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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#841

Post by Terr_ »

askonomm wrote: post #630
hombre_fatal wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Difference here being that you actually learned the information about Ruby on Rails, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a clipboard-like vessel that passes information from an LLM onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the code. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the code, they debug the LLM for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here ne…

> I've had to work with developers that are over dependent on LLM's, one didn't even know how to undo code, they had to ask an LLM to undo.

Some also get into a loop where they ask the LLM to rewrite what they have, and the result ends up changing in a subtle undetected way or loses comments.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#842

Post by [deleted] »

britzkopf wrote: post #513
hombre_fatal wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who the hell, in today's market, is going to hire an engineer with a tenuous grasp on foundational technological systems, with the hope that one day they will backfill?!

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#843

Post by Terr_ »

britzkopf wrote: post #513
hombre_fatal wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who the hell, in today's market, is going to hire an engineer with a tenuous grasp on foundational technological systems, with the hope that one day they will backfill?!

Yeah, my recollection of the past couple decades is many companies felt like: "Someone else will surely train up the junior developers, we'll just hire them away after they know what they're doing." This often went with an oddly-bewildered: "Wow, why is it so hard to find good candidates?"

I don't see how that trend would change much just because junior developers can use LLMs as a crutch. (Well, except when it helps them cheat at an interview that wasn't predictive of what the job really needed.)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#844

Post by rcpt »

coffeecat wrote: post #780
rcpt wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know what to say.

I've been able to get code working in libraries that I'm wholly unfamiliar with pretty rapidly by asking the LLM what to do.

As an example, this weekend I got a new mechanical keyboard. I like to use caps+hjkl as arrows and don't want to remap in software because I'll connect to multiple computers. Turns out there's a whole open source system for this called QMK that requires one to write C to configure the keyboard.

It's been over a decade since I touched a Makefile and I never really knew C anyway but I was able get the keyboard configured and also have some custom RGB lighting on it pretty easily by going back and forth with the LLM.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#845

Post by biohcacker84 »

Copilot to me is a multiplier, just like compilers and GUI editors and languages above machine language.

And possibly the biggest multiplier. But anything times zero is zero. Someone who does not understand the code Copilot writes is too dangerous to do anything.

But I worry what Copilot will do to future developers.

And knowing what universally available spell checking has done to me, destroyed my ability to spell correctly without it, I even worry how Copilot might deskill me over the coming years.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#846

Post by cma »

swiftcoder wrote: post #364
cma wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they bled users?

The core Facebook product? Yeah. Across all products, maybe not - Instagram appeals to a younger demographic, especially since they turned it into a TikTok clone. And WhatsApp is pretty ubiquitous outside of the US (even if it is more used as a free SMS replacement than an actual social network).

Growth in monthly actives across Facebook seems to have slowed but is still increasing--not bleeding users--from data I found through Q4 2023.

With 3 billion monthly actives and China being excluded, it's hard to expect a ton of growth since it is a major fraction of the remaining world population. There are bots etc. but they are one of the stricter networks with requiring photos of your ID and stuff a lot more often than others.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#847

Post by bigfishrunning »

fuy wrote: post #262
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…

And also these old C hands don't seem to get paid (significantly) more than a regular web-dev who doesn't care about hardware, memory, performance etc. Go figure.

They do where I'm from, and spend most of their time cleaning up the messes that the regular web-devs create...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#848

Post by bigfishrunning »

chasd00 wrote: post #434
lizknope wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go to the next step. I studied computer engineering not computer science in college. We designed our own CPU and then implemented it in an FPGA. You can go further and design it out of discrete logic gates. Then write it in Verilog. Compare the differences and which made you think more about optimizations.

"in order to bake a pie you must first create the universe", at some point, reaching to lower and lower levels stops being useful.

The universe underneath the pie is mostly made up of invariant laws that must be followed.

The OS, libraries, web browser, runtime, and JavaScript framework underneath your website are absolutely riddled with bugs, and knowing how to identify and fix them makes you a better engineer. Many junior developers get hung up on the assumption that the function they're calling is perfect, and are incapable of investigating whether that's the truth.

This is true of many of the shoulders-of-giants we're standing on, including the stack beneath python, rust, whatever...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#849

Post by bigfishrunning »

deadlast2 wrote: post #268
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…

The programming is an interface to the machine. The AI even what we know now (LLM's, Agents, RAG) will absorb all that. It has many flaws but is still much better than most programmers. All future programmers will be using it. For the programmers that don't want to use it. I think there will be literally billions of lines of unbelievably bad code generated by these 1-100 generation Ai's and junior programmers that ne…

> It has many flaws but is still much better than most programmers.

This says more about most programmers then about any given LLM

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#850

Post by bigfishrunning »

jerpint wrote: post #814
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 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

If cars were as unreliable as most software, you'd need a mechanic to drive you around.
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