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The Bitter Prediction

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Re: The Bitter Prediction

#81

Post by xg15 »

blackbear_ wrote: post #80
whiplash451 wrote: post #67

The thing is: the industry does not need people who are good at (or enjoy) programming, it needs people who are good at ( and enjoy) generating value for customers through code. So the OP was in a bad place without Claude anyways (in industry at least). This realization is the true bitter one for many engineers.

Productivity at work is well correlated with enjoyment of work, so the industry better look for people who enjoy programming. The realization that productive workers aren't just replaceable cogs in the machine is also a bitter lesson for businessmen.

I think the lifelong dream of many businesspeople is to create the perfect "cog in the machine" or ideally run a business without workers at all. (Tony Stark, Elon Musk's role model, is a good example of that. As far as the movies are concerned, he builds all his most important inventions himself, or with the help of AI, no workers involved)

Independent of what AI can do today, I suspect this was a reason why so many resources were poured into its development in the first place. Because this was the ultimate vision behind it.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#82

Post by wizzwizz4 »

zkmon wrote: post #62

It's not true that coding would no longer be fun because of AI. Arithmetic did not stop being fun because of calculators. Travel did not stop being fun because of cars and planes. Life did not stop being fun because of lack of old challenges. New challenges would come up. If calculators made the arithmetic easy, math challenges move to next higher level. If AI does all the thinking and creativity, human would move to…

I find legacy systems fun because you're looking at an artefact built over the years by people. I can get a lot of insight into how a system's design and requirements changed over time, by studying legacy code. All of that will be lost, drowned in machine-generated slop, if next decade's legacy code comes out the backside of a language model.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#83

Post by benoau »

xg15 wrote: post #77

A question that came up in discussions recently and that I found interesting: How will new APIs, libraries or tooling be introduced in the future? The models all have their specific innate knowledge of the programming ecosystem from the point in time where their last training data was collected. However, unlike humans, they cannot update that knowledge unless a new finetuning is performed - and even then, they can on…

I guess the counter-question is does it matter if nobody is building tools optimized for humans, when humans aren't being paid to write software?

I saw a submission earlier today that really illustrated perfectly why AI is eating people who write code:

> You could spend a day debating your architecture: slices, layers, shapes, vegetables, or smalltalk. You could spend several days eliminating the biggest risks by building proofs-of-concept to eliminate unknowns. You could spend a week figuring out how you’ll store, search, and cache data and which third–party integrations you’ll need.

$5k/person/week to have an informed opinion of how to store your data! AI going to look at the billion times we already asked these questions and make an instant decision and the really, really important part is it doesn't really matter what we choose anyway because there are dozens of right answers.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#84

Post by c7b »

xg15 wrote: post #77

A question that came up in discussions recently and that I found interesting: How will new APIs, libraries or tooling be introduced in the future? The models all have their specific innate knowledge of the programming ecosystem from the point in time where their last training data was collected. However, unlike humans, they cannot update that knowledge unless a new finetuning is performed - and even then, they can on…

Not sure this is going to be a big issue practice. Tools like ChatGPT regularly get new knowledge cutoffs and those seem to work well in my experience. I haven't tested it with programming features specifically, but you could simply do a small experiment: take the tool of your choice and a programming feature that was introduced after it first launched and see whether you can get it to use it correctly.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#85

Post by DeathArrow »

>Will programming eventually be relegated to a hobby?

I don't regard programming as merely the act of outputing code. Planning, architecting, having a high level overview, keeping the objective in focus also matters.

Even if we regard programming as just writing code, we have to ask ourselves why we do it.

We plant cereals to be able to eat. At first we used some primitive stone tools to dig the fields. Then we used bronze tools, then iron tools. Then we employed horses to plough the fields more efficiently. Then we used tractors.

Our goal was to eat, not to plough the fields.

Many objects are mass produced now while they were the craft of the artisans centuries ago. We still have craftsmen who enjoy doing things by hand and whose products command a big premium over mass market products.

I don't have an issue if most of the code will be written by AI tools, provided that code is efficient and does exactly what we need. We will still have to manage and verify those tools, and to do that we will still have to understand the whole stack from the very bottom - digital gates and circuits to the highest abstractions.

AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Some carpenters like to use very simple hand tools while other swear by the most modern ones like CNC.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#86

Post by roenxi »

fhd2 wrote: post #55
mjburgess wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not using AI right I use AI heavily, it's my field.

The part before "But seriously" was sarcasm. I find it very odd to assume that a professional developer (even if it's not what they would describe as their field) is using it wrong. But it's a pretty standard reply to measured comments about LLMs.

> I find it very odd to assume that a professional developer (even if it's not what they would describe as their field) is using it wrong.

They're encountering a type of tool they haven't met before and haven't been trained to use. The default assumption is they are probably using it wrong. There isn't any reason to assume they're using it right - doing things wrong is the default state of humans.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#87

Post by mckn1ght »

fire_lake wrote: post #74
zkmon wrote: post #62

It's not true that coding would no longer be fun because of AI. Arithmetic did not stop being fun because of calculators. Travel did not stop being fun because of cars and planes. Life did not stop being fun because of lack of old challenges. New challenges would come up. If calculators made the arithmetic easy, math challenges move to next higher level. If AI does all the thinking and creativity, human would move to…

> For example, navigating the complexities of legacy systems and workflows and human interactions needed to keep things working. Well this sounds delightful! Glad to be free of the thinking and creativity!

When you’re churning out many times more code per unit time, you had better think good and hard about how to organize it.

Everyone wanted to be an architect. Well, here’s our chance!

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#88

Post by eMPee584 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #82
zkmon wrote: post #62

It's not true that coding would no longer be fun because of AI. Arithmetic did not stop being fun because of calculators. Travel did not stop being fun because of cars and planes. Life did not stop being fun because of lack of old challenges. New challenges would come up. If calculators made the arithmetic easy, math challenges move to next higher level. If AI does all the thinking and creativity, human would move to…

I find legacy systems fun because you're looking at an artefact built over the years by people . I can get a lot of insight into how a system's design and requirements changed over time, by studying legacy code. All of that will be lost, drowned in machine-generated slop, if next decade's legacy code comes out the backside of a language model.

thanks to git repositories stored away in arctic tunnels our common legacy code heritage might outlast most other human artifacts.. (unless ASI choses to erase that of course)

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#89

Post by mckn1ght »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #82
zkmon wrote: post #62

It's not true that coding would no longer be fun because of AI. Arithmetic did not stop being fun because of calculators. Travel did not stop being fun because of cars and planes. Life did not stop being fun because of lack of old challenges. New challenges would come up. If calculators made the arithmetic easy, math challenges move to next higher level. If AI does all the thinking and creativity, human would move to…

I find legacy systems fun because you're looking at an artefact built over the years by people . I can get a lot of insight into how a system's design and requirements changed over time, by studying legacy code. All of that will be lost, drowned in machine-generated slop, if next decade's legacy code comes out the backside of a language model.

That’s fine if you find that fun, but legacy archeology is a means to an end, not an end itself.

Re: The Bitter Prediction

#90

Post by kassner »

> I've never been more productive

Maybe it’s because my approach is much closer to a Product Engineer than a Software Engineer, but code output is rarely the reason why projects that I worked on are delayed. All my productivity issues can attributed to poor specifications, or problems that someone just threw over the wall. Every time I’m blocked is because someone didn’t make a decision on something, or no one has thought further enough to see this decision was needed.

It irks me so much when I see the managers of adjacent teams pushing for AI coding tools when the only thing the developers know about the project is what was written in the current JIRA ticket.

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