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I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chat

I have been having the following debate with my friend who does AI and neural network stuff: Him: Coding will soon be obsolete, it will all be replaced by chatgpt-type code gen. Me: OK but the overwhelming majority of my job as a "senior engineer" is about communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements and how they will interface with our systems. Yes, I write code, but even if most of that were augmented with codegen, that would barely even change most of what I do.

decasia 3y ago
It kind of reminds me of this, except substitute coding for "hammering": https://www.buzzmaven.com/old-engineer-hammer-2/ https://www.buzzmaven.com/old-engineer-hammer-2/
- mock-possum 3y ago
  If they don’t want to pay for the work, you can always undo it for them.
jelsisi 3y ago
> communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements These problems sound like a result of working with people. Smaller but more capable teams because of AI will need less leaders and less meetings. Everything will become much more efficient. Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any
- creesch 3y ago
  > Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any Yeah... no. Not with LLMs as they currently are. They are great as an assisted tool, but still need people to validate their output and then put that output to work. Which means you need people who can understand that output, which are developers. Which also means that you need to keep training developers in order to be able to validate that output. The more nuanced approach would be saying that the work of developers will change. Which I agree with, but is also has been true over the past few decades. Developers these days are already working with a hugely different tool chain compared to developers a decade ago. It is an always evolving landscape and I don't think we are at a point yet where developers will be outright replaced. We might get there at some point, but not with current LLMs.
- kilmanio 3y ago
  >Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any and then slowly we run out of seniors with nobody to replace them
evilai 3y ago
I think that if that were the case, the change would be brutal. First, because as a comment below suggests, fewer people would be involved, so coordination would be simplified. Second, because many more people could access these coordination positions, and I think it would be likely that other professions would take on those roles, professions or personality types that are not usually "good coders" but now wouldn't need to be, since the machine itself could explain, for example, the general functioning of what is being produced. Therefore, I would expect the job field to be radically affected and salaries severely reduced.
TheBigSalad 3y ago
CEOs will be replaced before software engineers.
- consumer451 3y ago
  Which company and board of directors do you see doing that first?
- asdff 3y ago
  CEO is your scapegoat for a bad quarter. Throw all your eggs in the ai basket and you get a bad quarter, whats left to try? Companies don't like to admit they failed and walk things back to how they are. There's probably only a few off the shelf gpts you can throw in to replace your sacked one. Compared with 8 billion potential CEOs on earth you can go through to make the shareholders happy about a blood sacrifice.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  I don't think you know what a CEO does.
  - TheBigSalad 3y ago
    My point is that AI can replace all sorts of jobs in your company. Support, project managers, analysts, accountants, designers, etc. Software Engineer will be the very last to go, why is it the only one anyone talks about?
TheRealPomax 3y ago
But now we introduce a junior engineer into the mix: _their_ job is none of those things, it's just to take the issues as filed, and implement them. They don't get the hard problems to solve, they get both the task and the acceptance criteria, and for them a future version of CodeGPT or whatever it'll be called will completely replace their programming skills. And then, 10 years later, they'll be the senior engineer. And then what? Because today's seniors will be retired in a decade or two, and as they get replaced by people who actually benefited from automatic code generation, the concept of "coding" will (if this trend keeps up) absolutely become a thing that old timers used to do before we had machines to do it for us.
- creesch 3y ago
  These junior engineers still will need to validate that whatever the LLM implemented works and fits the requirements. If it doesn't work they need to figure out why it doesn't work. It might not be in the same way of current day developers, but I don't foresee a near future where developers don't learn to understand code to some degree. For example, I know a lot of people who work in the low-code development sphere of things. A lot of the developers there barely see any code if any. Yet, when you talk with them they talk about a lot of the same issues and problem-solving but in slightly different terms and from a slightly different perspective. But, the similarities are very much there as the problems are fundamentally the same. With generated code I feel like this will also be similarly true.
webworker 3y ago
Yeah I agree with this - it's much of my experience as a professional developer, too. I'm trying to navigate the organization, connect with other teams, understand what needs to get done. The code I write feels like a side-effect of what I actually do.
corethree 3y ago
You realize that LLMs don't just code right? In fact coding is one of the things they're least good at. LLMs are best at doing the stuff senior engineers do that's NOT coding.
Aerbil313 3y ago
Wait before product-gen AI emerges. No, seriously. Do folks here not see it's possible even today with a complex system based on LLMs? It's a matter of time.
- dhkk 3y ago
  No. I think those of us that work on enterprise software within massive orgs know the level of AI needed to do any portion of our job is leaps and bounds ahead of what is currently available. I can see some distant future where maybe this is possible, but I doubt we'll be using AI based on transformers by that point...
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  I read you. Connecting AI directly to a bank account and removing a human from the loop is a logical next step. It's a classical Paperclip Factory scenario though, i.e. playing with fire[0], yes, but it's nothing novel. [0] Actually, playing with hypnodrones.

decasia 3y ago

It kind of reminds me of this, except substitute coding for "hammering": https://www.buzzmaven.com/old-engineer-hammer-2/ https://www.buzzmaven.com/old-engineer-hammer-2/

mock-possum 3y ago
If they don’t want to pay for the work, you can always undo it for them.

jelsisi 3y ago

> communication, organizational leadership, and actually understanding all the product requirements These problems sound like a result of working with people. Smaller but more capable teams because of AI will need less leaders and less meetings. Everything will become much more efficient. Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any

creesch 3y ago
> Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any Yeah... no. Not with LLMs as they currently are. They are great as an assisted tool, but still need people to validate their output and then put that output to work. Which means you need people who can understand that output, which are developers. Which also means that you need to keep training developers in order to be able to validate that output. The more nuanced approach would be saying that the work of developers will change. Which I agree with, but is also has been true over the past few decades. Developers these days are already working with a hugely different tool chain compared to developers a decade ago. It is an always evolving landscape and I don't think we are at a point yet where developers will be outright replaced. We might get there at some point, but not with current LLMs.
kilmanio 3y ago
>Say goodbye to all the time spent mentoring junior engineers, soon you won't have any and then slowly we run out of seniors with nobody to replace them

evilai 3y ago

I think that if that were the case, the change would be brutal. First, because as a comment below suggests, fewer people would be involved, so coordination would be simplified. Second, because many more people could access these coordination positions, and I think it would be likely that other professions would take on those roles, professions or personality types that are not usually "good coders" but now wouldn't need to be, since the machine itself could explain, for example, the general functioning of what is being produced. Therefore, I would expect the job field to be radically affected and salaries severely reduced.

TheBigSalad 3y ago

CEOs will be replaced before software engineers.

consumer451 3y ago
Which company and board of directors do you see doing that first?
asdff 3y ago
CEO is your scapegoat for a bad quarter. Throw all your eggs in the ai basket and you get a bad quarter, whats left to try? Companies don't like to admit they failed and walk things back to how they are. There's probably only a few off the shelf gpts you can throw in to replace your sacked one. Compared with 8 billion potential CEOs on earth you can go through to make the shareholders happy about a blood sacrifice.
RamblingCTO 3y ago
I don't think you know what a CEO does.
- TheBigSalad 3y ago
  My point is that AI can replace all sorts of jobs in your company. Support, project managers, analysts, accountants, designers, etc. Software Engineer will be the very last to go, why is it the only one anyone talks about?

TheRealPomax 3y ago

But now we introduce a junior engineer into the mix: _their_ job is none of those things, it's just to take the issues as filed, and implement them. They don't get the hard problems to solve, they get both the task and the acceptance criteria, and for them a future version of CodeGPT or whatever it'll be called will completely replace their programming skills. And then, 10 years later, they'll be the senior engineer. And then what? Because today's seniors will be retired in a decade or two, and as they get replaced by people who actually benefited from automatic code generation, the concept of "coding" will (if this trend keeps up) absolutely become a thing that old timers used to do before we had machines to do it for us.

creesch 3y ago
These junior engineers still will need to validate that whatever the LLM implemented works and fits the requirements. If it doesn't work they need to figure out why it doesn't work. It might not be in the same way of current day developers, but I don't foresee a near future where developers don't learn to understand code to some degree. For example, I know a lot of people who work in the low-code development sphere of things. A lot of the developers there barely see any code if any. Yet, when you talk with them they talk about a lot of the same issues and problem-solving but in slightly different terms and from a slightly different perspective. But, the similarities are very much there as the problems are fundamentally the same. With generated code I feel like this will also be similarly true.

webworker 3y ago

Yeah I agree with this - it's much of my experience as a professional developer, too. I'm trying to navigate the organization, connect with other teams, understand what needs to get done. The code I write feels like a side-effect of what I actually do.

corethree 3y ago

You realize that LLMs don't just code right? In fact coding is one of the things they're least good at. LLMs are best at doing the stuff senior engineers do that's NOT coding.

Aerbil313 3y ago

Wait before product-gen AI emerges. No, seriously. Do folks here not see it's possible even today with a complex system based on LLMs? It's a matter of time.

dhkk 3y ago
No. I think those of us that work on enterprise software within massive orgs know the level of AI needed to do any portion of our job is leaps and bounds ahead of what is currently available. I can see some distant future where maybe this is possible, but I doubt we'll be using AI based on transformers by that point...
kubanczyk 3y ago
I read you. Connecting AI directly to a bank account and removing a human from the loop is a logical next step. It's a classical Paperclip Factory scenario though, i.e. playing with fire[0], yes, but it's nothing novel. [0] Actually, playing with hypnodrones.