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While I have been expecting AI to replace programmers for a while, the thing I was never sure about whether this will manifest itself as a business for some com

by atleta 4y ago

While I have been expecting AI to replace programmers for a while, the thing I was never sure about whether this will manifest itself as a business for some companies or whether it means the end of people creating apps altogether. Another risk for building businesses on AI in general is that unlike with software that anyone can build (e.g. for a niche), AI solutions seem to be costly because they require a lot of data and a lot of processing power (at least to train) so you'll end up using someone else's AI. And the real magic is the AI not whatever you build around it so it can be pulled from under you while the AI itself keeps developing and obviously it can make the thin layer built around it irrelevant. I know that AI companies, at least OpenAI will sell the vision that they will be like AWS (amazon) and other similar cloud providers, but I just don't see this as a realistic scenario. It can only happen if AI gets stuck near the level where it is now for a substantial period. Say, at least a decade. Where it's good enough to be included in SaaS (and maybe other) software products but it's not good enough yet to do away with all software products or at least the need for companies building software products.

immortalloom 4y ago
Yea, it's going to be interesting to see how this all unfolds. In my opinion, the future of software development looks like this: 1) Human developer instructs A.I. bots to build large volumes of code (like Second) 2) Human developer uses A.I. code assistants in the IDE to make "low level" changes or additions I do not believe that developers or engineers will be replaced. The world needs more software, and there's not enough of us to build it all. Quite frankly, we need the help of bots to meet the demand.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  I absolutely think people wont get hired though, that otherwise would Instead of looking for layoffs, look for the jobs and payment transactions never happening Note: this doesn't bother me
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I absolutely think people wont get hired though, that otherwise would If it is successful, it increases jobs in the field, while shifting skill demands to higher levels of analysis/abstraction. Just like every change improvement in how you program computers since "physically configure wiring or switches". Possibly some individuals won't get hired in the field that otherwise would have, but the size of the field developing software isn't likely to shrink because of it.
    - visarga 4y ago
      Software has been automating itself for 75 years. Automation cannibalizing itself forever. And yet there are more programmers than ever. AI will just expand the amount of software or create whole new fields on top.
      - ChatGTP 4y ago
        I guess there is more complexity than ever too? I feel like the early days of programming might've been actually easier to automate. There was often well designed specs, cleaner design and architectural patterns to follow etc. Not in all cases of course however now, I'm seeing people hoping to god that ChatGPT can write a client for the worlds shittiest XML API because no one else sure as hell wants to do it. So what happens now? We just generate more shit and then use moar AI (tm) to work with moar shit (tm), and evolve that pattern fast and faster? Yesterday I was using co-pilot and it was suggesting a bunch of obvious auto-completes etc, which is fine, that's why I use it, then it hit me, most people are probably going to start to not bother with libraries, clean APIs and specs because soon you will be just brute forcing your way to a solution using text to code and on we go. Maybe the answer will really just be to keep evolving generative coding AIs to keep up with it, let's see how it goes.
        atleta 4y ago
        People using AI to generate crap faster is definitely a (short term) risk. And, BTW, not only with code. I read an article stating that in a few years (2-3, can't remember) 80% of content only will be generated by AI. Which would be a disaster. We're already swimming in low quality information and this will only make it worse. OTOH, so much for the idea that people will guide the hand of AI to create better code. As this will unfold, there will be ever more incentives to remove (most) humans from the loop. And if past can be used to predict the future, what we have seen so far is that when AI gets reasonably competent at something it will gain superhuman capabilities very quickly. I still keep bringing up how people thought that after alpha go beat Fan Hui (European go champion) it would have taken a huge leap for it to beat Lee Sedol. Because Lee Sedol was so much better than Fan Hui. At least in human terms. It only took a few months of training and tinkering for DeepMind. Speaking of loops: since AIs are taught from the internet (simple language models or coding specialists), we're creating an unwanted feedback loop here. More AI generated content will likely make teaching future AIs harder. At least with information harvested from the internet after ~2022-ish.
- atleta 4y ago
  No/low-code not working this time either is not a surprise. All these attempts have been made several times throughout the history. Also, as Fred Brooks famously said there is no silver bullet: no/low-code promised to be a silver bullet while only removing the accidental complexities (again, Brooks' terminology). AI changes this, however. The scenario you are describing assumes that AI will get stuck, as I said. Otherwise I don't see why we would still need humans to supervise it. But if it can write good enough software without expensive human beings making corrections left and right, it will be able to do a lot of the jobs that we're trying to make more efficient (or even possible) with all this software we're writing. E.g. you don't really need GitHub (Jira, etc.) if you don't have a lot of developers cooperating. And this is true for a lot of white collar professions that we're creating these heaps of web apps for, that generate all that demand that you are mentioning. If we get stuck (and, BTW, have some time to figure out how to live with AI) then sure, we'll have programmers (and non-programmers with good analytical skills) command and supervise AI coders. Everyone and their colleague will turn into a tech-lead/product manager. If.
  - realusername 4y ago
    > No/low-code not working this time either is not a surprise. All these attempts have been made several times throughout the history. Also, as Fred Brooks famously said there is no silver bullet: no/low-code promised to be a silver bullet while only removing the accidental complexities (again, Brooks' terminology). That's basically my opinion, yeah sure this looks impressive, until you realise that it's basically recreating Wordpress with less modules. Generating code is far from enough to replace developers, it's the earliest step, even Frontpage itself is 30 years old at this point.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  3) AI bot claims IP rights to code it wrote, but so does the AI company that provided the service, and you end up in an Oracle vs Google vs John Doe scenario.
- falcor84 4y ago
  I see that > The world needs more software, and there's not enough of us to build it all ... is a paraphrasing of the following from your top-level text > Moreover, the world needs more software than there are engineers to build it all. ... which I'm very skeptical about. In what sense does the world "need" more software? What exactly is it that "the world" really needs this additional software for, and is it really software that's missing, or can the same need be fulfilled via other means (e.g. better software, or improved processes)? And to follow-up on that, if the world does need "more software", is there some level of software that is sufficient? I.e. is there a steady state of software/world, or at least, software/person, or are we "maximizing paperclips"?
lettergram 4y ago
I just released - https://vocalvoters.com/ https://vocalvoters.com/ It sends an AI generated letter to a congress person in a seconds. Users can edit it, but frankly the results are amazingly good. I bring it up because effectively exactly what you described - a shim on top of 4 APIs. (Code is open sourced, link on the site) The question is how will AI replace what I have? The AI might get better, but ultimately someone has to mail the letter (I use a different API for that). Someone has to ensure there’s no threats (we do a manual review, combined with the AI review) and someone needs to verify location. Sure the AI systems of the future could theoretically do all that, but it’s still the same work/services. Before the AI the service I built required me to manually create templates or users to write the full letter. Frankly, AI opened up this business, not closed it. It was more expensive and a lot more logistical work to manually generate these letters.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > It sends an AI generated letter to a congress person in a seconds. Users can edit it, but frankly the results are amazingly good. Probably not [0]; oh, the output may read nicely, but letters to legislators, even when I was working in a state legislative office in the 1990s, before mass online template generated near-zero-user-effort spam letters were common (but not before organizations sent out template for people to use, or even xerox-and-add-name-and-signature near-zero-effort spam) mostly got read by interns and processed by a heuristic like this (for issues mail, constituent service is different): (1) Is it from a constituent? No = done and file, Yes = continue. (2) Is it for a specific, identifiable active bill before the body in which the legislator sits (including the other House) -- see (3), or is it a general issue or one before a different body (if it seems to be maybe about an active bill, but the information is insufficient to identify the bill readily, treat as the second) -- see (4)? (3) Does it clearly support or oppose the bill? If so, record it in the running tally (creating it if necessary) of constituent support/opposition for that bill; file and done. (4) Does it address an issue that the legislator has identified as important and has a message on? If so, respond with that message; file and done. Literally, the ultimate constituent letter on a bill for effect (maximum effect, minimum chance of getting misinterpreted, minimum effort) was a postcard with sufficient address information to identify the sender as a constituent, a bill number, and "Support" or "Oppose". I don't imagine individual issue letters are getting even that much attention these days, which is why all the serious activist trainings focus on live calls ass the "low effort but low effect" approach and visiting legislators offices as the high effort/high effect approach to influence. Letters and emails might get categorized and mined for propaganda use by legislators, but they aren't moving positions, and every new tool to spam legislators with them reinforces that effect. They are a placebo button, and incorporating AI technology to make a newer, fancier-looking placebo button isn't changing that. [0] But at least it gets the federal legislative reps (almost) right (it makes the error of using the legal name of a Senator rather than the name they actually use publicly, and hey, if it was going to actually be read, nothing makes a better impression than using the wrong name), for state reps it gives me none of the actual reps, but three of the eight statewide Constitutional officers (the Governor, AG, and Secretary of State).
AOsborn 4y ago
I mean you're not wrong about the rug pull scenario, and you're specifically increasing reliance on one monolithic company. That said, you have exactly the same category of risk with hiring an employee or team. They could leave at any point also. You always have the option to contract in handcuffs or a notice period, but then the same applies to the AI tooling as well. In the same way this can't end up much worse than cloud vendor lock-in either. Many businesses dream or discuss about being 'cloud agnostic' but realistically most are tightly coupled, especially around cost-of-change and institutional knowledge.
- atleta 4y ago
  It's absolutely not the same ball park of risk. First of all, once you have a reasonable business, you'll have a number of employees (and multiple teams). And teams are unlikely to stand up at once, not to mention all your employees leaving at once. I mean unless something is seriously wrong with the company, of course. That's one thing. The other thing is that employees who leave only hamper future development not the current business/operation. (Again, unless a large number of employees leave in a short time, which means you have screwed up something.) Once you have a stable organization, you can replace individual employees at a reasonable rate without serious issues. (You actually have to prepare for this as employees will leave, no matter what.) The big difference with cloud providers is that they really offer something that's complementary and not something that can easily be turned into your product. (I mean except for the SaaS companies that really just repackage the cloud offer into an easier to use product. They are definitely at risk all the time.)

by atleta 4y ago

immortalloom 4y ago

Yea, it's going to be interesting to see how this all unfolds. In my opinion, the future of software development looks like this: 1) Human developer instructs A.I. bots to build large volumes of code (like Second) 2) Human developer uses A.I. code assistants in the IDE to make "low level" changes or additions I do not believe that developers or engineers will be replaced. The world needs more software, and there's not enough of us to build it all. Quite frankly, we need the help of bots to meet the demand.

yieldcrv 4y ago
I absolutely think people wont get hired though, that otherwise would Instead of looking for layoffs, look for the jobs and payment transactions never happening Note: this doesn't bother me
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I absolutely think people wont get hired though, that otherwise would If it is successful, it increases jobs in the field, while shifting skill demands to higher levels of analysis/abstraction. Just like every change improvement in how you program computers since "physically configure wiring or switches". Possibly some individuals won't get hired in the field that otherwise would have, but the size of the field developing software isn't likely to shrink because of it.
  - visarga 4y ago
    Software has been automating itself for 75 years. Automation cannibalizing itself forever. And yet there are more programmers than ever. AI will just expand the amount of software or create whole new fields on top.
    - ChatGTP 4y ago
      I guess there is more complexity than ever too? I feel like the early days of programming might've been actually easier to automate. There was often well designed specs, cleaner design and architectural patterns to follow etc. Not in all cases of course however now, I'm seeing people hoping to god that ChatGPT can write a client for the worlds shittiest XML API because no one else sure as hell wants to do it. So what happens now? We just generate more shit and then use moar AI (tm) to work with moar shit (tm), and evolve that pattern fast and faster? Yesterday I was using co-pilot and it was suggesting a bunch of obvious auto-completes etc, which is fine, that's why I use it, then it hit me, most people are probably going to start to not bother with libraries, clean APIs and specs because soon you will be just brute forcing your way to a solution using text to code and on we go. Maybe the answer will really just be to keep evolving generative coding AIs to keep up with it, let's see how it goes.
      - atleta 4y ago
        People using AI to generate crap faster is definitely a (short term) risk. And, BTW, not only with code. I read an article stating that in a few years (2-3, can't remember) 80% of content only will be generated by AI. Which would be a disaster. We're already swimming in low quality information and this will only make it worse. OTOH, so much for the idea that people will guide the hand of AI to create better code. As this will unfold, there will be ever more incentives to remove (most) humans from the loop. And if past can be used to predict the future, what we have seen so far is that when AI gets reasonably competent at something it will gain superhuman capabilities very quickly. I still keep bringing up how people thought that after alpha go beat Fan Hui (European go champion) it would have taken a huge leap for it to beat Lee Sedol. Because Lee Sedol was so much better than Fan Hui. At least in human terms. It only took a few months of training and tinkering for DeepMind. Speaking of loops: since AIs are taught from the internet (simple language models or coding specialists), we're creating an unwanted feedback loop here. More AI generated content will likely make teaching future AIs harder. At least with information harvested from the internet after ~2022-ish.
atleta 4y ago
No/low-code not working this time either is not a surprise. All these attempts have been made several times throughout the history. Also, as Fred Brooks famously said there is no silver bullet: no/low-code promised to be a silver bullet while only removing the accidental complexities (again, Brooks' terminology). AI changes this, however. The scenario you are describing assumes that AI will get stuck, as I said. Otherwise I don't see why we would still need humans to supervise it. But if it can write good enough software without expensive human beings making corrections left and right, it will be able to do a lot of the jobs that we're trying to make more efficient (or even possible) with all this software we're writing. E.g. you don't really need GitHub (Jira, etc.) if you don't have a lot of developers cooperating. And this is true for a lot of white collar professions that we're creating these heaps of web apps for, that generate all that demand that you are mentioning. If we get stuck (and, BTW, have some time to figure out how to live with AI) then sure, we'll have programmers (and non-programmers with good analytical skills) command and supervise AI coders. Everyone and their colleague will turn into a tech-lead/product manager. If.
- realusername 4y ago
  > No/low-code not working this time either is not a surprise. All these attempts have been made several times throughout the history. Also, as Fred Brooks famously said there is no silver bullet: no/low-code promised to be a silver bullet while only removing the accidental complexities (again, Brooks' terminology). That's basically my opinion, yeah sure this looks impressive, until you realise that it's basically recreating Wordpress with less modules. Generating code is far from enough to replace developers, it's the earliest step, even Frontpage itself is 30 years old at this point.
gabereiser 4y ago
3) AI bot claims IP rights to code it wrote, but so does the AI company that provided the service, and you end up in an Oracle vs Google vs John Doe scenario.
falcor84 4y ago
I see that > The world needs more software, and there's not enough of us to build it all ... is a paraphrasing of the following from your top-level text > Moreover, the world needs more software than there are engineers to build it all. ... which I'm very skeptical about. In what sense does the world "need" more software? What exactly is it that "the world" really needs this additional software for, and is it really software that's missing, or can the same need be fulfilled via other means (e.g. better software, or improved processes)? And to follow-up on that, if the world does need "more software", is there some level of software that is sufficient? I.e. is there a steady state of software/world, or at least, software/person, or are we "maximizing paperclips"?

lettergram 4y ago

I just released - https://vocalvoters.com/ https://vocalvoters.com/ It sends an AI generated letter to a congress person in a seconds. Users can edit it, but frankly the results are amazingly good. I bring it up because effectively exactly what you described - a shim on top of 4 APIs. (Code is open sourced, link on the site) The question is how will AI replace what I have? The AI might get better, but ultimately someone has to mail the letter (I use a different API for that). Someone has to ensure there’s no threats (we do a manual review, combined with the AI review) and someone needs to verify location. Sure the AI systems of the future could theoretically do all that, but it’s still the same work/services. Before the AI the service I built required me to manually create templates or users to write the full letter. Frankly, AI opened up this business, not closed it. It was more expensive and a lot more logistical work to manually generate these letters.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 4y ago
> It sends an AI generated letter to a congress person in a seconds. Users can edit it, but frankly the results are amazingly good. Probably not [0]; oh, the output may read nicely, but letters to legislators, even when I was working in a state legislative office in the 1990s, before mass online template generated near-zero-user-effort spam letters were common (but not before organizations sent out template for people to use, or even xerox-and-add-name-and-signature near-zero-effort spam) mostly got read by interns and processed by a heuristic like this (for issues mail, constituent service is different): (1) Is it from a constituent? No = done and file, Yes = continue. (2) Is it for a specific, identifiable active bill before the body in which the legislator sits (including the other House) -- see (3), or is it a general issue or one before a different body (if it seems to be maybe about an active bill, but the information is insufficient to identify the bill readily, treat as the second) -- see (4)? (3) Does it clearly support or oppose the bill? If so, record it in the running tally (creating it if necessary) of constituent support/opposition for that bill; file and done. (4) Does it address an issue that the legislator has identified as important and has a message on? If so, respond with that message; file and done. Literally, the ultimate constituent letter on a bill for effect (maximum effect, minimum chance of getting misinterpreted, minimum effort) was a postcard with sufficient address information to identify the sender as a constituent, a bill number, and "Support" or "Oppose". I don't imagine individual issue letters are getting even that much attention these days, which is why all the serious activist trainings focus on live calls ass the "low effort but low effect" approach and visiting legislators offices as the high effort/high effect approach to influence. Letters and emails might get categorized and mined for propaganda use by legislators, but they aren't moving positions, and every new tool to spam legislators with them reinforces that effect. They are a placebo button, and incorporating AI technology to make a newer, fancier-looking placebo button isn't changing that. [0] But at least it gets the federal legislative reps (almost) right (it makes the error of using the legal name of a Senator rather than the name they actually use publicly, and hey, if it was going to actually be read, nothing makes a better impression than using the wrong name), for state reps it gives me none of the actual reps, but three of the eight statewide Constitutional officers (the Governor, AG, and Secretary of State).

AOsborn 4y ago

I mean you're not wrong about the rug pull scenario, and you're specifically increasing reliance on one monolithic company. That said, you have exactly the same category of risk with hiring an employee or team. They could leave at any point also. You always have the option to contract in handcuffs or a notice period, but then the same applies to the AI tooling as well. In the same way this can't end up much worse than cloud vendor lock-in either. Many businesses dream or discuss about being 'cloud agnostic' but realistically most are tightly coupled, especially around cost-of-change and institutional knowledge.

atleta 4y ago
It's absolutely not the same ball park of risk. First of all, once you have a reasonable business, you'll have a number of employees (and multiple teams). And teams are unlikely to stand up at once, not to mention all your employees leaving at once. I mean unless something is seriously wrong with the company, of course. That's one thing. The other thing is that employees who leave only hamper future development not the current business/operation. (Again, unless a large number of employees leave in a short time, which means you have screwed up something.) Once you have a stable organization, you can replace individual employees at a reasonable rate without serious issues. (You actually have to prepare for this as employees will leave, no matter what.) The big difference with cloud providers is that they really offer something that's complementary and not something that can easily be turned into your product. (I mean except for the SaaS companies that really just repackage the cloud offer into an easier to use product. They are definitely at risk all the time.)