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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#691

Post by necovek »

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…

Agreed, and I haven't yet seen any single instance of a company firing software engineers because AI is replacing them (even if by increasing productivity of another set of software engineers): I've asked this a number of times, and while it's a common refrain, I haven't really seen any concrete news report saying it in so many words.

And to be honest, if any company is firing software engineers hoping AI replaces their production, that is good news since that company will soon stop existing and treating engineers like shit which it probably did :)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#692

Post by adityamwagh »

abeppu wrote: post #412
lolinder wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think also a critical weakness is that LLMs are trained on the code people write ... and our code doesn't annotate what was written by a human and what was suggested by a tool. In your analogy, this would be like if your sat nav system suggests that you turn right where other people have turned right ... because they were directed to turn by their sat nav.

Exactly! This is an amazing observation and analogy.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#693

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lolinder wrote: post #674
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The code you can inspect is analogous to directions on a map. Some have noted in this thread that for them directions on a map actually do help them learn the territory. I have found that they absolutely do not help me. That's not for lack of curiosity, it seems to be something about the way that I'm wired that making decisions about where to navigate helps me to learn in a way that following someone else's decisions…

You have to study the map to learn from it. Zoom in and out on surroundings, look up unfamiliar landmarks, et cetera. If you just follow the GPS or copy paste the code no, you won’t learn.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#694

Post by sevensor »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

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…

> 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.

Well put. There’s a similar phenomenon in industrial maintenance. The “grey tsunami.” Skilled electricians, pipefitters, and technicians of all stripes are aging out of the workforce. They’re not being replaced, and instead of fixing the pipeline, many factories are going out of business, and many others are opting to replace equipment wholesale rather than attempt repairs. Everybody loses, even the equipment vendors, who in the long run have fewer customers left to sell to.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#695

Post by dartos »

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…

Marketing is really good at their job.

That coupled with new money and retail investors being thinking they’re in a gold rush and you get the environment we’re in.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#696

Post by benatkin »

csmpltn wrote: post #214
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 think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

When I see people trying to define which programmers will enjoy continued success as AI continues to improve, I often see One True Scotsman used.

I wish more would try to describe what the differentiating skills and circumstances are instead of just saying that real programmers should still be in demand.

I think maybe raw talent is more important than how much you "genuinely love coding" (https://x.com/AdamRackis/status/1888965636833083416) or how much of a real programmer you are. This essay captures raw talent pretty well IMO: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#697

Post by sterlind »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

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…

At present, LLMs are basically Stack Overflow with infinite answers on demand... of Stack Overflow quality and relevance. Prompting is the new Googling. It's a critical base skill, but it's not sufficient.

The models I've tried aren't that great at algorithm design. They're abysmal at generating highly specific, correct code (e.g. kernel drivers, consensus protocols, locking constructs.) They're good plumbers. A lot of programming is plumbing, so I'm happy to have the help, but they have trouble doing actual computer science.

And most relevantly, they currently don't scale to large codebases. They're not autonomous enough to pull a work item off the queue, make changes across a 100kloc codebase, debug and iterate, and submit a PR. But they can help a lot with each individual part of that workflow when focused, so we end up in the perverse situation where junior devs act as the machine's secretary, while the model does most of the actual programming.

So we end up de-skilling the junior devs, but the models still can't replace the principal devs and researchers, so where are the principal devs going to come from?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#698

Post by zahlman »

csmpltn wrote: post #214
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 think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

>I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together.

My experience with Stack Overflow, the Python forums, etc. etc. suggests that we've been there for a year or so already.

On the one hand, it's revolutionary that it works at all (and I have to admit it works better than "at all").

But when it doesn't work, a significant fraction of those users will try to get experienced humans to fix the problem for them, for free - while also deluding themselves that they're "learning programming" through this exercise.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#699

Post by nitwit005 »

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 a bit paradoxical. A smart enough AI, and there is no point in worrying, because almost everyone will be out of a job.

The problem case is the somewhat odd scenario where there is an AI that's excellent at software dev, but not most other work, and we all have to go off and learn some other trade.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#700

Post by floatrock »

Kerrick wrote: post #690
askonomm wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference here being that you actually learned the information about Ruby on Rails, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a clipboard-like vessel that passes information from an LLM onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the code. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the code, they debug the LLM for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here ne…

Difference here being that you actually learned the information about computers, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a typist-like vessel that passes information from an architect onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the compiled instructions. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the machine code, they complain about the compiler for not getting…

Abstractions on top of abstractions on top of turtles...

It'll be interesting to see what kinds of new tools come out of this AI boom. I think we're still figuring out what the new abstraction tier is going to be, but I don't think the tools to really work at that tier have been written yet.

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