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AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

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Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#71

Post by dwaltrip »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #28
vannevar wrote: post #9

>I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less. While this is a great argument that there will be more software in the future (something that I don't think anyone disputes), it's not an argument in favor of the prop…

I look around sometimes and see digitized/software-ized products I wish weren't. So the number can be negative. One example: restaurant menus. Second example: car audio volume buttons/knobs.

This is a good point. However, even if we account for this and subtract all products that are currently digitized poorly, I think we still get a very large positive number.

The number of useful digital products that don’t yet exist is enormous. We can’t fathom the vast array of creations that future generations will dream up.

P.s. very strong agree about digital menus… so annoying to use!

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#72

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

Beltiras wrote: post #65
littlecranky67 wrote: post #16

I am believing that, too. Just imagine this: Take a Laptop with WinXP+Office 98 from the 2000 era and travel back in time to the 60s or 70s using a time machine. Show the power of Excel to any of those developers punching holes into a punch card, feeding room-sized "computers". Tell them that this "Excel" tool is used by business and sales people without any programming skills. Those developers would clearly tell the…

You have the right comparison. Developers need to remember that nobody had a job punching holes in cards after the revolution of personal computing. Going to be the same here. The jobs will revolve around operating the new "loom" which we have been given.

It's not clear to me that the new "loom" won't just operate itself completely.

That's the problem with comparing this to previous tech advances. Past advances made people much more efficient at some task, but it still required the people to work the new thing. But now we have a new thing that might be able to work itself.

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#73

Post by sangnoir »

adventured wrote: post #63
jstx1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe but only if you're imagining completely new and inexperienced people who wouldn't be able to get anything done without AI entering the field - I can see how that can cause an emotional reaction. But if you compare two experienced developers - one of them uses AI, the other doesn't - I don't see what's there to be reviled, one of them just found a tool that makes them more productive.

The reviled part of it is going to come from the bottom 2/3 of people writing code today getting brutalized economically (permanent job destruction and the lowering of income for those in that segment that manage to find jobs writing code and or managing AI that writes the code). The median software developer in the US is solidly earning six figures. That's going away, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to…

Developers who'll use AI as a crutch will be no different to entry-level, PHP-only developers of yore who relied on StackOverflow and will be reviled for the same reason: their code will be buggy & inconsistent.

I was an experienced polyglot developer and I occasionally used PHP for rapid prototyping, but the hate knew no nuance on HN and elsewhere.

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#74

Post by fxj »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #70
fxj wrote: post #62

One thing that is often overlooked in the discussionis that GPT is just extracting the information from sites like stackoverflow and such and distills its knowledge to write new code. But what happens if the main source of coding knowledge - stack overflow etc - suddenly falls dry? No new information for GPT. We all know that unmaintained code starts rotting and this is what will happen to the GPT generated code. GPT…

It can learn from it's own users. People paste their code into GPT for context, so it'll see new patterns that way. People paste the error message that results from some bad code GPT spit out, it learns from context plus the error text what the correct code should be.

yes, but it also sees a lot of buggy code this way, because users are no longer experts and write lots of buggy code. Remember, GPT cannot decide whether code is correct or not, it is just a parrot that tells you the code that it sees most often. Try to ask it about some esotheric language like supercollider or J. It will just hallucinate some code that it thinks looks like the one you want. GPT need a certain critical mass of information to give reliable results.

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#75

Post by yamazakiwi »

jszymborski wrote: post #57
yamazakiwi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't remove ALL barriers obviously, but AI can explain quirks, significance, reference, and cultural trends in speech. An AI can dive deep to further comprehension, which will facilitate more cultural understanding through linguistic relativity.

I'm sorry, but I'm really not seeing anything here you can't get from a quick web search. LLMs are not a panacea, and there's no way for them to mainline a Comparative Cultures class into you in 5 minutes. There really is no shortcut to compassion and understanding... so much of it is simply taking the time to inform yourself. You can get an LLM to summarize a wiki page on some culture's customs, but there is better…

No one is claiming what you're arguing against.

We're simply saying that AI can give you more cultural understanding through deep diving into language. Not that opening chatgpt makes you understand everything about a culture or a group of people.

No one here was saying LLM's are a panacea for cultural misunderstanding and it's bizarre you think anyone on HN would believe that. You've created an imaginary argument for the sake of positing your opinion. You did however bring up willingness, which is an important consideration.

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#76

Post by adventured »

sangnoir wrote: post #73
adventured wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reviled part of it is going to come from the bottom 2/3 of people writing code today getting brutalized economically (permanent job destruction and the lowering of income for those in that segment that manage to find jobs writing code and or managing AI that writes the code). The median software developer in the US is solidly earning six figures. That's going away, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to…

Developers who'll use AI as a crutch will be no different to entry-level, PHP-only developers of yore who relied on StackOverflow and will be reviled for the same reason: their code will be buggy & inconsistent. I was an experienced polyglot developer and I occasionally used PHP for rapid prototyping, but the hate knew no nuance on HN and elsewhere.

It's not going to be a crutch. It's going to be a large segment of lower paid grunts, doing work that will be less difficult and more mind numbing. The requirements will still be modestly high, you'll need a degree, and you'll get paid less than today's software developers (in some cases far less).

A software developer in the future will be someone who only interfaces with AI centric tools, with the AI writing essentially all the code. It'll be rare to directly tweak code for the typical software developer. It will no longer mean someone who writes code to develop software, it will mean someone who uses AI tools to develop software.

What you think of as a software developer today, isn't what people will know them as in another 15 years. It'll happen fast. The code is going to get abstracted away. An 18 year old in 2040 that is looking to become a software developer will go to school for how to build software, which will mean using AI tools to do it; they won't go to school to learn how to program. In fact they won't know much about writing code at all.

In several decades it will be a far more rare skill, that will be viewed as a bit archaic, to still directly write software code. Stories will abound about the old times when millions of people used to directly write code, and they got paid ridiculously well to do it. That problem got solved.

One of the great benefits of AI will be abstracting away complexity (complexity as far as the human mind is concerned), and writing software code is a big juicy target that won't be difficult to abstract away (for something like GPT version 13).

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#77

Post by adventured »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #61
re-thc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT turned the next 4 hours of menial work into 10 minutes. This is the true incoming disruption. Problem is how do you know if it's correct? If you have to verify it all it may take even longer. And when it's wrong it's back to square 1. > People who just vaguely know how to program, getting a powerful tool that can assist them 95% of the way for simple automations like this. Is assuming it's correct.

It doesn't take 4 hours to code review a few lines of code for generating random QR codes.

And besides that, there will be AI systems drastically superior to a good human software developer today, that can trivially review code. These are not challenging things to solve, these are trivial things to solve (which we'll solve in the very early days of AI, ie now), AI systems will march right through it, and soon.

The notion that only a human can effectively check code, will be viewed as a joke before this decade is out. Humans will be very inferior. Emphasis on very. Anybody that doesn't realize that yet, is still thinking in the terms of today, right now - and not understanding how fast this is all about to change, much less how much it'll change in a decade of time.

There will be button pushing monkeys, that are called ... code confirmation engineers, that sit at a computer and sign off on the AI systems doing code checks. They'll go to school for it, they'll almost never directly review code, most of them won't be able to even if they cared to (which they won't).

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#78

Post by jszymborski »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #75
jszymborski wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but I'm really not seeing anything here you can't get from a quick web search. LLMs are not a panacea, and there's no way for them to mainline a Comparative Cultures class into you in 5 minutes. There really is no shortcut to compassion and understanding... so much of it is simply taking the time to inform yourself. You can get an LLM to summarize a wiki page on some culture's customs, but there is better…

No one is claiming what you're arguing against. We're simply saying that AI can give you more cultural understanding through deep diving into language. Not that opening chatgpt makes you understand everything about a culture or a group of people. No one here was saying LLM's are a panacea for cultural misunderstanding and it's bizarre you think anyone on HN would believe that. You've created an imaginary argument for…

> You've created an imaginary argument for the sake of positing your opinion. You did however bring up willingness, which is an important consideration.

This is getting rather pointed and I ask you to consider whether it's just to be questioning my motives for posting. It's clear you think I've not addressed your argument, the civil thing is to attribute that to a perceived misunderstanding and not some desire to speak past you with my own opinion.

Re: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

#80

Post by yamazakiwi »

jszymborski wrote: post #78
yamazakiwi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is claiming what you're arguing against. We're simply saying that AI can give you more cultural understanding through deep diving into language. Not that opening chatgpt makes you understand everything about a culture or a group of people. No one here was saying LLM's are a panacea for cultural misunderstanding and it's bizarre you think anyone on HN would believe that. You've created an imaginary argument for…

> You've created an imaginary argument for the sake of positing your opinion. You did however bring up willingness, which is an important consideration. This is getting rather pointed and I ask you to consider whether it's just to be questioning my motives for posting. It's clear you think I've not addressed your argument, the civil thing is to attribute that to a perceived misunderstanding and not some desire to spe…

My civility seems to be struggling today, thanks for pointing this out!
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