415666 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#655

Post by RicoElectrico »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #502
thedanbob wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I'm pretty sure this already happens and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Some of the "alternate routes" Google Maps has suggested for me in the past are almost certainly due to other people making unscheduled detours for gas or whatever, and the algorithm thinks "oh this random loop on a side street is popular, let's suggest it". And then anyone silly enough to follow the suggestion just adds more…

Long before any use of LLMs, OsmAnd would direct you, if you were driving past Palo Alto, to take a congested offramp to the onramp that faced it across the street. There is no earthly reason to do that; just staying on the freeway is faster and safer. So it's not obvious to me that patently crazy directions must come from watching people's behavior. Something else is going on.

OsmAnd doesn't use traffic data. You can enable traffic map layers by feeding a reverse-engineered URL, though.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#656

Post by hypothesis »

xp84 wrote: post #648
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…

> It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. I agree with this completely. However the problem that I think the article gets at is still real because junior engineers also can't do significant changes on a mature codebase when they first start out. They used to do the 'easy stuff' which freed the rest of us up to do bigger stuff. But: 1. Companies like mine don't hire juniors any…

> So now who is going to train those juniors to get to the level where we need them to be to make those "significant changes"?

Founders will cash out long before that becomes an issue. Alternatively, the hype is true and they will obsolete programmers, also solving the issue above…

This is quite devious if you think about it, withering pipeline of new devs and only them having an immediate fix in all cases.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#657

Post by mulmboy »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #617
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…

> The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs After 20 years in tech, I can't think of a single company I've worked for/with that would fit the profile of an "intelligent" company. All of them make poor and irrational decisions r…

> After 20 years in tech, I can't think of a single company I've worked for/with that would fit the profile of an "intelligent" company. All of them make poor and irrational decisions regularly. I think you over-estimate the intelligence of leadership whilst simultaneously under-estimating their greed and eventual ability to self-destruct.

Says nothing about companies and everything about you

> you also over-estimate the desire for developers to increase their productivity with AI. I use AI to reduce complexity and give me more breathing room, not to increase my output.

I'm the same. But I expect that once many begin to do this, there will be some who do use it for productivity and they will set the bar. Then people like you and I will either use it for productivity or fall behind.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#658

Post by elric »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #19

For each programmer who actually spends their time on complex design work or fixing difficult bugs, there are many more doing what amounts to clerical work. Adding a new form here, fiddling with a layout there. It is the latter class who are in real danger.

That kind of boring busywork can be eliminated by using better abstractions. At the same time, it's a useful training ground for junior developers.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#659

Post by tmnvdb »

cejast wrote: post #651
tmnvdb wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compute power increases and algorithmic efficiency improvements have been rapid and regular. I'm not sure why you thought that Back to the Future was a documentary film.

Unless you have a crystal ball there is nothing that can give you certainty that will continue at the same or better rate. I’m not sure why you took the second half of the comment more seriously than the first.

Nobody has certainty about the future. We can only look at what seems most likely given the data.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#660

Post by darepublic »

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 dunno if it's always good at explaining code. It tends to take everything at face value and is unable to opinionatedly reject bs when it's presented with it. Which in the majority of cases is bad.
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