3 ms·

Can anyone give me some estimates instead of defending your jobs as coders?

gwoolhurme 3y ago
What? Nobody is defending their jobs here. It’s explaining how non-trivial this is. What is the point of your comment? If you wanted pure token to money amount and are too lazy to calculate it your self use the tool in the link. That’s not how the real world even with an LLM will work. Let’s assume the LLM writes everything, even gpt4 won’t get everything in 1 go now. Requirements of software are hard to put into pure English… why write this snarky message. Adds nothing to the conversation.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  These comments remind me of newspaper articles saying the internet will fail and horse breeders saying cars will fail. All want to deflect to how wrong this is when it should be like the Drake Equation and can still give you data and ranges. With time and AI evolution, the estimates will get more close to this. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
  - gwoolhurme 3y ago
    You misunderstood what so many people here wrote with even more snark and a bad quote. It could and probably will replace my job and I have no contingency plan in place leaving me at great risk. That’s a given it seems. What isn’t is giving an estimate on a dollar amount and of time. Especially with any scientific rigor. The tool in the link is silly and that is what everyone is talking about. Perhaps you should try to be less bias reading the comments here.
    - vba616 3y ago
      >It could and probably will replace my job People tell stories about employees at big companies whose entire job is to send a small report to someone once a week. Even in cases like that, it's illogical to fear AI, because if it really was so simple to automate, it would've been done already. Either the storytellers are clueless about the true nature of the job, or else there are defenses against redundancy that aren't obvious.
      - tstrimple 3y ago
        > Even in cases like that, it's illogical to fear AI, because if it really was so simple to automate, it would've been done already. This hasn't been my experience. There is a TON of low hanging fruit for automating workloads which exist in almost every large company. While not all automations are easy, there's no shortage of easy work in automation. Almost every financial organization I've worked at has had some amount of manual processing of overnight batch jobs.
        vba616 3y ago
        >This hasn't been my experience. What you mean by "experience" is unclear to me. I agree with you insofar as everyone with even a little experience at a large company knows there are a lot of apparently low hanging fruit possibilities for automation. But do you mean you have seen things that seem simple to automate, or have you tried to do so and found out what happens? There is a lot going on below the surface.
        tstrimple 3y ago
        Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement. Things like "I move the file from this folder where it's dropped off by over night batch processing to this other folder and then I kick off the processing job" or "I copy these values into our master excel spreadsheet and take the results from the calculations and put them in this other system." Extremely basic and low hanging fruit is all over the place.
        vba616 3y ago
        >Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement. The most technically trivial change has a litany of obstacles involving people. Off the top of my head: 1) Finding out a process exists 2) Finding out who knows about a process 3) Being able to communicate with such a person 4) Motivating them or other stakeholders to make a change 5) Making the new process independent of specific employees
  - vba616 3y ago
    >when his salary depends on his not understanding it "That don't make no sense!" If you believe in the potential of chatbots to replace programmers, then the salary of every programmer depends on them not not understanding it. Here's why they seem like a waste of time to me, even for writing bland emails and comments; what say you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36079462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36079462
swyx 3y ago
its obviously an impossible question to answer with confidence but i attempted to put some fermi estimates here https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1657603239251181570 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1657603239251181570 and based on kiinda conservative assumptions, ai coders start being competitive in 2028
- gwoolhurme 3y ago
  This seems sloppy too. Is this based on anything scientifically rigorous? Where I live even startups will take on less profit for a quarter to train new graduates who have never touched an IDE on purpose. The point of training a junior isn’t to be immediately competitive. It’s to take over your job as you move on to other roles.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Thank you!
- sph 3y ago
  Nice guesstimate, but I have an issue with this: "One junior dev will improve to senior dev in 5 years" That's true only for the HR department. Because code and experience wise, someone that has been programming for 5 years isn't that much experienced than someone fresh from college. In 5 years you barely have time to get to know your editor inside out, and start to have a grasp on your first tech stack. I consider someone to be an experienced developer one that has seen a couple frameworks and hype cycles come and go. Let's say 10 years of experience. Also, AI has 0% productivity. Being able to churn out code without being able to reason about it in the grand scheme of things makes it worse than even a non-programmer in problem solving ability. AI has no problem-solving ability. Ignoring this issue makes the whole thing moot, because it assumes that GPT is actually AGI.
  - swyx 3y ago
    > I consider someone to be an experienced developer one that has seen a couple frameworks and hype cycles come and go. Let's say 10 years of experience. sure you draw the line where you feel comfortable, but in the US job market, people get the senior title in 3-7 years, its just a statement of fact rather than opinion.
ipaddr 3y ago
It's like asking what the squareroot of yellow is. How cheap could it cost would be calculated based on the smallest cost of input parameters required with the smallest code output while minimizing how many time something needs to be reprompted. No one knows the minimum prompting required. It's like asking how much does it cost to recreate google (a popular upwork fake project). However much money you want to pour into it but you are still not getting google.

What? Nobody is defending their jobs here. It’s explaining how non-trivial this is. What is the point of your comment? If you wanted pure token to money amount and are too lazy to calculate it your self use the tool in the link. That’s not how the real world even with an LLM will work. Let’s assume the LLM writes everything, even gpt4 won’t get everything in 1 go now. Requirements of software are hard to put into pure English… why write this snarky message. Adds nothing to the conversation.

Mistletoe 3y ago
These comments remind me of newspaper articles saying the internet will fail and horse breeders saying cars will fail. All want to deflect to how wrong this is when it should be like the Drake Equation and can still give you data and ranges. With time and AI evolution, the estimates will get more close to this. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
- gwoolhurme 3y ago
  You misunderstood what so many people here wrote with even more snark and a bad quote. It could and probably will replace my job and I have no contingency plan in place leaving me at great risk. That’s a given it seems. What isn’t is giving an estimate on a dollar amount and of time. Especially with any scientific rigor. The tool in the link is silly and that is what everyone is talking about. Perhaps you should try to be less bias reading the comments here.
  - vba616 3y ago
    >It could and probably will replace my job People tell stories about employees at big companies whose entire job is to send a small report to someone once a week. Even in cases like that, it's illogical to fear AI, because if it really was so simple to automate, it would've been done already. Either the storytellers are clueless about the true nature of the job, or else there are defenses against redundancy that aren't obvious.
    - tstrimple 3y ago
      > Even in cases like that, it's illogical to fear AI, because if it really was so simple to automate, it would've been done already. This hasn't been my experience. There is a TON of low hanging fruit for automating workloads which exist in almost every large company. While not all automations are easy, there's no shortage of easy work in automation. Almost every financial organization I've worked at has had some amount of manual processing of overnight batch jobs.
      - vba616 3y ago
        >This hasn't been my experience. What you mean by "experience" is unclear to me. I agree with you insofar as everyone with even a little experience at a large company knows there are a lot of apparently low hanging fruit possibilities for automation. But do you mean you have seen things that seem simple to automate, or have you tried to do so and found out what happens? There is a lot going on below the surface.
        tstrimple 3y ago
        Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement. Things like "I move the file from this folder where it's dropped off by over night batch processing to this other folder and then I kick off the processing job" or "I copy these values into our master excel spreadsheet and take the results from the calculations and put them in this other system." Extremely basic and low hanging fruit is all over the place.
        vba616 3y ago
        >Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement. The most technically trivial change has a litany of obstacles involving people. Off the top of my head: 1) Finding out a process exists 2) Finding out who knows about a process 3) Being able to communicate with such a person 4) Motivating them or other stakeholders to make a change 5) Making the new process independent of specific employees
- vba616 3y ago
  >when his salary depends on his not understanding it "That don't make no sense!" If you believe in the potential of chatbots to replace programmers, then the salary of every programmer depends on them not not understanding it. Here's why they seem like a waste of time to me, even for writing bland emails and comments; what say you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36079462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36079462

swyx 3y ago

its obviously an impossible question to answer with confidence but i attempted to put some fermi estimates here https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1657603239251181570 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1657603239251181570 and based on kiinda conservative assumptions, ai coders start being competitive in 2028

gwoolhurme 3y ago
This seems sloppy too. Is this based on anything scientifically rigorous? Where I live even startups will take on less profit for a quarter to train new graduates who have never touched an IDE on purpose. The point of training a junior isn’t to be immediately competitive. It’s to take over your job as you move on to other roles.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Thank you!
sph 3y ago
Nice guesstimate, but I have an issue with this: "One junior dev will improve to senior dev in 5 years" That's true only for the HR department. Because code and experience wise, someone that has been programming for 5 years isn't that much experienced than someone fresh from college. In 5 years you barely have time to get to know your editor inside out, and start to have a grasp on your first tech stack. I consider someone to be an experienced developer one that has seen a couple frameworks and hype cycles come and go. Let's say 10 years of experience. Also, AI has 0% productivity. Being able to churn out code without being able to reason about it in the grand scheme of things makes it worse than even a non-programmer in problem solving ability. AI has no problem-solving ability. Ignoring this issue makes the whole thing moot, because it assumes that GPT is actually AGI.
- swyx 3y ago
  > I consider someone to be an experienced developer one that has seen a couple frameworks and hype cycles come and go. Let's say 10 years of experience. sure you draw the line where you feel comfortable, but in the US job market, people get the senior title in 3-7 years, its just a statement of fact rather than opinion.

ipaddr 3y ago

It's like asking what the squareroot of yellow is. How cheap could it cost would be calculated based on the smallest cost of input parameters required with the smallest code output while minimizing how many time something needs to be reprompted. No one knows the minimum prompting required. It's like asking how much does it cost to recreate google (a popular upwork fake project). However much money you want to pour into it but you are still not getting google.