Comment by drvdevd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drvdevd | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is both a developer and currently occasionally uses GPT in the course of development, I skimmed this article looking for the one point I think there is to make on this subject.

I think the opposite of what people are worrying about will happen here. AI will create a feedback loop for developers, where there just aren’t enough humans to keep up with the work - exacerbating the existing problem of a shortage.

For me, LLMs can essentially replace large portions of my workflow: stack overflow, googling for examples, finding some obscure syntax, getting started on a problem when I’m coming from a place of little understanding. Assuming I ask the right questions in the right order and get the output running, it can drastically reduce my time to a working solution.

This is the same thing previous tools have done, but with a faster and tighter feedback loop. That will just amplify the primary pattern of software: with every solution we create new problems to solve. And every new abstraction has some hidden cost.

Mark my words: our near future problem as engineers is not that we can’t get jobs, it’s that we can’t fill them all. We will most likely find ourselves desperately chasing automation that never quite gets as automated as we need it to be.

Of course this is both good and bad. But it means that like this author, we need to encourage everyone possible to “learn to code” in some sense.

The problem isn't how you, an engineer, perceives the tool could be useful.

The problem is how your CEO, not an engineer, perceives the tool could be useful.

This. I asked a question regarding this on a forum and I got downvoted to oblivion just because I said a manager/CTO/CEO could see this as an opportunity to lay off people, cut salaries, etc...

I am skeptical that this will happen but if it does it seems to me it will still be a short term situation. I don’t believe the world’s need for software, especially high quality software, is anywhere near met. There are many problems waiting to be solved with software that just aren’t due to cost or time of implementation. The outcome will be more software and more complex software, you may as an individual engineer be expected to manage and produce more software then before but the demand for software engineers will not be reduced because all of the sudden there is much more software in the world.

Maybe those laid off people can start a business that replaces the CEO/CTO with an AI.

Reality has a way to make itself perceived at some point.

M̶a̶r̶k̶e̶t̶s̶ MBAs and their ilk can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Alright, then I'll be the CEO.

If it's a real problem, it'll only be a temporary one that eventually self-corrects.

The CEO at a company I worked for a few years ago suddenly one day discovered open source. He decided that we were now going to be a software company and "the nerds will do the work for free!" Not even paraphrasing there, that's what he said at a companywide town hall meeting. He thought he was brilliant for discovering open source and that he was the first to think of exploiting it for commercial gain.

Bankruptcy reorganization took longer than expected but he's still CEO, so I guess it didn't impact him very much but lots of people lost their jobs and everyone who owned stock was wiped out, which included a good chunk of the employees.

The problem is your CEO was right. Exploiting open source is the right move. Instead of hiring engineers to write an operating system you guys likely exploited Linux and a bunch of other free tools.

100 percent: open source has contributed to less demand. It's the only logical conclusion.

The thing is that supply is so low that even with less demand it still outstrips supply.

Here's the the thing we should be cautious about. Times change. Technology changes, the culture changes and interest rates also change. Demand may not always outstrip supply.

No, the CEO was wrong. You're conflating a serendipitous use of open source software with a targeted exploitation of it. People decided to open source Linux, GCC, and other tools. So developers at companies use them, because they are available. This is not exploitation, though, it is the intention. Developers made these tools specifically for other developers to use them, even at their jobs.

The CEO, however, wants to convince developers to work on software that would drive value for the company. In essence, the CEO wants to trick open source developers. This is clearly doomed to fail.

I know commercial products where the code is open source (and largely useless to anything except the product) and people contribute. Decent Espresso is one. It is insane anyone contributes but they do. Rich owner gets tons of free labor.

You are getting your emotions mixed up with facts.

When you use open source you are exploiting a resource as there is no fair trade. It's not a crime nor is it immoral but because no fair trade occured it is technically an exploitation.

No CEO tricked open source developers. Open source developers create open source as a charity to society that's all. They aren't tricked. They willingly choose to allow others to exploit their goodwill as a resource. Many people choose not to exploit them and donate money for their efforts, but most don't.

Put it this way. People can be aware they are being exploited and people can be unaware that they are exploiting others. Knowledge of the action is independent of the action of exploitation.

If I gift you resources, the trade is fair. This is you putting your own emotions into it, and projecting. You don't get to tell me what I do with my resources, and my labor and time has no intrinsic value.

Even with your description of things, you still have the wrong way of things. The CEO in the description obviously wants to make open source developers build _something new_. That is, something they have not decided to gift to the community already. We can argue semantics of the word exploit, of which I think you're being ridiculous, but even with your definition the situations are different.

>If I gift you resources, the trade is fair.

A gift isn't a fair trade. That's why a gift is not called a fair trade. There's such phrase: "fair gift".

> You don't get to tell me what I do with my resources, and my labor and time has no intrinsic value.

I never did tell you what to do with your time and resources. Why would you assume I did something that never occurred? I think your emotions are saying this.

>The CEO in the description obviously wants to make open source developers build _something new_. That is, something they have not decided to gift to the community already.

No exploitation doesn't just involve that. Even taking something already built without a fair trade is still exploitation.

>We can argue semantics of the word exploit, of which I think you're being ridiculous, but even with your definition the situations are different.

Not only CAN we argue this, we are arguing this. This is the central point. And it's not about MY definition either. It's about the colloquial definition of the word exploit. If you google it, you will see that I am right.

There is no different "situation" here. You're simply offended by the word "exploit" because you have preconceived connotations attached to it. I don't have any skin in the game, I don't have to adjust vocabulary or my interpretation of the English language to justify my place in the world.

That CEO is strategically making the best decision by "exploiting" open source. Anyone following that plan is also making the most cost efficient strategic move. He may be acting like an ass about it, but logically his strategy is correct. That's just reality.

> A gift isn't a fair trade. That's why a gift is not called a fair trade. There's such phrase: "fair gift".

Open source can be understood as a gift economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

I mean how you perceive the tool is relevant as well. It's just self delusion and denial.

It's obvious if your productivity increases because of AI it diminishes the need of another person's productivity. You give everyone more AI tools you could increase productivity to levels beyond what is necessary. If some productivity isn't necessary it's laid off. Simple logic.

It's quite obvious. It's just people have a fascination and love for this technology such that they need to construct a delusional narrative that validates their love and validates their moral imperatives. But deep down they know, because it's really really straightforward the consequences of any tool like this.

Increased efficiency leads to more demand, not less. This is known as the Jevons paradox in economics (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).

The historical precedent would be for increased productivity to lead to more software being developed, not the same amount but by fewer developers.

Except how did the company go bankrupt then?

This paradox only occurs if every resource is abundant. We tend to see it a lot (especially in the last decade) because of the easy money policies by the Fed in the last decade or so. Following your example, if we have unlimited money and gas prices are cheap, we buy more gas. But with limited money, when gas gets cheaper, we don't buy more gas, we usually allocate more money for more essentials.

The scenario with a bankruptcy is largely parallel to what we're seeing recently with interest rates and the lay offs. Free money is being tightened. With limited money the paradox no longer functions. Big tech is not going to hire people to write existing software they can get on the open source world, so they let go of a bunch of people.

You can literally see the two curves correlate ever since interest rates started to rise... Open source projects are going up right now while lay offs are also increasing... violating the paradox.

The Jevons paradox was noted in the 19th century when the world was far less wealthy than today. Recent American monetary policy has little relevance.

There’s many more examples if you look up induced demand - a similar effect is the Downs–Thomson paradox, where adding more roads increases traffic congestion in the long term. You may see a short term improvement (the same way a struggling company that increases productivity will let go of employees) but eventually a new equilibrium is reached.

But the problem is we see opposite trends as well.

We see paradoxical trends and trends that are not. It just means the paradox can sometimes occur it does not mean the paradox is a general rule.

There is no worker shortage for engineers in software roles. Nor a shortage in other engineering professions. That's corpo propaganda used to reduce salaries, the largest expense of tech. More job competition = less pay.

If anyone wants the best software devs there's plenty of them uploading projects on GitHub. The resume is right there in plain sight. Speaking to numerous hiring managers personally, the story is the same. They know, they also have a few hundred applications already. You'll know there's a shortage when the org actually puts money into education, interns, and makes offers to juniors.

Further - if there were a shortage, that would be an existential crisis to any engineering org. They would be tumbling over themselves trying to get people through school. They have actual billions lying around. This is not the case. These corps contribute almost nothing, because they don't need to.

I certainly can’t argue with this point. Except I will add that when I speak of a shortage of engineers, I am perhaps more speaking of a gut feeling on the overall quality of software the entire industry is putting out. There may or may not be a surplus of engineers out there to fill jobs, but there are a lot of hats an engineer has to wear if they actually want to drive systemic positive forward change, much of which is of course not really “engineering” at all.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is: for the vast majority of new-hires despite qualifications, they will consistently produce more technical debt and that debt will need to be paid from time to time. I believe the increase in popularity of LLM-type AIs will amplify this effect and make that debt more visible and urgent.

Where's the shortage of engineering? Tech companies nearly universally (outside like Defense) are laying off huge swaths of developers.

It's always been a shortage of firms willing to pay the appropriate amount.

When you pay enough the talent pool is endless.

This is true but this doesn’t imply those companies couldn’t still use those engineers in some capacity but rather they have decided to cut the cost of employing them.

Universally, software is so flawed and yet so fundamental to modern life, there is certainly a possibility for everyone to contribute but not necessarily funding to pay them for their work.

On the other hand, if it replaces large parts of your workflow, that means your work is now very different. It will perhaps be more about making strategic decisions, less about implementing the details. So depending on what type of work you are good at and enjoy, it can be a good or a bad thing.

Don’t forget that most companies want us to actually do more, there’s pretty much infinite creativity available. Faster and cheaper code delivery will probably lead to more code , more moonshot ideas to be involved in, more scaling issues, security issues and on and on.

There will now be more competition of course, more LLMs to build and maintain. More features to keep up with etc.

Also AI safety jobs will become more of a thing, could just be getting started.

…or it’s the end of all work!!!!!!

I have a similar take. I suspect at some stage “software development” will mean feeding business requirements (with some degree of precision) into the algorithm and letting it handle logic, resource provisioning etc. The last traditional programming jobs to go will be legacy software for critical infrastructure, defense, and financial institutions.

Communication skills and business domain knowledge will become far more important than what we consider “tech skills” today.

I doubt the world’s appetite for software will decline even when one person manages to develop in a day what used to take a team of people months. We’ll have a lot more work to do, and a lot more people will join the field.

However, on average, it might become a much less lucrative and prestigious profession.

> I suspect at some stage “software development” will mean feeding business requirements (with some degree of precision) into the algorithm and letting it handle

That’s just a higher level programming language… And we all know that it doesn’t solve things.

It actually does solve a lot things, in the sense that there’s a lower barrier for entry. A lot of lower-level programming skills are being abstracted away and obsoleted. My prediction may be wrong, but it’s based on the extrapolation of the trends you’re referring to.

High level languages like Python abstract away boring specifics like memory management and implantation data structures.

Natural language programming via GPT instead abstracts away the actual functioning.

I’ve seen colleagues use snippets from chatGPT that are horrendously inefficient despite being “simple” prompts. They look fine at first glance, but work only 50% of the time.

Oh, there’s no doubt this particular AI software is flawed. But I don’t think there’s anything inherent to AI that renders it unable to master specific frameworks or algorithms in future iterations. The timeframe is up in the air, though.

I’m not convinced it’s an AI quality problem - rather, the difficulty of translating natural language into machine requirements. This is an age-old problem, not even restricted to Computer Science.

I agree with the other comment responding to you. Consider SQL. A typical select statement with a join and a sort would have taken a team of people months to implement in an application-specific proprietary data-storage structure (perhaps a red black tree). Now it’s a trivial line of SQL. Like the top comment said, this has not eliminated those teams’ jobs.

The one difference I see is that SQL is still predictable in it's output. I don't think feeding requirements into an AI is at that state yet

+1 Predictability and rigour are crucial IMHO.

Absolutely, but GPT has taken "rubber ducky debugging" to an entire new level.

Interesting you should mention SQL, because a lot of non-tech business people I’ve met have rudimentary SQL skills nowadays. Database administration is a dying field.

I was speaking of the engineering teams that existed before database administration was formalized as a field at all. Mainframe, batch processing, and written in C: proprietary company-specific applications.

Analogously, it may not be long before crud websites are created, end to end, by non-tech people with mostly natural language.

That being said, today’s crud web developers won’t be out of work. Their experience writing/designing code will be put to use in more complex, potentially yet-unseen applications.

This assessment is correct. Many more engineers will be needed. Far more than exist right now. There is a lot of work to do. There could be innovation in products and services...more products, more services, more innovation, for another 1,000 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com