Software engineers don't get to be Luddites about AI

I, maybe naively, thought that when I automated a particular boring tasks that it would free up those people to do more interesting work. I made the mistake once of measuring time savings in hours saved, and did the math to determine one particular task was using the equivalent of 3 FTEs. When the task was automated, instead of people doing more interesting work (there was more than enough to do), 3 people were laid off. It's been about 10 years and I'm still upset about it.

Not only did that destroy moral, but it destroyed the trust in the team. I didn't matter how much repetitive work that team had, they never complained... at least not to anyone that could automate it. If we wrote some automation and it broke, they wouldn't tell us, they would just carry on and do it manually.

The reason I learned to code was because I had a job that required doing the same thing 1000 times, and I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again. I wrote code for myself, to make my life easier, shared that with the team to make their life easier, then that led to the software engineering position where I was automating stuff full time. I never wanted to replace anyone, I just wanted to make their jobs less annoying.

Though looking back, sometimes removing that annoyance also made it boring... "push this button." It also led to a loss of skill, or a lack of development. Not too dissimilar to how some people feel coding with AI.

So I guess I did the same thing to them as AI is looking to do to me, even when I felt I had nothing but good intentions and was just trying to give people the same stuff I wanted for myself... stuff I started making for myself. I guess I have a lot to think about.

I partly disagree. Many software/devices are doing work that human can't possibly do in reasonnable time (measurement tools). For other industries like EDA the progress would not have been the same without these tools, how long would it take to place manually billions of transistors ? He's also forgetting about the many non-dev people like management who are also "living by the sword" and are not that much perishing by it. That's a bit hypocritical to kind of tell engineers "you deserved it" if you forget a part of the story.

Software engineers aren't being Luddites. The Luddites were organized.

> From the very beginning, software engineering has been about automating other people’s work.

Excuse you; since the beginning of my career I've been automating my work, thank you much.

While I don’t know anyone who at this point challenges the idea that LLLMs will have no lasting impact on the industry, what I struggle with is the handwaving and the zealotry.

Can an agentic harness be used somewhat successfully? Yes, undoubtably so. Do agents still come up with absolutely bonkers solutions on a regular basis? Also yes.

The problem, again and again, is the way that humans evaluate intelligence. When you’ve asserted that someone is reasonably smart, it will take you a very significant amount of proof of the contrary to change that opinion.

What we need, for LLMs to become reliable intellectual partners, is a way for them to convey lack of certainty. This is, by the way, also the same thing that many of the LLM-luddites want of the LLM-zealots.

Yeah, it's the nature of the game really.

It doesn't particularly bother me, but I can understand why people are upset. I think it's one of those things where when it happens to other people, you can't really feel the effects of it. But as soon as it happens to you, you realise what all of those people went through.

To me, it's part of technological development and businesses are (of course) going to choose the options which help them improve productivity and likely decrease costs in the long run.

For people that really enjoy programming, I think it becomes closer to something like a hobby.

It looks to me that most engineers are between the AI entusiasts, not Luddites. We love to use it, we build tools around it, trying to optimize the whole chain... And so on, as always. I think your reasoning is more for startups and software houses than for engineers, because if the software cost go to "zero", a single engineer still have something to do. A company can't survive without good margins.

I agree that there is cosmic karma when it comes to software engineers being automated out of jobs, but I don't agree with the tired idea that a bunch of new jobs are going to magically appear to replace what is lost.

Machines with superior cognition to humans is completely unchartered territory and fundamentally changes everything. Assuming an industrial-revolution-esque new set of jobs to materialize is naive copium.

>From the very beginning, software engineering has been about automating other people’s work.

Deliberately narrow view of the field which I suspect was chosen to bolster a pretty weak article. I typically don't find much insight in the author's usual posts but this one seems especially vapid.

Grandpa, you have no clue about anything. Not even about Luddites. Everyone laughs about Luddites, because they got killed by the government, not by technology. Haha, so stupid they took bullets to the head. Really backwards people.

We already know the planet is burning.

In fact, we are the forest fire. What we're worried about isn't that the fire is growing bigger. We're worried that we're falling behind our peers in growing the fire.

But to whoever thinks they're safe from the fire, we have a message for you: We're coming for you next!

I'll be honest the blog author is more of a Luddite than the vast majority of developers. It's an incredibly anti software and anti technology position to write this. Why? When AI writes code it is still using computers and so it is validating and reinforcing the existing tech industry rather than weaken it.

What I'm trying to get at is that you have to be utterly pessimistic towards technological progress to make the argument that AI will just reduce the labor hours of software developers and do nothing else. You're essentially saying that technological progress has stalled out and now the only thing needed to do is just do the existing things at lower cost.

The only thing that changed at my job is the pressure to deliver more and faster.

So far I managed to avoid doing any kind of software to automate others out of work, so nope we aren't all into the same basket.

If anything, I managed to have lost my position a few times thanks to offshoring.

Now the capitalist lords have figured out a path to cut offshoring, and delegate to machines instead, and naturally that software doesn't write by itself, at least not yet.

I can and I will

Like the author but didn’t like this post. I was born in 2000s, how the fuck is it my fault that people were replaced by software? Why do I deserve to be punished? Have my generation not had a hard enough time, now they have even fewer paths to a good career.

There seems to be an understanding between older engineers (who have watched technology evolve, and expect it to happen) and much younger engineers (where technology and AI already happened, so don’t know any different). It’s the mid-aged people in-between who seem to think they are entitled to a certain kind of job.

Times change and so do jobs. I worked in restaurants in the 00’s when that was hot, now without cash and different service expectations it’s not the boom it once was. Many sales jobs no longer exist because customers expect to self-serve. Just because a sector is hot is no guarantee it will continue, nobody should expect to take high wages and their individual value for granted.

There are plenty of jobs available in the world, and in the US the minimum wage and benefits are some of the highest they’ve ever been. But, many people don’t want the available jobs. Plenty of people have degrees in other fields and chose software because it was a better option at the time, similarly many software engineers may have to figure out what skills they have that will translate elsewhere.

None of this is new. And globalization makes all of it more competitive than ever. No man is an island, better to find ways to contribute within the community and support each other, especially if we want change and believe we should have a fallback in social services.