13 ms·

There is no way this is going to make it so that "engineers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals."

• krainboltgreene 3y ago
  This post has the same energy as when a junior programmer talks to be about the "dead language called java".
• optimalsolver 3y ago
  >can focus on more interesting problems Kind of like how art was supposed to be what humans would be doing while AI does the jobs we don't want, but looks like that will be the first thing to fall to the machines, while humans fight for carpet installation and plumbing jobs (for a while).
  • CipherThrowaway 3y ago
    AI still can't do art. Tacky AI generated imagery is mid-2020s clip art, already recognizable to consumers and signalling negative brand associations like "cheap", "scam", "low quality."
  • Almondsetat 3y ago
    Have you ever seen people dreaming of becoming a soulless cog in the machine creating forgettable 3D assets for mobile video games at a no-name studio once we achieve "full automation"? Me neither. What people dream about is being able to go to a field and paint or sing at their leisure, not engaging in the soul crushing rat race that is artistic entrepreneurship. AI is replacing the jobs that make money but are most certainly creatively bankrupt.
    • infinitezest 3y ago
      OK but... How will I get money to live and feed my kids and stuff? Will the rich decide they finally have enough this time? Why would they?
  • alx_the_new_guy 3y ago
    Art as a concept is basically meaningless these days. What is art? Apparently, anything can be art, so what's the difference between art and not_art? From my personal experience, it is used more as a shitty excuse for substandard/lame/overpriced stuff to exist. And to boost it's creator's ego. AI certainly isn't really doing it, just as people aren't. Fuck art.
    • huhhohp 3y ago
      As you note: “it is used more as a shitty excuse”, this is “art as excuse”. > Fuck art. For me, art is both personal expression and interpretation, and yeah, those things can be imbued or ascribed to “anything”. Even a comment on a web forum. Your comment is an expression of your personality. Your comment is your art.
• siva7 3y ago
  I would have dismissed this thought a year ago but seeing how fast openai is moving, in 5 years those ai assistants will be what nowadays human junior/intermediate devs are.
  • steve_adams_86 3y ago
    The fact that these agents don't sleep is what will really kill human developers. Even with my nearly 15 years of experience, I'm not sure I see companies justifying the cost of employing me soon when someone half as "capable"* as me can work relentlessly and tirelessly at churning out half-baked features. *I doubt AI agents will be able to use bigger picture foresight and reasoning (especially reasoning as software pertains to human user experiences) to architect sane applications (as we understand them today, at least) but this likely won't matter in a vast majority of cases.
  • eloisant 3y ago
    That's exactly what people were saying of self driving cars 15 years ago. "We're so close, within 5 years we're have full self driving, and in 10 nobody will need a driver's licence!"
    • siva7 3y ago
      We're pretty close now, aren't we from within 10 years now!?
      • elicksaur 3y ago
        Yes, and next year we will be 10 years away from full self driving. By 2025, we should be 11 years away if all goes well.
    • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      I remember discussing it in 2009 exactly as you say. I thought "my kids won't ever need to learn to drive". Sadly it turned out to be wrong :(
  • CipherThrowaway 3y ago
• readthenotes1 3y ago
  As we eat our own dog food, we get eaten by it...
• IncreasePosts 3y ago
  If AI can't make AI improvements that humans can, then it shouldn't be considered a very capable coder.
  • bigyikes 3y ago
    How many coders do you know that can make AI improvements? That ability is already reserved for the top humans. AI doesn’t even need to reach this bar to be better than the average coder.
    • IncreasePosts 3y ago
      I don't really think it is the "top humans" who are doing AI, it is just people whose skillsets and interests mesh with what is used in AI now. I will say that I am doing AI work and I am certainly not a top human when it comes to intellect.
  • mpg33 3y ago
    https://twitter.com/cognition_labs/status/1767548767337672895 https://twitter.com/cognition_labs/status/176754876733767289...
• swatcoder 3y ago
  The printing press replaced the need for scribes but introduced the need for typesetters. Talented scribes did cool things with illustrations and flourishes that were lost in the transition, but ultimately spent quite a lot of their time stroking the letter "e" or "i" or whatever. Meanwhile, typesetters found themselves in a whole new creative domain which was a different one than the scribes had been working in while also being informed by it and related to it. With their different workflow and this different domain, they were able to innovate in many ways unique to typesetting but also in ways that would circulate back to calligraphers and other inheritors of the hand-crafted letterwork tradition. I'm personally not sold that we're soon to see LLM-based code generators replace software engineers anyway, but things are not so black and white as you suggest even were that to happen.
  • cyrialize 3y ago
    I understand where you are coming from, but I think using the impact of the printing press to help predict the future of careers and AI is flawed. I think AI is hard to compare against the past. A printing press replaced some jobs, but AI could replace way more jobs. Maybe it is like the printing press, but without typesetters.
    • swatcoder 3y ago
      That's fine, but once one assumes the impact of this technology is wholly without precedent then they're left speculating about a future informed only by their own imagination. They'll always be able to re-affirm their own preconceptions (fears) because its the "just so" fantasy future of their own making. I don't see the point of coming to HN to trade those invented stories, as people here traditionally push to stay within the engineer's realm of how real things work, how they fit into the history of innovation, and what people might practically build with those things based on how they work. There are countless speculative fiction communities better suited to idle "yeah, but what if the sky was purple tomorrow?" discussions.
  • ewild 3y ago
    eventually we will reach the limits of what can be discovered with physics. the same applies here. eventually the limit of what a human can improve on through a job will be done. is this that point? idk but there will be one time that "new jobs" arent made
• bigyikes 3y ago
  If an AI was truly capable of replacing engineers en mass, the upside would hugely outweigh the downside. Engineering muscle will be limited by chips instead of brains. Injecting millions of AI “engineers” into any economy would be a massive boon. Many of us would be out of work, but if we can redistribute the AI-generated surplus, this will still be a net-win for us all. I think the top engineers will still be able to find a niche regardless - we get paid to solve problems, and there will always be human problems.
  • thfuran 3y ago
    >if we can redistribute the AI-generated surplus, this will still be a net-win for us all. We can't.
    • bigyikes 3y ago
      Like, due to lack of political willpower? Or do you see some fundamental limitation of, say, an automation tax?
      • steve_adams_86 3y ago
        Arguably we haven't seen redistribution of wealth due to past automation advances, so it seems unreasonable to believe it will happen now. As automation has improved in the last decades especially, wealth has disproportionately moved upwards.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • antisthenes 3y ago
        Yes, the complete impotency of anti-trust and big business regulation over the last 50-60 years. And any political willpower that exists is constantly used for smearing campaigns for either side of the political spectrum (e.g. look at them, they are the bad guys). Automation tax is also the worst possible outcome, since it both stifles innovation AND doesn't address the redistribution problem.
• _factor 3y ago
  Or maybe the best engineers will be able to shine since they have the best ai management ability with the coding knowledge. Let’s give all the shovelers spoons and live in the past where we can ignore the benefits technology can bring because we’re so afraid of what it means about the way we run society.
  • happymellon 3y ago
    > Or maybe the best engineers will be able to shine since they have the best ai management ability with the coding knowledge. Considering we haven't seen talent rise to management, I'm not sure what makes you think that management will improve now.
    • uh_uh 3y ago
      Because the human talent will not have many alternatives left in this scenario. So far they could stay in the technical lane, now they will be forced into AI-management.
• ak_111 3y ago
  This is correct but somewhat unfair given that it applies to any technological project, since the purpose of technological project is to improve efficiency in some workflow, and improved efficiency means less demand for worker time. I don't know which part of technology you work in but I can probably spin it as making possible for some manager to reduce staff.
• jackblemming 3y ago
  The answer is not hating AI, it’s implementing UBI when AI produces x10 more wealth and resources for humanity. That’s a people problem, not an AI problem. And furthermore, we’re not even remotely close to that. I guarantee this product actually sucks and is totally useless in practice. No offense, the tech is just not there yet. Saying this as someone at the cutting edge of AI and software development.
• mym1990 3y ago
  How is this any different than the industrial revolution ushering in a new age, or for that matter any technology that creates huge efficiencies in labor? The truth is that the future is still very uncertain, and while the easiest thing to do is yell "they took er jerbs" from the top of your lungs, maybe think about how to effectively move forward into the future. There is a book called "Who Moved My Cheese?" and I wouldn't say its an amazing book, but the concept that not everything lasts forever, in relation to job security, is the takeaway.
  • pizza234 3y ago
    > How is this any different than the industrial revolution ushering in a new age, or for that matter any technology that creates huge efficiencies in labor? Indeed it isn't. It's just that at each technological breakthrough, a number of (vocal) people thinks that it's a new type of revolution, ignoring those of the previous centuries /shrug.
  • jprete 3y ago
    The whole point of AGI is to be able to do everything a human can do, so this argument doesn't apply in the same way it did for mechanical automation.
    • mym1990 3y ago
      You seem to be really dumbing down AGI, considering AGI will likely do everything a human can do, as well as many things a human cannot do, and all of those things will be done vastly faster and better.
      • jprete 3y ago
        Your statement augments my point. All human beings should be concerned about their place in a system that doesn't need them, to the extent it's constructive to think about.
    • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      Many jobs require a corporeal body so at least we have that.
• andrewmutz 3y ago
  > Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings. We continually hear anxiety about technology leading to mass unemployment and it keeps not happening. Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Technological advancements transformed agriculture from being 75% of the workforce to being less than 5% of the workforce over the last 200 years and instead of mass unemployment, everyone found other ways to add value to society and it has been an absolute win, with higher standards of living. (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percent-of-the-Labor-Force-Employed-in-Agriculture-United-States-1800-to-2000-Sources_fig1_51117517 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percent-of-the-Labor-For...)
  • throwway120385 3y ago
    Meanwhile we all spend more of our time working for someone else and living our lives with greater intensity than in the days of agriculture.
  • HumblyTossed 3y ago
    > Instead, workers tend to have higher productivity, which drives higher wages. Wages have not kept up with productivity.
    • xena 3y ago
      There's one notable exception! Tech work in the Silicon Valley area. All other jobs should be paid like that to keep up with productivity and inflation since the 70's.
    • lkbm 3y ago
      It doesn't need to for productivity gains to be good for workers. Employment and real wages both are up. The fact that profits are also up doesn't change that.
      • dukeyukey 3y ago
        Real wages haven't improved for 15 years where I am :(
• yoside5 3y ago
  [dead]
• raytopia 3y ago
  I don't think it's the end of software work yet. A lot of these AI companies are promising the world and of course no one can deliver on that. I think it's more likely we'll enter another AI winter first after all these impressive party tricks get boring and investors realize that just because a product uses AI doesn't mean it provides any value.
  • steve_adams_86 3y ago
    What do you expect would cause the next winter? Or in other words, what capabilities of AI in this context do you expect will stall next?
    • raytopia 3y ago
      Failing to meet investors hype would be the biggest reason in my book. Also it seems like training and running these systems is incredibly costly and the prices AI companies charge for their products are being subsidized by investor money, which won't last forever.
      • steve_adams_86 3y ago
        Good point. I've wondered about costs becoming prohibitive. However, I've seen impressive optimization of some models where compute requirements are reduced by orders of magnitude. I'm not sure if these accomplishments will be transferrable to all expensive AI use cases, though. If we were to pay for the actual costs at this point, I do wonder how many people would consider it worth the expense. But I wonder, how much should ChatGPT cost, for example?
      • ipaddr 3y ago
        The investor money running out is a likely outcome which will push ai prices higher and change who uses it.
• noncoml 3y ago
  Call me fool but s this hype reminds me the hype about self-driving cars coming in a year back in 2014. AI engineers are coming, but I think we would have long retired before they reach a point where they can replace us.
  • pzo 3y ago
    The difference with self-driving cars hype is that they need to be 99.999% good so pretty much perfect to be useful on road and be incorporated mainstream. AI doing some tasks 90% as good as human is good enough. Self driving cars got massively improved in the last 15 years. I remember 15 years ago when DARPA were doing their first self driving challenge and the current tech we have is like magic comparing to what we had back then.
    • halfjoking 3y ago
      But with software doesn't technical debt accumulate over time when low quality engineers keep working on it? That's why starting projects with something like Cursor makes you seem superhuman, but as the project grows the AI is more likely to get stuck because of previous low-quality choices. Just like with driving cars, it seems like you need strong supervision. (at least for the foreseeable future)
    • blibble 3y ago
      need a few more 9's than that otherwise everyone would be dead within 50 years
      • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        99.999% on an annual basis is ~10x safer than human drivers
    • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      It depends on what the 10% is. For example, if your code only works 90% of the time that's not exactly good enough to use...
• CipherThrowaway 3y ago
  >Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings. This is the same logic that has driven cheap off-shoring in non-technical companies. For decades orgs have been able to buy "human-level" (i.e. humans) engineering for a tiny fraction of an engineer's salary, and there have been millions of eager salesmen for off-shore dev shops pushing them to do it too. After seeing the outcomes of this approach, I understand why well-paid engineers remain well paid. And why they'll remain well-paid after the LLM non-pocalypse. If you think LLMs are so amazing, I would encourage you to see how much you can rely on them to replace human beings in real world scenarios. Not in contrived PR pieces and cherry picked examples but in situations where actual real people would otherwise be working together to deliver commercially valuable outcomes. You believe you have domain specific insights that allow you to state, with confidence, that LLMs are able to replace a highly technical and well-compensated role at virtually no cost. If that's the case, you're sitting on a gold mine. If I believed that, I'd be starting a development agency tomorrow.
  • hackerlight 3y ago
    "If I believed that, I'd be starting a development agency tomorrow." The company making Devin is doing just that. As we can see, it will take some work to perfect.
    • pdimitar 3y ago
      The "some work" phrase is doing a lot of work for you here. It can easily take them 100 years as well and they will get broke long before. I see nothing in the original article that doesn't strike me as the techno-optimism of the 1960s where people made movies and books saying "It's the year 2003 and the humanity is exploring the vast depths of the Universe". So again, it's a very plain old boring techno-optimism. I am sure they can automate some work (like scaffold a certain CRUD part of the app) but there are always nuances and specifics and the current generation AI has so far proven inadequate in catching those and taking proper care of them.
    • Verdex 3y ago
• observationist 3y ago
  Software engineering still needs a human in the loop, just like art still needs to be prompted and tweaked by a human that can do composition, or writing that needs to be edited and refined, and so on. AI can't do 100% of the jobs, but it seems like we're somewhere past the 100x capabilities point. AI should be able to make a good employee able to do 100x the output at the same level of quality, and AI only gets more efficient and capable from here on out. Lawyers doing highly specialized work like doc review can use million token context lengths to achieve days or weeks of work in minutes or hours. Doctors can review huge quantities of literature in search of information relevant to their patients, maximizing the value of their time. Any knowledge work, anything that has repeatable processes, anything not requiring physical work in the real world, will be subject to increasing, accelerating, and unstoppable automation. Market forces will reward efficiency, and eliminating human overhead with relative cost reductions approaching 99.99% is a victory for companies nimble enough to pull it off. We're living in the apocryphal interesting times.
  • tfpdotdev 3y ago
    The next wave of AI will just take one high-level goal, and prompt you to reduce ambiguity. You’re already seeing it with this Devin thing, but it’ll get way more effective.
  • LunaSea 3y ago
    Lawyers famously don't care about productivity because they are paid by the hour.
    • observationist 3y ago
      Lawyers will usually bill at a 1 hour minimum, occasionally 30 minutes. Lawyer A cares about productivity, and is paid by the hour, and so charges 1 hour of doc review at $4000, using the latest greatest technology, and is able to bill 1 hour of doc review to 100 clients. He begins to charge $3500/hr to undercut competition, and intersperses each week of work with training his paralegals and associates to amplify their capabilities. Law Firm B doesn't care about productivity, and bills 1 hour of doc review at $4000 to 100 clients, but have to pay 100 lawyers in turn. Several weeks later, their clients have left for the cheaper, higher quality competition. Being paid hourly doesn't mean you benefit from inefficiency. Small hungry shops who can rapidly embrace and integrate new technology are going to eat giant firms alive. When you can set up agents to replace employees, consultants, contractors, and so on, even if the AI is only 90% as good as the average human, that's a staggering advantage for fast movers.
• molticrystal 3y ago
  From the article: >Devin correctly resolves 13.86%* of the issues end-to-end... previous state-of-the-art of 1.96%." While the cliff everybody will be shoved off is coming closer, it still seems engineers have plenty of room to do their job. Whether the next shove will come in months or years it is still early to tell.
• antisthenes 3y ago
  > Are we about to enter a software engineering winter? People will find new careers, no kids will learn to code since AI can do it all. It's important to remember that the reason AI can do it at all is that millions of software engineers wrote decent/good code and made it available on the internet. The reason it's going to be a winter is that going forward, there's going to be a huge reluctance to share code by people. And that AI will never write code better than humans. It will write it 90% as well, still requiring a human to fix the last 10%. It will further create a bimodal distribution of wages in the software industry. Those who know how to clean up the last 10%, and those who don't (AI prompt monkeys). The rift between these 2 categories will keep widening.
• Bjorkbat 3y ago
  Something I kind of tell myself is that if AI effectively becomes a drop-in replacement for software engineers (or is at least 95% as good as the median one) it's going to suck because I lost my job and we've killed one of the few good careers that exist out there, but on the other hand, look at the big picture. I'm not even sure the "software" industry will exist. I mean, think about it. Rationally speaking, if people can hire AI engineers at a fraction of the cost of minimum wage employee, then the price pressure on software will be "significant" to put it mildly. The more complex a piece of software is, the more incentive there is for open-source developers to collaborate and pool their resources to make a cheaper alternative using AI agents. This logic could even extend to the AI agents themselves. I know my prediction is deeply flawed, but basically, if we create an AI that's a drop-in replacement for (most) software engineers, we're probably going to have a massive deflationary crash not just from the software sector, but in the economy in general considering that many white-collar workers have also probably been automated, with the consequences that follow. I might lose my job, but I'm going to take so much more down with me. My loss is their catastrophe. Sounds terrifying, maybe terrifying enough for our political representatives to address the elephant in the room, that an AI just took out their tax base, the people who still have a job probably make so little that their tax contributions are cancelled out by government benefits (not just welfare mind you, but the simple fact that they drive on free roads), and taxing corporations won't fix this when corporate revenue is probably going to also decrease. Otherwise though, we're notoriously bad at predicting the future and estimating the general difficulty of something as ambitious as trying to replace certain careers with AI or robots. Any argument you could make for why software engineers (or white-collar work in general) will be different this time was probably made earlier by someone in reference to something like self-driving cars or physical labor, or possibly in reference to a prior attempt at automating white-collar work using a more primitive form of AI. Best course of action, individually, is probably to skate to where the puck is heading and make an earnest effort at improving your productivity with software copilots, but otherwise I think the least likely outcome is that automating the software engineering profession is as easy as the e/acc crowd on Twitter would have you believe.
  • Bjorkbat 3y ago
    Also, something else to consider, I kind of consider the automation of writing code not all that different from the automation of architectural and engineering drawings. No doubt some engineers were distraught when computers took the fun out of drawing, and professional draftsmen were devastated, but otherwise engineering is still viable enough as a career for parents to pressure their kids into studying it. Perhaps a more realistic prediction of the future is that we start to identify a little more as designers, concerned more with the design of software and how it functions, rather than engineering concerns like making code performant and efficient. I felt that software engineering as a career had a short shelf-life around 2020, but I wasn't too worried about it, as I figured I'd probably just transition to design as a career, I kind of think graphic design is cooler anyway. I began to have doubts about this plan once DALL-E caused an existential panic among illustrators, but otherwise I think it still has legs. Those who adapt will probably do so by essentially becoming UI/UX designers who happen to also know how to code well, and probably know some other more general design skills just to round things out a little more.
• pdimitar 3y ago
  You are vastly overselling current generation AI here. It can do some things -- GitHub Copilot has been useful for people to reduce the boilerplate generation, for example -- but in terms of actual programming which 98% of the time is maintenance (fixing bugs, debugging, adding tests, refactoring, adding features) it's performing mostly bad. It's only good at generating code and maybe "understanding" some of it. Prove me wrong with links and the AI equivalent of CodePen (something that's a very glaring omission in the area). Secondly, bosses try to fire the most expensive programmers ever since expensive programmers became a thing. All the outsourcing to wherever the salaries are much smaller is being attempted even as I type this now, by probably no less than 1000 companies, in this very second. Why hasn't the area in general still gotten rid of their expensive programmers? Easy -- the outsourced "talent" produces crap that then costs more to fix and repair than if you hired proper programmers in the first place. Of course that requires some forward thinking that's not limited only by the short-sighted "we are about to save money muahahaha" mindset and as we know many businessmen are incapable of looking forward -- hence this mistake is being done 24/7. It's 99% the same with these AI coding bots. Wishing cost savings into existence so far hasn't worked. Will some interns and smart people who coast on much-higher-than-local wages because they wrote some Python to import their boss' Excel spreadsheets and automatically generate other stuff, lose their jobs? Yes, that's very likely. Will the senior programmer be replaced? It's not a zero chance, surely, and we already saw significant layoffs in most big US companies but (1) most of the world didn't over-hire during COVID and (2) it's unclear if senior devs were fired, or actual redundancies, and (3) well, most of the world isn't the USA. So again, you are vastly overselling the current generation AI.
  • rewgs 3y ago
    Fair, but: Whether or not the tech can actually live up to the hype doesn't mean execs/VCs/etc won't try to get there anyway. That will, at best, result in a ton of volatility, as those trying to utilize AI figure out that it actually can't do what they want, and then have to hire engineers again, etc... I don't know. Who knows where this is heading.
  • rohandakua 3y ago
    what do you think about devin? just curious
• qgin 3y ago
  We’re still not quite there but you’re correct though. This tech could free up software engineers to focus on more interesting things. But that’s also true every time there are layoffs. Those engineers they got rid of were free to focus on more interesting things, had the company wanted to utilize them that way. Instead, of course, they reduced headcount to reduce cost. Same will happen with AI tools.
• cm2012 3y ago
  If AI gets good enough to wholesale replace developers, that is amazing news for the world. It's basically AGI. Productivity and GDP growth would skyrocket, tax receipts will explode, gov debts will be paid off, etc.
  • jspdown 3y ago
    At first it would be a big win for companies. But as jobs gets absorbed, the productivity boost will become pointless. The pool of potential buyers will shrink because of unemployment and we will end up with the opposite of what you are describing. I'm not saying that's what will happen, nor your version. Things are never that simple. But shouldn't we be more precautious? And take time to understand the shift and prepare as a society for this big change? Why rushing on something that would potentially negatively affect millions people life in the hope of productivity boost? The outcome is not all good, not all bad. We need carefulthinking and planning.
  • LunaSea 3y ago
    Who will buy the products? Because they won't be bought be the displaced workers.
• bilvar 3y ago
  If you are so sure this is happening you can just buy some stock or calls on these AI companies and you will become a millionaire, no need to worry about your job.
• breadsniffer 3y ago
  They're 100% shooting for being able to fire most engineers. That's the dream that allows raising a bunch of $$$. Just know there's a reason their product is a closed demo. Any working "agent" will require intervention. If a product requires intervention, you still need someone managing the AI and they just become software devs using a powerful tool.
• idontpost 3y ago
  [dead]
• slig 3y ago
  > Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers Twitter/X fired about that % even before the AI meme. Companies are way too bloated and it's bound to happen.