Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

> At some point there might be massive layoffs due to ostensibly competent AI labor coming onto the scene, perhaps because OpenAI will start heavily propagandizing that these mass layoffs must happen. It will be an overreaction/mistake. The companies that act on that will crash and burn, and will be outcompeted by companies that didn't do the stupid.

We're already seeing this with tech doing RIFs and not backfilling domestically for developer roles (the whole, "we're not hiring devs in 202X" schtick), though the not-so-quiet secret is that a lot of those roles just got sent overseas to save on labor costs. The word from my developer friends is that they are sick and tired of having to force a (often junior/outsourced) colleague to explain their PR or code, only to be told "it works" and for management to overrule their concerns; this is embedding AI slopcode into products, which I'm sure won't have any lasting consequences.

My bet is that software devs who've been keeping up with their skills will have another year or two of tough times, then back into a cushy Aeron chair with a sparkling new laptop to do what they do best: write readable, functional, maintainable code, albeit in more targeted ways since - and I hate to be that dinosaur - LLMs produce passable code, provided a competent human is there to smooth out its rougher edges and rewrite it to suit the codebase and style guidelines (if any).

One could argue that's not strictly "AI labor", just cheap (but real) labor using shortcuts because they're not paid enough to give a damn.

Oh, no, you’re 100% right. One of these days I will pen my essay on the realities of outsourced labor.

Spoiler alert: they are giving just barely enough to not get prematurely fired, because they know if you’re cheap enough to outsource in the first place, you’ll give the contract to whoever is cheapest at renewal anyway.

What lasting consequences? Crowdstrike and the 2017 Equifax hack that leaked all our data didn't stop them. The shares of crowdstrike after it happened I bought are up more than the SP500. Elon went through Twitter and fired everybody but it hasn't collapsed. A carpenter has a lot of opinions about the woodworking used on cheap IKEA cabinets, but mass manufacturing and plastic means that building a good solid high quality chair is no longer the craft it used to be.

I'll take that bet, easily.

There's absolutely no way that we're not going to see a massive reduction in the need for "humans writing code" moving forward, given how good LLMs are getting at writing code.

That doesn't mean people won't need devs! I think there's a real case where increased capabilities from LLMs leads to bigger demand for people that know how to direct the tools effectively, of which most would probably be devs. But thinking we're going back to humans "writing readable, functional, maintainable code" in two years is cope.

  increased capabilities from LLMs leads to bigger demand for people that know how to direct the tools effectively

This is the key thing.

> There's absolutely no way that we're not going to see a massive reduction in the need for "humans writing code" moving forward, given how good LLMs are getting at writing code.

Sure, but in the same way that Squarespace and Wix killed web development. LLMs are going to replace a decent bunch of low-hanging fruit, but those jobs were always at risk of being outsourced to the lowest bidder over in India anyways.

The real question is, what's going to happen to the interns and the junior developers? If 10 juniors can create the same output as a single average developer equipped with a LLM, who's going to hire the juniors? And if nobody is hiring juniors, how are we supposed to get the next generation of seniors?

Similarly, what's going to happen to outsourcing? Will it be able to compete on quality and price? Will it secretly turn into nothing more than a proxy to some LLM?

> And if nobody is hiring juniors, how are we supposed to get the next generation of seniors?

Maybe stop tasking seniors with training juniors, and put them back on writing production code? That will give you one generation and vastly improve products across the board :).

The concern about entry-level jobs is valid, but I think it's good to remember that in the past years, almost all coding is done at entry-level, because if you do it long enough to become moderately competent, you tend to get asked to stop doing it, and train up a bunch of new hires instead.

Hate to be the guy to bring it up but Jevons paradox - in my experience, people are much more eager to build software in the LLM age, and projects are getting started (and done!) that were considered 'too expensive to build' or people didn't have the necessary subject matter expertise to build them.

Just a simple crud-ish project needs frontend, backend, infra, cloud, ci/cd experience, and people who could build that as one man shows were like unicorns - a lot of people had a general how most of this stuff worked, but lacked the hands on familiarity with them. LLMs made that knowledge easy and accessible. They certainly did for me.

I've shipped more software in the past 1-2 years than the 5 years before that. And gained tons of experience doing it. LLMs helped me figure out the necessary software, and helped me gain a ton of experience, I gained all those skills, and I feel quite confident in that I could rebuild all these apps, but this time without the help of these LLMs, so even the fearmongering that LLMs will ;make people forget how to code' doesn't seem to ring true.

I think the blind spot here is that, while LLMs may decrease the developer-time cost of software, it will increase the lifetime ownership cost. And since this is a time delayed signal, it will cause a bullwhip effect. If hiring managers were mad at the 2020 market, 2030 will be a doozy. There will be increased liability in the form of over engineered and hard to maintain code bases, and a dearth of talent able to undo the slopcode.

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