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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#871

Post by gorjusborg »

kmoser wrote: post #836
gorjusborg wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've missed my core point if you think those isn't different. Before AI there was always someone who understood the code/system. In the a world where people are having machines build the entire system, there is potentially no human that has ever understood it. Now, we are talking about a yet unseen future; I have yet to see a real world system that did not have a human driving the design. But, maintaining a system…

Humans will always have a hand in the design because they need to explain the real-world constraints to the AI. Sure, the code it produces may be complex, but if the AI is really as smart as you're claiming it will eventually be, then it will also have the ability to explain how the code works in plain English (or your human language of choice). Even today, LLMs are remarkably good at summarizing what code does. Phil…

> Philosophical question: how is LLM-produced code that nobody has ever understood any different from human-written legacy code that nobody alive today understands?

- There is zero option of paying an obscene amount of money to find the person and make the problem 'go away'

- There is a non-zero possibility that the code is not understandable by any developer you can afford. By this I mean that the system exhibits the desired behavior, but is written in such a way that only someone like Mike Pall* can understand.

* Mike Pall is a robot from the future

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#872

Post by meiraleal »

snackbroken wrote: post #634
franktankbank wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be imagining a sentience that is still confined to the prime directive of "self-improving" where that no longer is well defined at it's scale.

No, I was just taking "runaway self-improving" as a premise because that's what the comment I was responding to did. I fully expect that at some point "self-improving" would be cast aside at the altar of "self-replicating". That is actually the biggest long-term threat I see from an alignment perspective; As we make AI more and more capable, more and more general and more and more efficient, it's going to get harder…

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#874

Post by meiraleal »

999900000999 wrote: post #458
renewiltord wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly, I spent years making multiples of your target comp and now I’m home sitting around using AI to make myself toy games. The barrier has dropped so low that I think I’d have been more productive if I were still working.

Not like it's going to happen for me, but how did you reach such comp. I'm a simple man. If I hit 2 million in net worth I'm done working. I don't plan on having a family, so I'm just supporting myself. If I really made a ton of money I'd fund interesting open source games. Godot is the most popular open source game engine, and they're making it happen off just 40k a month. I'm a bit surprised Microsoft hasn't filled…

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#876

Post by psytrancefan »

rcpt wrote: post #844
coffeecat wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is just very random. LLMs help me write a synthesizer using an odd synth technique in an obscure musical programming language with no problem, help me fix my broken linux system no problem but then can't do anything right with the python library pyro. I think it is why people have such different experiences. It all depends randomly on how what you want to solve lines up with what the models are good at.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#877

Post by psytrancefan »

high_na_euv wrote: post #277
RohMin wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do feel with the rise of "reasoning" class of models, it's not hard to believe that code quality will improve over time.

The thing is: how much 0.2x, 2x, 5x, 50x?

It all comes down to a religious faith in AGI or not.

There can't be things that a human can program that AGI can not program or it is not "AGI".

While I am never a true believer in AGI, it seems to go I get a little faith when a new model comes out then I become increasingly agnostic the weeks and months after that. Repeat.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#878

Post by justanotherunit »

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…

This is so on point IMO, I feel like there is no better time than to learn more low level languages than now. Since the hype will in the end resolve around insanely technical people carrying all the major weight.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#879

Post by tguedes »

jvanderbot wrote: post #241
chubot wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll probably never have evidence either way ... Did Google and Stack Overflow "replace" programmers? Yes, in the sense that I suspect that with the strict counterfactual -- taking them AWAY -- you would have to hire 21 people instead of 20, or 25 instead of 20, to do the same job. So strictly speaking, you could fire a bunch of people with the new tools. --- But in the same period, the industry expanded rapidly, an…

This is an insightful comment. It smells of Jevron's paradox, right? More productivity leads to increased demand. I just don't remember anyone saying that SO would replace programmers, because you could just copy-paste code from a website and run it. Yet here we are: GPTs will replace programmers, because you can just copy-paste code from a website and run it.

I completely agree with Jevron's paradox being the right way to think about this. Much like ERP and HR software made it so you needed less back of office staff to accomplish the same task, but it allows these huge, multi-national companies to exist. I don't think these tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands employee companies would be possible without ERP and HR software.

I think another way of thinking about this is with low-code/no code tools. Another comment in this post said they never really took off and they didn't in the way some people expected. But a lot of large companies use them quite a bit for automating internal processes such as document/data aggregation and manipulation. JP Morgan has multiple job listings right now for RPA developers. Before this would needed to be done by actual developers.

I suspect (and hope) AI will follow a similar trajectory. I hope the future is exciting and we build new, more complex systems we can build that wasn't possible before due to lack of

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#880

Post by leovingi »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #617
nerder92 wrote: post #155

This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions: 1. AI code ability will be the same as is today 2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change…

> The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs After 20 years in tech, I can't think of a single company I've worked for/with that would fit the profile of an "intelligent" company. All of them make poor and irrational decisions r…

>After 20 years in tech, I can't think of a single company I've worked for/with that would fit the profile of an "intelligent" company

It's not even necessarily about intelligence but about the simple concept of unknown unknowns. If everyone had perfect knowledge of the current reality and could perfectly describe what it is that they want immediately, without spending any time investigating, producing proof-of-concept work, iterating on a product, etc. I would agree that it could be feasible for AI to replace a lot of programming work.

As it stands, what I just described above is THE BULK of development. Coding is the last thing that happens and it also happens to be the fastest, easiest and smallest part of the entire process.

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