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I really doubt if AI will have any impact on developer jobs. If I want to build an alternative to TurboTax, how much can AI help? I like to think of software as

by yedava 4y ago

I really doubt if AI will have any impact on developer jobs. If I want to build an alternative to TurboTax, how much can AI help? I like to think of software as automating a large number of bizarre corner cases which are a result of us being human. And corner cases are what AI usually fails at.

it_citizen 4y ago
> How much can AI help? In 2019, this is sci-fi In 2023, it can help engineers understand the complexity of taxes, translate some tax rules into code, help refine edge cases and fix mistakes. In 2030, ??? Things move insanely fast lately. I would not bet on anything.
- xwdv 4y ago
  People seem to assume tech progress is always some linear or exponential thing where things just keep getting better. They can’t imagine we could also just hit a plateau and have no progress for a decade until some other major breakthrough happens. AI art is hitting a plateau or has hit a plateau. Progress came quickly for months but nowadays each update is just a bit better details with more resolution and better hands. That’s it. If you have AI anxiety, just read my comment history.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Is there a name for this fallacy? Because I see it a lot.
    - xwdv 4y ago
      Maybe whatever you call “past performance doesn’t imply future results” or something.
    - antondd 4y ago
      (Roughly) Amara's Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      False uniqueness effect? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-uniqueness_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-uniqueness_effect
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Is there a name for the technology advancement fallacy? I see all the time that people think with enough time technology will simply make every problem surmountable. It doesn't matter if it's limited by physics, conservation of energy, or reality
  - it_citizen 4y ago
    I am not saying that some linear or exponential curve is certain but so far I don't see any sign of slowing down. The research papers seem actually full of new avenues and very promising low hanging fruits. > AI art is hitting a plateau or has hit a plateau. I am not sure I am following. Are you saying AI art has hit a plateau since stable diffusion and dall-e 2 got released? This is less than a year ago. Look for plateau at the scale of a 5 to 10 years, not 6 months.
- koboll 4y ago
  It honestly seems sort of like a straight path toward an LLM that can hold a whole codebase in context and can produce new functionality on command. Fundamentally, software is just taking inputs and producing outputs; we will almost certainly be able to define those and let the LLM do everything in between within a year or two.
  - packetlost 4y ago
    And brain surgery is just cutting someone's head open with a scalpel. Programming languages are stupidly information dense. I'm highly skeptical an AI will be useful for non-trivial boiler plate any time soon, they lack the reasoning powers to get the details right even occasionally for common tasks and basically never for uncommon ones.
    - dmreedy 4y ago
      While I take your meaning here, I would suggest also that natural languages are even more stupidly information-dense. And while the rules of their logic are not as hard and immutable as the semantics of programming languages, they do have plenty.
      - packetlost 4y ago
        I don't agree that natural language is more information dense than most programming languages, there's a bunch of shared context, work, and assumptions that must be understood before effective use of both, but natural language is typically pretty loose and relies heavily on context for real meaning, which is still subjective. Conversely, PLs have no subjectivity once executed/compiled. Natural language is very verbose when trying to express the concepts of a PL with the same specificity, just look at how long entry-level tutorials for writing hello world in any PL are. Or try explaining all the details of even a basic function call in C to a CS101 class. You need to say a lot of words to describe the same exact thing. PLs benefit from being targeted at a specific domain dramatically that NL just can't.
    - koboll 4y ago
      Programming languages are stupidly information dense indeed, but if that's the most major roadblock, I don't see why throwing more compute at the problem won't eventually solve it. GPT-4 is already handling a very stupid amount of information density.
- Zetice 4y ago
  I don't think your second list item here is true, or uniquely true of GPT/LLMs anyway, so I'm not sure we're any further along than we were in 2019 for this specific problem.
  - it_citizen 4y ago
    What part you don't think is true? Help engineers understand taxes: it is pretty much part of the GPT-4 demo. You can copy the tax code in it and ask questions about it. As a matter of facts, it helped me with some taxes questions I had this year, although it was ChatGPT and I didn't paste the tax document in it. Translate some tax rules into code? I did something similar last week for a complex billing project I am working on. It didn't give me the best variable names and made up a few some functions but the formulas were correct and I reused a good chunk of it. Fixing the logic of the code it just wrote? I think there are enough examples of that on Twitter.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      > You can copy the tax code in it and ask questions about it. Doesn't it still have problems with outright hallucinating a bunch of crap? If so, the dangers of using something flaky/unreliable for potentially life changing decisions...
      - it_citizen 4y ago
        I use it a fairly amount and it does indeed hallucinate things here and there. I know not to take things at face value. But whenever I have to deal with a complex question such as taxes, I often find it very useful to break down a problem, rephrase and provide context around my question and offer different leads to follow or cross reference. I see it as GPT spiting out a skeleton of an answer onto which I can attach some meat. It is very useful when I don't really know the domain and therefore how to attack a problem.
    - Zetice 4y ago
      What part of what you just wrote couldn’t we do before, with human labor and/or existing tools?
- Pxtl 4y ago
  In 2040 we are its support staff. By the end of the century our great-grandkids are basically its pets. And I'm not even sure any of that is a bad thing. How do we deal with the idea that the AI industry might create a benevolent God?
electrondood 4y ago
> I really doubt if AI will have any impact on developer jobs. It already has. Every single one of my coworkers is using Copilot. If you mean in terms of the job market, the shift to more declarative supervision of the tool rather than imperative implementation of the work yourself means that the bar for skill is far lower. There will come a time when product managers and UX designers just use AI to generate Figma mocks, and AI generates an entire scaleable platform from just that. Will they need developers? Sure, but maybe 1. Certainly not 8-10.
- it_citizen 4y ago
  Fortunately in every company I worked, the main limiting factor to hire engineers seem to be money and not lack of tings to build. For a time, it might just translate in companies building more features and being even more wasteful than today.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > Every single one of my coworkers is using Copilot And all of you still got a job. Copilot has been out for a time now, if it was transformative we would see companies releasing a ton of products and fix all the bugs and then fire most of their developers etc the past half year, but that didn't happen. Making developers a bit more productive wont have an impact on developer jobs. It changes your day to day job a bit, but that is like switching to another IDE, it wont transform the industry. Even if it reduces the need for developers by an entire 10% it is not that big of a deal, it would be worth many billions but for an average developer they wont notice much of an impact. It is like the productivity improvement of giving developers another screen, a better computer, a better IDE etc, those are nice but they didn't transform the industry.
  - hoot 4y ago
    In a few years it will be called Pilot instead of Copilot.
- travbrack 4y ago
  I think capitalism might take care of this. Let's say we have tools that make devs 10x more productive. A company could lay off 90% of their engineers and produce as much as they did before generative AI. What if their competitor decides they're going to retain all of their engineers and produce 10x more than they did before? That's going to force everyone to staff up to be able to keep up with the 10x company.
okdood64 4y ago
As an SRE I'm not too worried on a 25 year horizon. Yes I pulled that number out of my ass. Depending on the quarter only 10% to 25% of my time is writing code. The other is dealing with: finding high level reliability concerns, figuring out what solutions to implement, diving into complex acute production issues, evaluating trade-offs for fixes, finding ways to make things more efficient, negotiating what to prioritize with other teams/orgs/leadership, etc. Could an AI do some of these things? Sure. Are they going to be able to figure out the right stakeholder to talk to, negotiate with them, get buy-in and decide on overall designs/solutions? No. I'd be a bit concerned if I was a frontend developer (though any decent one could pivot to something else.) however.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Why? Frontend development is one of the most challenging roles and for any non-trivial UI application, there is a ton of "non-code" user context that isn't even available to an AI. AI might be able to spit out template websites, but it can also spit out Cloudformation templates.
  - okdood64 4y ago
    It is extremely challenging! (Based on my brief foray into it.) But leveraging LLMs to create really good starting point for a new feature would reduce the amount of frontend developers needed. I guess what I mean to say as SRE/Systems, we code so little already that it being able to spit out a CF template wouldn't reduce the needs for cross-functional ops type work.
    - throwaway1851 4y ago
      I think a review of the state of frontend tooling will show that efficiency with respect to developer hours is not a widely shared priority. I only say this with only 50% intention of starting a flame war.
- giardini 4y ago
  okdood64 says>"As an SRE I'm not too worried on a 25 year horizon. Yes I pulled that number out of my ass."< I so wish you had not done that: the number 25 is now tainted in my workmates' collective memory, no one of them is willing to touch it, yet I fear we shall need it again soon. You should have instead "pulled that number out of a hat": https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+a+hat https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+a+hat As you can see by the following, there is a difference: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+ass https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+ass Perhaps you can be forgiven this once, being a back-end developer, but, in the future, please consider your audience.
plaidfuji 4y ago
> If I want to build an alternative to TurboTax, how much can AI help? The alternative would be built to help users leverage AI to do their taxes. Upload your docs and it’ll get you 90% of the way there or something like that. AI will help developers build that alternative faster. Almost every piece of software will need to be reimagined from the ground up in this way. That is the job security

by yedava 4y ago

it_citizen 4y ago

> How much can AI help? In 2019, this is sci-fi In 2023, it can help engineers understand the complexity of taxes, translate some tax rules into code, help refine edge cases and fix mistakes. In 2030, ??? Things move insanely fast lately. I would not bet on anything.

xwdv 4y ago
People seem to assume tech progress is always some linear or exponential thing where things just keep getting better. They can’t imagine we could also just hit a plateau and have no progress for a decade until some other major breakthrough happens. AI art is hitting a plateau or has hit a plateau. Progress came quickly for months but nowadays each update is just a bit better details with more resolution and better hands. That’s it. If you have AI anxiety, just read my comment history.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Is there a name for this fallacy? Because I see it a lot.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Maybe whatever you call “past performance doesn’t imply future results” or something.
  - antondd 4y ago
    (Roughly) Amara's Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    False uniqueness effect? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-uniqueness_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-uniqueness_effect
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Is there a name for the technology advancement fallacy? I see all the time that people think with enough time technology will simply make every problem surmountable. It doesn't matter if it's limited by physics, conservation of energy, or reality
- it_citizen 4y ago
  I am not saying that some linear or exponential curve is certain but so far I don't see any sign of slowing down. The research papers seem actually full of new avenues and very promising low hanging fruits. > AI art is hitting a plateau or has hit a plateau. I am not sure I am following. Are you saying AI art has hit a plateau since stable diffusion and dall-e 2 got released? This is less than a year ago. Look for plateau at the scale of a 5 to 10 years, not 6 months.
koboll 4y ago
It honestly seems sort of like a straight path toward an LLM that can hold a whole codebase in context and can produce new functionality on command. Fundamentally, software is just taking inputs and producing outputs; we will almost certainly be able to define those and let the LLM do everything in between within a year or two.
- packetlost 4y ago
  And brain surgery is just cutting someone's head open with a scalpel. Programming languages are stupidly information dense. I'm highly skeptical an AI will be useful for non-trivial boiler plate any time soon, they lack the reasoning powers to get the details right even occasionally for common tasks and basically never for uncommon ones.
  - dmreedy 4y ago
    While I take your meaning here, I would suggest also that natural languages are even more stupidly information-dense. And while the rules of their logic are not as hard and immutable as the semantics of programming languages, they do have plenty.
    - packetlost 4y ago
      I don't agree that natural language is more information dense than most programming languages, there's a bunch of shared context, work, and assumptions that must be understood before effective use of both, but natural language is typically pretty loose and relies heavily on context for real meaning, which is still subjective. Conversely, PLs have no subjectivity once executed/compiled. Natural language is very verbose when trying to express the concepts of a PL with the same specificity, just look at how long entry-level tutorials for writing hello world in any PL are. Or try explaining all the details of even a basic function call in C to a CS101 class. You need to say a lot of words to describe the same exact thing. PLs benefit from being targeted at a specific domain dramatically that NL just can't.
  - koboll 4y ago
    Programming languages are stupidly information dense indeed, but if that's the most major roadblock, I don't see why throwing more compute at the problem won't eventually solve it. GPT-4 is already handling a very stupid amount of information density.
Zetice 4y ago
I don't think your second list item here is true, or uniquely true of GPT/LLMs anyway, so I'm not sure we're any further along than we were in 2019 for this specific problem.
- it_citizen 4y ago
  What part you don't think is true? Help engineers understand taxes: it is pretty much part of the GPT-4 demo. You can copy the tax code in it and ask questions about it. As a matter of facts, it helped me with some taxes questions I had this year, although it was ChatGPT and I didn't paste the tax document in it. Translate some tax rules into code? I did something similar last week for a complex billing project I am working on. It didn't give me the best variable names and made up a few some functions but the formulas were correct and I reused a good chunk of it. Fixing the logic of the code it just wrote? I think there are enough examples of that on Twitter.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > You can copy the tax code in it and ask questions about it. Doesn't it still have problems with outright hallucinating a bunch of crap? If so, the dangers of using something flaky/unreliable for potentially life changing decisions...
    - it_citizen 4y ago
      I use it a fairly amount and it does indeed hallucinate things here and there. I know not to take things at face value. But whenever I have to deal with a complex question such as taxes, I often find it very useful to break down a problem, rephrase and provide context around my question and offer different leads to follow or cross reference. I see it as GPT spiting out a skeleton of an answer onto which I can attach some meat. It is very useful when I don't really know the domain and therefore how to attack a problem.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    What part of what you just wrote couldn’t we do before, with human labor and/or existing tools?
Pxtl 4y ago
In 2040 we are its support staff. By the end of the century our great-grandkids are basically its pets. And I'm not even sure any of that is a bad thing. How do we deal with the idea that the AI industry might create a benevolent God?

electrondood 4y ago

> I really doubt if AI will have any impact on developer jobs. It already has. Every single one of my coworkers is using Copilot. If you mean in terms of the job market, the shift to more declarative supervision of the tool rather than imperative implementation of the work yourself means that the bar for skill is far lower. There will come a time when product managers and UX designers just use AI to generate Figma mocks, and AI generates an entire scaleable platform from just that. Will they need developers? Sure, but maybe 1. Certainly not 8-10.

it_citizen 4y ago
Fortunately in every company I worked, the main limiting factor to hire engineers seem to be money and not lack of tings to build. For a time, it might just translate in companies building more features and being even more wasteful than today.
Jensson 4y ago
> Every single one of my coworkers is using Copilot And all of you still got a job. Copilot has been out for a time now, if it was transformative we would see companies releasing a ton of products and fix all the bugs and then fire most of their developers etc the past half year, but that didn't happen. Making developers a bit more productive wont have an impact on developer jobs. It changes your day to day job a bit, but that is like switching to another IDE, it wont transform the industry. Even if it reduces the need for developers by an entire 10% it is not that big of a deal, it would be worth many billions but for an average developer they wont notice much of an impact. It is like the productivity improvement of giving developers another screen, a better computer, a better IDE etc, those are nice but they didn't transform the industry.
- hoot 4y ago
  In a few years it will be called Pilot instead of Copilot.
travbrack 4y ago
I think capitalism might take care of this. Let's say we have tools that make devs 10x more productive. A company could lay off 90% of their engineers and produce as much as they did before generative AI. What if their competitor decides they're going to retain all of their engineers and produce 10x more than they did before? That's going to force everyone to staff up to be able to keep up with the 10x company.

okdood64 4y ago

As an SRE I'm not too worried on a 25 year horizon. Yes I pulled that number out of my ass. Depending on the quarter only 10% to 25% of my time is writing code. The other is dealing with: finding high level reliability concerns, figuring out what solutions to implement, diving into complex acute production issues, evaluating trade-offs for fixes, finding ways to make things more efficient, negotiating what to prioritize with other teams/orgs/leadership, etc. Could an AI do some of these things? Sure. Are they going to be able to figure out the right stakeholder to talk to, negotiate with them, get buy-in and decide on overall designs/solutions? No. I'd be a bit concerned if I was a frontend developer (though any decent one could pivot to something else.) however.

chrisco255 4y ago
Why? Frontend development is one of the most challenging roles and for any non-trivial UI application, there is a ton of "non-code" user context that isn't even available to an AI. AI might be able to spit out template websites, but it can also spit out Cloudformation templates.
- okdood64 4y ago
  It is extremely challenging! (Based on my brief foray into it.) But leveraging LLMs to create really good starting point for a new feature would reduce the amount of frontend developers needed. I guess what I mean to say as SRE/Systems, we code so little already that it being able to spit out a CF template wouldn't reduce the needs for cross-functional ops type work.
  - throwaway1851 4y ago
    I think a review of the state of frontend tooling will show that efficiency with respect to developer hours is not a widely shared priority. I only say this with only 50% intention of starting a flame war.
giardini 4y ago
okdood64 says>"As an SRE I'm not too worried on a 25 year horizon. Yes I pulled that number out of my ass."< I so wish you had not done that: the number 25 is now tainted in my workmates' collective memory, no one of them is willing to touch it, yet I fear we shall need it again soon. You should have instead "pulled that number out of a hat": https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+a+hat https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+a+hat As you can see by the following, there is a difference: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+ass https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+ass Perhaps you can be forgiven this once, being a back-end developer, but, in the future, please consider your audience.

plaidfuji 4y ago

> If I want to build an alternative to TurboTax, how much can AI help? The alternative would be built to help users leverage AI to do their taxes. Upload your docs and it’ll get you 90% of the way there or something like that. AI will help developers build that alternative faster. Almost every piece of software will need to be reimagined from the ground up in this way. That is the job security