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Comment by RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm | Hacker News Reader

If my house burns down due to random bugs in a big appliance, do you think the random underpaid 3rd world developers which will be used do care about that?

I think this will lead to extreme cost cutting measures in choice of the developers which are used.

People who would have previously been totally ineligible to develop software will happily be chosen.

And they won't care about the garbage code they produce as long as it somehow seems to work from the outside.

They'll care about feeding their families in the dire situation they are in, not more.

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I think you're overestimating code quality currently in big enterprise written entirely by humans.

It's adherence to safety regulations that's stopping your house burning down at the moment and this responsibility will be there regardless of how the code is written.

I don't think there is adherence to safety regulations.

The majority of electronics gets produced in foreign nations far far away.

Do you really think they obey the regulations?

they absolutely do. those might be different regulations, but there are some. and there're import control and certifications.

and most of all, there's reputation. it still works

If they're produced in a foreign nation for sale in the US, with a (legitimate) UL sticker, then yes they adhere to those regulations.

If we're talking about Kitchen Aid / Whirlpool / Samsung / LG / etc, they're going to design for certification and have them produced in the foreign nation to those specifications.

If you're getting random things on Amazon or Alibaba, they definitely may not be produced to those regulations, and you may be risking your insurance coverage if one of those is found to be the source of a fire, as I understand it.

At least in Europe, if you're importing goods for sale, they have to be fit for purpose (including passing any applicable safety standards) regardless of where the product was manufactured.

That said, if some vendors are illegally selling products that _don't_ meet safety standards, I'd be doubtful of the GP's claim - that the reason they aren't burning down your house is because of the calibre of software devs working on the product.

> I think you're overestimating code quality currently in big enterprise written entirely by humans.

On HN, many seem to have interesting ideas about what goes on in the world of programming because they read HN articles and posts and thing everyone is adhering to the high standards advocated on here. It's not only enterprises though; plenty of startups (or small companies that are no longer strictly startups but not enterprise either) who are still running the code from the founders from the day 1 MVP. Held together back hacks and misery, deployed from version25_12_22_xmas_bugfix.zip.

Yep, but that has been going on for a long time. This might speed it up though. Probably it will. It's just simply cheaper to have a $5-9/hr crappy dev clicking around and copying/testing 100+ 'solutions' from chatgpt for a week trying to match the inputs/outputs they are given as 'spec' than it is hiring someone good for 3-4 hours. And it's less risk to the company too.

Like said, this is already the case since somewhere beginning '00 when the outsourcing boom started taking off.

Tools like this probably simply will lower the bar to $2-3/hr 'data entry' 'specialists', who were ignored before for programming work.

I already see people directly around me who normally couldn't really write much of anything (be it natural language or code) with ease or at all who suddenly (since chatgpt saw the light) produce both with success. They could already do that with gpt3 or copilot, but that takes prompting; chatgpt lowers the barrier to entry significantly.

> And they won't care about the garbage code they produce as long as it somehow seems to work from the outside.

It would be a black box for sure; json in, json out. When something is broken, that 'nano service' is just replaced by a new black box nano service that does the same thing but without the reported bug(s).

> People who would have previously been totally ineligible to develop software will happily be chosen.

And you would logically be without a job hence your fear of these tools?

Maybe it’s much more likely that these tools entrench current software developers who did in fact learn the craft before these tools and can successfully use them to make themselves much more productive?

Does the recent memory of bootcampers getting paid as much as industry vets after a year or two have an impact on this psychology of feeling replaceable?

That is not my memory of what happened with bootcamps, sadly.

There's a good chance this will produce BETTER code than "eligible" low-grade coders which do this now. You're overly optimistic about them

You are comparing things which are not equal.

The currently semi-bad low-grade coders will get pushed out and replaced with even WORSE ones.

The worse ones will be the ones responsible for choosing and approving the code which was generated by AI.

So let's say there is a "Q(c)" which measures worst possible quality of code c.

If the person who monitors this things has a bad worst possible quality Q(c), the code will also have a bad worst possible quality Q(c).

not really

If current code has Q=0.1, "AI" has Q=0.3 and "person who monitors" has Q=0.02 end result might still be better. It's not a simple multiplication of coefficients there. Better baseline would pull result higher

It's going to be like "self-driving": the computer does the work, but there's a human whose job it is to take responsibility for failures of the system.

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