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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it. Of course, sometimes it tampers with your data in horrifying ways because something you entered (or imported into the system from elsewhere) just happened to look kinda like a date, even though it was intended to be something completely different. So there's that.

Excel is a programming system with pure functions, imperative code (VBA/Python recently), database (cell grid, sheets etc.) and visualization tools. So, not really "no-code".

That’s technically correct but it’s also wrong.

No-code in excel is that most functions are implemented for user and user doesn’t have to know anything about software development to create what he needs and doesn’t need software developer to do stuff for him.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves This is the incorrect assumption, or at least there’s no evidence to support it.

If benchmark means anything in evaluating how model capability progress, the evidence is that all the existing benchmark have been pretty much solved, except FrontierMath ( https://epoch.ai/frontiermath )

Benchmarks cannot tell you whether the tech will continue supernaturally, linearly, or plateau entirely.

In the 90s, companies showed graphs of CPU frequency and projected we would be hitting 8ghz pretty soon. Futurists predicted we would get CPUs running at tens of ghz.

We only just now have 5ghz CPUs despite running at 4ghz back in the mid 2000s.

We fundamentally missed an important detail that wasn't consider at all in those projections.

We know less about the theory of how LLMs and neural networks grow with effort than we did about how transistors operate over different speeds.

You utterly cannot extrapolate from those kinds of graphs.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#723
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…

It is far more likely that everything, and not just IT, but everything collapses than we make it to the point you mention.

LLMs replace entry level people who invested in education. They would have the beginning knowledge, but there's no means to become better because opportunities are non-existent because they replaced these positions. Its a sequential pipeline failure of talent development. In the meantime you have the mid and senior level people who cannot pass their knowledge on, they age out, and die.

What happens when you hit a criticality point where production which is dependent on these systems, and it can no longer continue.

The knowledge implicit in production is lost, the economic incentives have been poisoned. The distribution systems are destroyed.

How do you bootstrap recovery for something that effectively took several centuries to build in the first place, but not in centuries but in weeks/months.

If this isn't sufficient enough to explain the core of the issue. Check out the Atari/Nintendo crash, which isn't nearly as large as this but goes into the dangers of destroying your distributor networks.

If you pay attention to the details, you'll see Atari's crash was fueled by debt financing, and in the process they destroyed their distributor networks with catastrophic losses. After that crash, Nintendo couldn't get shelf-space; no distributor would risk the loss without a guarantee. They couldn't advertise as video games. They had to trojan horse the perception of what they were selling, and guarantee it. There is a documentary on Amazon which covers this, playing with power. Check it out.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#724
post #643

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…

People somehow have expectations that are both too high and too low at the same time. They expect (demand) current language models completely replace a human engineer in any field without making mistakes (this is obviously way too optimistic) while at the same time they are ignoring how rapid the progress has been and how much these models can now do that seemed impossible just 2 years ago, delivering huge value when…

ChatGPT 4 was released 2 years ago. Personally I don't think things have moved on significantly since then.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with you. The general pattern behind "x tool came along that made work easier" isn't to fire a bunch of folks, its to make the people that are there work whatever increment of ease of work more. ie, if the tool cuts work in half, you'd be expected to do 2x more work. Automation and tools almost never "makes our lives easier", it just removes some of the lower value added work. It would be nice to live…

> but our overlords won't let that happen If you have a job, working for a boss, you're trading your time for money. If you're a contractor and negotiate being paid by the project, you're being paid for results. Trading your time for money is the underlying contract. That's the fundamental nature of a job working for somebody else. You can escape that rat race if you want to. Someone I know builds websites for client…

>You can escape that rat race if you want to.

I'm working on it. But it takes money and the overlords definitely are trying to squeeze as of late.

And yes, while I don't think I'm being replaced in months or years, I can a possibility in a decade or two of the ladder being pulled up on most programming jobs. We'll either be treated as well as artists (assuming we still don't unionize) or we'll have to rely on our own abilities to generate value without corporate overlords.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#726
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company allowed us to use it but most developers around me didn't reach out to the correct people to be able to use it. Yes I find it incredibly helpful and try to tell them. But it's only helpful in small contexts, auto completing things, small snippets, generating small functions. Any large scale changes like most of these AI companies try to push them being capable of doing it just falls straight on its face. I…

In a similar situation at my workplace. What models are you using that you feel comfortable trusting it to understand and operate on 10-20k LOC? Using the latest and greatest from OpenAI, I've seen output become unreliable with as little as ~300 LOC on a pretty simple personal project. It will drop features as new ones are added, make obvious mistakes, refuse to follow instructions no matter how many different ways I…

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#727

My opinion: tech isn't firing programmers for AI. If is firing peogrammers because of the financial environment, and waving around AI as a fig leaf to pretend that it is not really cutting back in output. When the financial environment loosens again, there’ll be a new wave of tech hiring (which is about equally likely to publicly be portrayed as either reversing the AI firing or exploiting new opportunities due to AI…

No one 0ast sole very small businesses (aka a single person with contractors) is seriously trying to replace programmers with AI right now. I do feel we will hit that phase sometimes down the line (probably in the 30's).so I at least think this is a tale to keep in the back of our minds long term.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an insightful comment. It smells of Jevron's paradox, right? More productivity leads to increased demand. I just don't remember anyone saying that SO would replace programmers, because you could just copy-paste code from a website and run it. Yet here we are: GPTs will replace programmers, because you can just copy-paste code from a website and run it.

People definitely said this about SO!

Those people never tried googling anything past entry level. It's at best a way to get some example documentation for core languages.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's all fun and games until you realise you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. If the issue is that the AI can't code, then yes you shouldn't replace the programmers: not because they're good consumers, just because you still need programmers. But if the AI can replace programmers, then it's strange to argue that programmers should still get employed just so they can get money to consume, even though…

The natural conclusion I see is dropping the delusion that every human must work to live. If automation progresses to a point that machines and AI can do 99% of useful work, there's an argument to be made for letting humanity finally stop toiling, and letting the perhaps 10% of people who really want to do the work do the work. The idea that "everybody must work" keeps harmful industries alive in the name of jobs. It…

It's our only conclusion unless/until countries start implementing UBI or similar forms of post scarcity services. And it's not you or me that's fighting against that future.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#730

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 problem is that coders taking this approach are dominantly ones who lack the relevant skill - ones who are taking that approach because they lack that skill.

The ones that until now copied and pasted everything from Stack Overflow.
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