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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

$2k is way way cheaper than a junior developer which, if I had to guess their thinking, is who the Thought Leaders think it'll replace.

Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired

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I found those tools to resemble an intern: they can do some tasks pretty well, when explained just right, but others you'd spend more time guiding than it would have taken you to do it yourself.

And rarely can you or the model/intern can tell ahead of time which tasks are in each of those categories.

The difference is, interns grow and become useful in months: the current rate of improvements in those tools isn't even close to that of most interns.

I have a slightly different view. IMHO LLMs are excellent rubber ducks or pair programmers. The rate at which I can try ideas and get them back is much higher than what I would be doing by myself. It gets me unstuck in places where I might have spent the best part of a day in the past.

My experience differs: if at all, they get me unstuck by trying to shove bad ideas, which allows me to realize "oh, that's bad, let's not do that". But it's also extremely frustrating, because a stream of bad ideas from a human has some hope they'll learn, but here I know I'll get the same BS, only with an annoying and inhumane apology boilerplate.

Not my experience at all. What kind of code are you using it for?

Not everyone does CRUD applications.

It's premature to think you can replace a junior developer with current technology, but it seems fairly obvious that it'll be possible within 5-10 years at most. We're well past the proof-of-concept stage IMO, based on extensive (and growing) personal experience with ML-authored code. Anyone who argues that the traditional junior-developer role isn't about to change drastically is whistling past the graveyard.

Your C-suite execs are paid to skate where that particular puck is going. If they didn't, people would complain about their unhealthy fixation on the next quarter's revenue.

Of course, if the junior-developer role is on the chopping block, then more experienced developers will be next. Finally, the so-called "thought leaders" will find themselves outcompeted by AI. The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage.

Unless I’ve missed some major development then I have to strenuously disagree. AI is primarily good at writing isolated scripts that are no more than a few pages long.

99% of the work I do happens in a large codebase, far bigger than anything that you can feed into an AI. Tickets come in that say something like, “Users should be able to select multiple receipts to associate with their reports so long as they have the management role.”

That ticket will involve digging through a whole bunch of files to figure out what needs to be done. The resolution will ultimately involve changes to multiple models, the database schema, a few controllers, a bunch of React components, and even a few changes in a micro service that’s not inside this repo. Then the AI is going to fail over and over again because it’s not familiar with the APIs for our internal libraries and tools, etc.

AI is useful, but I don’t feel like we’re any closer to replacing software developers now than we were a few years ago. All of the same showstoppers remain.

Google's LLM can ingest humongous contexts. Check it out.

All of the code you mention implements business logic, and you're right, it's probably not going to be practical to delegate maintenance of existing code to an ML model. What will happen, probably sooner than you think, is that that code will go away and be replaced by script(s) that describe the business logic in something close to declarative English. The AI model will then generate the code that implements the business logic, along with the necessary tests.

So when maintenance is required, it will be done by adding phrases like "Users should be able to select multiple receipts" to the existing script, and re-running it to regenerate the code from scratch.

Don't confuse the practical limitations of current models with conceptual ones. The latter exist, certainly, but they will either be overcome or worked around. People are just not as good at writing code as machines are, just as they are not as good at playing strategy games. The models will continue to improve, but we will not.

The problem is, the feature is never actually "users should be able to select multiple receipts". It's "users should be able to select multiple receipts, but not receipts for which they only have read access and not write access, and not when editing a receipt, and should persist when navigating between the paginated data but not persist if the user goes to a different 'page' within the webapp. The selection should be a thick border around the receipt, using the webapp selection color and the selection border thickness, except when using the low-bandwidth interface, in which case it should be a checkbox on the left (or on the right if the user is using a RTL language). Selection should adhere to standard semantics: shift selects all items from the last selection, ctrl/cmd toggles selection of that item, and clicking creates a new, one-receipt selection. ..." By the time you get all that, it's clearer in code.

I will observe that there have been at least three natural-language attempts in the past, none of which succeeded in being "just write it down". COBOL is just as code-y as any other programming language. SQL is similar, although I know a fair amount of non-programmers who can write SQL (but then, back in the day my Mom taught be about autoexec.bat, and she could care less about programming). Anyway, SQL is definitely not just adding phrases and it just works. Finally, Donald Knuth's WEB is a mixture, more like a software blog entry, where you put the pieces of the software inamongst the explanatory writeup. It has caught on even less, unless you count software blogs.

I will observe that there have been at least three natural-language attempts in the past, none of which succeeded in being "just write it down". COBOL...

I think we're done here.

Please ping me in 5 years to reassess. I'm ready to bet 1 month of my salary that human software developers will still exist then.

1 months salary now, or then? You'll be 5 years further into your career, so it'll hopefully be higher, but also, the industry is changing. Even if ChatGPT-5 never comes out, it's already making waves on developer productivity where there's enough training data. So in five years will it still be a highly paid $300k/yr at a FAANG position, or will it pay more like being the line cook at a local diner. Or maybe it'll follow the pay rate for musicians - trumpet players before cheap records came out made a decent living. Since then, the rise of records, and then radio and CDs and now the Internet and Spotify means that your local bar doesn't need to have a person come over to play music in order to have music. or visuals for that matter. The sports bar wouldn't exist without television. So maybe programming will be like being a musician in five years, with some making Taylor Swift money, and others busking at subway entrances. I'm hoping it'll still be a highly paid position, but it would be foolish of me not to see how easy it is to make an app by sitting down with Claude and giving it some high level directives and iterating.

You have to make a PRODUCT, not an hello world app :)

Using an advanced programming technique called modularization, where you put the code into multiple different files, you may find it possible to get around the LLMs problem of limited context window length and find success building more than a trivial todo app. Of course you'd have to try this for yourself instead of parroting what you read on the Internet, so your mileage may vary. =p

We both know it won't work, but please make a youtube demo about this.

Well, of course they will. Human farmers still exist, too, but their day-to-day activities don't resemble their ancestors jobs in the slightest.

Cursor has no problem making complicated PRs spanning multiple files and modules in my legacy spaghetti code. I wouldn't be surprised if it could replace most programmers already.

How well does it propagate the effects of the files it has modified?

Not everybody's job is necessarily as simple as yours.

It's anything but simple; good try though.

From your comments, it's clear you've already made up your mind that it can't possibly be true and you're just trying to find rationalisations to support your narrative. I don't understand why you feel the need to be rude about it though.

My comments stem from real world experience, since I do exist outside of my comments (although I understand it can be hard to imagine).

Every single person who claimed AI was a great help to their job in writing software that I've encountered was either inexperienced (regardless of age) or working solely on very simple tasks.

The fact that it's even remotely useful at all at such an early, primitive stage of development should give you pause.

When it comes to stuff like this, the state of the art at any given time is irrelevant. Only the first couple of time derivatives matter. How much room for growth do you have over the next 5-10 years?

Early primitive stage? Markov chains generators have been around for at least 30 years…

As I said, I'm taking bets…

Markov chains generators have been around for at least 30 years…

Show me a Markov generator that can explain how it works.

Train it on an irc channel about how markov chains works :D

You would think thought leaders would be the first to be replaced by AI.

> The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage.

[citation needed]

If you can drag a 9-dan grandmaster up and down the Go ban, you can write a computer program or run a company.

> Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired

Ours told us not to use LLMs because they are worried about leaking IP and confidential data.

I think Enterprise plans mostly solve this. And Copilot is quite aggressive with blocking public code (haven't looked in to what that really means and what we've configured, I just get the error often)

Ah yes, because microsoft never had a leak right?

I can absolutely not go on the internet and download the source code for windows, because microsoft's security is impeccable.

Which thought leader is telling you to use AI or get fired?

My CTO (C level is automatically a Thought Leader)

A junior developer gets better every day (hopefully), an AI is a blank slate every time more or less.

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