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> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.

It's not though. It's fundamentally different because TurboTax will still work with clear deterministic algorithms. We need to see that the jump to AI is not a jump from hand written math to calculators. It's a jump from understanding how the math works to another world of depending on magic machines that spit out numbers that sort of work 90% of the time.

Imagine if Math calculators were just subtly wrong some percentage of the time for use cases that people use dozens or hundreds of times a day. If you could punch in the same math formula 100 times and get more than 1 answer on a calculator, most people wouldn't trust those for serious work.

They probably wouldn't think that the calculator makes them faster either

If calculators did work that way, I'm afraid that people would nevertheless take them up because "it saves so much time", and would develop fancy heuristics to plausibility-test for errors.

From what I remember, typical new C++ debugged code speed is about 20-25K lines per year, lines that are non-blank, non-comment and not completely verifiable by compiler. E.g., standalone bracket or comma or semicolon are not lines of code, function header is too not a line of code, but computation, conditions and loops are. This is from old IBM statistics, I learned about it circa 2007.

If we assume that there are 50 weeks per year, this gives us about 400-500 lines of code per week. Even at long average 65 chars per line, it goes not higher than 33K bytes per week. Your comment is about 1250 bytes long, if you write four such comments per day whole week, you would exceed that 33K bytes limit.

I find this amusing.

LOL. If you look at their comment history, they sure are typing a lot of characters for their wrists.

Yes, I checked their history of comments before posting. It made me confident that I hit the right note.

My software engineering experience longs almost 37 years now (December will be anniversary), six-to-seven years more than Earth's human population median age. I had two burnouts through that time, but no carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms at all. When I code, I prefer to factor subproblems out, it reduces typing and support costs.

I find it much more valuable to exchange ideas with humans than type every curl bracket and common boilerplate pattern and debug commit myself.

That said, I am also actively experimenting with VTT solutions which are getting quite good.

Most of the commentators here are bots these days anyways.

> I find this amusing.

In what way? You're either very young or very old, right? Voice-to-text has been a common way to input text online since iPhone. Someone commented on HN != they typed that many words with their fingers.

I strongly believe you can use voice-to-text for coding.

If the person I replied do use voice-to-text, their mention of carpal syndrome is moot and this is amusing. If they do not use voice-to-text, it is still amusing in the sense of my previous comment.

Or, you know, it's far easier to input natural language with voice-to-text than coding with voice-to-text, so even if they can write long comments on HN, coding is still a problem?

Nah, impossible. They must be making up their carpal syndrome because nothing is ever real.

I mean this genuinely and in good faith in case you didn’t already know it: the term for “non-blank, non-comment…” in programming is usually “Significant Lines Of Code” or SLOC.

Thanks, I didn't knew that. I thought that SLOC means "Source Lines Of Code."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code

> If you have never written and maintained a complex project by hand, you should not be allowed to be involved in the development of production bound code.

So only the old hands allowed from now on, or how are we going to provide these learning opportunities at scale for new developers?

Serious question.

Even by pessimistic progress projections AI will be better than most at coding before this is a long term issue. And the output multiplier I'm seeing I suspect the number of SWEs needed to achieve the same task is going to start shrinking fast.

I don't think SWE is a promising career to get started in today.

But you have to be good at SWE to be good at security engineering and sysadmin, and the demand there is skyrocketing.

We have a completely broken internet with almost nothing using memory encryption, deterministic builds, full source bootstrapping, secure enclaves, end to end encryption, remote attestation, hardware security auth, or proper code review.

Decades of human cognitive work to be done here even with LLM help because the LLMs were trained to keep doing things the old way unless we direct them to do otherwise from our own base of experience on cutting edge security research no models are trained on sufficiently.

There’s certainly a lot of uncertainty.

But pro-AI posts never seem to pin themselves down on whether code checked in will be read and understood by a human. Perhaps a lot of engineers work in “vibe-codeable” domains, but a huge amount of domains deal with money, health, financial reporting, etc. Then there are domains those domains use as infrastructure (OS, cloud, databases, networking, etc.)

Even where it is non-critical, such as a social media site, whether that site runs and serves ads (and bills for them correctly) is critical for that company.

im not convinced that it will.

you dont notice it when you are only looking at your own harness results, but the llm bakes so very much of your own skills and opinions into what it does.

LLMs still regurgitate a ton.

If you're enrolling in uni today you're looking at 6-10 years till your career is in a good place. I'm willing to bet there will 1/10 of junior positions available in 5 years.

And insufficient talent because of retirement becomes an issue in like 30 years even with current developer demand, and I expect that demand to go down significantly over time, even with current level of capabilities.

Perhaps at some point, but tokens are expensive and the major providers are burning through cash.

I suppose it's like bandwidth cost in the 90s. At some point, it becomes a commodity.

Something I don’t see “SWE-is-Doomed” comments address is this - SWE, I think we can all agree, is one of the more complex white collar jobs. If it gets automated, then likely most other white collar jobs have been too. At that point, don’t we have bigger problems?

Indeed. The bottom 90% of white collar work as it exists today is probably gone over the next decade.

Oh. Well I meant this as a counter point to the idea that AI can replace us.

Junior developers have always been a lot less effective than senior developers. We will need new senior developers so we will need to train junior developers. Maybe we train them by forcing them to do things the hard way. The slow way. By hand. Because if we let them do things the fast way they are going to cause some serious damage.

Who's going to be doing that?

Employers were already refusing to hire juniors, even when 0.5-1 years' salary for a junior would be cheaper than spending the same on hiring a senior.

They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good.

internships for one.

my last summer intern did everything the manual way, except for a chunk where I wanted him to get something done fast without having to learn all the underlying chunks

> They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good.

That comes post Chernobyl.

The same way I learned 25 years ago still works today. Volunteer on open source projects.

Always happy to mentor people at stagex and hashbang (orgs I founded).

Also being a maintainer of an influential open source project goes on a resume, and helps you get seen in a crowded market while boosting your skills and making the world better. Win/win all around.

Can't disagree, that's how I did it too :-)

> It is like hiring an army of accountants that have never done math on paper and exclusively let turbotax do all the work.

That is exactly been the situation for years. Once graduated accountants are not doing maths. They are using software (Exel, Xero etc.). They do need to know some basic formulas eg. NPV.

What they need to know is the law, current business practices etc.

> LLMs let me produce the same quality I always have with a lot less typing

If that's true, then you likely used to produce slop for code. :-(

> I did things the old way for 25 years and my carpal tunnels are wearing out.

You wrote so much code as to wear out your carpal tunner? Are you sure it isn't the documentation and the online chatter with your peers? :-(

... anyway, I know it's corny to say, but - you should have, and shoudl now, improve the ergonomics of your setup. Play with things like the depth of your keyboard on your desk, the height of the chair and the desk, with/without chair handrests, keyboard angle, etc.

> Job one of everyone I mentor is to build Linux from scratch

"from scratch" can mean any number of things.

> If that's true, then you likely used to produce slop for code. :-(

Local models are quite good now, and can jump right in to projects I coded by hand, and add new features to them in my voice and style exactly the way I would have, and with more tests than I probably would have had time to write by hand.

Three months ago I thought this was not possible, but local models are getting shockingly good now. Even the best rust programmers I know look at output now and go "well, shit, that is how I would have written it too"

That is a hard thing to admit, but at some point one must accept reality.

> anyway, I know it's corny to say, but - you should have, and shoudl now, improve the ergonomics of your setup. Play with things like the depth of your keyboard on your desk, the height of the chair and the desk, with/without chair handrests, keyboard angle, etc.

I already type with colemak on a split keyboard with each half separated and tented 45 degrees on a saddle stool, with sit/stand desk I alternate. I have read all the research and applied all of it that I can. Without having done all that I probably would have had to change careers.

> "from scratch" can mean any number of things.

As far as I know I was the first person alive to deterministically build linux from 180 bytes of machine code, up to tinycc, to gcc, to a complete llvm native linux distribution.

When I say from scratch, I mean from scratch. Also, all of this before AI without any help from AI, but I sure do appreciate it to help with package maintenance and debugging while I am sleeping.

> When I say from scratch, I mean from scratch.

If you mean this kind of from scratch:

https://www.bootstrappable.org/

then - that's both impressive and important, and I salute you!

Indeed, I do, so thanks :)

I founded https://stagex.tools

not all coding tasks are created equal. It is not a representative discussion to show a "greenfield" routine in new, popular language using only standard library (I assume) for one coder, is the whole topic. In this example, greenfield refers to "implement a new routine in a way I prefer"..

sadly the discussion steeply diverges IMHO -- rote work by defined spec in highly defined API environment is absolutely a thing, while abstracted and/or original ideas on a platform of choice with substantial new or custom work implementation, is different.