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> boring low paid drudgery > the sort of work that AI is coming for This is NOT what AI is coming for. Its too far from even barely capable for that sort of

> boring low paid drudgery > the sort of work that AI is coming for This is NOT what AI is coming for. Its too far from even barely capable for that sort of work. BI tools, Wordpress themes, layers and layers of internal tools for custom business processes are all incredibly fragile and intricately balanced. It will have to learn systems where extra empty tags in the xml response get accounts flagged for removal, systems where the output must be a zip file archived within a .cab file for the downstream systems to be able to process it. Its an insanely stupid house of cards held together by bottom feeding groups of human intelligence. There's no budget to fix it. No incentive to improve it. It will never change, till its replaced with garbage from an even lower bottom feeding group. AI is hopeless, because of the sheer lack of anything to accurately train itself for this task. It is trying to sell itself to the OEMs and platforms with shiny demos as an even cheaper alternative to the bottom feeding group of outsourced labor. The joke is going to be real when the $$$ are spent on AI and the outcome is outsourced to the bottom feeding group to maintain.

spaceman_2020 2y ago
They literally said in the earnings call that they now need fewer third party developers because of AI. And this is one of the biggest legacy companies on the planet. Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless…
- moneywoes 2y ago
  70% fewer?
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless… I mean, it sounds a lot like a standard management failure mode, which must be about half a century old at this stage: pretend you can get by on X% of staff due to [faddish pretext], then a year later when the cracks start showing quietly hire more people again. The nature of the fad changes, but the basic story is generally about the same. Actually, I’m not sure it’s even that; at this point the claim seems to be that they _can_ get by on 30% of the staff, not that they _are doing so_. There’s a decent chance this is just a case of “oh, shit, earnings call coming up, we have to mention AI because the markets like that”, tbh.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  You're unironically believing an MBA who's bonus likely depends on optimizing processes (which is a fancy way of saying "firing whoever they can get away with") over people on this forum, half of which likely code themselves? AI has made big splashes and some industries are in the process of getting annihilated (ie. Designers working for marketing agencies and similar roles). I'd expect things to get more spicy over the coming decade for programming, too... But right now, at this very moment: LLMs can't code good enough to save time unless the programmer is a total novice.
  - kcplate 2y ago
    > unless the programmer is a total novice Might be different in SV or at a FAANG, but speaking from my nearly 4 decades of experience in tech, many to most programmers that have come up in the last 20 years are either lifetime novices, or at least just barely capable of productivity. I see 80% of the work being done by the top 20%. I think AI is definitely going to devastate the vocation because it’s going to replace that 80% barely productive group. I can see a future where most of the code is written to a 90% completion level by AI, then finished by the best of the best of us ugly bags of mostly water.
  - spaceman_2020 2y ago
    I don’t think there are any coders on HN who actually write the kind of code that’s being AI-ed away
- binkethy 2y ago
  "People in the trenches" That is rich. People on HN are often working software devs of some kind, but what do i know.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mediumsmart 2y ago
So true. What it did come for was my part time job of taking a png in a folder, create 5 sizes with the size appended to the file names, put these in a subfolder, convert all sizes to avif and webp and generate the picture html block for the image (avif with fallback webp. png sizes are deleted, original png archived). It took one prompt to get that script and I only changed the name of it to dothis.sh it works with one or 258 .png files in the folder. I fired the me responsible last week.

spaceman_2020 2y ago

They literally said in the earnings call that they now need fewer third party developers because of AI. And this is one of the biggest legacy companies on the planet. Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless…

moneywoes 2y ago
70% fewer?
rsynnott 2y ago
> Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless… I mean, it sounds a lot like a standard management failure mode, which must be about half a century old at this stage: pretend you can get by on X% of staff due to [faddish pretext], then a year later when the cracks start showing quietly hire more people again. The nature of the fad changes, but the basic story is generally about the same. Actually, I’m not sure it’s even that; at this point the claim seems to be that they _can_ get by on 30% of the staff, not that they _are doing so_. There’s a decent chance this is just a case of “oh, shit, earnings call coming up, we have to mention AI because the markets like that”, tbh.
ffsm8 2y ago
You're unironically believing an MBA who's bonus likely depends on optimizing processes (which is a fancy way of saying "firing whoever they can get away with") over people on this forum, half of which likely code themselves? AI has made big splashes and some industries are in the process of getting annihilated (ie. Designers working for marketing agencies and similar roles). I'd expect things to get more spicy over the coming decade for programming, too... But right now, at this very moment: LLMs can't code good enough to save time unless the programmer is a total novice.
- kcplate 2y ago
  > unless the programmer is a total novice Might be different in SV or at a FAANG, but speaking from my nearly 4 decades of experience in tech, many to most programmers that have come up in the last 20 years are either lifetime novices, or at least just barely capable of productivity. I see 80% of the work being done by the top 20%. I think AI is definitely going to devastate the vocation because it’s going to replace that 80% barely productive group. I can see a future where most of the code is written to a 90% completion level by AI, then finished by the best of the best of us ugly bags of mostly water.
- spaceman_2020 2y ago
  I don’t think there are any coders on HN who actually write the kind of code that’s being AI-ed away
binkethy 2y ago
"People in the trenches" That is rich. People on HN are often working software devs of some kind, but what do i know.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mediumsmart 2y ago

So true. What it did come for was my part time job of taking a png in a folder, create 5 sizes with the size appended to the file names, put these in a subfolder, convert all sizes to avif and webp and generate the picture html block for the image (avif with fallback webp. png sizes are deleted, original png archived). It took one prompt to get that script and I only changed the name of it to dothis.sh it works with one or 258 .png files in the folder. I fired the me responsible last week.