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Comment by thallium205 | Hacker News Reader

Copilot and GPT are going after these teams first.

I'm not sure how this is possible. I'm sure programmers are aware how bad these are for writing code. Is management just caught up in the buzz?

The whole 'AI taking programming jobs' reminds me of the '3rd world countries taking programming jobs'.

Don't get me wrong, its great for filling in parameters of functions and APIs, it sometimes good at figuring out errors and solutions. Its bad at coding anything other than generic algorithms, and its typically bad at that too.

Don't get me wrong, its great for filling in parameters of functions and APIs

That's pretty much what most of these firms do.

That was my thought too. The outsourcing teams that aid in development require specifications and documentation. "Code factories" feels like a target for LLM-replacement.

Perhaps there's a startup idea here: identify the way communication is done with these teams (PRDs? I have no idea...), and create a service that takes that as input and creates results using LLM? There for sure should be room for fine-tuning models for it, as well as learning to have the LLMs create and run tests for all the code, according to requirements/specs.

LLMs are probably better at generating specifications than writing code.

There are outsourcing firms whose sole job is to create unit tests. If there is one feature these LLMs do well right now, today, it is generating unit tests well. QA engineers in general were already treading on thin ice.

This is not a outsourcing team in the current context.

Interesting observation.

Is FAANG laying off employees in Sweden as well?

Do you think most of the Swedish engineers working for FAANG would be replaced by GPT4 soon?

Are you planning of doing it in your startup as well?

Should the employees be worried?

Long term we should all be worried. Or hopeful? It is unclear to me if it is a blessing or a curse to have what one loves doing revolutionized... I am actually leaning towards blessing. At least if the goal of programming is passion for building. And this gets to your other point: if what a programmer does is direct implementation of requirements, in a mechanical fashion, without any consideration other than passing some requirements set off in a PRD... then yes, I would replace that. We have discussed this internally, and the way we work an LLM will be a tool not a replacement. So our employees are safe. For now.

As for FAANG layoffs - I think it is happening all over, but also that it is overreported. The graph of hires over the past few years should be references whenever number of people layed off is mentioned. Over the past 1-2 years I think the tech giants are way up in head count.

I'm generally baffled by the obliviousness of so many people I know who work in the IT industry and are either unaware of GPT or have only used it a couple of times as a toy.

So many of these folks fill up seats in code factories or do glorified data entry.

I don't think the world is ready for what's coming.

They are going for them, but they won't get them in the next 5 years at least, probably more; this move has nothing to do with AI.

The level of human interaction required to distill the abstract and implicit requirements of the customers into a machine-implementable format far outstrips the capabilities of current LLM based systems, and I say that as a daily GPT and Copilot user. It will just re-balance the workforce, turning 10x programmers into 50x programmer-project-managers, hence just ever more scarce.

> turning 10x programmers into 50x programmer-project-managers, hence just ever more scarce

I don't understand the math here: Why would it make programmers more scarce?

Because there won't be a 5x increase in the amount of work to do. When companies are given a choice between doing the same amount of work with 5x fewer employees vs doing 5x the amount of work with the same number of employees, they will almost always go with the less risky path (doing what they have always done before just with less).

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