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IDK, it seems to me that the people who genuinely feel threatened by AI, are the ones that are impressed by it and/or fear it will only get better. Whereas thos

by Rury 2y ago

IDK, it seems to me that the people who genuinely feel threatened by AI, are the ones that are impressed by it and/or fear it will only get better. Whereas those pointing out the shortcomings, and/or know it will always have its shortcomings, don't see any reason to feel threatened.

TillE 2y ago
I really wonder about the programmers who feel threatened by LLMs. The vast majority of my daily work in software engineering does not remotely boil down to "write code for a discrete isolated task". It's all about solving difficult problems in a complex, interconnected system. Feature requests which require previous assumptions to be thrown out and new architectural decisions to be made. Can current LLMs help with that? Almost never. What about in 5-10 years? Probably a little more, but I'm extremely skeptical that they'll ever reach beyond the tip of the iceberg.
- Rury 2y ago
  I can only think it stems from fear of the unknown, leading people to believe in the worst-case scenarios. But the way I look at it is: no matter how good AI gets, for AI to do something, someone must train it, instruct it, or ask it to do something for them, and then verify the results. All of which takes work from people. I mean even the mere instruction of saying "hey AI, do my taxes for me" takes work from me as I had to muster the very instruction, and there's no getting around this. So there will always be software developers regardless of however good AI gets. We may stop calling such people software developers, but I don't see why that matters. Now, as whether we need less software developers because of efficiency gains? Unlikely to happen, because jobs are created from demand, and humans capacity for demanding things is endless, so the capacity for jobs is endless. This is the reason why the Jevons paradox happens. But in the case that we do in fact need less software developers, it still doesn't matter, because all it does is free up the time to do another job, just like a dishwasher does...
noobermin 2y ago
I'm not in big tech and I am absolutely worried because middle management and the c suite think my job will be redundant soon, even though I can see it won't, and thus they'll lay me or my peers off before shtf and ofc they fave no consequences for that decision. May be tech managers are better, but seeing the recent run of layoffs, it seems they're not really that much better. The problem fundamentally is your boss doesn't know how to code and will be so impressed that he can get code to write fizzbuzz, so why does he need you anymore?

by Rury 2y ago

TillE 2y ago

I really wonder about the programmers who feel threatened by LLMs. The vast majority of my daily work in software engineering does not remotely boil down to "write code for a discrete isolated task". It's all about solving difficult problems in a complex, interconnected system. Feature requests which require previous assumptions to be thrown out and new architectural decisions to be made. Can current LLMs help with that? Almost never. What about in 5-10 years? Probably a little more, but I'm extremely skeptical that they'll ever reach beyond the tip of the iceberg.

Rury 2y ago
I can only think it stems from fear of the unknown, leading people to believe in the worst-case scenarios. But the way I look at it is: no matter how good AI gets, for AI to do something, someone must train it, instruct it, or ask it to do something for them, and then verify the results. All of which takes work from people. I mean even the mere instruction of saying "hey AI, do my taxes for me" takes work from me as I had to muster the very instruction, and there's no getting around this. So there will always be software developers regardless of however good AI gets. We may stop calling such people software developers, but I don't see why that matters. Now, as whether we need less software developers because of efficiency gains? Unlikely to happen, because jobs are created from demand, and humans capacity for demanding things is endless, so the capacity for jobs is endless. This is the reason why the Jevons paradox happens. But in the case that we do in fact need less software developers, it still doesn't matter, because all it does is free up the time to do another job, just like a dishwasher does...

noobermin 2y ago

I'm not in big tech and I am absolutely worried because middle management and the c suite think my job will be redundant soon, even though I can see it won't, and thus they'll lay me or my peers off before shtf and ofc they fave no consequences for that decision. May be tech managers are better, but seeing the recent run of layoffs, it seems they're not really that much better. The problem fundamentally is your boss doesn't know how to code and will be so impressed that he can get code to write fizzbuzz, so why does he need you anymore?