Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

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I have seen this happening since the 70s. My father made a tool to replace programmers. It did not and it disillusioned him greatly. Sold very well though. But this time is different though; I have often said that I thought chatgpt like AI was at least 50 years out still but it's here; it does replace programmers every day. I see many companies inside (I have a troubleshoot company; we get called to fix very urgent stuff and we only do that so we hop around a lot) and many are starting to replace outsourced teams with, for instance, our product (which was a side project for me to see if it can be done, it can). But also just shrinking teams and give them claude or gpt to replace the bad people.

It is happening just not at scale yet to really scare people; that will happen though. It is just stupidly cheaper; for the price of one junior you can do so many api requests to claude it's not even funny. Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run.

Good logical thinkers and problemsolvers won't be replaced any time soon, but mediocre or bad programmers are already gone ; a llm is faster, cheaper and doesn't get ill or tired. And there are so many of them, just try someone on upwork or fiverr and you will know.

"Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run."

Privacy is a fundamental right.

And companies should care about not leaking trade secrets, including code, but the rest as well.

US companies are known to use the cloud to spy on competitors.

Companies should have their own private LLM, not rely on cloud instances with a contract that guarantees "privacy".

I know and agree: it's strange how many companies and people just step over and on their privacy. Or export private info to other countries. But what I mean here is that, good or bad, money always wins. Unfortunately also over fundamental rights. That sucks, but still happens and will happen.

> Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run.

That attitude is why our industry has such a bad rep and why things are going down the drain to dystopia. Devs without ethics. This world is doomed.

It definitely is doomed. But somehow we might survive.

> It is just stupidly cheaper; for the price of one junior you can do so many api requests to claude it's not even funny

Idk if the cheap price is really cheap price or promotion price, where after that the enshittification and price increase happen, which is a trend for most tech companies.

And agree, llm will weed bad programmers further, though in the future, bad alternatives (like analyst or bad llm users) may emerge

"For the price of a cab you can take so many ubers it's not even funny". Yeah, until the price dumping stops and workers demand better conditions and you start comparing apples to apples.

Why do you have bad programmers on staff? Let them go, LLMs existing or not.

Bad programmers aren't black and white situation, there's so many range of programmers quality out there, with different sector too (analysis, programming, db design, debugging, etc). And as the standard, companies need to adjust cost and requirement, while those are affected by supply and demand too. Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy, and bad programmers have delayed effect too. So it's not as simple as not hire bad programmers.

LLM however, will change the playing field. Let's say that bottom 20 or 30% of programmers will be replaced by LLM in form of increased performance by the other 70%.

> Moreover, common people cannot measure programmers quality as easy

So you can't fire the bad apples because you don't know who they are, but you feel confident that you can pick out whom to replace by an LLM and then fire?

It's hopefully obvious to everybody that this is a hopelessly naïve take on things and is never going to play out that way.

People hire teams from some countries because they are cheap and they are terrible. LLMs are not good but better than many of these and cheaper. It's not really changing much in code quality or process, just a lot cheaper.

Companies like that deserve to die out since the quality they bring to the market is horrendous either way.

I agree with all remarks you made; but how old are you? As it all seems pretty naive? The world unfortunately is only about money and nothing else, it is terrible but it is. Better worlds are eradicated by this reality all the time.

It is by far most companies. But yes, I agree.

Which tool did he make?

I do not want to dox myself but if you were in enterprise IT in the 80s in europe you will have heard of it or used it.

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