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Ask HN: Do you think some devs are in denial regarding coming AI changes?

Reading a recent thread on people's anticipations on how the job market will change due to AI in 5 years, it seems many people are somewhat reluctant to admit the scope of change just on the horizon. There seems to be a somewhat pervasive sentiment that AI will just be "more of the same" and the same old rules will still apply years down the line. Specifically, I've repeatedly noticed the following sentiments, which I disagree with: 1. LLM/their obvious ancestors are nearly maximized in their effectiveness, and will fade and another tech hype cycle will take its place 2. While most junior level dev work is easily automatable, mid-senior level dev work cannot be replaced and in 5 years time will be no sooner able to be replaced 3. LLM's and AI coding tools will actually make code worse and less efficient, cancelling out any presumed efficiency gains from their use. The overall sentiment from some senior devs regarding recent changes in the job market I seem to be picking up is: "Haha I feel bad for all you Junior dev's who can't get a job now, but AI will never replace ME". Anyone who agrees with any of the 3 sentiments, what is the justification backing up your belief? Do you feel the general cynicism/dismissiveness is justifiable?

micahdeath 3y ago
It'll probably be more like the chat bots or automated call centers that just annoy people. If it's on the web it can do it, but if it's new or complex it doesn't seem to work. Mostly, I see it as an interface to reporting and maybe calling some API's. The conversion of data tests I've tried all failed horribly.
- micahdeath 3y ago
  Come to think of it... The main people that are working on it are advertisers. That is probably the future. =P
robswc 3y ago
>Anyone who agrees with any of the 3 sentiments, what is the justification backing up your belief? Do you feel the general cynicism/dismissiveness is justifiable? >While most junior level dev work is easily automatable, mid-senior level dev work cannot be replaced and in 5 years time will be no sooner able to be replaced Because companies were not set up with the idea of being able to contextualize and feed all their internal information into an AI. Maybe going forward, this will change... _maybe_ in 10-20 years (rather arbitrary I guess) one or two "managers" could use AI to interface with customers but for the foreseeable future, I just don't see how it could work. Assume you had an LLM that would never hallucinate or give a "wrong" answer. Someone still has to hook that up and constantly feed it context or its rather useless.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  This is something I understand as a criticism and my assumptions for why it won't hold have to do with my assumption (based on product releases and papers I've read) that the following capabilities will be rolled out in the coming years: 1. Fine tuning LLM's with a company's internal information (already on the "coming soon" part of OpenAI ChatGPT enterprise) 2. More agentic models able to use tools to retrieve, process, and record data, then access its own work as a sort of memory (lots of open source tools are working on these problems now) 3. Much larger context windows with lower tradeoff, and "networks" of AI models controlled by higher level agents with rotating/overlapping context windows
  - verdverm 3y ago
    We will need a completely new set of models, LLMs are not sufficiently complex enough to deal with what we deal with. You cannot remove hallucinations so will always need humans to double check what the AI outputs. Most of the time, it's faster and cheaper for the human to do it the first time. Make the AI the junior, not the human We first have to move beyond text token streams, but to do so requires insanely large models. It will probably be 5 years before we can even make enough GPUs to support every company having an OpenAI scale model they can build & run Large context windows come with their own problems and there are other papers that show the agent pyramids are fools errand (the "liar" checks the "liar" issue) Generally, I think you are holding onto the positive hype and not looking at the limitation, negative results, and real world, where these programming AI become more of a burden than a boon. So no, jobs are not going to magically disappear in the next 5 years. There is plenty of economic history and research to more accurately estimate the job changes that will come with a new technology
    - atleastoptimal 3y ago
      > You cannot remove hallucinations What makes you sure that will hold for the next 5 years as tech improves? > It will probably be 5 years before we can even make enough GPUs to support every company having an OpenAI scale model they can build & run Not every company needs its own monster model, the point is OpenAI type companies will build the base model and other companies will fork their own versions >Large context windows come with their own problems and there are other papers that show the agent pyramids are fools errand (the "liar" checks the "liar" issue) I looked up agent pyramids and "liar" checks the "liar" issue and found nothing. Could you link those papers you're referencing? I don't imagine jobs are just going to "disappear", what I do imagine is that gradually senior devs will offload more and more of their work to internal AI models. Big companies like Google will have the best, so they'll signal how things will change for the rest. As the models improve, the chance of any task a model is set to has a higher and higher chance of success and more human readable documentation, to the point where senior devs no longer have to check that they did their job correctly, and other AIs will begin to read/use the code and documentation other AIs wrote. This process will inch up the ladder piece by piece until senior devs begin assigning AI tasks that other senior devs would have done, notice that the AI does it better, and the total efficacy of the senior staff erodes. At this point companies will emerge entirely autonomously run, which is the final signal for other companies that human labor is no longer needed the moment something is automatable.
deleted 3y ago
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themerone 3y ago
We could be headed towards a future where 80% of software is written by AI, but the other 20% requires 200 million humans. AI will likely revolutionize some software development tasks, but it is too hard to predict the long term effects when we don't even know the future demand for software.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  I wonder why you believe the remaining 20% will require 200 million humans. What will those humans do that no AI could do or even hope to do?
  - themerone 3y ago
    You completely missed the point. I'm just illustrating the possiblity that, if there are only tasks that humans can do, there is the possible those segment of the software industry could grow to be bigger that todays software industry. It's been roughly 75 years since the world had one computer and a handful of programmers. Nobody would have predicted that humans would replace wristwatches with computers. The AI revolution is just beginning , but the state of technology could be so different that any predictions we make are likely to be worthless.
    - atleastoptimal 3y ago
      My point is how do you imagine that software will require 200 million people after it becomes more efficient due to AI? As a field becomes more efficient, unless demand increases, labor decreases. My question is, why would demand for human software labor increase? Not saying it won't happen, but I'd like to know what you're speculating will happen that will lead to that change, even if it's hard to pin down anything specific.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        So what do you think the future will look like, there will be a product owner sitting there on their own prompting the "auto-coder" and then having it deploy to prod? Flawlessly, no problems, no issues figuring anything out just writing words and having products spat out the other end? In my opinion, the more you can do, the more will be done. The business will want more, we're never going to run out of work to do. So it will be you, working with an "AI" or whatever just generating code and trying to deploy it at break neck speeds while the business has an existential crisis about what to do next. If AI is successful as you're making out, it sounds like everyone will be able to have a business, there will be no value in software creation, so the whole industry will be gone, it will just be about products and product delivery. Any current day developer can use the AI to build the things they want to build. It will just be different.
superchroma 3y ago
My job is messy. AI isn't about to replace that or figure it out. Humans naturally are inclined to create complexity. Product owners, designers, etc.; the apparatus of business. It all comes down to us. AI can take the business of shunting flat boring data around in APIs, but everything else isn't quite such low hanging fruit. It can also have a crack at complex data analysis in really constrained problems, say, feature detection. I can't see dealing with the infinitely variable whims of UI designers or approaching new problems to be within its purview however.
elfbargpt 3y ago
I echo a lot of what the other people in here are saying. I'm also pretty convinced that AI won't replace software dev any earlier than it will replace the majority of corporate jobs, and at that point everyone has a problem.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  then everyone will have a problem
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
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ChatGTP 3y ago
I think even if it replace devs, the devs will make up some other bullshit job to do. Most software development is bullshit so it's already this way.

micahdeath 3y ago

It'll probably be more like the chat bots or automated call centers that just annoy people. If it's on the web it can do it, but if it's new or complex it doesn't seem to work. Mostly, I see it as an interface to reporting and maybe calling some API's. The conversion of data tests I've tried all failed horribly.

micahdeath 3y ago
Come to think of it... The main people that are working on it are advertisers. That is probably the future. =P

robswc 3y ago

>Anyone who agrees with any of the 3 sentiments, what is the justification backing up your belief? Do you feel the general cynicism/dismissiveness is justifiable? >While most junior level dev work is easily automatable, mid-senior level dev work cannot be replaced and in 5 years time will be no sooner able to be replaced Because companies were not set up with the idea of being able to contextualize and feed all their internal information into an AI. Maybe going forward, this will change... _maybe_ in 10-20 years (rather arbitrary I guess) one or two "managers" could use AI to interface with customers but for the foreseeable future, I just don't see how it could work. Assume you had an LLM that would never hallucinate or give a "wrong" answer. Someone still has to hook that up and constantly feed it context or its rather useless.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
This is something I understand as a criticism and my assumptions for why it won't hold have to do with my assumption (based on product releases and papers I've read) that the following capabilities will be rolled out in the coming years: 1. Fine tuning LLM's with a company's internal information (already on the "coming soon" part of OpenAI ChatGPT enterprise) 2. More agentic models able to use tools to retrieve, process, and record data, then access its own work as a sort of memory (lots of open source tools are working on these problems now) 3. Much larger context windows with lower tradeoff, and "networks" of AI models controlled by higher level agents with rotating/overlapping context windows
- verdverm 3y ago
  We will need a completely new set of models, LLMs are not sufficiently complex enough to deal with what we deal with. You cannot remove hallucinations so will always need humans to double check what the AI outputs. Most of the time, it's faster and cheaper for the human to do it the first time. Make the AI the junior, not the human We first have to move beyond text token streams, but to do so requires insanely large models. It will probably be 5 years before we can even make enough GPUs to support every company having an OpenAI scale model they can build & run Large context windows come with their own problems and there are other papers that show the agent pyramids are fools errand (the "liar" checks the "liar" issue) Generally, I think you are holding onto the positive hype and not looking at the limitation, negative results, and real world, where these programming AI become more of a burden than a boon. So no, jobs are not going to magically disappear in the next 5 years. There is plenty of economic history and research to more accurately estimate the job changes that will come with a new technology
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    > You cannot remove hallucinations What makes you sure that will hold for the next 5 years as tech improves? > It will probably be 5 years before we can even make enough GPUs to support every company having an OpenAI scale model they can build & run Not every company needs its own monster model, the point is OpenAI type companies will build the base model and other companies will fork their own versions >Large context windows come with their own problems and there are other papers that show the agent pyramids are fools errand (the "liar" checks the "liar" issue) I looked up agent pyramids and "liar" checks the "liar" issue and found nothing. Could you link those papers you're referencing? I don't imagine jobs are just going to "disappear", what I do imagine is that gradually senior devs will offload more and more of their work to internal AI models. Big companies like Google will have the best, so they'll signal how things will change for the rest. As the models improve, the chance of any task a model is set to has a higher and higher chance of success and more human readable documentation, to the point where senior devs no longer have to check that they did their job correctly, and other AIs will begin to read/use the code and documentation other AIs wrote. This process will inch up the ladder piece by piece until senior devs begin assigning AI tasks that other senior devs would have done, notice that the AI does it better, and the total efficacy of the senior staff erodes. At this point companies will emerge entirely autonomously run, which is the final signal for other companies that human labor is no longer needed the moment something is automatable.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

themerone 3y ago

We could be headed towards a future where 80% of software is written by AI, but the other 20% requires 200 million humans. AI will likely revolutionize some software development tasks, but it is too hard to predict the long term effects when we don't even know the future demand for software.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
I wonder why you believe the remaining 20% will require 200 million humans. What will those humans do that no AI could do or even hope to do?
- themerone 3y ago
  You completely missed the point. I'm just illustrating the possiblity that, if there are only tasks that humans can do, there is the possible those segment of the software industry could grow to be bigger that todays software industry. It's been roughly 75 years since the world had one computer and a handful of programmers. Nobody would have predicted that humans would replace wristwatches with computers. The AI revolution is just beginning , but the state of technology could be so different that any predictions we make are likely to be worthless.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    My point is how do you imagine that software will require 200 million people after it becomes more efficient due to AI? As a field becomes more efficient, unless demand increases, labor decreases. My question is, why would demand for human software labor increase? Not saying it won't happen, but I'd like to know what you're speculating will happen that will lead to that change, even if it's hard to pin down anything specific.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      So what do you think the future will look like, there will be a product owner sitting there on their own prompting the "auto-coder" and then having it deploy to prod? Flawlessly, no problems, no issues figuring anything out just writing words and having products spat out the other end? In my opinion, the more you can do, the more will be done. The business will want more, we're never going to run out of work to do. So it will be you, working with an "AI" or whatever just generating code and trying to deploy it at break neck speeds while the business has an existential crisis about what to do next. If AI is successful as you're making out, it sounds like everyone will be able to have a business, there will be no value in software creation, so the whole industry will be gone, it will just be about products and product delivery. Any current day developer can use the AI to build the things they want to build. It will just be different.

superchroma 3y ago

My job is messy. AI isn't about to replace that or figure it out. Humans naturally are inclined to create complexity. Product owners, designers, etc.; the apparatus of business. It all comes down to us. AI can take the business of shunting flat boring data around in APIs, but everything else isn't quite such low hanging fruit. It can also have a crack at complex data analysis in really constrained problems, say, feature detection. I can't see dealing with the infinitely variable whims of UI designers or approaching new problems to be within its purview however.

elfbargpt 3y ago

I echo a lot of what the other people in here are saying. I'm also pretty convinced that AI won't replace software dev any earlier than it will replace the majority of corporate jobs, and at that point everyone has a problem.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
then everyone will have a problem
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ChatGTP 3y ago

I think even if it replace devs, the devs will make up some other bullshit job to do. Most software development is bullshit so it's already this way.