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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#811

Post by pipes »

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…

I'm not so sure, I think a junior dev on my team might be being held back by AI, he's good at using it. However he was really struggling to do something very basic. In my view he just needs to learn that syntax and play around with it in a throw away console app. But I think AI is crutch that may distract from doing that. Then again it is utterly fantastic at explaining small bits of code so it could be an excellent teacher too.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#812

Post by beretguy »

Havoc wrote: post #132

That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway. Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.

I ones worked for a company that used to hire 70 developers from Vietnam to work on their product. Then one day they decided to hire ~5 developers from US. These 5 developers did the job faster, better and cheaper than 70 Vietnamese developers. So they fired all overseas developers and doubled the size of US team to about a dozen.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#813

Post by Gerardo1 »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #146
Gerardo1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the common theme is that a lot of people: meaning both people in the community, like here on HN, and people making decisions in industry, are treating AI today as if it's what they hope it will be in five years. That's a very leveraged bet, which isn't always the wrong call, but I'm not convinced they are aware that that's what they're doing. I think this is different from the usual hype cycle.

Well, it still feels like a form of hype to me. They are being very loudly told by ever AI cloud service, of which there are many, that worker-replacing AI agents are just around the corner so they should buy in with the inferior agents that are being offered today.

Oh it's definitely still driven by hype, I think it's just a slightly more extreme version than your normal tech hype cycle.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#814

Post by jerpint »

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…

I think a good analogy is being able to drive a car vs understanding the engine of a car.

Both are useful, but you wouldn’t hire a mechanic drive you around

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#815

Post by morsecodist »

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…

Benchmarks are meaningless in and of themselves, they are supposed to be a proxy for usefulness. I have used Sonnet 3.5, ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4o, o1, o3-mini, o3-mini-high nearly daily for software development. I am not saying AI isn't cool or useful but I am experiencing diminishing returns in model quality (I do appreciate the cost reductions). The sorts of things I can have AI do really haven't changed that much since I got access to my first model. The delta between having no LLM to an LLM feels an order of magnitude bigger at least than the delta between the first LLM and now.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#816

Post by markisus »

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…

This is a great point. I remember my first computer programming class was Java. The teacher said “just type public static void main( string[] args) at the top”. I asked why and he said it didn’t matter for now just memorize that part. That was great advice. At that point it was more important to get a feel for how computers behave and how programs are structured on a high level. I just kept typing that cryptic line mindlessly on top of all my programs so that I could get to the other stuff. Only many months later I looked into the mysterious line and understood what all the keywords meant.

It’s funny now that I haven’t programmed Java for more than a decade and the “public static void main” incantation is still burned into my memory.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#817

Post by jajko »

weatherlite wrote: post #378
insane_dreamer wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll happen gradually over time, with more pressure on programmers to "get more done". I think it's useful to look at what has already happened at another, much smaller profession -- translators -- as a precursor to what will happen with programmers. 1. translation software does a mediocre job, barely useful as a tool; all jobs are safe 2. translation software does a decent job, now expected to be used as time-savin…

> It'll happen gradually over time How much time? I totally agree with you but being early is the same as being wrong as someone clever once said. There's a huge difference between it happening in less than 5 years like Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are saying and it taking 20 more years. If the second scenario is what happens me and many people on this thread can probably retire rather comfortably, and humanity possibly…

20 years as in real replacement, maybe. But change will be cca gradual if looking at whole market, even if composed of many smaller jumps. Top management of companies are now itching for that promised paradise of minimal IT with just few experts. Then comes inevitable sobering up, but the direction is clear.

I wouldn't be considering programming if choosing university studies now. With that smart, many other fields look more stable, albeit demand curve and how comfy later years of career looks like is very different (maybe lawyers, doctors, for blue collars some trades but look at long term health effects with ie back or knee issues).

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#818

Post by jbeninger »

commandlinefan wrote: post #396
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…

My son is a CS major right now, and since I've been programming my whole adult life, I've been keeping an eye on his curriculum. They do still teach CS majors from the "ground up" - he took system architecture, assembly language and operating systems classes. While I kind of get the sense that most of them memorize enough to pass the tests and get their degree, I have to believe that they end up retaining some of it.

I always considered my education to be a "Table of Contents" listing for what I'd actually learn later

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#819

Post by jajko »

dyauspitr wrote: post #785
groos wrote: post #684

A good analogy from not-so-distant past is the outsourcing wave that swept the tech industry. Shareholders everywhere were salivating at the money they would make by hiring programmers in India at 1/10 the cost while keeping their profits. Those of us who have been in the industry a while all saw how that went. I think this new wave wave will go roughly similarly. Eventually, companies will realize that to keep their…

What do you mean by see how that went? The corps are at the point now where they stopped using consultancies and instead have their own company divisions in India where they still pay them 1/10th. If anything it’s a more dire situation.

In those few (some of them global big players) companies I've been in past 20 years, it was mostly onshore -> max offshore -> near shore -> mix of it all since business kept growing so people ended up everywhere.

Focus purely on 100% outsourcing always failed, this is true across all industries. Ignoring it completely was a luxury few companies could keep, ie some small private banks or generally luxury products and services. Conservative optimism was the way to go for long term success without big swings.

Even though when offshoring came it was felt as end of days, most of the threat didn't materialize long term. Without time machine we of course don't know real effects. I think it will be similar, not same here. I expect companies will get more work done (backlogs for software changes are often huge in non-tech companies), maybe trim fat a bit but nothing shocking. Lets be a bit smart and not succumb to emotional swings just because others are doing it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#820

Post by lordofgibbons »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #226
lordofgibbons wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI? The whole point of AI is that it doesn't need an "operator". I'm not talking about GH Copilot or some autocomplete IDE feature, I'm talking about fully autonomous agents 2-3 years in the future. Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years. The next two years will be even faster if the past few months are anything to go by.

> But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI? For the same reason you need Engineers to operate CAD software.

CAD software can't use other CAD software. AI can use other AI
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