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The Last Programmers?

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Re: The Last Programmers?

#91

Post by NoGravitas »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #53
oytis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but given how many breakthroughs we had in AI recently, for text, sound, images and video the odds of new breakthroughs happening are probably higher than otherwise. We have no idea how many of them we need till AGI or at least replacing software engineers though.

That's mostly just a few discoveries finding multiple applications. That's fairly common after a large breakthrough, and what you see is typically a flurry of activity and then things die down as the breakthrough gets figured out.

It's "a few discoveries finding multiple applications" plus throwing as much data and compute as possible at those applications, a process that seems to be increasingly struggling uphill in the last year or so.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#92

Post by lbreakjai »

Rzor wrote: post #4
davydm wrote: post #3

FTA: "But with billions of dollars pouring into generative AI every year, we will see instant voice-to-code capabilities + bug-free quality in 2-5 years." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA omg, thanks for the laugh - "bug-free quality in 2-5 years" pfffffft I'm not holding my breath - rather, I think that by then, the hype will have finally lost some steam as companies crash and burn with their shitty, "almost work…

I'm in the same camp as you where I don't think the hype is justified, but when it comes to the medium and long term adoption I can easily see LLMs getting good enough so that programmers will be more like plumbers than system designers and maintainers. At the very least it's going to be hard to justify big teams. I do wonder if tech is ready for more competition then because starving is a hell of a motivator.

> programmers will be more like plumbers

Are some of us not, already? I sure have been in roles where I felt like it, writing glue to move things from one AWS service to another.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#93

Post by adastra22 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #89
adastra22 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Kimi K2 (SOTA on metrics) for about $10k/mo on full speed for many parallel sessions and no quantization on rented hardware. About $20k to buy Mac Studio hardware for running locally, at a slower but usable speed. Maybe $4k or so for an Epyc box that gets you a snail's pace output, but still usable if you are very patient. 3rd party dependence is out of convenience, not necessity.

I am not getting your point. Are you saying I should be spending 2y of savings (20k) to get rid of the 3rd party dependency, and if I don't, it is merely convenience? And are you saying I should buy another lock-in system (an Apple device) in exchange?

Cost of doing business. A contractor will need to buy a truck. A programmer would need to rent hardware. The cost of hardware would go down over time, of course.

The point is with open weight models that are SOTA, this isn’t techno feudalism as some people here seem to claim.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#94

Post by danjl »

warpspin wrote: post #90

I totally do not get why AI coding proponents constantly seem to feel the need to argue that "one day" coding through AI will work. As if you truly must be prepared for this day or "adapted" to AI as the article argues. That day will either happen or not in my lifetime. If it happens, no amount of interacting with shitty 2025 tools will prepare me for that because as soon as any such tool would actually understand wh…

We're also at the peak of "mt. stupid" in the Dunning-Krueger graph of LLMs for programming. All prognostication is suspect.

Re: The Last Programmers?

#95

Post by hakfoo »

fragmede wrote: post #77
germandiago wrote: post #39

Poor the people/assistants that make mistakes when they have to fit, intrgrate and modify all AI-written code. My experience is always that there is a complexity threshold at which things start to take longer, not shorter, with the use of AI. This is not one-off scripts or small programs. But when you have systems that touch a lot of context, different languages and parts of the stack, IA sucks for how to design that…

> Give any AI any atypical problem and you will see it spit big hallucinations. So don't give it atypical problems. Hammers are really bad at driving in screws.

If we could get that sort of mindset into the AI-maximalists, particularly in the executive suite, we'd be so much better off.

Use the tools that are APPROPRIATE FOR THE SPECIFIC TASK. Even if that means we're not always using the shiny toy you're desperate to get metrics up on. You'd look like a putz going into a machine shop and yelling at the guy working a lathe "but we just bought this laser engraver, go use it now!" Why is it different for programmers or other creatives?

Maybe the AI vendors need to start broadening their products too-- sell a better lathe to go with the laser engraver.

There are a lot of problems where the developer knows roughly what they want in terms of code already. The labour savings is mostly "not having to type in 500 lines of code" and it's wasted if they instead have to spend the same amount of time trying to craft prompts and babysit the LLM. I think there's a lot of potential in the "spicy autocomplete" flow for that use case-- start with a few key lines and let the system use pattern recognition and templates to quickly infer the other 450, all within the workflow they're already productive in.

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