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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#791

Post by [deleted] »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #779
jdmoreira wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#792

Post by fragmede »

wincy wrote: post #748
fragmede wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting. So it sounds like I need to get into the market and charge half as much and steal all of his customers. These things eventually always end up as a Red Queen’s race, where you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place.

From a game theory perspective, it is that simple. But humans are messy and have emotions and feelings and shit.

A different friend who's contractor in a non-tech area told me a client of his secretly showed him his competition's bid for the same project. The competition's bid was much higher, and the reason the client showed him that was to get my friend to raise his rates and resubmit his bid.

So you're welcome to try, but as a programmer looking into the abyss, I'm looking at the whole thing as encouragement to develop all those soft skills that I've been neglecting.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#793

Post by podunkPDX »

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…

These AI tools are also not good at answering PagerDuty to fix a production problem that is a result of the code they imagined.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#794

Post by menaerus »

vunderba wrote: post #644
menaerus wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest context that I am aware that an open-source model (e.g. qwen) can manage is 1M tokens. This should translate to ~30kLoC. I'd envision that this could in theory work even on large codebases. It certainly depends on the change to be done but I can imagine that ~30kLoC of context is large enough for most of the module-specific changes. Possibly the models that you're using have a much smaller context window?…

I've heard pretty mixed opinions about the touted capabilities of Devon. https://www.itpro.com/software/development/the-worlds-first-...

That's good news for us I suppose.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#795

Post by liampulles »

The strange thing is that AI tools would be used a lot more if they weren't being positioned as an alpha stage for AGI. There are things that LLMs are genuinely useful for, but they seem to get used in these large scale agent style tools which regularly fail and are thus not used very widely. Give me some smaller focused tools with high accuracy and everyone wins.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#796

Post by chrz »

tmnvdb wrote: post #747
mirsadm wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Really now. I think that deserves a bit more explaination, given the cost per token has dropped by several orders of magnitude, we have seen large changes on all benchmarks (including entirely new capabilities), multimodality is now a fact since 4o, test time compute with reasoning models is making big strides since o1.... It seems on the surface a lot is happening. In fact, I wanted to share one of the benchmark ove…

its bigger, shinier, faster, but still doesnt fly

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#797

Post by InDubioProRubio »

Its a opportunity. Programmers contain internal architecture information. If they leak - and you collect the full set, you can reconstruct a similar product fresh from scratch for cheap- and then take over the business of a failing behemoth with ai-rot.

The eternal death-wish to cut the coding dependency murders yet another set of companies. So many where there before- Outsourcing, UML, node-based programming, no-codes in all variations and colours. Generations of managers have marched into this abyss and none-came back alive, the skulls of the ego-dream of "only business management is irreplaceable crunching beneath the boots" trying to cut the knowledge worker dependency out of the equation. And deep down, they feel the tingle of things going wrong- even now.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#798

Post by InDubioProRubio »

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…

The "prompt" engineering is also going to create a ton of cargocult tips and tricks- endless shell scripts, that do nothing but look spectacular, with one or two important commands at the end. Fractal classes, that nobody knows why they exist. Endless boilerplate.

And the ai will be trained on this- and thus cluelessness reinforced and baked in. Omnissiah, hear our prayers in the terminal for we are but -h less man (bashes keyboard with a ritual wrench).

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#799

Post by tiborsaas »

idle_zealot wrote: post #213
pgm8705 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I think part of the problem is how good it is at starting from a blank slate and putting together an MVP type app. As a developer, I have been thoroughly impressed by this. Then non-devs see this and must think software engineers are doomed. What they don't see is how terrible LLMs are at working with complex, mature codebases and the hallucinations and endless feedback loops that go with that.

The tech to quickly spin up MVP apps has been around for a while now. It gets you from a troubling blank slate to something with structure, something you can shape and build on. I am of course talking about npx create-{template name} Or your language of choice's equivalent (or git clone template-repo).

Yes, but the LLM driven MVP-s are not only builerplates but actual functioning apps. The "create-" is somewhat good, but it's usually throwaway code and do it properly later. While my LLM made boilerplate is the actual first few steps to get the boring parts done. It also needs refactoring and polishing, but it's an order of magnitude better than the "MVP helper tooling" before.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#800

Post by jjav »

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…

> But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long

I agree, but have found that for a lot of people that is totally satisfying enough. Most people don't care to really understand how the code works.

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