AI won't replace human devs anytime soon
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hypothetical AI will replace humans, sure. LLMs probably won't. original GPT4 was the best coding LLM I dealt with, and it was 1.5+ years ago. the context size was pitiful, yes, but it was a lot smarter than the current crop of big models.
Anytime someone says "this is the worst it'll ever be" I can't help but think "oh sweet summer child"; and then I ask them, what's your favorite operating system you've ever used?
The answer heavily depends on the person's age. Windows 10 or 7 dominates the conversation, and for slightly older folks, XP. "MacOS Snow Leopard" gets said a lot, that was a beloved MacOS release because they very famously said "no new features we're just fixing the old ones" and they actually did it.
No one ever says "MacOS Sequoia" or "Windows 11". Man, the discourse surrounding the new iOS 18 Photos app is reaching a fever pitch.
Sorry for the weird music on this, but its the first clip I could find of even, gasp, Elon Musk, stating this very real fact [1]: Technology does not automatically improve. In fact, it seems like especially software loves to get worse, and it takes a focused effort, from talented individuals, as far removed from money and business and agilescrum as possible to keep things operationally stable.
But, sure, definitely the new metaversecryptoai bubblescam will escape that and be built to the highest possible quality. There definitely won't be investors and men in suits in every room saying "we're losing billions is there a knob we can turn to reduce electricity usage?" OpenAI is definitely raising billions to fund the R&D of the next level of intelligence, and certainly not because without that capital they'd be bankrupt in three months.
But Windows 11 is a massive improvement over Windows 2000 in many, many areas. Just because Windows 2000 was my favourite doesn’t mean I think it’s the best. It doesn’t even have built-in support for WiFi.
I think they’re even moving towards something that could be my new favourite Windows. Windows 11 is the first Windows with a visual style that I actually find appealing, and they seem to be making some serious efforts to make it all visually consistent too. The new settings app has its flaws but if they just finish the work of supporting all the features of the old control centre and finally have a unified place to change settings, I would say it’ll be all-in-all better than Win2k.
The GPU driver system and WSL2 are leaps and bounds beyond what Win2k could do. The built in support for virtual desktops and window arrangement is something I would never want to be without.
Yeah, on the Mac side I remember Snow Leopard fondly. That doesn’t mean I think it’s the best. On Mac I see even less reason to think older versions of MacOS is better in any way. They’ve stayed visually pleasing and consistent, haven’t made any huge UI changes similar to Windows’s attempts at making a better start menu, and have added many genuinely useful features over the years.
You see, that's exactly why I don't have high hopes about OpenAI. They came up with a state of the art GPT-4 that was slow and expensive to maintain, so they came up with this o1 that is basically a chain of cheap 4os, something that people used to do from the moment LLMs appeared. And they started calling GPT-4 a "legacy model".
In the meantime Anthropic is steadily raising the bar with each iteration. But even there the efforts plateaued and what we have still has the inherent problems of LLMs, that is the ability to give completely wrong answers with amazing self-confidence.
I guess my point is that if an AI is doing computing why would it doing computing resemble a person doing it? It's much closer to the machine then me. Why not take advantage of that?
My last struggle was creating an SVG arrow pointing to a specific corner. Both Claude and CGPT failed with many attempts.
Something interesting you can do with LLMs is you can constrain their output. What if you just write a test case to encapsulate the bug then try to filter out the most "sane" LLM output that results in the code compiling and the test case passing?
It doesn't seem like much, but it's like using more computing power to filter out all the "obviously wrong" solutions. Doing this in practice might require you to make too many test cases though.
If you manage to have more breakthroughs to senior then you can maybe leave it unattended for a few months but not if the product team is inexperienced or strong willed. The code will still end up as unmaintainable spaghetti.
So you need more breakthroughs to achieve staff or higher which requires a lot more agency and initiative on the part of the bot to push past what your team mates think they want and do what actually needs to be done modifying not only the code and the requirements but the process that leads to miscommunication and inefficiencies within the org.
If you manage to invent a bot that knows what’s better for the people prompting it and acts on that then you’ve potentially also violated the first law of robotics and created a death bot.
And boy oh boy would it be astronomically expensive to run.
I swear to god, it’s better than our junior devs fresh out of college.
Like, I let the LLM solve a PBI and it’s just faster with better code.
Actual devs will still have a job, but the low hanging write some code guys? They’re done. And a lot of companies had a bunch of them..
I then said, heh and asked it to implement a circuit breaker pattern using axios, and it again implemented a timeout and added it to axios options!
Could be am dumb or o1 was hallucinating on me intentionally, but the thing is very far away from a Jr dev fresh out of college.
Feels like your Jr position claims 3 YoE in hardcore backend. Last time I’ve seen them, they discussed == vs === and “in” vs “of”. Wouldn’t hold my breath asking them to implement a rate limiter mw or any sort of debouncer. Unless humanity boosted their average intelligence very recently, ofc, where you’re an async networking specialist fresh outta school.
o1 is very far away from being a Jr dev replacement and is actually slightly more useful(if I ignore the costs entirely) than the existing intelligent autcomplete features.
They are definitely being replaced by ChatGPT in our company. Think of it what you will, several teams write all their unit tests with ChatGPT now instead..
what a waste of a nice sunday
LLMs still cannot solve most logic problems. They generate language. It can be a programming language but obviously the scope is limited.
Have it run through all the branches of spaghetti code and isolate the problematic sections along with proposed changes.
A lot of times at work, support teams modify their systems and don't bother communicating what they're doing, they seem to rely on scream tests to figure out who is even using their services and for what purpose. It's a total fucking mess and I laugh whenever I hear someone suggest that "AI" is going to replace what I do when some massive % of what I do has fucking nothing to do with code at all.
AI software devs don’t understand requirements well, and they don’t write code that confirms to established architecture practices. They will happily create redundant functions and routes and tables, in order to deliver “working code”.
So AI coding is bunk? No, it’s just that the primary value lies elsewhere than code generation. You can stuff A LOT of context into an LLM and ask it to explain how the system works. You can ask it to create a design that emulates existing patterns. You can feed it a diff of code and ask it to look for common problems and anti-patterns. You can ask it create custom diagrams, documentation and descriptions and it will do so quickly and accurately.
These are all use cases that assist with coding, yet don’t involve actually writing code. They make developers more knowledgeable and they assist with decision making and situational awareness. They reduce tedium and drudgery without turning developers into mindless “clickers of the Tab key”.
Aider, for example, has been pretty decent at finding where to do what, as long as it's guided there in a certain way.
Still, it's far from perfect, but in more and more cases, doable.
We have a long way to go before AI surpasses human.
As an example, I made a browser extension in 5 minutes this weekend using chatgpt by telling it what I wanted. I didn't know how to make a browser extension before that, so you could say AI surpassed this human quite easily.
If it's not in the dataset the AI won't handle it correctly (unless it's trvial and a linear model is good enough, but then why even use AI)
The task of programming or engineering is generally one where you spend 80% of the time solving bugs in 20% of the code. LLMs are good for suggesting possible solutions based on existing things, but not for verifying solutions or doing any sort of real problem solving (they generally waste more time than they save because they give plausible but wrong answers).
If you just want to reproduce some boilerplate or example code it is great though because documentation tends to lack good examples, and LLMs have a ton of real code stored in their latent space. Sometimes I even just use it as a thesaurus, if I have something on the tip of my tounge.
Yeah, see I don't think that's at all shocking.
It doesn’t make non-programmers programmers, and it doesn’t make junior devs into senior devs, but at least for more basic problems/well-defined projects it can help turn a night of typing away into a night of development.
It's similar to the way that Excel exposed non programmers to data manipulation.
Lots of people had very successful careers building software this way. They created a valuable product with mostly just domain knowledge and not programming knowledge.
But there are boundaries to this approach. Because they lack the fundamentals, they're (mostly) unable to understand what something is doing or how something works. So there's a skilled group providing assistance (paid) whenever they hit a boundary.
AI won't make programmers go away. But it will both expand the reach of "writing programs" to more people, and simultaneously replace "unskilled" programmers.
As more joe public writes code, more programmers will ultimately be needed to support those Joe's. And in some cases, just like spreadsheets, the help might be "we need to throw all this away and build it correctly."
If you are using multiple programming languages though you really can't say you are a non-programmer.
I just got up and running with Julia in like two weeks when I didn't even know what Julia was 3 weeks ago.
On the other hand, I have the digital audio workstation Reaper installed. It is one thing for LLMs to write crud apps and data science scripts but to write a digital audio workstation(something I have 25 years of experience as a user), as a non-software engineer I wouldn't even know how to begin. Even if I could compile the code to play an audio file with a volume knob, the gulf is so huge. I wouldn't be able to add more than a few features before it would become totally unmanageable since I don't know what I am doing.
Much of what makes LLMs so impressive is we have such low expectations of modern software. They have broken the market for demo CRUD apps. Beyond that though I wouldn't trust anything cursor and I make.
The author lists specific tasks LLMs can't do today. But there's no fundamental reason they won't be able to in the near future. Domain expertise, understanding downstream effects, configuring CI pipelines - these are all learnable patterns. As models get larger, are trained on more diverse datasets, size of context window increases, and new architectures emerge, these capabilities will come online rapidly. The jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was substantial, and we should expect continued leaps.
This doesn't mean human developers will become obsolete overnight. But it does mean the nature of software development work is likely to change significantly. Lower-level coding tasks may be increasingly automated, shifting focus to higher-level design, architecture, and problem framing.
Rather than dismissing the potential impact, we should be preparing for a world where AI significantly augments or even replaces many current development tasks. This might involve focusing more on skills that complement AI capabilities or exploring new areas where human creativity and insight remain critical.
I agree with your sentiment by the way, developers should find ways to use LLM’s to improve their development process. But the drama is getting old.
That will trigger mass unemployment and our current economic system could collapse and need replacing with a new system, hopefully one where the profits of AI are shared around more equally.
As far as the jobs that could be automated away soon go, I'd say that being a developer is one of the least likely to be automated away in the short term and it may be one of the last to be automated.
Not to be confused with legacy arts like coding, or programming, which required Very Important project management frameworks... I guess we don't need PMs now either... or anyon-
What a completely weird thing to identify yourself by number of commits. I can make 5k+ commits in 3 days. Does that make me a better developer?
At that speed working 40 days I’m already blasting this guys number of commits every year lol
Stupid metric, stupid post
On the other hand I remember hearing the old electrical engineers saying "you do not need a microcontroller for that. Just use a resistor and capacitor, or a 555".
As an aside, is my Firefox spell check worse? Are they getting ready to replace it with a LLM?
Why not? Isn't it just a matter of adding the new V2 response type to the context window and asking it to update those types in another file?
> LLMs cannot successfully configure a CI action such that I won't have to publish myself
Why can't it do this? I'd like to see your prompt.
> LLMs do not understand the downstream effect of fixing the problem will be updating yournextstore's code
I suppose I don't understand the specifics enough to analyze why this isn't doable with an LLM. However, it seems like the theme is that code almost always relies on other code, and if one part breaks, it's hard to get it agreeing again. To solve this, you could have the LLM agent routinely add changelogs to the context window when making maintenance changes.
If you can't get an LLM to do something, you probably aren't thinking creatively enough.
Btw, if you do agree with OP about development, extend that to art, writing, etc. The same kind of deep domain specific knowledge is required in almost all things that humans do.
The question is WHEN and HOW many devs?
Not all devs will be replaced, but how much will be replaced and when will it start?
If you take your AI and your prompt it to build an app, are you not a dev? I believe the same way we have redefined AI and AGI numerous times, we will redefine what it means to be a developer.
What ended up happening in practice is just that time was saved on grunt work, and really engineers just ended up working on composing and debugging higher level components, optimization, or low level work.
Perhaps it's all a completely legit market turn, and I'm the one in the dark. But I continue to be pessimistic that LLMs are truly going to change anything for the better.
Tinfoil hat vibes all around for me too with the LLM's taking Dev jobs.
i.e. What will the greenhouse gas emissions of China be in 2032?
The candidates from college, so often, come into the interview completely unprepared for the job. We have hired some bootcamp grads and college grads, but the only candidates we've ever fired for inadequate work were college grads (and this is, of course, a high bar at our company. We do our best to train and foster growth and hate firing anyone, but sometimes people are just not ready for the job).
I have some experience with this first-hand. I did half my degree in college before trying a bootcamp. What they taught me was night and day more practical than what I was learning in college. I think college CS programs are paced poorly and lead to students forgetting most of what they learned by the time they graduate. Bootcamp students have been preparing for the job 40-60 hours a week for months, and are ready to start as soon as they join. I don't get all the hate for them. I think it speaks to some kneejerk gatekeeping that isn't based in anything concrete.
But of course, there are lots of other reasons to go to college than raw practical experience.
For bootcamp graduates it was very hit and miss and they usually lacked most of the basic computer science knowledge in data structures, algorithms and higher level concepts like design patterns and object oriented design. So the ramp up ended up being much longer. I think you can do something in six months but it's not the same as college, had a great experience when I was there and wouldn't trade it for "faster" job placement at all.
well yeah. this wasn't going to last forever.
in the US especially. Salaries here were bonkers compared to the rest of the global developer workforce. Gotta remember, remote work wasn't common and barely possible at scale not that long ago. COVID put an end to that, and with it the expectation that management hire developers in any particular local geography. Despite all the RTO drama in some organizations, the majority of the economy was always going to cash in on the advantages of hiring developers in other countries, and squeezing even more productivity out of them with AI tooling.
Downward pressure has been a long time coming. Hope y'all enjoyed the ride.
LLMs can be useful in very specific tasks but these people don’t care about it as they don’t have the technical knowledge to see how and why. All they care about is more money for them.
It won’t be limited to developers though if that happens, and with the darkest scenario, UBI will have to happen as you can’t have half the population unemployed roaming the streets.
It could very well be time period where just less software will be produced. And software that is need to make returns at least in medium term already.
I've been seeing the same thing Steve Yegge has with AI. It could very well replace all of the grunt work in software engineering.
I'm fairly worried that AI as it is developing now is going to be the most effective ladder pull in the world. While a new dev is grappling with "grunt work", they're learning. I'm working with them, explaining why this was done and why that was done, and why, yeah, that's busted, but actually not for the reason you think, and they're learning a lot more than just how to accomplish the specific task nominally laid out in the specific ticket they are working on. If they do the work by just asking an LLM for the answer and they actually get it, they may finish the task today... but what of their progress in five years? Ten? I'm very concerned that juniors leaning on AI will discover that in five years, the easy stuff is still easy, but the hard stuff is still as incomprehensible as it was five years ago.
You do realize that SAML has been around for a long time? If anything what you want is an executive to tell everyone to use SAML rather than a "senior architect".
An executive can certainly issue the mandate but the project to make it happen is going to be a very detailed one.
It's a good project to do. There shouldn't be 250 ways of doing authentication. Authorization is rather difficult to just wave a magic wand and harmonize, but authentication shouldn't be a cookie here, and a JWT token there, and a microservice with its own tokens that also integrate with some vital system over there, and Basic Auth with LDAP creds over there, and so on.
But the project is going to be a lot more than just standing in a room and shouting "HEY EVERYONE USE SAML, ok, cool, project is now spec'd, timelined, prioritized, and staffed problem solved".
Maybe I’m just fortunate, but most places I’ve worked the difference between jr and senior has been the scope they owned and the amount of time spent architecting/reviewing/mentoring vs heads down coding. Seniors are not just handing off grunt work to juniors.
I do the hard work of software Eng away from my computer, trying to think clearly about the problem(s).
Of course many organizations don't like the whole 'training' people thing anymore so it's rough for junior devs out there. Good for my career since I can demand a premium since the pool of experienced engineers will only go down over time, but ultimately bad for software as a whole.
But the concept of a second brain that you can use to rubber duck concepts, decipher documentation and save your wrists from carpal tunnel when dealing with boilerplate is very useful.
With that all said, as a senior dev my day is only about 50-75% coding (on a good day) and the rest is often meetings/planning boards/bug triage/helping juniors and just plain translating product requirements into meaningful pieces of work for Devs, which I've not had much luck using an LLM to replace.
I will occasionally ask Copilot for something when I’m in a hurry, and the there is some minor thing I don’t care about that someone is telling me needs to get done. The other 99% of the time, I’m doing it myself. Any time I reach for AI instead of doing it myself, I’m learning less, growing less, and understanding my code less. Why would anyone want this?
But you get multiple availability zones and regions with much lower capital cost! (But do you need them?)
Er, that's the same thing. The only change is that HR thinks my position is labeled "devops engineer" now instead of "sysadmin", but it's the same job.
saying “i am learning less, growing less…” is just so amazingly shortsighted, like farmers when first tractors arrived going “fuck this, imma walk this field in 100 degree weather - doing it myself”(sound familiar?).
But even if I didn't, I'd still choose the team that delivers 1 month later with high quality code, over the team that cranks out dozens of half broken features they have no idea how to support. Mandating I spend the same amount on a team able to barely maintain that team's mistakes. I know I'm just making the "buy once, cry once" argument, and I understand that's "not how business works" but I'm an engineer, not a manager trading company interest for a promo.
Local compute vs cloud compute is not the same distinction as that between pets vs cattle, but it has many of the same market participants, and with both Microsoft and Apple making moves to bundle AI capabilities with other cloud products for free with subscription value-add-on features is interesting. These features entice users into the vendor walled gardens, nudging users subtly away from local-first pets.
https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of...
When automation actually does equivalent work in less time or at lower cost it will replace human labor. Right now LLMs cannot deliver equivalent work compared to an experienced and skilled human programmer. If you experience an LLM able to do your job that says more about your skills than the LLM.
If LLMs get close to doing any part of my work I will incorporate them, like I have previous “threats” like cloud computing. I won’t panic too soon or give up because I have enough experience and expertise to know better.
I can't predict what might happen, but right now LLMs don't do much of value in the domains I work in. They seem mainly to exist as excuses for stock pumping and managers cutting their labor costs to the bone. The people who don't get laid off cling to their jobs out of fear. The threat to (mostly junior) programmers comes from turning our work into a commodity, not from automation itself.
Maybe your analogy does apply. A person who can drive a tractor will indeed outperform a farmer in one important but limited way: covering more area in a day than a farmer on foot. But the person who can only drive a tractor likely won't have all of the skills and expertise of a farmer who knows the land, soil, crops, weather, etc. from direct experience. And the person who can only drive a tractor -- but cannot actually grow anything or manage a farm -- becomes more interchangeable and replaceable. Tractor driving already gets replaced by robots, but knowing how to run a farm does not. Likewise a good programmer offers a lot more value than just the code they write; in fact code itself has no value without the context of a business domain and a theory [1] of the system.
By the way, I'm one of those old guys who still use vim and the command line, as I have since the late 1970s, and will continue to do so. I can use IDEs and GUIs if I have to, I didn't get left behind, but those don't improve my efficiency or quality. They can slow me down and distract me with futzing with tools rather than getting real work done, and they don't work in all of the environments I need them to. I haven't had any problem keeping up with the IDE users.
given your age/time in the industry you may be able to coast to retirement and finish the career and say “vim got me through it all…” - someone with 10-years in will never be able to experience that
All tools take time to master, and then once mastered they can maintain an advantage over competitors that seem objectively better in some ways. I used VSCode for a year and ended up going back to vim. Nothing really wrong with VSCode but it wasn't a 10X or even 2X improvement for me. But I have internalized vim and the Unix/Linux command line tools to a degree that -- as you point out -- younger programmers don't have the runway to catch up with.
As a freelancer (and for a long time a f/t employee in various companies) I gradually figured out that the best value I can offer (and the best way to stay employed) is not how fast I can produce code, but how well I can understand the business domain and then tease out and translate requirements into software solutions. Optimizing for producing more or "better" code (however we measure that) I think sends a lot of programmers down the wrong path, one that leads to over-specialization, commodification of skills, and eventual replacement by outsourcing or AI. I think it will take a lot longer for LLMs to do the real work of software development, which has about as much to do with producing code as word processing has to do with writing an interesting book.
I also find it much harder to go through someone else’s code than to work with my own. If I’m just glancing at it, it seems to technically work, and it needs a rubber stamp… sure, that’s easy. If it doesn’t work, especially if it’s a logic issue rather than a hard error, that takes time to read and learn the context of everything that’s going on. Will someone in school today even have the skills to do that if they only ever use AI?
The impact of the "modern" IDEs of 20 years ago was distinctly measurable, and sensibly perceptible by anyone that tried them.
At the same time, it's not even clear if the gain from LLMs is even positive.
But if your claim was that neither was relevant enough to change the overall noisy productivity of developers, than yeah. At least not positively.
But on linux you can just can just figure it out once and "su install compiler-version text-editor-version debugger-version && cp dotfiles ~/.config"
Nah, the turn of the century IDEs were better enough that almost all the text editors adopted the relevant feature.
We mostly do not have pure text editors like there were back then. There's nano, and notepad++, but on the traditional holdouts, vi became an IDE, and emacs, that was already an IDE turned into a multi-language one too.
That said, those features were compelling enough for every editor to adopt, but didn't change the picture enough so that people had no choice but to use them. It is still perfectly viable to not use the IDE features of your favorite editor.
I understand how generative AI works better than most of the SWEs I work with, but I have absolutely no desire to incorporate it into my workflow. I like that I understand how the code I wrote works, but even if I didn't, I wouldn't trade this rediscovered enjoyment for anything, including the "promised" career velocity.
So far, I have managed to work out how to spot a hallucinating ChatGPT derived "organic blog post" but it is bloody annoying.
Back in the day, Linux related queries would generally end up in Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu, Mint (int al) forums or wikis or perhaps Reddit and co, sometimes it would end up in TLDP by accident. Now we have a plethora of wankery "blogs" that clog up the search returns. Mostly very pretty and mostly following the same old pattern and mostly correctish and wrong at some crucial point.
I have to deal with a lot of pretty complicated and quite niche stuff, for example HA Proxy, Apache Guacamole, on Linux which itself (despite running mostly everything on our lovely planet) is also considered niche.
Windows related queries normally end up with a post on an MS site with a response that suggests that "SFC /SCANNOW" will fix everything from stiffness in the joints to cancer. That has always been the way since around the late noughties, thanks to a rather lax hiring policy becoming the norm in a large part of the world using internet points as a score for hiring. That is understandable and humans being lazy and abrogating responsibility is not a new thing. Now we have multi zillion <currency> things happening that claim intelligence and what looks suspiciously tulip flavoured.
Oh dear!
People are just willingly leaving massive landmines across their codebase waiting to blow their feet off and don't even have the experience to know when the code generated by the AI is bad or not.
To some extent.
> and incorporate into their daily work life.
No, not necessarily. Frankly it's of no use, or is actively counterproductive, in many fields.
Those working in specialized fields will hold on for much longer.
But CRUD apps, apps requiring gluing bunch of APIs with backend and database wil go away.
Most apps do not need much scaling so highly specialized scaling masters aren't really needed
Currently using zed editor, I am blown away by its Ai integration.
Though completion via FIM throut custom LLMs is lacking
And there are other problems like lacking git integration, I prefer vscode for that!
They were already going away with the improvements in no-code tools, Zapier, scaffolding frameworks etc. LLMs are just another automated tool in this context.
So maybe one dev can handle writing five or ten times as many CRUD services as before. The idea that the biz person is gonna get rid of those devs entirely and babysit the coding agents/deploys/etc themselves strikes me as wildly unrealistic, though. Nor is it realistic that SAAS as a market will just dry up because individuals will just have their own coder agents that do everything for them.
Question is if there's going to be an "enough is enough" point feature/change-wise. But I can't think of the last time I worked at a company where the product team and senior management threw up their hands and said "we did it, we finally cleared the entire product development backlog" as opposed to generating ideas at a rate many multiples of the rate of implementation.
The baseline "here's what you can get with a shoestring team" level of output will get higher. But it will also get higher for your competitors. So expectations will just be much higher. So you just gotta move that much faster now.
So you can create, edit, even delete to-dos, and it’s even hosted online.
* Once a user has a lot of to-do’s, they might want to organize them. You could organize them hierarchically, or with tags, or represented as a graph.
* what if somebody makes an a new to do or an edit while their cell phone is out of service?
* Are multiple users supported? Can users collaborate on a single to-do? Are entire organizations supported?
* what happens if somebody accidentally deletes a to-do? Can they ever get it back?
* What about concurrent edits to the same to-do?
* Can just anybody make to-dos? What if somebody writes a bot to make millions of to-dos on your website?
* If I load up my to-do list when my phone has no service, do I just get a loading spinner?
The perfect to-do app might actually take an expert a year or more to write. Then it still has to generate a profit somehow.
The thing about AI up to this point is that it has replaced, well, very few jobs, but what jobs it seems to be most capable of replacing are extremely counter-intuitive. Eight years ago, everyone thought it would be: self-driving, machines, hard labor, etc. Turns out that stuff is really hard, and the first industries to fall were actually the more creative ones like writing and art.
If you have an intuition for how the next ten years will look, I'd implore you to be open to the reality that there is no way you could have predicted the world-state of 2024 from the perspective of 2019; and that's only 5 years.
Here's the counter-intuitive take that I believe to be true: Specialized coding might fall faster than generalist CRUD apps, if either falls at all. The value in specialized engineering is biased a lot heavier toward knowledge of the specialized thing you know about. Versus, the problems generalist CRUD coders deal with every day aren't actually technical or coding problems; they're business problems, coordination, resource allocation, and politics. AI has demonstrated itself as being pretty good at knowing things, even highly specialized things; it has not demonstrated itself as being very good at taking responsibility for its actions.
have writing and art really fallen? aside from stupid SEO drivel writing, that is
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/technicalwriting/comments/1fuz4m6/a... [1] - https://youtu.be/U2vq9LUbDGs [2] - https://bloomberry.com/i-analyzed-5m-freelancing-jobs-to-see... [3] - https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/20/business/ai-jobs-workers-repl...
This obviously means many jobs are not needed anymore. Much of ETL, office frontline etc for instance. But if you tell anyone this is not new, it's decade old stuff you are clearly a bad manager because you could makes things much better much before, of you simply state that most people are ignorant of IT and that's a dramatic problem for the society because if we know IT we can create new jobs, if not we can only dismiss many and so on. So "hej, it's AI!" [and obviously that's new eh]...
Aside the office use of LLM could led to interesting nightmares in infosec terms, so brace yourself...
But good luck trying to measure or even speculate about the impact that has on the market for software people.
The big picture is geopolitics (which is crazy right now), and then monetary policy (which has been all over the place for years and years), then politics and fiscal policy implications (which is crazy as hell right now), then this recent trend towards just brutally bare-fanged go-for-broke class warfare Thiel shit where FAANG is “tightening its belt” and smashing EPS simultaneously (boomeranging people for less RSUs and shit) with products that are now basically loathed but sticky like a stalker.
And all the quasi-consensus benchmarks of who’s even good are shot to hell: YC is funding Pear, Google can’t ship an LLM anyone wants, Amazon is just dark patterns and price fixing, they legendary shops just aren’t good anymore. Some of the best hackers I’ve met in decades are under-appreciated if they even have work, and “culture fit” (sociopath) knuckleheads are turning down windfalls.
It’s a fucking casino in 2024 and AI coding is a blip on this scale.
We’re both right but I understand that moderation has constraints that comments don’t.
Please either un-flag sibling or flag me.
Maybe it is just legit flags that bury everything from Garry Tan tweeting “die motherfucker die” to elected officials, or Mike Seibel defrauding Autodesk with claims that SocialCam had novel technology before vesting in Thailand and ignoring emails for a year, or Emmett cashing out just in time for Twitch to fly into the side of a mountain, or for Altman to have been rescued from his abject incompetence via pg and Conway rigging up Green Dot. It goes on and on, and that’s for people who dismiss out of hand the allegations of sexual assault.
I’ve not only lived in the same building as Drew Houston, I’ve held his head when he was vomitting up mystery pills in Tahoe: and there is no evidence I’ve ever seen that any of these people are any good at anything other than “becoming powerful” to quote Paul.
I’ve just barely scratched the surface of the perversity, criminality, and sociopathy of the Culture Fit in 2024.
You’re one of the good guys, and I don’t envy the head that wears the crown on being both scrupulously fair and painting YC in a good light.
I know that it’s a small moderation team and that 3 humans don’t have the speed and clarity of an Azure IPv4 block.
But if you tell me that 3-5 is still the right number of people who can flag something dead while the community has grown by 7 orders of magnitude, no sir.
Flags are OP as fuck because you can count on the lie that comp.lang.lisp being hostile in bytes was worse than the contemporary fact that the Valley ends people’s livelihoods and smiles the whole time.
there is no way in hell I would tell it to "generate X feature" or "fix X bug" wholesale. half the time it is just dead wrong in it's approach and it's more time consuming to grok what it did exactly and then either 1) suggest an alternate approach and 2) fix what it did wrong.
like i get it, in the end if it generates the right code and it works then most people will call it a day. but longevity is in being able to understand and maintain your codebase and at this point i can't trust it to do that. it some sense it reminds me of (and still reminds me of) those wysiwyg site builders where sure, your output might be fine for 90% of those cases like a simple landing page but the code underneath is a big pile of shit. good luck if you need to break out of that box at any point.
i guess all to say AI will start replacing low level static site facing stuff. for instance if you're selling cookie cutter WP themes i'd be worried at some point. for everything else it's a non-factor right now.