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Comment by nvy | Hacker News Reader

Perusing the comments here, it's interesting how short-sighted HN can be when it comes to LLMs. Generative "AI" is only going to get better, and the question of whether or not ChatGPT can write FizzBuzz, or avionics firmware, or a CRUD app, seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

Even if LLMs or some successor technology never ends up supplanting programmers entirely, it is guaranteed we will see a mixture of deskilling (certain skills no longer being required, like spelling in the age of autocorrect) and massive productivity gains (meaning n-m workers can now do the job of n). These tools aren't going away, and they're only going to improve.

Thus the market for programmers will shrink henceforth. There are no doubts about it. Maybe slowly, maybe quickly, but shrink it will, for the same reason that the market for radiologists is shrinking, or the reason that engineering firms no longer employ whole floors of draftsmen.

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> the market for radiologists is shrinking

On the contrary, it's expanding and there's a global shortage of them [1].

AI has been changing the role of radiologists but not replacing it [2] and radiologists are needed more than ever, but the industry has been struggling to communicate this to students worried by ill-informed claims the profession is under threat from AI [3].

[1] https://www.rsna.org/news/2022/may/global-radiologist-shorta...

[2] https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/imaging/radiology/article/...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10131993/

I think it's two sides of the same coin. Demand for medical imaging is not necessarily the same as demand for human radiologists. One radiologist can service 2 or 3 hospitals thanks to the internet, and "AI" is getting better at radiology too. Human-AI Augmentation is happening right now.

When steam drills were becoming the norm I'm sure some mining firms were struggling to hire human diggers too.

The demand for human radiologists never actually went down, though[1]. There is improved efficiency due to technology, but it hasn't kept up with increased demand for scanning and increased patient volumes. There's also induced demand caused by efficiency increasing. Diagnostic AI tends to make different kinds of errors than a human, so even if it were better, both together is even stronger.

The "Radiologists are being replaced by technology" story has been repeated so many times by uninformed software developers that it has become popular wisdom, but the reality so far is that we need more radiologists than ever.

Ironically, radiology might be a decent proxy for what could happen with software engineering, but in the opposite way you intend.

[1] https://marvel-b1-cdn.bc0a.com/f00000000046012/info.vrad.com...

Assuming LLM improve productivity why do you think the market will shrink instead of getting even more stuff done? Say if some actually smart LLM could improve my team productivity with 25% then

1 we could fire a person

2 we could handle 25% more tasks, features and bugs

So I think 2 will happen.

My latest example of LLM issues,| I asked ChatGPT and competition to convert a line of jQuery into native JS, they all got it wrong because jQuery has some selectors like ":header" that is native to JS but the LLM used it anyway though somewhere in it's big memory it has the information that his is not native and if you prompt it right it will fix the issue. So seems to me the LLM are focusing too much on the prompt and failing to use it's full memory on the problem, so it can fix small individual micro tasks but is a complete waste of time for something a bit more advanced , my conclusion you can't have a manager or an artist armed with ChatGPT and create a full project without actually learning to code, at best they will learn to code from the LLM but the hard way and probably using outdated code and inefficient ways.

>Assuming LLM improve productivity why do you think the market will shrink instead of getting even more stuff done?

Because this is what always happens when tools cause productivity gains. Budgets aren't infinite.

- Computerized avionics dramatically cut demand for flight crews. It used to require a dedicated "flight engineer" to literally run the engines (like a train engineer) in a WWII-era bomber, and a dedicated navigator. Now airliners barely need a co-pilot.

- As I mentioned previously, computerized medical imaging has caused demand for radiologists to go down, because one radiologist today can do the work of multiple radiologists of yesteryear.

- In software in particular, if engineering and development is more productive, companies can cut costs and still get the same amount of work done, or possibly more. It's not about firing people immediately, it's about the next company hiring fewer. And the one after that hiring even fewer. Generative coding is going to make software development labs leaner.

>my conclusion you can't have a manager or an artist armed with ChatGPT and create a full project without actually learning to code, at best they will learn to code from the LLM but the hard way and probably using outdated code and inefficient ways.

That's the current state of affairs. Why do you think the technology will not improve beyond where it is now?

> As I mentioned previously, computerized medical imaging has caused demand for radiologists to go down

And as I said in my reply, this isn't true.

Maybe I was wrong on that point, and maybe I wasn't. Are you suggesting it invalidates the entire premise? Or is this just classic HN pedantry?

Do you have anything useful to add to the discussion?

I don't care about the rest of the post, or about arguing with you. I'm publicly correcting a specific, widely repeated, false claim. One which, if you take the time to read the links I posted, you will see is having a concrete negative effect on an industry responsible for real people's wellbeing. In particular (see the third link), ~50% of students considering radiology as a specialisation express concerns because of false claims its future as a job is under threat. These concerns contribute to hiring problems in that profession, which exacerbate a global staff shortage (first link) which results in worsened healthcare outcomes.

There's a non-zero chance that correcting your statement will influence somebody considering whether to specialise in this field, and replying to your repeating of the claim as well as to the original instance increases that chance. I don't consider it pedantry.

You're seriously trying to claim being factually right doesn't matter in a discussion of facts?

I think the misconception is that there's a finite amount of stuff to do. Every place i've worked at there's been a near infinite backlog. Lots of stuff that would be done if they could. It's always been a constraint on the number of people hired (budget and availability).

I don't see engineers not being part of the process for many years, even if most of the work is done for them. For most companies, if they had their engineers suddenly become 10x more productive, they'd want them to do 10x as much, not scale down to 10% of the staff. Not to say some companies wouldn't.

There are certainly more programmers now than when you had to build a program by wiring together vacuum tubes, or even manually manage memory. Hollywood definitely didn't employ 2.5 million people back in the silent film era when film-making tools were much less productive. That's Jevon's Paradox, increased efficiency increases demand. Labor is like 30% of an airline ticket, and that counts not just the flight crew, so efficiency doesn't do much much for demand when jet fuel is pricey. Likewise there's only so many Xrays that are justified to give out. There's an infinite amount of software crud to be created, and it's primary input is programmers.

>That's the current state of affairs. Why do you think the technology will not improve beyond where it is now?

To replace a developer you would need a human level AI, that is impossible for now.

You can improve the tech to do simple jobs and help me like

- review this code I wrote for potential corner cases

- generate some unit tests for this functions

- find some code in this giant project that does X . I know I wrote it 3 years ago but I have no idea how I named the function or maybe it was a different project.

- rewrite this old IE6 JS/jQuery into modern JAvascript

But IMO a tool that can do this would use LLM but you need an actual valid code checker/interpretor to do a production ready code. I can't trust an LLM to update a giant piece of code without chainging something, I prefer a tool like Intellj refactoring that actual understand code.

>Because this is what always happens when tools cause productivity gains. Budgets aren't infinite.

I think you'd actually struggle to find an example in history where productivity gains have resulted in prolonged, and industry-wide unemployment for those trained in that area.

I completely agree that technology can make individuals redundant, as in your flight crew example. And yet we are seeing a global shortage of airline pilots, how do you explain that? If technology makes people unemployed (across an economy, over the medium-long term), why aren't there piles of pilots working at McDonald's?

Is not that as technology improves, industries which were once small/unprofitable can balloon into hugely lucrative industries?

Assuming that HumanEval is a good benchmark (it's not) and assuming you can naively scale under fat-tails (you can't) then according to OpenAI's own gpt4 report (someone did the math on hn/reddit where they reproduced the curve but i can't find the link) at 100x the training cost of gpt4 you will still have a 15% error rate on medium difficulty tasks.

"Programmers" is ill defined. Once it meant translating maths and engineering specs for assemblers. Now it can mean anything from someone writing verified and audited device drivers for robotics to designers a/b testing retail workflows. In the last century, 'programming' became a major economic and technological field of activity.

To think some new 'programming' tool will make it shrink is not at all warranted. Tools that make computer programming more accessible, more flexible and more powerful will increase demand for people who can reason about it, work on it, teach it, evaluate it etc etc.

It may get better but I'm not convinced it will get good. Currently I am not impressed. By which I mean I'm really impressed, it's pretty cool stuff but also hugely overrated.

I'm not even slightly worried about my job security. I tried Copilot and it sucked.

At the end of the day, LLMs are fakers. They do not possess real intelligence, they merely fake intelligence using statistics and training data. There comes a point where you can't fake it any more.

> meaning n-m workers can now do the job of n... Thus the market for programmers will shrink henceforth.

Maybe in the far future when we have programmed nearly everything there is to program... Until then companies will just produce n*(n/(n-m)) more output.

Actually, the reduction of the cost of programming output will logically lead to more demand as solutions that were previously deemed too expensive to produce will become viable.

The assumption that these models can only improve is a pretty big one.

duck I guess I really should be worried.

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