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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#771

Post by intelVISA »

gorjusborg wrote: post #362
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.

> I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen. So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits product…

As one HNer aptly put it: coding is to SWE as cutting is to surgery.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#772

Post by lurking_swe »

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…

depends on what you work on in the software field. Many of these LLM’s have pretty small context windows. In the real world when my company wants to develop a new feature, or change the business logic, that is a cross-cutting change (many repos/services). I work at a large org for background. No LLM will be automating this for a long time to come. Especially if you’re in a specific domain that is niche.

If your project is very small, and it’s possible to feed your entire code base into an LLM in the near future, then you’re in trouble.

Also the problem is the LLM output is only as good as the prompt. 99% of the time the LLM won’t be thinking of how to make your API change backwards compatible for existing clients, how to help you do a zero-downtime migration, following security best practices, or handling a high volume of API traffic. Etc.

Not to mention, what the product team _thinks_ they want (business logic) is usually not what they really want. Happens ALL THE TIME friend. :) It’s like the offshoring challenge all over again. Communication with humans is hard. Communication with an LLM is even harder. Writing the code is the easiest part of my job!

I think some software development jobs will definitely be at risk in the next 10-15 years. Thinking this will happen in 1 years time is myopic in my opinion.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#773

Post by gitprolinux »

A problem is the group think of programmers. Many of them view themselves as investors as a side track instead of a union shop worker because there are so few union employers. Their thinking being to maximize revenue for owners and shareholders during and from software development efforts, services, and software products created. Almost every other industry that there's money has sensibly created AI limitations from unions and trade groups, from Hollywood strikes, entry level knowledge requirements from lawyers and judges preventing AI generated research and briefs, and construction workers and shipyard unions preventing automated and AI machinery such as AI cranes cargo and other AI automation of logistics. Programmers seem to get a new trend software assistant every few years and now AI, then the first thing is the programmer group think their investors thinking to recommend attrition of the non 10x, elite, non-coding high wizards, instead of more jobs the merrier from an economic perspective.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#774

Post by mulmboy »

darkhorse222 wrote: post #768
mulmboy wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How old are you? All it takes is one bad experience to show you the emperor has no clothes. Corporations, executives, and middle managers are almost by definition self interested and short sighted. Just look at the over hiring during covid and the methods used to cull that workforce after they realized their mistake. Back handed and inhumane. Executives are more followers than a junior dev is. They just have a lot mo…

what you're saying is orthogonal to the post I was replying to, and to my reply.

self interested and short sighted says nothing about intelligence, irrationality, or poor decision making. Back handed and inhumane covid hiring and firing is probably not a mistake from their perspective. professional bullshitting is a form of intelligence (I hate it too, I've been done in by it, but I respect it)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#775

Post by johnnyanmac »

mulmboy wrote: post #741
johnnyanmac wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience. >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. Yeah, probably. I've had companies so pinpointed on "velocoity" instead of quality. I imagine th…

> I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience. No one is making this claim. My comment was a bit terse and provocative, rude, deserves the downvotes tbh. I'll take them. To elaborate ~ I've got a lot of empathy for the poster I was originally replying to. I've…

That's fair enough. But I don't think companies are irrational outright. I just know their rational, potentially selfish actions are orthogonal to my rational and selfish goals.So you almost have to stay scrutinous if you want to keep your goals aligned.

>And if every company you've ever worked for truly has poor leadership then, yeah, it's probably worth reassessing how you interview.

No need. I work in games. There isn't a major studio in the industry that isn't like this. An industry used to churning workers and releasing them the moment the project ends.

In some ways it's a path I chose, but at the same time it means I need to be more cynical to defend myself from their inevitably orthogonal actions. I have an exit plan, but I need more time and money first.

If the industry wasnt so secretive with its techniques and knowledge, maybe I could have side stepped it altogether. But alas.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#776

Post by anothermathbozo »

bodegajed wrote: post #760
anothermathbozo wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has certainty here. It’s an emergent technology and no one knows for certain how far it can be pushed. It’s reasonable that people explore contingencies where the technology does improve to a point of driving changes in the labor market.

Theranos made bold claims too according to wikipedia Theranos claimed they devised diagnostic using blood tests that required very small amounts of blood. Then their PR machine made them raise $9 billion.

Big companies indeed work hard to generate investment and interest. We can take the threat and promise of the technology seriously without taking the science fiction grade hype literally.

If you have your certainty then there are plenty of opportunities to short this space. For the rest of us who don’t have crystal balls, contingency planning (ideally through policy and not as individuals) will have to do.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#777

Post by ein0p »

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…

+1. I've tried really hard to replace even some parts of my job with AI ever since GPT3 era, unsuccessfully. All it does for me is it allows me to enter unfamiliar domains (such as e.g. SwiftUI) but then I'm all on my own. In domains where I already have expertise it just doesn't work well. So it is a productivity booster, sure, but I don't see it replacing anyone doing non-bullshit work. I don't even see a trend line pointing in that direction.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#778

Post by Capricorn2481 »

ytpete wrote: post #590
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long That's the difference. This is how you feel because you like programming to some extent. Having worked closely with them, I can tell you there are many people going into bootcamps that flat out dislike programming and just heard it pays well. Some of them get jobs, but they don't want to learn anything. They just want to do as much that doesn't ge…

There have been people entering the profession for (purported) money and not love of the craft for at least as long as the 20 years I've been in it. So long as there are also people who still genuinely enjoy it and take pride in doing the job well, then the junior->expert pipeline isn't lost. I buy that LLMs may shift the proportion of those two camps. But doubt it will really eliminate those who genuinely love build…

I'm not sure it takes more than a shift, though. There aren't 0 people in training to be a doctor, but we have a shortage for sure and it causes huge problems.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#779

Post by Capricorn2481 »

jdmoreira wrote: post #453
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got some compute hidden in your couch? There's plenty of reason to think there's not enough compute to achieve this, and there's little reason to think compute improves intelligence linearly.

don't you follow the news? Amazon is bidding on nuclear power plants. We will just build more energy sources. We have way too much leeway to go. Also optimizations are being built both in hardware and software. There is no foreseen barrier. Maybe data to do training but now the models have pivoted to test / inference compute and reinforcement learning and that seems to have no barrier except more compute and energy.…

Ignoring how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant, and how we have limited resources to do so, is there anything to suggest they're doing that because of AI compute? From what I understand, they just want to be carbon neutral which is difficult to do when your compute needs increase exponentially.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#780

Post by coffeecat »

rcpt wrote: post #431
whynotminot wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though? Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory. Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software…

LLMs are a much bigger jump in productivity than moving to a high level language.

Lately, I've been asking ChatGPT for answers to problems that I've gotten stuck on. I have yet to receive a correct answer from it that actually increases my productivity.
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