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We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

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Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#81

Post by fxtentacle »

colechristensen wrote: post #39
fxtentacle wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you from first-hand experience that a wall of source code which only works 50% of the time is precisely the level of quality that you can expect from cheap outsourcing. I believe what AI can do is change managers' expectations so that smaller teams become more accepted. And by kicking out the worst performers, you increase average productivity, no matter what the AI does or doesn't do.

I’d believe if you did nothing with AI and just fired a big chunk of your bottom tier cheap outsourced programming “talent” your productivity would significantly increase as a result of your actual talent no longer being occupied with managing and reacting to low quality code contribution and contributor hand holding.

Agree. If someone's productivity is negative, bringing it closer to 0 is an improvement. That means keeping them busy with a useless AI is actually helpful.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#82

Post by spaceman_2020 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #61
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally said in the earnings call that they now need fewer third party developers because of AI. And this is one of the biggest legacy companies on the planet. Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless…

You're unironically believing an MBA who's bonus likely depends on optimizing processes (which is a fancy way of saying "firing whoever they can get away with") over people on this forum, half of which likely code themselves? AI has made big splashes and some industries are in the process of getting annihilated (ie. Designers working for marketing agencies and similar roles). I'd expect things to get more spicy over…

I don’t think there are any coders on HN who actually write the kind of code that’s being AI-ed away

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#84

Post by boring-alterego »

AI can help those of us on the edges of what the "coder" of an environment is. Things like getting the right syntax for a given set of pseudocode instructions. Background is EE, inherited an airgapped DCS with everything from things running Fortran from the early 1980s to modern controllers in a heavily regulated industry. Time savings do matter. And for low end little things we could never get an external contract on we are enabling those that take more of the system owner type role to have more tools in their bag for response.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#85

Post by [deleted] »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #50
gofreddygo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boring low paid drudgery > the sort of work that AI is coming for This is NOT what AI is coming for. Its too far from even barely capable for that sort of work. BI tools, Wordpress themes, layers and layers of internal tools for custom business processes are all incredibly fragile and intricately balanced. It will have to learn systems where extra empty tags in the xml response get accounts flagged for removal, sys…

They literally said in the earnings call that they now need fewer third party developers because of AI. And this is one of the biggest legacy companies on the planet. Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless…

[deleted]

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#86

Post by ac130kz »

danpalmer wrote: post #19

What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%). It's creating dashboards in BI tools, it's tweaking Wordpress themes, it's writing custom business processes in ABAP for SAP deployments, or it's 3-10 engineers doing the work of 1 so that a outsourcing company can bulk up its bills. This is the sort of wo…

GPT 4 Turbo can't even write good automations most of the time, these companies absolutely don't care about the quality of their product.

Re: We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

#87

Post by anonzzzies »

soco wrote: post #77
dns_snek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you'll get a site without that particular bug, but you're almost guaranteed to get a site where the unspecified semantics are slightly different compared to the previous version, along with new exciting bugs, and at some point you're likely going to get to data corruption issues because some invariant of the system won't be preserved properly. You'll run into memory leaks and race conditions that you won't be a…

I won't disagree with you so just let me add that also today we get buggy software and enshittification all over the place. All what AI has to do is deliver those cheaper.

Cheaper, but also more of it because cheaper. So we will have to manage that somehow as it is quite inevitable (as in; it’s already happening).
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