4 ms·

If all you're doing is very simple crud apps and transforming API responses, your coding is already replaceable with "no code" tools.

theshrike79 4y ago
I'm still waiting for the no-code tools that can replace me, the API Glue Coder. They've been promising those since the early 2000's, but I'm still employed. Some stuff has been automated by Zapier, IFTTT and the like, but most of the systems I'm integrating with don't have public APIs.
- joenot443 4y ago
  "I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. They've been promising those since the 1880s, but I've still got passengers in my carriage every day!" Obviously it's a cheeky example, but this would not be the first time in history a previously well-established career was upended in a (relatively) short amount of time. I'm a FAANG dev, I've got skin in the game too and I'm trying to be optimistic, but I can't help but be at least a little worried. From Wikipedia - "In 1890 there were 13,800 companies in the United States in the business of building carriages pulled by horses. By 1920, only 90 such companies remained." I don't think we'll be out of the job entirely, but I can definitely imagine the bar being raised and the compensation stagnating as we now have to justify the time and cost of our work compared to the near-free, near-instantaneous output of an LLM. All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    > All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried. Yea, that's mostly why I get hired. Experience gives people a certain intuition on what kind of solutions work for which cases. And when you've been working long enough, you don't (hopefully) feel the need to do cool bleeding edge shit at work, you just want the work code to ... work. You pick the simplest and most boring solution possible so you can clock out at 1600 and not think about services crashing because the newfangled thingamageek coded with the latest language du jour failed because of an edge case nobody has seen before.
    - joenot443 4y ago
      That's a comforting perspective, I hope that you're right.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. Wow. The hype around "AI"s has entered the crypto stages. Just like crypto was the new car, the new internet etc., so is AI now. Well, at least AI is useful in certain applications.
    - AstralStorm 4y ago
      Again? Last time it ended in a long winter. And horse carriages have some serious advantages, maybe even will make a comeback. :)
    - joenot443 4y ago
      I got into and out of Bitcoin back in 2010 when I was still in high school. Even then, I thought and still do that crypto as a whole is a complete ponzi scheme with little real world utility. I feel completely differently about LLMs; I'd say we're closer to 2007 when the first iPhone was released. I believe LLMs will become a part of our day to day lives at a level that crypto never came close to.
  - saurik 4y ago
    But horse carriage drivers were never out of a job, because cars still needed people to drive them... (yes, people can drive their own car, but they can also drive their own carriage, so nothing is different there). In contrast, horses were out of a job; do you think we are more like horses than like the people who drive horses?
bboygravity 4y ago
Except it isn't and it won't be until 10 layers of management learn what no-code tools are and why they should want them.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  And i guess this will never happen as management at the first sign of trouble making AI do that they want, will gladly pay someone else to do it for them. Of course as little as possible, but either way they will be glad to delegate. It's same for me. I can learn how to tile my bathroom or repair my car, but i just don't feel like and am happy to pay someone else.
illiarian 4y ago
I've been a programmer for 23 years now. In all these years every year was the year of no-code tools. And you know what? We went from having actual no- or low-code tools (UI builders, forms in Access and FoxPro etc.) to zero no-code tools worth a damn [1]. There was a brief dream of Yahoo! Pipes in mid-to-late 2000s, but it's dead as well. [1] Except some applications like Unreal Blueprints and similar node-based tools in audio and graphical software
- eestrada 4y ago
  I think the reason Unreal Blueprints and cousins work and are useful is: they are used in a relatively narrow domain, the primitives of that domain are well understood/defined, and the primitives are easily compossible. Once you create a general purpose no-code option, it is so complicated and sprawling that the mental burden to understand it is just as great (if not greater) as just using plain old code again. Or conversely, it is so constraining (for the sake of "simplicity") that it can't do anything useful.
weatherlite 4y ago
> If all you're doing is very simple crud apps and transforming API responses, I think all of us here conflate simple with easy. It's simple in theory yes - you get some JSON from service X, maybe tweak service Y that talks to X and then feed it into some front end. In practice even very experienced engineers can take days writing or changing a simple end point or some front end because unclear requirements/bugs/micro service hell/unclear existing code/etc etc. If it was that easy the pace and quality would have been much higher than what I'm seeing in tech companies.

theshrike79 4y ago

I'm still waiting for the no-code tools that can replace me, the API Glue Coder. They've been promising those since the early 2000's, but I'm still employed. Some stuff has been automated by Zapier, IFTTT and the like, but most of the systems I'm integrating with don't have public APIs.

joenot443 4y ago
"I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. They've been promising those since the 1880s, but I've still got passengers in my carriage every day!" Obviously it's a cheeky example, but this would not be the first time in history a previously well-established career was upended in a (relatively) short amount of time. I'm a FAANG dev, I've got skin in the game too and I'm trying to be optimistic, but I can't help but be at least a little worried. From Wikipedia - "In 1890 there were 13,800 companies in the United States in the business of building carriages pulled by horses. By 1920, only 90 such companies remained." I don't think we'll be out of the job entirely, but I can definitely imagine the bar being raised and the compensation stagnating as we now have to justify the time and cost of our work compared to the near-free, near-instantaneous output of an LLM. All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  > All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried. Yea, that's mostly why I get hired. Experience gives people a certain intuition on what kind of solutions work for which cases. And when you've been working long enough, you don't (hopefully) feel the need to do cool bleeding edge shit at work, you just want the work code to ... work. You pick the simplest and most boring solution possible so you can clock out at 1600 and not think about services crashing because the newfangled thingamageek coded with the latest language du jour failed because of an edge case nobody has seen before.
  - joenot443 4y ago
    That's a comforting perspective, I hope that you're right.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > I'm still waiting for the automobile that can replace me, the Horse Carriage Driver. Wow. The hype around "AI"s has entered the crypto stages. Just like crypto was the new car, the new internet etc., so is AI now. Well, at least AI is useful in certain applications.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    Again? Last time it ended in a long winter. And horse carriages have some serious advantages, maybe even will make a comeback. :)
  - joenot443 4y ago
    I got into and out of Bitcoin back in 2010 when I was still in high school. Even then, I thought and still do that crypto as a whole is a complete ponzi scheme with little real world utility. I feel completely differently about LLMs; I'd say we're closer to 2007 when the first iPhone was released. I believe LLMs will become a part of our day to day lives at a level that crypto never came close to.
- saurik 4y ago
  But horse carriage drivers were never out of a job, because cars still needed people to drive them... (yes, people can drive their own car, but they can also drive their own carriage, so nothing is different there). In contrast, horses were out of a job; do you think we are more like horses than like the people who drive horses?

bboygravity 4y ago

Except it isn't and it won't be until 10 layers of management learn what no-code tools are and why they should want them.

vincnetas 4y ago
And i guess this will never happen as management at the first sign of trouble making AI do that they want, will gladly pay someone else to do it for them. Of course as little as possible, but either way they will be glad to delegate. It's same for me. I can learn how to tile my bathroom or repair my car, but i just don't feel like and am happy to pay someone else.

illiarian 4y ago

I've been a programmer for 23 years now. In all these years every year was the year of no-code tools. And you know what? We went from having actual no- or low-code tools (UI builders, forms in Access and FoxPro etc.) to zero no-code tools worth a damn [1]. There was a brief dream of Yahoo! Pipes in mid-to-late 2000s, but it's dead as well. [1] Except some applications like Unreal Blueprints and similar node-based tools in audio and graphical software

eestrada 4y ago
I think the reason Unreal Blueprints and cousins work and are useful is: they are used in a relatively narrow domain, the primitives of that domain are well understood/defined, and the primitives are easily compossible. Once you create a general purpose no-code option, it is so complicated and sprawling that the mental burden to understand it is just as great (if not greater) as just using plain old code again. Or conversely, it is so constraining (for the sake of "simplicity") that it can't do anything useful.

weatherlite 4y ago

> If all you're doing is very simple crud apps and transforming API responses, I think all of us here conflate simple with easy. It's simple in theory yes - you get some JSON from service X, maybe tweak service Y that talks to X and then feed it into some front end. In practice even very experienced engineers can take days writing or changing a simple end point or some front end because unclear requirements/bugs/micro service hell/unclear existing code/etc etc. If it was that easy the pace and quality would have been much higher than what I'm seeing in tech companies.