7 ms·

Am I still relevant as a programmer now that there's AI?

33 points by ahuth 4y ago

illiarian 4y ago
Does the AI know your product? Does the AI know your database? Does the AI know your design, device, legal and other constraints? No, and won't for any foreseeable future.
- whoomp12342 4y ago
  todays generation of AI yes. I worry about an AI that will LEARN your product and LEARN your database and LEARN your tribal knowledge. As a similie, I fear we are like a horse, in the era of Henry T. Ford. On the other hand. Someone still needs to interact with ChatGPT or the likes. Someone needs to keep an eye on quality control. Someone needs to ASK chatgpt TO write the code. Its like programming on yet an even higher level. I just worry that, with that increased efficiency there wont be troves of teams writing code like today. On the foot, chatgpt doesnt write perfect code and can introduce complex bugs that only the best of the best will be able to decipher, so there is that. On the other foot, when you look at what joomla,wordpress,squarespace did to website design it is a very similar trajectory. There will always be niches
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > todays generation of AI yes. No. They have no idea what my codebase it, how to translate concepts like "audio is limited to users on free tier" into code etc. > I worry about an AI that will LEARN your product and LEARN your database and LEARN your tribal knowledge. It won't, not for any foreseeable future. It fails consistently even at the most simple of tasks. If you're afraid that you will be made relevant because we will be able to teach it those simple tasks? > when you look at what joomla,wordpress,squarespace did to website design it is a very similar trajectory. What did they do? Did they make you obsolete?
  - sethammons 4y ago
    If an AI can "rationalize" your product, know your database, know your design, legal, and other constraints, at that point, what employment role is not at risk? You wouldn't need project or product managers or designers. Heck, at that point, you don't need accountants either. Maybe you have a team that supervises the AI - but, really, you could have an AI do that. So you have the business owner(s) and zero employees. No more tech companies as everything can be done by AI, including CEO work. What I actually expect: better tooling. We were not replaced when we went from punch cards to C - it just increased demand for programmers. AI may be the next tooling, but I only see more opportunity: solutions happening faster.
- cousin_it 4y ago
  The foreseeable future is quite short though, and getting shorter. You didn't predict the success of LLMs even a year before they hit the mainstream. Right now you can't predict the next big AI thing, what it'll do and when. To me the future stops being "foreseeable" and becomes very foggy (which jobs still exist and so on) a few years from now at the longest.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > The foreseeable future is quite short though, and getting shorter. Not really. The answers for my questions are as far away now as they were 15 years ago.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  To approximate the validity of this statement, you can ask yourself "What was the earliest time, when I expected AI to be where it is today?"
  - illiarian 4y ago
    You're assuming that every single year you're going to have major leaps in this tech. And that in any foreseeable future the leap will be such that an AI will be useful enough to answer those questions.
    - jstummbillig 4y ago
      I am assuming neither, and while interpreting the present is hard, correctly projecting into the future is a lot harder.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  The junior programmer we would hire doesn't know any of that as well, they have to get all of that from someone else on the team - so perhaps that job can be replaced by us giving all of that info to some cheap computer instead of a relatively expensive person, as even junior programmers cost quite a lot.
nluken 4y ago
Existential questions aside, this post is a non-article that adds nothing to this conversation. It's the kind of noise that I'd expect LLMs to replace.
gregjor 4y ago
For the many programmers asking questions like this… if your programming skills can’t compete with a supercharged auto-complete (call it “AI” if you prefer), then you won’t stay relevant or employed for long. Until SkyNet nukes us all I will continue doing what I do. None of my customers imagine replacing me or anyone else developing software with a really good chatbot.
- ahuth 4y ago
  Nice framing - need to be better than supercharged auto-complete. What kind of stuff do you work on?
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    Sounds like the best stuff to work on is supercharged auto-complete.
  - gregjor 4y ago
    Web application development and system admin, which mostly means cloud infrastructure. A lot of that is already automated in some sense, but not enough for my customers to tell Alexa to set up a VPC and write some useful code for them.
- Riverheart 4y ago
  I think this person is concerned with AI as it will evolve not as it currently exists today. This person may be young and will need to stay in the market dealing with that evolution longer. Everybody starts as a junior before they become elite programmer but if the bottom is removed people won't be able to skill up.
- commitpizza 4y ago
  You sound a bit like an old man not adapting to technology progress. As an example, if I would make a logo today I would perhaps before used Fiverr or similar services but not I will use an AI and then edit it in some photo editor. It has become much easier to do stuff like that even if you suck at photo editing.
dougmwne 4y ago
I think this equally applies to all knowledge workers. LLMs are not going to cut the human out of the loop just yet, but building them into the workflow is going to end up being so powerful that anyone not using an LLM will be uncompetitive. I see this being at least a few years out. Performance is stil scaling up and cost is still scaling down. It’s going to require collecting a lot more specialized training data to produce fine tuned model. Business will need to adapt and people will need to learn how to accelerate themselves. But eventually, I see this going the way of the introduction of the computer to the office. No productive person will work without it. As a thought exercise, I’m going to assume you’ve used same GPT model to produce some code before and been impressed in a narrow kind of way. Then project that forward a few years, through GPT-4 and GPT-5. Add some better training data and a better understanding of how to fit the LLM output into day-to-day work. Maybe add the ability to fine-tune on the existing code base and design documents. The trend-line is at least going to hit junior dev level, so the job will probably turn into a senior dev supervising a “team” of LLMs.
- username3 4y ago
  People will still use Excel.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    Nothing will ever beat the horse.
    - leeoniya 4y ago
      unless it's dead, which Excel isnt.
      - noduerme 4y ago
        What's scary is Bill Gates may have finally found a new horse to flog...
  - analog31 4y ago
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Imagining that AIs would truly be better at writing code than humans one day, I wonder who would write the instructions telling the AI what code to write. It may be a whole new kind of job, kind of like programming instructions that the AI has to follow. Maybe we could think of a name for that. Programmers maybe?
- ahuth 4y ago
  Programming the programmers
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  Here's a scenario that might be possible in the future: Person: I need a website to sell shoes. Here's my brand and logo. Here's a selection of what the product looks like. 5 seconds later.. AI: I've generated 5 prototype sites and deployed them to URL1, URL2 .. URL5. Please review and select one. Person: URL3 looks great. Let's get that deployed and add all the shoes in this CSV. Monitor the site and make any changes to increase engagement and sales.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    That kind of cookie-cutter site generation is already kind of possible without AI. The AI might dream up the design (which is cool, and certainly a threat to designers). But all the hard parts of actual logic that would be unique to this project still needs to be specified, implemented, verified. Now you might say: but what's so special about a shoe store? Payment, inventory, shopping carts, databases - it can all be the same as every other shoe store! But that's the key takeaway here. If you work in something where the next deployment has much in common with the last one: then your job is at risk. But these jobs have been eaten by SaaS for a long time. An "online store as a service" was a thing long before AI. Could AI help take over this type of software development even more? Sure. But that's like machines taking over dull industrial jobs. We shouldn't worry about being out of a job, we should be happy that we can do more interesting things than what the machines can do, just like we could stop weaving fabric.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
zmgsabst 4y ago
For fun, I asked ChatGPT what it thought: https://zmichaelgehlke.com/autocontent/essay-sde.html https://zmichaelgehlke.com/autocontent/essay-sde.html
melenaboija 4y ago
Maybe there will be a time where programing in high-level languages will be seen as punch cards are seen today. Even if that happens maybe the ones that know how programming languages work will be the good ones, as today a good programmer knows about OS’, architecture or compilers.
- acover 4y ago
  How many programmers are there for large language models? It seems like there are very few ai researchers compared to the number of programmers. There will be more people using the ai to program computers, but the ai interface may be so easy that it's no longer a skill.
- sakex 4y ago
  What kind of maths is required? I am not a practitioner but I try to stay up to date. I read ML papers, and it seems like they only require pretty basic maths (as in High School level.) Linear algebra, calculus, and stochastic calculus. It seems to me you can go a long way with just understanding the chain rule and dot products. I am trying to build my own Language Model using Pytorch and it is much easier than a lot of the stuff I've had to do as a traditional SWE over the years. My understanding is that the difficulty comes from training massive models that cannot fit on a single GPU efficiently, so more of a software problem than a maths problem. Am I suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect ? Or is the genius of the field in the combination of this limited set of techniques ?
DeathArrow 4y ago
Yes, I am.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
- difficult to automate or low value dev work is already being offshore to cheaper locations - lot of dev work is just plumbing, config files, packages, APIs and tedious non challenging stuff - demanding roles have high barrier: leetcode, certifications, open source, github, networking and so on - it will get more imo - coding is treated as a basic skill taught in schools, like english or maths - not itself a differentiator AI still does not have access to most businesses internal context, terminologies and so on - that is where we still have leverage.
carlmcqueen 4y ago
The fear of language model AI takes me back to my original fear when I joined a data science team at a huge bank with just a bachelor's degree and five years of experience. I was embedded in the mess of databases created by hundreds of large bank mergers. I was working with really, really smart PHDs and was doubting my hiring to the team. I felt like a lot of these guys had forgotten more than I'd ever known. During my time in that job, I realized that my experience in navigating the complex databases from working with the business and operational teams gave me an advantage. I took my domain knowledge for granted and was able to work on the problems at hand much faster than the highly intelligent colleagues who relied on IT/DBAs to write their queries. They often had to go back and forth for a couple of days to clarify their requests, leading to misunderstandings and delays. In the end, I fit in just fine, held my own, and was aware of my individual talents. I enjoyed learning from the PhDs, and they were happy to teach from their backgrounds. A lot of the experience from the big bank has 0 transferability to any other company. What made me stand out was I knew which tables of the gigantic data environment were the best to use, I had hundreds of already built queries for many different problems and I was dependable. It got me really far before I went off on my own.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  > A lot of the experience from the big bank has 0 transferability to any other company. That's one of the beauties of IT work - for almost all of us, unless you shoot your own foot continuously, maybe 95% of our skillsets are easily transferrable not only to another employer, but also to another domain. Of course if you willingly position yourself to some tiny niche that makes you unfireable or just follow your passions unchecked, you may end up in similar situation... an advice, for an easy life don't do that, rather accept potentially slightly lower pay and enjoy life more, its anyway damn too short
albertzeyer 4y ago
I think it depends. As a programmer, you really should carefully watch the development, and adapt to it. It might be that the way programmers work in 10 or 20 years will really be quite different than how we work now. Maybe we just talk to some AI and give it high-level instructions on how to design some system, speak about bugs, etc, and the actual coding, debugging, etc is delegated to the AI. So your role transitions more into management. Or maybe that's not realistic, and it will look somehow different. In any case, I think it will change, and you should be prepared to adapt to it. If you ignore the whole development, your job might indeed be at risk, or just be at much lower value.
lex2ross 4y ago
I'm Naive in AI domain. LLMs are trained on existing contains which are presumably original so far. This means LLM can not think beyond what it has learnt from past resources. - Would it be safe to assume LLM can not produce new original work? - I worry internet will be soon will be flood with LLMs generated content which will again feed in to LLMs to train them further. IMO such feedback will hardly help, in fact that may make LLM more rigid in answers. I know there is parallel effort going to detect machine generated content so that they dont rank on top but its is still in nascent phase.
ForHackernews 4y ago
Turns out Tom[0] has the laugh after all. The goddamn people skills will be what counts in the end. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
stuven 4y ago
There has been a shift in how we discuss this question. For a long time, the answer was, "No jobs are at risk, AI can't compete in any scenarios. At best, it's a tool." Now the answer is, "Only a few jobs are at risk, AI can only compete in a small range of tasks." It's possible we're at the beginning of a hockey stick graph. So what would it look like for AI to make the leap to mid level developer? It would have to understand: 1.) The codebase 2.) The technical requirements (amount of traffic served, latency target) 3.) The parameters (must have code coverage, this team doesn't integration test, must provide a QA plan, all new infrastructure must be in Terraform) 4.) The end goal of some task (e.g. integrate with snail mail provider to send a customer snail mail on checkout attempt if it was denied for credit reasons) It would then have to make a design based as much as possible on the existing code style and library choices and follow it. This is all probably possible now, although perhaps not for a general AI or LLM. But someone could build a program leveraging an LLM to provide a decent stab at this for a given language ecosystem. The hard parts: Point 2 requires an understanding of performance which is a quantifiable thing, and LLMs up until now have been bad at making math-based inferences. Point 3 requires the bot to either provide opinions for you (inflexible) or to be very configurable for your team's needs (takes longer to develop). Point 4 requires a _current_ understanding of libraries, or the ability to search for them and make decisions as to the best ones for the job. ----- What about extending the above for a senior role? Now the bot has to understand business context, technical debt (does technical debt even exist in a world where bots are doing the programming?), and other "situational factors" and synthesize them into a plan of action, then kick off as many "mid level bot" processes as necessary to execute the plan of action. The hard parts: Current LLMs are pretty uninspired when suggesting ideas. Business context + feature decisions often involve math, which again LLMs aren't great at.
- generalizations 4y ago
  And that's just context. It also has to be capable of debugging its own code, and looking for resources when it doesn't have the knowledge to come up with a solution.
  - stuven 4y ago
chasing 4y ago
“Programming” isn’t writing code, it’s understanding computers on a technical level well enough to make them do exactly what you want them to do given a certain set of constraints. The tools we use today are incredibly powerful and time-saving without AI. I can whip up a reasonably interesting mobile app with a data backend I could scale to millions of users in less than a week and basically for free. And yet there are more programmers than ever. Which indicates that maybe these tools empower human engineers instead of cutting them out of the loop. Although just as software engineering is very different today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, in 20 or 30 years it will be very different…
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  >Although just as software engineering is very different today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, in 20 or 30 years it will be very different… It's not actually very different than 20 or 30 years ago. The platforms are rather different, the end product is different too in some cases, but the development work itself is surprisingly similar. That doesn't mean there cannot ever be a real leap forward of course.
throwaway71271 4y ago
I have been coding for 22 years, never thought of myself as programmer, programming for me is like literacy, it's like calling yourself a 'reader' because you can read. Programming is a first order thinking, a way to deconstruct and construct things, sometimes you have to use it on a computer, sometimes you have to use it while baking bread, or while woodworking. AI will help me so much, I am super excited, and now I use it every day, I plugged in whisper+chatgpt[1] to my emacs and now it is more and more like a partner, it is of course still stupid, but it will get better, and soon (with the recent llama work people are doing) I hope we will be able to finetune it. We are doing lists and tables and data transformations and input validation for 60 years now, we built gazillion specialised spreadsheet clones.. I think now we can start building some new things, some really "soft" software, where the users can program it with language. This is the first time I feel the computer is helping me do something, and its not me "fighting" with it. [1] https://github.com/jackdoe/emacs-chatgpt-jarvis https://github.com/jackdoe/emacs-chatgpt-jarvis
- noduerme 4y ago
  Look, most good programming is not the simple data transformations, read/write, CRUD, etc. even though that is most day-to-day busywork we have to deal with. Good programming is envisioning a whole set of behaviours and the architecture to support them, before a line of code is ever written. If an AI can bang out the boilerplate for you once you know what you want, that's great. But like any tool, relying on it to do all things will lead to places where you're at a crossroads and might take the way the tool suggests instead of continuing along your intention to build something the way you conceived of it. And the tool may seem to "know" - but it doesn't, and it shouldn't guide you (anymore than, say, taking the path of least resistance with React should guide your decisions about app architecture). Lists and tables aren't an unsolved problem anymore. Good programming is about solving the problems that haven't been solved yet. But an AI is trained on existing art, and can only follow paths that have already been trodden.
  - throwaway71271 4y ago
    i am sad to say that lists and tables are totally unsolved problems, look how many issues there are in react's virtualized list[1] (just an example, not picking on react) but i think we are talking about the same thing :) programming is creative, and for me it is art, i love it. https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue+virtualized+list https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue...
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I think that "mass-produced" code; the type that is fairly typical, for many companies, these days, using systems like React Native, Xamarin, Flutter, etc., are almost certainly going to be replaced by auto-generated stuff. I guarantee that the C-Suite people are already salivating over the thought of firing all their programmers. For people like me; probably not, but then, my skills don't seem to be in demand, so much.
rimliu 4y ago
There is no AI. ChatGPT is a glorified and hyped Markov chain generator with zero understanding what's it is doing.
- GaggiX 4y ago
  I asked chatGPT for a response: "There's no such thing as human intelligence. We're just a bunch of organic machines following pre-programmed genetic codes and learned responses, with zero understanding of the true nature of our existence."
pookha 4y ago
Getting a strong John Henry vibe with Programming (and law degrees). Things are going to get interesting...Tinkering with Calculus and ML models feels like the eventual future of logic tasks.
makach 4y ago
Yes. For the time being you are still relevant. But AI is slowly taking over these tasks, pretty much the same way the conveyor belt revolutionized our industry. It is difficult to predict how fast this will happen, but somewhere within a 5-10 year period high level programming will definitively be different from what we are used to today. As the AI technology improves, programming will be a matter of dictating what you want, from what sources and how it should be displayed. Code will become better, stable, accessible for all and make us all high level programmers. There will still be programmers, however they will most likely be much more specialized than what they are today.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
I'm probably a bit older than you. Even so, I plan to work as a programmer for roughly the next 25 years at least. I'm not worried about competition from AI becoming a meaningful factor in that timeframe, any more than actors in the past few centuries have been worried about being replaced by trained parrots.
gwoolhurme 4y ago
I deal with a bit of anxiety for a number of reasons, that I personally work on. I have a background in control theory we even used early neural nets in my research. I’m somewhat familiar with how LLMs work. With all that said? I get mini panic attacks about what my job will look like in 10 years. To pay the bills I’ve been in mobile native development for a few years now. I genuinely panic when I see people say AGI is coming soon, or Sam Altman say that AI is coming for Knowledge based work first. Is my whole world about to crumble? Will I be ok? What can I do to prepare? Then other days, I use chatgpt or bing and I see some silly response, or I remember my control theory background and I feel at ease again. It’s a really horrible rollercoaster ride mentally.
bedobi 4y ago
I mean, take the next ticket on your board, feed it into an AI and call it a day. You could even take another job (or why not a dozen) and just outsource yourself to an AI. Good luck! In case it's not obvious, this is sarcasm. It doesn't work like that, nor is it likely to anytime soon. And even if that day comes in our lifetime (which I doubt), your boss or PM still couldn't just delegate tickets to the AI. The AI would need people with advanced knowledge of both the AI and the domain who understand how to supervise it, and that would most likely be you and me.
phpisthebest 4y ago
The failure of no-code will be the same failure of AI programming... People miss understand (and most business failure to realize the potential) of IT in general which is not typing functions in the latest programming lang... It is problem solving. The number if times I have sat down with a business user to go over a problem they are having only to have to unpack the Rube Goldberg machine of illogical processes, datasets, and dependencies they have created to arrive at their "solution" they are now asking for my assistance with..... I dont look for AI, at least not ChatGPT AI to solve that. Most IT problems are Solution XY issues. ChatGPT can solve to Y, but understanding X is the real trick
Jevon23 4y ago
Surely if there’s one task that’s AGI-complete, it’s programming. So if the AI makes programming obsolete, you probably have bigger things to worry about than job security.
habibur 4y ago
Look around and see how many programmers' jobs have been replaced by AI at your office. None? Search the net to find how many companies are cutting down their programmers' workforce and replacing it with AI. Still none? Search for anecdotal evidence on forums to find any programmer's job been replaced by AI. All talks point to promises in the "future" only? Rest assured. It happens when it happens.
dagw 4y ago
My wife had an uncle who has been programming a long time, and he tells of a time when he believed that languages like COBOL and FORTRAN IV would make programmers obsolete since now anybody could just tell the computer what they wanted it do and they didn't actually have know anything about computers or programming to do so. Turns out he was kind of right and kind of wrong. On the one hand most programmers today know virtually nothing about computers and programming in the sense that a programmer in early 60s knew computers and programming. Yet programmers today are more prolific and in demand than ever before. I suspect we'll see something similar play out.
psychlops 4y ago
Much of coding today is doing the same thing all over again in a new environment or new language or tool. LLM's will have plenty of examples of this and will be able to generate those products faster and better. Original code will be harder to duplicate. We can assume that those coders will use an LLM as a tool to speed up their development, but won't be able to trust it for mission critical items. Although, writing this I realized that an LLM may become an excellent way to bug test.
fauigerzigerk 4y ago
I think there two questions. The first is whether the current generation of AI is capable of writing finished software based on an end user's natural language specification. I think the answer to that is no. There are too many loose ends and these AIs are not good enough at logical inference and root cause analysis, especially when the logic is extralingual. The second question is whether these AIs can make developers more productive so that fewer developers are going to find employment. I'm not sure. Yes they will make us more productive, but the demand for developers may well outstrip the added supply. If something gets cheaper, people tend to use more of it.
albertopv 4y ago
I have to deal with POs, PMs, helpdesk people, clients changing requirements every week... Programming is almost a tiny part of my job, understanding what people want now and what will want in 6 month is the real trick
varispeed 4y ago
It's like a carpenter asking if they are relevant now that there are intelligent hammers?

33 points by ahuth 4y ago

Does the AI know your product? Does the AI know your database? Does the AI know your design, device, legal and other constraints? No, and won't for any foreseeable future.

whoomp12342 4y ago
todays generation of AI yes. I worry about an AI that will LEARN your product and LEARN your database and LEARN your tribal knowledge. As a similie, I fear we are like a horse, in the era of Henry T. Ford. On the other hand. Someone still needs to interact with ChatGPT or the likes. Someone needs to keep an eye on quality control. Someone needs to ASK chatgpt TO write the code. Its like programming on yet an even higher level. I just worry that, with that increased efficiency there wont be troves of teams writing code like today. On the foot, chatgpt doesnt write perfect code and can introduce complex bugs that only the best of the best will be able to decipher, so there is that. On the other foot, when you look at what joomla,wordpress,squarespace did to website design it is a very similar trajectory. There will always be niches
- illiarian 4y ago
  > todays generation of AI yes. No. They have no idea what my codebase it, how to translate concepts like "audio is limited to users on free tier" into code etc. > I worry about an AI that will LEARN your product and LEARN your database and LEARN your tribal knowledge. It won't, not for any foreseeable future. It fails consistently even at the most simple of tasks. If you're afraid that you will be made relevant because we will be able to teach it those simple tasks? > when you look at what joomla,wordpress,squarespace did to website design it is a very similar trajectory. What did they do? Did they make you obsolete?
- sethammons 4y ago
  If an AI can "rationalize" your product, know your database, know your design, legal, and other constraints, at that point, what employment role is not at risk? You wouldn't need project or product managers or designers. Heck, at that point, you don't need accountants either. Maybe you have a team that supervises the AI - but, really, you could have an AI do that. So you have the business owner(s) and zero employees. No more tech companies as everything can be done by AI, including CEO work. What I actually expect: better tooling. We were not replaced when we went from punch cards to C - it just increased demand for programmers. AI may be the next tooling, but I only see more opportunity: solutions happening faster.
cousin_it 4y ago
The foreseeable future is quite short though, and getting shorter. You didn't predict the success of LLMs even a year before they hit the mainstream. Right now you can't predict the next big AI thing, what it'll do and when. To me the future stops being "foreseeable" and becomes very foggy (which jobs still exist and so on) a few years from now at the longest.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > The foreseeable future is quite short though, and getting shorter. Not really. The answers for my questions are as far away now as they were 15 years ago.
jstummbillig 4y ago
To approximate the validity of this statement, you can ask yourself "What was the earliest time, when I expected AI to be where it is today?"
- illiarian 4y ago
  You're assuming that every single year you're going to have major leaps in this tech. And that in any foreseeable future the leap will be such that an AI will be useful enough to answer those questions.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    I am assuming neither, and while interpreting the present is hard, correctly projecting into the future is a lot harder.
PeterisP 4y ago
The junior programmer we would hire doesn't know any of that as well, they have to get all of that from someone else on the team - so perhaps that job can be replaced by us giving all of that info to some cheap computer instead of a relatively expensive person, as even junior programmers cost quite a lot.

nluken 4y ago

Existential questions aside, this post is a non-article that adds nothing to this conversation. It's the kind of noise that I'd expect LLMs to replace.

gregjor 4y ago

For the many programmers asking questions like this… if your programming skills can’t compete with a supercharged auto-complete (call it “AI” if you prefer), then you won’t stay relevant or employed for long. Until SkyNet nukes us all I will continue doing what I do. None of my customers imagine replacing me or anyone else developing software with a really good chatbot.

ahuth 4y ago
Nice framing - need to be better than supercharged auto-complete. What kind of stuff do you work on?
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  Sounds like the best stuff to work on is supercharged auto-complete.
- gregjor 4y ago
  Web application development and system admin, which mostly means cloud infrastructure. A lot of that is already automated in some sense, but not enough for my customers to tell Alexa to set up a VPC and write some useful code for them.
Riverheart 4y ago
I think this person is concerned with AI as it will evolve not as it currently exists today. This person may be young and will need to stay in the market dealing with that evolution longer. Everybody starts as a junior before they become elite programmer but if the bottom is removed people won't be able to skill up.
commitpizza 4y ago
You sound a bit like an old man not adapting to technology progress. As an example, if I would make a logo today I would perhaps before used Fiverr or similar services but not I will use an AI and then edit it in some photo editor. It has become much easier to do stuff like that even if you suck at photo editing.

dougmwne 4y ago

I think this equally applies to all knowledge workers. LLMs are not going to cut the human out of the loop just yet, but building them into the workflow is going to end up being so powerful that anyone not using an LLM will be uncompetitive. I see this being at least a few years out. Performance is stil scaling up and cost is still scaling down. It’s going to require collecting a lot more specialized training data to produce fine tuned model. Business will need to adapt and people will need to learn how to accelerate themselves. But eventually, I see this going the way of the introduction of the computer to the office. No productive person will work without it. As a thought exercise, I’m going to assume you’ve used same GPT model to produce some code before and been impressed in a narrow kind of way. Then project that forward a few years, through GPT-4 and GPT-5. Add some better training data and a better understanding of how to fit the LLM output into day-to-day work. Maybe add the ability to fine-tune on the existing code base and design documents. The trend-line is at least going to hit junior dev level, so the job will probably turn into a senior dev supervising a “team” of LLMs.

username3 4y ago
People will still use Excel.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  Nothing will ever beat the horse.
  - leeoniya 4y ago
    unless it's dead, which Excel isnt.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      What's scary is Bill Gates may have finally found a new horse to flog...
- analog31 4y ago

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Imagining that AIs would truly be better at writing code than humans one day, I wonder who would write the instructions telling the AI what code to write. It may be a whole new kind of job, kind of like programming instructions that the AI has to follow. Maybe we could think of a name for that. Programmers maybe?

ahuth 4y ago
Programming the programmers
gardenhedge 4y ago
Here's a scenario that might be possible in the future: Person: I need a website to sell shoes. Here's my brand and logo. Here's a selection of what the product looks like. 5 seconds later.. AI: I've generated 5 prototype sites and deployed them to URL1, URL2 .. URL5. Please review and select one. Person: URL3 looks great. Let's get that deployed and add all the shoes in this CSV. Monitor the site and make any changes to increase engagement and sales.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  That kind of cookie-cutter site generation is already kind of possible without AI. The AI might dream up the design (which is cool, and certainly a threat to designers). But all the hard parts of actual logic that would be unique to this project still needs to be specified, implemented, verified. Now you might say: but what's so special about a shoe store? Payment, inventory, shopping carts, databases - it can all be the same as every other shoe store! But that's the key takeaway here. If you work in something where the next deployment has much in common with the last one: then your job is at risk. But these jobs have been eaten by SaaS for a long time. An "online store as a service" was a thing long before AI. Could AI help take over this type of software development even more? Sure. But that's like machines taking over dull industrial jobs. We shouldn't worry about being out of a job, we should be happy that we can do more interesting things than what the machines can do, just like we could stop weaving fabric.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago

zmgsabst 4y ago

For fun, I asked ChatGPT what it thought: https://zmichaelgehlke.com/autocontent/essay-sde.html https://zmichaelgehlke.com/autocontent/essay-sde.html

melenaboija 4y ago

Maybe there will be a time where programing in high-level languages will be seen as punch cards are seen today. Even if that happens maybe the ones that know how programming languages work will be the good ones, as today a good programmer knows about OS’, architecture or compilers.

acover 4y ago
How many programmers are there for large language models? It seems like there are very few ai researchers compared to the number of programmers. There will be more people using the ai to program computers, but the ai interface may be so easy that it's no longer a skill.
sakex 4y ago
What kind of maths is required? I am not a practitioner but I try to stay up to date. I read ML papers, and it seems like they only require pretty basic maths (as in High School level.) Linear algebra, calculus, and stochastic calculus. It seems to me you can go a long way with just understanding the chain rule and dot products. I am trying to build my own Language Model using Pytorch and it is much easier than a lot of the stuff I've had to do as a traditional SWE over the years. My understanding is that the difficulty comes from training massive models that cannot fit on a single GPU efficiently, so more of a software problem than a maths problem. Am I suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect ? Or is the genius of the field in the combination of this limited set of techniques ?

DeathArrow 4y ago

Yes, I am.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

- difficult to automate or low value dev work is already being offshore to cheaper locations - lot of dev work is just plumbing, config files, packages, APIs and tedious non challenging stuff - demanding roles have high barrier: leetcode, certifications, open source, github, networking and so on - it will get more imo - coding is treated as a basic skill taught in schools, like english or maths - not itself a differentiator AI still does not have access to most businesses internal context, terminologies and so on - that is where we still have leverage.

carlmcqueen 4y ago

The fear of language model AI takes me back to my original fear when I joined a data science team at a huge bank with just a bachelor's degree and five years of experience. I was embedded in the mess of databases created by hundreds of large bank mergers. I was working with really, really smart PHDs and was doubting my hiring to the team. I felt like a lot of these guys had forgotten more than I'd ever known. During my time in that job, I realized that my experience in navigating the complex databases from working with the business and operational teams gave me an advantage. I took my domain knowledge for granted and was able to work on the problems at hand much faster than the highly intelligent colleagues who relied on IT/DBAs to write their queries. They often had to go back and forth for a couple of days to clarify their requests, leading to misunderstandings and delays. In the end, I fit in just fine, held my own, and was aware of my individual talents. I enjoyed learning from the PhDs, and they were happy to teach from their backgrounds. A lot of the experience from the big bank has 0 transferability to any other company. What made me stand out was I knew which tables of the gigantic data environment were the best to use, I had hundreds of already built queries for many different problems and I was dependable. It got me really far before I went off on my own.

saiya-jin 4y ago
> A lot of the experience from the big bank has 0 transferability to any other company. That's one of the beauties of IT work - for almost all of us, unless you shoot your own foot continuously, maybe 95% of our skillsets are easily transferrable not only to another employer, but also to another domain. Of course if you willingly position yourself to some tiny niche that makes you unfireable or just follow your passions unchecked, you may end up in similar situation... an advice, for an easy life don't do that, rather accept potentially slightly lower pay and enjoy life more, its anyway damn too short

albertzeyer 4y ago

I think it depends. As a programmer, you really should carefully watch the development, and adapt to it. It might be that the way programmers work in 10 or 20 years will really be quite different than how we work now. Maybe we just talk to some AI and give it high-level instructions on how to design some system, speak about bugs, etc, and the actual coding, debugging, etc is delegated to the AI. So your role transitions more into management. Or maybe that's not realistic, and it will look somehow different. In any case, I think it will change, and you should be prepared to adapt to it. If you ignore the whole development, your job might indeed be at risk, or just be at much lower value.

lex2ross 4y ago

I'm Naive in AI domain. LLMs are trained on existing contains which are presumably original so far. This means LLM can not think beyond what it has learnt from past resources. - Would it be safe to assume LLM can not produce new original work? - I worry internet will be soon will be flood with LLMs generated content which will again feed in to LLMs to train them further. IMO such feedback will hardly help, in fact that may make LLM more rigid in answers. I know there is parallel effort going to detect machine generated content so that they dont rank on top but its is still in nascent phase.

ForHackernews 4y ago

Turns out Tom[0] has the laugh after all. The goddamn people skills will be what counts in the end. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

stuven 4y ago

There has been a shift in how we discuss this question. For a long time, the answer was, "No jobs are at risk, AI can't compete in any scenarios. At best, it's a tool." Now the answer is, "Only a few jobs are at risk, AI can only compete in a small range of tasks." It's possible we're at the beginning of a hockey stick graph. So what would it look like for AI to make the leap to mid level developer? It would have to understand: 1.) The codebase 2.) The technical requirements (amount of traffic served, latency target) 3.) The parameters (must have code coverage, this team doesn't integration test, must provide a QA plan, all new infrastructure must be in Terraform) 4.) The end goal of some task (e.g. integrate with snail mail provider to send a customer snail mail on checkout attempt if it was denied for credit reasons) It would then have to make a design based as much as possible on the existing code style and library choices and follow it. This is all probably possible now, although perhaps not for a general AI or LLM. But someone could build a program leveraging an LLM to provide a decent stab at this for a given language ecosystem. The hard parts: Point 2 requires an understanding of performance which is a quantifiable thing, and LLMs up until now have been bad at making math-based inferences. Point 3 requires the bot to either provide opinions for you (inflexible) or to be very configurable for your team's needs (takes longer to develop). Point 4 requires a _current_ understanding of libraries, or the ability to search for them and make decisions as to the best ones for the job. ----- What about extending the above for a senior role? Now the bot has to understand business context, technical debt (does technical debt even exist in a world where bots are doing the programming?), and other "situational factors" and synthesize them into a plan of action, then kick off as many "mid level bot" processes as necessary to execute the plan of action. The hard parts: Current LLMs are pretty uninspired when suggesting ideas. Business context + feature decisions often involve math, which again LLMs aren't great at.

generalizations 4y ago
And that's just context. It also has to be capable of debugging its own code, and looking for resources when it doesn't have the knowledge to come up with a solution.
- stuven 4y ago

chasing 4y ago

“Programming” isn’t writing code, it’s understanding computers on a technical level well enough to make them do exactly what you want them to do given a certain set of constraints. The tools we use today are incredibly powerful and time-saving without AI. I can whip up a reasonably interesting mobile app with a data backend I could scale to millions of users in less than a week and basically for free. And yet there are more programmers than ever. Which indicates that maybe these tools empower human engineers instead of cutting them out of the loop. Although just as software engineering is very different today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, in 20 or 30 years it will be very different…

fauigerzigerk 4y ago
>Although just as software engineering is very different today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, in 20 or 30 years it will be very different… It's not actually very different than 20 or 30 years ago. The platforms are rather different, the end product is different too in some cases, but the development work itself is surprisingly similar. That doesn't mean there cannot ever be a real leap forward of course.

throwaway71271 4y ago

I have been coding for 22 years, never thought of myself as programmer, programming for me is like literacy, it's like calling yourself a 'reader' because you can read. Programming is a first order thinking, a way to deconstruct and construct things, sometimes you have to use it on a computer, sometimes you have to use it while baking bread, or while woodworking. AI will help me so much, I am super excited, and now I use it every day, I plugged in whisper+chatgpt[1] to my emacs and now it is more and more like a partner, it is of course still stupid, but it will get better, and soon (with the recent llama work people are doing) I hope we will be able to finetune it. We are doing lists and tables and data transformations and input validation for 60 years now, we built gazillion specialised spreadsheet clones.. I think now we can start building some new things, some really "soft" software, where the users can program it with language. This is the first time I feel the computer is helping me do something, and its not me "fighting" with it. [1] https://github.com/jackdoe/emacs-chatgpt-jarvis https://github.com/jackdoe/emacs-chatgpt-jarvis

noduerme 4y ago
Look, most good programming is not the simple data transformations, read/write, CRUD, etc. even though that is most day-to-day busywork we have to deal with. Good programming is envisioning a whole set of behaviours and the architecture to support them, before a line of code is ever written. If an AI can bang out the boilerplate for you once you know what you want, that's great. But like any tool, relying on it to do all things will lead to places where you're at a crossroads and might take the way the tool suggests instead of continuing along your intention to build something the way you conceived of it. And the tool may seem to "know" - but it doesn't, and it shouldn't guide you (anymore than, say, taking the path of least resistance with React should guide your decisions about app architecture). Lists and tables aren't an unsolved problem anymore. Good programming is about solving the problems that haven't been solved yet. But an AI is trained on existing art, and can only follow paths that have already been trodden.
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  i am sad to say that lists and tables are totally unsolved problems, look how many issues there are in react's virtualized list[1] (just an example, not picking on react) but i think we are talking about the same thing :) programming is creative, and for me it is art, i love it. https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue+virtualized+list https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues?q=is%3Aissue...

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I think that "mass-produced" code; the type that is fairly typical, for many companies, these days, using systems like React Native, Xamarin, Flutter, etc., are almost certainly going to be replaced by auto-generated stuff. I guarantee that the C-Suite people are already salivating over the thought of firing all their programmers. For people like me; probably not, but then, my skills don't seem to be in demand, so much.

rimliu 4y ago

There is no AI. ChatGPT is a glorified and hyped Markov chain generator with zero understanding what's it is doing.

GaggiX 4y ago
I asked chatGPT for a response: "There's no such thing as human intelligence. We're just a bunch of organic machines following pre-programmed genetic codes and learned responses, with zero understanding of the true nature of our existence."

pookha 4y ago

Getting a strong John Henry vibe with Programming (and law degrees). Things are going to get interesting...Tinkering with Calculus and ML models feels like the eventual future of logic tasks.

makach 4y ago

Yes. For the time being you are still relevant. But AI is slowly taking over these tasks, pretty much the same way the conveyor belt revolutionized our industry. It is difficult to predict how fast this will happen, but somewhere within a 5-10 year period high level programming will definitively be different from what we are used to today. As the AI technology improves, programming will be a matter of dictating what you want, from what sources and how it should be displayed. Code will become better, stable, accessible for all and make us all high level programmers. There will still be programmers, however they will most likely be much more specialized than what they are today.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

I'm probably a bit older than you. Even so, I plan to work as a programmer for roughly the next 25 years at least. I'm not worried about competition from AI becoming a meaningful factor in that timeframe, any more than actors in the past few centuries have been worried about being replaced by trained parrots.

gwoolhurme 4y ago

I deal with a bit of anxiety for a number of reasons, that I personally work on. I have a background in control theory we even used early neural nets in my research. I’m somewhat familiar with how LLMs work. With all that said? I get mini panic attacks about what my job will look like in 10 years. To pay the bills I’ve been in mobile native development for a few years now. I genuinely panic when I see people say AGI is coming soon, or Sam Altman say that AI is coming for Knowledge based work first. Is my whole world about to crumble? Will I be ok? What can I do to prepare? Then other days, I use chatgpt or bing and I see some silly response, or I remember my control theory background and I feel at ease again. It’s a really horrible rollercoaster ride mentally.

bedobi 4y ago

I mean, take the next ticket on your board, feed it into an AI and call it a day. You could even take another job (or why not a dozen) and just outsource yourself to an AI. Good luck! In case it's not obvious, this is sarcasm. It doesn't work like that, nor is it likely to anytime soon. And even if that day comes in our lifetime (which I doubt), your boss or PM still couldn't just delegate tickets to the AI. The AI would need people with advanced knowledge of both the AI and the domain who understand how to supervise it, and that would most likely be you and me.

phpisthebest 4y ago

The failure of no-code will be the same failure of AI programming... People miss understand (and most business failure to realize the potential) of IT in general which is not typing functions in the latest programming lang... It is problem solving. The number if times I have sat down with a business user to go over a problem they are having only to have to unpack the Rube Goldberg machine of illogical processes, datasets, and dependencies they have created to arrive at their "solution" they are now asking for my assistance with..... I dont look for AI, at least not ChatGPT AI to solve that. Most IT problems are Solution XY issues. ChatGPT can solve to Y, but understanding X is the real trick

Jevon23 4y ago

Surely if there’s one task that’s AGI-complete, it’s programming. So if the AI makes programming obsolete, you probably have bigger things to worry about than job security.

habibur 4y ago

Look around and see how many programmers' jobs have been replaced by AI at your office. None? Search the net to find how many companies are cutting down their programmers' workforce and replacing it with AI. Still none? Search for anecdotal evidence on forums to find any programmer's job been replaced by AI. All talks point to promises in the "future" only? Rest assured. It happens when it happens.

dagw 4y ago

My wife had an uncle who has been programming a long time, and he tells of a time when he believed that languages like COBOL and FORTRAN IV would make programmers obsolete since now anybody could just tell the computer what they wanted it do and they didn't actually have know anything about computers or programming to do so. Turns out he was kind of right and kind of wrong. On the one hand most programmers today know virtually nothing about computers and programming in the sense that a programmer in early 60s knew computers and programming. Yet programmers today are more prolific and in demand than ever before. I suspect we'll see something similar play out.

psychlops 4y ago

Much of coding today is doing the same thing all over again in a new environment or new language or tool. LLM's will have plenty of examples of this and will be able to generate those products faster and better. Original code will be harder to duplicate. We can assume that those coders will use an LLM as a tool to speed up their development, but won't be able to trust it for mission critical items. Although, writing this I realized that an LLM may become an excellent way to bug test.

fauigerzigerk 4y ago

I think there two questions. The first is whether the current generation of AI is capable of writing finished software based on an end user's natural language specification. I think the answer to that is no. There are too many loose ends and these AIs are not good enough at logical inference and root cause analysis, especially when the logic is extralingual. The second question is whether these AIs can make developers more productive so that fewer developers are going to find employment. I'm not sure. Yes they will make us more productive, but the demand for developers may well outstrip the added supply. If something gets cheaper, people tend to use more of it.

albertopv 4y ago

I have to deal with POs, PMs, helpdesk people, clients changing requirements every week... Programming is almost a tiny part of my job, understanding what people want now and what will want in 6 month is the real trick

varispeed 4y ago

It's like a carpenter asking if they are relevant now that there are intelligent hammers?