8 ms·

AI won't replace human devs anytime soon

109 points by skeptrune 2y ago

WheelsAtLarge 2y ago
I agree but it's important to know that AI is a tool that devs need to understand and incorporate into their daily work life.
- skeptrune 2y ago
  100%, but my mental exhaustion grows every time I see a post claiming Claude or some other LLM can build your whole company
- mattl 2y ago
  Nobody needs to incorporate AI into their daily work life.
- al_borland 2y ago
  Is a statement like this any different than someone saying developers needed modern IDEs 20 years ago? Yet we still have people in the industry using vim or emacs, and are successful. I will occasionally ask Copilot for something when I’m in a hurry, and the there is some minor thing I don’t care about that someone is telling me needs to get done. The other 99% of the time, I’m doing it myself. Any time I reach for AI instead of doing it myself, I’m learning less, growing less, and understanding my code less. Why would anyone want this?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lz400 2y ago
    I think it's more like the move to cloud. It didn't make developers obsolete but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps.
    - dboreham 2y ago
      People are still being sysadmins and dbas, with new titles. It's just the MBAs that think they're gone.
      - majormajor 2y ago
        Now you get to pay a team of system engineers AND you get to pay Amazon crazy monthly bills! But you get multiple availability zones and regions with much lower capital cost! (But do you need them?)
    - gregjor 2y ago
      No. Moving to cloud computing only obsoleted managing physical hardware. System admins and DBAs just as necessary as before. In my experience even more necessary because managers and programmers think they don’t need sysadmins or DBAs until they have messed things up so bad they have to call in an expert.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps. Er, that's the same thing. The only change is that HR thinks my position is labeled "devops engineer" now instead of "sysadmin", but it's the same job.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    once you realize you are 30-40-50..% slower than your peers you will not only want it but need it to keep being employed. saying “i am learning less, growing less…” is just so amazingly shortsighted, like farmers when first tractors arrived going “fuck this, imma walk this field in 100 degree weather - doing it myself”(sound familiar?).
    - grayhatter 2y ago
      I reject the assertion that it's slower. But even if I didn't, I'd still choose the team that delivers 1 month later with high quality code, over the team that cranks out dozens of half broken features they have no idea how to support. Mandating I spend the same amount on a team able to barely maintain that team's mistakes. I know I'm just making the "buy once, cry once" argument, and I understand that's "not how business works" but I'm an engineer, not a manager trading company interest for a promo.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        sounds fun but your days are numbered, much like the farmer I mentioned in the previous comment were when the first tractors rolled into town…
        aspenmayer 2y ago
        To extend the analogy, I'm reminded of the pets vs cattle debate in the context of managing computer systems, and how that distinction continues to shake out. I suspect that as personal computing moves toward cloud computing, following businesses, we will see tension between local-first AI solutions and cloud AI products. Seeing as how the same megacorps that build personal computer pets and pet products are building cloud computing AI cattle products with AI that gives the benefits of pets with some of the upsides of cattle as well. Local compute vs cloud compute is not the same distinction as that between pets vs cattle, but it has many of the same market participants, and with both Microsoft and Apple making moves to bundle AI capabilities with other cloud products for free with subscription value-add-on features is interesting. These features entice users into the vendor walled gardens, nudging users subtly away from local-first pets. https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/ https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of...
  - greenhat76 2y ago
    I still use vim, has all the features "modern ides" use. It just isn't a gui.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Well, it's actually different. The impact of the "modern" IDEs of 20 years ago was distinctly measurable, and sensibly perceptible by anyone that tried them. At the same time, it's not even clear if the gain from LLMs is even positive. But if your claim was that neither was relevant enough to change the overall noisy productivity of developers, than yeah. At least not positively.
    - beeflet 2y ago
      modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows because they bundle the compiler and text editor and debugger together, and installing and configuring anything on windows is a pain of wizards and menus, especially if you want those programs to talk to each other correctly. I've had jobs where we have spent entire days configuring and installing visual studio and related software and activating all of the licenses and connecting all the databases. But on linux you can just can just figure it out once and "su install compiler-version text-editor-version debugger-version && cp dotfiles ~/.config"
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        > modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows Nah, the turn of the century IDEs were better enough that almost all the text editors adopted the relevant feature. We mostly do not have pure text editors like there were back then. There's nano, and notepad++, but on the traditional holdouts, vi became an IDE, and emacs, that was already an IDE turned into a multi-language one too. That said, those features were compelling enough for every editor to adopt, but didn't change the picture enough so that people had no choice but to use them. It is still perfectly viable to not use the IDE features of your favorite editor.
- grayhatter 2y ago
  funny, I recently switched back to vim, and delayed enabling many IDE features such that I don't even use tab complete anymore. I'm actually enjoying writing code again. It's easier to get into the flow state, and generally I find the code I do write to be a higher quality. While the last bit might be completely subjective, and likely a bit of not just sample, but also confirmation bias. I have no interest in any flavor of code complete, or other advanced IDE features. For me, it's seems to be a net loss. I understand how generative AI works better than most of the SWEs I work with, but I have absolutely no desire to incorporate it into my workflow. I like that I understand how the code I wrote works, but even if I didn't, I wouldn't trade this rediscovered enjoyment for anything, including the "promised" career velocity.
  - dboreham 2y ago
    vim would be a luxury for the likes of me. Still using ed here...
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Not for writing code, no. If you're experienced enough it's going to slow you down.
- the_gorilla 2y ago
  It's important for low skill developers. I never understood why everyone was afraid of the shit chatgpt output, until I finally realized it actually surpassed many "software engineers" in skill. Sobering!
- gerdesj 2y ago
  Your comment is rather prescriptive without any working. Why do I need to ... ? So far, I have managed to work out how to spot a hallucinating ChatGPT derived "organic blog post" but it is bloody annoying. Back in the day, Linux related queries would generally end up in Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu, Mint (int al) forums or wikis or perhaps Reddit and co, sometimes it would end up in TLDP by accident. Now we have a plethora of wankery "blogs" that clog up the search returns. Mostly very pretty and mostly following the same old pattern and mostly correctish and wrong at some crucial point. I have to deal with a lot of pretty complicated and quite niche stuff, for example HA Proxy, Apache Guacamole, on Linux which itself (despite running mostly everything on our lovely planet) is also considered niche. Windows related queries normally end up with a post on an MS site with a response that suggests that "SFC /SCANNOW" will fix everything from stiffness in the joints to cancer. That has always been the way since around the late noughties, thanks to a rather lax hiring policy becoming the norm in a large part of the world using internet points as a score for hiring. That is understandable and humans being lazy and abrogating responsibility is not a new thing. Now we have multi zillion <currency> things happening that claim intelligence and what looks suspiciously tulip flavoured. Oh dear!
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Only if it provides value, which at this point I wouldn't agree it does.
- fzeroracer 2y ago
  Honestly, when I see stuff like this I laugh all the way to the bank knowing how many developers and teams are opening themselves up to massive security holes and/or bugs by trying to incorporate LLMs into their toolsets. People are just willingly leaving massive landmines across their codebase waiting to blow their feet off and don't even have the experience to know when the code generated by the AI is bad or not.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > need to understand To some extent. > and incorporate into their daily work life. No, not necessarily. Frankly it's of no use, or is actively counterproductive, in many fields.
NBJack 2y ago
Honestly, this opinion is borderline tinfoil hat territory, but I'd like to point out that between the sudden market expectation that fired hundreds of thousands of developers across multiple companies (in a very close time period!) and constant "LLMs that replace humans are just around the corner" marketing drivel, it almost appears as if The Market (tm) wants to really just drive down the costs of developers more than anything else. Perhaps it's all a completely legit market turn, and I'm the one in the dark. But I continue to be pessimistic that LLMs are truly going to change anything for the better.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  There's already a type of search that is much better now than 3 years ago.
  - skeptrune 2y ago
    I made an HN search engine which I think is better than the existing - https://hn.trieve.ai https://hn.trieve.ai and I still agree with the above comment. Tinfoil hat vibes all around for me too with the LLM's taking Dev jobs.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    For people not actively dipping their toes in the field, which type of search do you have in mind ?
    - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
      Predictive search: i.e. What will the greenhouse gas emissions of China be in 2032?
- majormajor 2y ago
  2020 bubble hiring was weird enough that I mostly throw out the 2020 hiring and the 2022 layoffs both and just look at things compared to 2018/2019. That ramp-up in the 2010s was called a bubble for years even before Covid but has never popped yet. The expected product bar just keeps getting hire instead.
faangguyindia 2y ago
80% coders, just make CRUD apps. Those working in specialized fields will hold on for much longer. But CRUD apps, apps requiring gluing bunch of APIs with backend and database wil go away. Most apps do not need much scaling so highly specialized scaling masters aren't really needed Currently using zed editor, I am blown away by its Ai integration. Though completion via FIM throut custom LLMs is lacking And there are other problems like lacking git integration, I prefer vscode for that!
- kordlessagain 2y ago
  So an agentic system can handle git. Would you be willing to use that to manage those processes for you? What about Docker?
- selcuka 2y ago
  > But CRUD apps, apps requiring gluing bunch of APIs with backend and database wil go away. They were already going away with the improvements in no-code tools, Zapier, scaffolding frameworks etc. LLMs are just another automated tool in this context.
- majormajor 2y ago
  CRUD isn't the complexity with CRUD apps. Working with the rest of the business to make sure the processes get built out in ways that make sense and are actually worthwhile is. So maybe one dev can handle writing five or ten times as many CRUD services as before. The idea that the biz person is gonna get rid of those devs entirely and babysit the coding agents/deploys/etc themselves strikes me as wildly unrealistic, though. Nor is it realistic that SAAS as a market will just dry up because individuals will just have their own coder agents that do everything for them. Question is if there's going to be an "enough is enough" point feature/change-wise. But I can't think of the last time I worked at a company where the product team and senior management threw up their hands and said "we did it, we finally cleared the entire product development backlog" as opposed to generating ideas at a rate many multiples of the rate of implementation. The baseline "here's what you can get with a shoestring team" level of output will get higher. But it will also get higher for your competitors. So expectations will just be much higher. So you just gotta move that much faster now.
123yawaworht456 2y ago
95% of real dev work is digging through piles of brownfield spaghetti to fix a bug or implement a feature. human-provided descriptions of the bug to fix or the feature to implement are often so vague that even a human developer can barely comprehend them. also more often than not, a visual link is required between the developer and the product being fixed/improved. hypothetical AI will replace humans, sure. LLMs probably won't. original GPT4 was the best coding LLM I dealt with, and it was 1.5+ years ago. the context size was pitiful, yes, but it was a lot smarter than the current crop of big models.
- 015a 2y ago
  > original GPT4 was the best coding LLM I dealt with, and it was 1.5+ years ago. the context size was pitiful, yes, but it was a lot smarter than the current crop of big models. Anytime someone says "this is the worst it'll ever be" I can't help but think "oh sweet summer child"; and then I ask them, what's your favorite operating system you've ever used? The answer heavily depends on the person's age. Windows 10 or 7 dominates the conversation, and for slightly older folks, XP. "MacOS Snow Leopard" gets said a lot, that was a beloved MacOS release because they very famously said "no new features we're just fixing the old ones" and they actually did it. No one ever says "MacOS Sequoia" or "Windows 11". Man, the discourse surrounding the new iOS 18 Photos app is reaching a fever pitch. Sorry for the weird music on this, but its the first clip I could find of even, gasp, Elon Musk, stating this very real fact [1]: Technology does not automatically improve. In fact, it seems like especially software loves to get worse, and it takes a focused effort, from talented individuals, as far removed from money and business and agilescrum as possible to keep things operationally stable. But, sure, definitely the new metaversecryptoai bubblescam will escape that and be built to the highest possible quality. There definitely won't be investors and men in suits in every room saying "we're losing billions is there a knob we can turn to reduce electricity usage?" OpenAI is definitely raising billions to fund the R&D of the next level of intelligence, and certainly not because without that capital they'd be bankrupt in three months. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDC6kWC8y2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDC6kWC8y2Y
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
jti107 2y ago
our company uses them LLM's extensively for coding and it was something that was optional the company paid for. we got training on how to use it and was told don't blame the LLM for shitty code, you're responsible for the work you push to the branch. most people ended up using it...our superstar dev uses it and he think he is way more productive with it.
Ferret7446 2y ago
Senior devs, no. Junior devs? Uh... I've been seeing the same thing Steve Yegge has with AI. It could very well replace all of the grunt work in software engineering.
- mattlutze 2y ago
  If teams are hiring Junior developers to give them "grunt work," they're doing something wrong to begin with.
  - jerf 2y ago
    That probably felt very nice to say, but it's wrong. Everyone starts somewhere. Nobody can start out architecting the login infrastructure for the 250 applications at a major company, all of which already have their own login system and local considerations. Everybody starts out on some simple work. They have to. It's all they can do on day one. It's all I could do. It's all anyone can do. I'm fairly worried that AI as it is developing now is going to be the most effective ladder pull in the world. While a new dev is grappling with "grunt work", they're learning. I'm working with them, explaining why this was done and why that was done, and why, yeah, that's busted, but actually not for the reason you think, and they're learning a lot more than just how to accomplish the specific task nominally laid out in the specific ticket they are working on. If they do the work by just asking an LLM for the answer and they actually get it, they may finish the task today... but what of their progress in five years? Ten? I'm very concerned that juniors leaning on AI will discover that in five years, the easy stuff is still easy, but the hard stuff is still as incomprehensible as it was five years ago.
    - imtringued 2y ago
      "All of which have their own login system" You do realize that SAML has been around for a long time? If anything what you want is an executive to tell everyone to use SAML rather than a "senior architect".
      - jerf 2y ago
hindsightbias 2y ago
Given all these news articles are Ai generated I think they’re shouting at clouds now. The Ai knows how to generate clicks better than you do.
dbetteridge 2y ago
I personally like the idea of a "companion AI", it comes up a lot in video games and sci-fi stories (funnily enough ones where capitalism has been taken out back and shot.) But the concept of a second brain that you can use to rubber duck concepts, decipher documentation and save your wrists from carpal tunnel when dealing with boilerplate is very useful. With that all said, as a senior dev my day is only about 50-75% coding (on a good day) and the rest is often meetings/planning boards/bug triage/helping juniors and just plain translating product requirements into meaningful pieces of work for Devs, which I've not had much luck using an LLM to replace.
kgilpin 2y ago
I think people / the market have gotten a little too excited about something AI is actually pretty bad at - making changes to existing code (which is, after all, most of the code). AI software devs don’t understand requirements well, and they don’t write code that confirms to established architecture practices. They will happily create redundant functions and routes and tables, in order to deliver “working code”. So AI coding is bunk? No, it’s just that the primary value lies elsewhere than code generation. You can stuff A LOT of context into an LLM and ask it to explain how the system works. You can ask it to create a design that emulates existing patterns. You can feed it a diff of code and ask it to look for common problems and anti-patterns. You can ask it create custom diagrams, documentation and descriptions and it will do so quickly and accurately. These are all use cases that assist with coding, yet don’t involve actually writing code. They make developers more knowledgeable and they assist with decision making and situational awareness. They reduce tedium and drudgery without turning developers into mindless “clickers of the Tab key”.
- rohansood15 2y ago
  Could not agree more. Plus, even for all of those tasks it takes a couple of iterations if not more.
- j45 2y ago
  I'm finding different tools can do this to different degrees of success. Aider, for example, has been pretty decent at finding where to do what, as long as it's guided there in a certain way. Still, it's far from perfect, but in more and more cases, doable.
aussieguy1234 2y ago
By the time AI can replace Human Devs, it'll also be able to replace almost all jobs that involve working on a computer. That will trigger mass unemployment and our current economic system could collapse and need replacing with a new system, hopefully one where the profits of AI are shared around more equally. As far as the jobs that could be automated away soon go, I'd say that being a developer is one of the least likely to be automated away in the short term and it may be one of the last to be automated.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  I prefer the Alternate Reality where businesses are now finally run as they should be: managers describing issues using technical terms that are fed into a machine to produce desired outputs. Not to be confused with legacy arts like coding, or programming, which required Very Important project management frameworks... I guess we don't need PMs now either... or anyon-
kaushikc 2y ago
I don't care about writing code, all I care is that my work (non-tech) needs to be done. I code out of necessity to save more time, reduce labour and errors. LLM has made a non-programmer like myself and given me super powers, all I have to do is ask the right questions and I am directed to somewhat of a reasonable place to look for a solution and create ones. I can create CRUD apps, use api's and various stacks from multiple programming languages while referencing documentation to build and practice building pretty much what I desire which could have costed me a fortune and a lot of time from professional coders, some work I could not give to anyone else for maintaining confidentiality.
- alphabettsy 2y ago
  How is it different for you than using StackOverflow and GitHub?
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    LLM + search is far more powerful and intuitive than searching alone. I can actually explain what I want, what problems I have, and what I don’t want and it will (kinda) follow the directions laid out. It doesn’t always work, but it also hasn’t been too difficult to troubleshoot either. It absolutely cannot fix itself though, so if you can’t find the problem then you‘re very much stuck. All in all, it‘s different because it lets me delegate writing the code while I can focus on designing the program/problem solving, which I enjoy more anyway. It doesn’t make non-programmers programmers, and it doesn’t make junior devs into senior devs, but at least for more basic problems/well-defined projects it can help turn a night of typing away into a night of development.
- bruce511 2y ago
  I've spent my career working in and on a low-code tool. For 30 years we've been doing what you describe; allowing non-coders to generate working applications that solve business problems. It's similar to the way that Excel exposed non programmers to data manipulation. Lots of people had very successful careers building software this way. They created a valuable product with mostly just domain knowledge and not programming knowledge. But there are boundaries to this approach. Because they lack the fundamentals, they're (mostly) unable to understand what something is doing or how something works. So there's a skilled group providing assistance (paid) whenever they hit a boundary. AI won't make programmers go away. But it will both expand the reach of "writing programs" to more people, and simultaneously replace "unskilled" programmers. As more joe public writes code, more programmers will ultimately be needed to support those Joe's. And in some cases, just like spreadsheets, the help might be "we need to throw all this away and build it correctly."
tocs3 2y ago
I am curious to see how all this plays out. I am not a developer but have played some with chatGPT to write some simple python. It has done an OK job. When it works it is sometime easier than other cut and paste methods. That is a long way from replacing those that know what they are doing (even at a junior level). On the other hand I remember hearing the old electrical engineers saying "you do not need a microcontroller for that. Just use a resistor and capacitor, or a 555". As an aside, is my Firefox spell check worse? Are they getting ready to replace it with a LLM?
benreesman 2y ago
LLM coding stuff is interesting. Sonnet is a class apart and I think I’ve upgraded it to unqualified “useful” on certain tasks. But good luck trying to measure or even speculate about the impact that has on the market for software people. The big picture is geopolitics (which is crazy right now), and then monetary policy (which has been all over the place for years and years), then politics and fiscal policy implications (which is crazy as hell right now), then this recent trend towards just brutally bare-fanged go-for-broke class warfare Thiel shit where FAANG is “tightening its belt” and smashing EPS simultaneously (boomeranging people for less RSUs and shit) with products that are now basically loathed but sticky like a stalker. And all the quasi-consensus benchmarks of who’s even good are shot to hell: YC is funding Pear, Google can’t ship an LLM anyone wants, Amazon is just dark patterns and price fixing, they legendary shops just aren’t good anymore. Some of the best hackers I’ve met in decades are under-appreciated if they even have work, and “culture fit” (sociopath) knuckleheads are turning down windfalls. It’s a fucking casino in 2024 and AI coding is a blip on this scale.
- throwaway-snek 2y ago
  [dead]
- benreesman 2y ago
  @dang what is with sibling getting flagged dead for saying he agrees with (my) parent. We’re both right but I understand that moderation has constraints that comments don’t. Please either un-flag sibling or flag me.
- benreesman 2y ago
  @dang I hate to push the point but I’m a real stickler for the vulnerable getting signal boosted rather than shouted down. Maybe it is just legit flags that bury everything from Garry Tan tweeting “die motherfucker die” to elected officials, or Mike Seibel defrauding Autodesk with claims that SocialCam had novel technology before vesting in Thailand and ignoring emails for a year, or Emmett cashing out just in time for Twitch to fly into the side of a mountain, or for Altman to have been rescued from his abject incompetence via pg and Conway rigging up Green Dot. It goes on and on, and that’s for people who dismiss out of hand the allegations of sexual assault. I’ve not only lived in the same building as Drew Houston, I’ve held his head when he was vomitting up mystery pills in Tahoe: and there is no evidence I’ve ever seen that any of these people are any good at anything other than “becoming powerful” to quote Paul. I’ve just barely scratched the surface of the perversity, criminality, and sociopathy of the Culture Fit in 2024. You’re one of the good guys, and I don’t envy the head that wears the crown on being both scrupulously fair and painting YC in a good light. I know that it’s a small moderation team and that 3 humans don’t have the speed and clarity of an Azure IPv4 block. But if you tell me that 3-5 is still the right number of people who can flag something dead while the community has grown by 7 orders of magnitude, no sir. Flags are OP as fuck because you can count on the lie that comp.lang.lisp being hostile in bytes was worse than the contemporary fact that the Valley ends people’s livelihoods and smiles the whole time.
mattfrommars 2y ago
Neal Wu recently posted a video of him attending Meta Hack Coding challenge. This time around, Meta has two score board, one for all human and the other one, I believe is AI assisted. Shockingly, the leader board for human was significantly faster than leaderboard for folks who used AI. We have a long way to go before AI surpasses human.
- discordance 2y ago
  A competition like that is for the top 1% and very difficult problems. For most people and most problems, AI is very helpful and speeds up the process. As an example, I made a browser extension in 5 minutes this weekend using chatgpt by telling it what I wanted. I didn't know how to make a browser extension before that, so you could say AI surpassed this human quite easily.
  - krater23 2y ago
    So AI is the next way to give people that don't know what they do new tools to generate and release shit where they don't know what it does to customers that don't know how much shit they got. I'm sure this will bring the mankind further...
    - Ozzie_osman 2y ago
      People said similar stuff about the printing press.
  - jppope 2y ago
    As expected, AI is great for stuff thats been done a million times. AI will slow you down for anything even slightly novel.
    - 93po 2y ago
      for now
      - 2y ago
yashvg 2y ago
While I understand the desire to reassure developers, I think this perspective seriously underestimates the pace of progress in AI. Just 3-4 years ago, the idea of AI writing any functional code seemed far-fetched. Now they can handle many coding tasks competently. The author lists specific tasks LLMs can't do today. But there's no fundamental reason they won't be able to in the near future. Domain expertise, understanding downstream effects, configuring CI pipelines - these are all learnable patterns. As models get larger, are trained on more diverse datasets, size of context window increases, and new architectures emerge, these capabilities will come online rapidly. The jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was substantial, and we should expect continued leaps. This doesn't mean human developers will become obsolete overnight. But it does mean the nature of software development work is likely to change significantly. Lower-level coding tasks may be increasingly automated, shifting focus to higher-level design, architecture, and problem framing. Rather than dismissing the potential impact, we should be preparing for a world where AI significantly augments or even replaces many current development tasks. This might involve focusing more on skills that complement AI capabilities or exploring new areas where human creativity and insight remain critical.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Maybe we should instead do those things when that time actually comes. Premature optimization and all that.
- lurking_swe 2y ago
  current AI is already stressing the power grid, and much of it will need to be redeveloped and improved just to keep pushing the limits of LLM’s. Power is the limiting factor with scaling here, so i’m rather unconvinced with your hypothesis. The improvements in the last 2-3 years are in no way indicative of the next 2-3 years. I agree with your sentiment by the way, developers should find ways to use LLM’s to improve their development process. But the drama is getting old.
zubairq 2y ago
I “wish” AI would replace me so that I could do other stuff than coding
- 93po 2y ago
  ive loved the past two weeks of working on a project where cursor is doing 98% of the coding, i have a sweet project at 20x the normal speed i could do it
  - zubairq 2y ago
    Thanks. I've tried Cursor, but probably more useful on smaller codebases I found and for simple code changes. Can you share the github repo that you use it on, or give me an indication of the codebase size that you use it on?
    - 93po 2y ago
      It's a React project with less than a hundred files made by me/claude. Not really sure of lines of code. It's not overly complex but somewhat novel - it's recreating a game interface and engine and not really a traditional web app. Don't really want to associate my github with my HN username because I used to be a bit more adversarial when posting anonymously on the internet and I'm not super proud of that and don't necessarily want it tied to my real name :)
      - zubairq 2y ago
        Ok I'm using cursor again. It is helping me with about 10% of the autocomplete on a very simple one file NodeJS project, but anything more complex it definitely messes it up.
        93po 2y ago
        my use is mostly with the chat window, i tell it what i want or the changes i want and it generates the file for me. i rarely use the auto complete
Aeolun 2y ago
> I'm a developer myself (2k+ commits 3yrs in a row) What a completely weird thing to identify yourself by number of commits. I can make 5k+ commits in 3 days. Does that make me a better developer?
- purple-leafy 2y ago
  Yeah, low number of commits too if they are trying to brag. I did a PR the other day that was ~50 commits, and I only took a few hours. At that speed working 40 days I’m already blasting this guys number of commits every year lol Stupid metric, stupid post
- lispisok 2y ago
  I could see it as being a metric like lines of code written. The days I make more commits is usually because I coding poorly and having to fix my bugs and fix missed edge cases. Fewer well thought out tested changes are better
noobermin 2y ago
All I'll say is if you for the past few years were chiming in with how this will change everything only to join the rest of us skeptics in the last year or so, you don't get to turn around and pretend you were right all along about the limitations, that AGI was never going to happen with LLMs only, etc, etc. I just wish some of you , who let's be real, just jumped off the crypto bandwagon a few years ago, would do some introspection first. Btw, if you do agree with OP about development, extend that to art, writing, etc. The same kind of deep domain specific knowledge is required in almost all things that humans do.
segmondy 2y ago
Well, it's not a matter of if AI will replace human devs, it will. The question is WHEN and HOW many devs? Not all devs will be replaced, but how much will be replaced and when will it start? If you take your AI and your prompt it to build an app, are you not a dev? I believe the same way we have redefined AI and AGI numerous times, we will redefine what it means to be a developer.
owenpalmer 2y ago
> LLMs cannot update the SDK code to V2 response types in the first place Why not? Isn't it just a matter of adding the new V2 response type to the context window and asking it to update those types in another file? > LLMs cannot successfully configure a CI action such that I won't have to publish myself Why can't it do this? I'd like to see your prompt. > LLMs do not understand the downstream effect of fixing the problem will be updating yournextstore's code I suppose I don't understand the specifics enough to analyze why this isn't doable with an LLM. However, it seems like the theme is that code almost always relies on other code, and if one part breaks, it's hard to get it agreeing again. To solve this, you could have the LLM agent routinely add changelogs to the context window when making maintenance changes. If you can't get an LLM to do something, you probably aren't thinking creatively enough.
- leshenka 2y ago
  No amount of "please don't use features that do not exist" will stop LLM from making stuff up
kkfx 2y ago
Anyone who have ever tried to generate code via LLMs know that. The main hype point though it's selling something that can't work but people believe it do to hide a very simple phenomenon: after DECADES of technical possibility and opportunity IT automation timidly became a bit spread, so finally people have discovered they do not need to physically go to a bank to operate with it, since web-banking is here since decades, they discover they do not need an insurance broker for 99% of insurances instead they choose some on-line offer comparison portal, they do not even need an office to do office works since without paper we can WFH. This obviously means many jobs are not needed anymore. Much of ETL, office frontline etc for instance. But if you tell anyone this is not new, it's decade old stuff you are clearly a bad manager because you could makes things much better much before, of you simply state that most people are ignorant of IT and that's a dramatic problem for the society because if we know IT we can create new jobs, if not we can only dismiss many and so on. So "hej, it's AI!" [and obviously that's new eh]... Aside the office use of LLM could led to interesting nightmares in infosec terms, so brace yourself...
ookblah 2y ago
currently AI focus is very narrow. I treat it like a junior dev where it can repeat structure it's given and then I basically "approve" it or I use it like a super robust autocomplete where it knows what I'm writing next like 80% of the time. also good for bouncing ideas to see if there's something someone else had done similarly. there is no way in hell I would tell it to "generate X feature" or "fix X bug" wholesale. half the time it is just dead wrong in it's approach and it's more time consuming to grok what it did exactly and then either 1) suggest an alternate approach and 2) fix what it did wrong. like i get it, in the end if it generates the right code and it works then most people will call it a day. but longevity is in being able to understand and maintain your codebase and at this point i can't trust it to do that. it some sense it reminds me of (and still reminds me of) those wysiwyg site builders where sure, your output might be fine for 90% of those cases like a simple landing page but the code underneath is a big pile of shit. good luck if you need to break out of that box at any point. i guess all to say AI will start replacing low level static site facing stuff. for instance if you're selling cookie cutter WP themes i'd be worried at some point. for everything else it's a non-factor right now.
ristos 2y ago
I feel like the hype around LLMs replacing dev work is similar to what happened years ago when they were saying the same thing about scripting languages and WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver... What ended up happening in practice is just that time was saved on grunt work, and really engineers just ended up working on composing and debugging higher level components, optimization, or low level work.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

109 points by skeptrune 2y ago

I agree but it's important to know that AI is a tool that devs need to understand and incorporate into their daily work life.

skeptrune 2y ago
100%, but my mental exhaustion grows every time I see a post claiming Claude or some other LLM can build your whole company
mattl 2y ago
Nobody needs to incorporate AI into their daily work life.
al_borland 2y ago
Is a statement like this any different than someone saying developers needed modern IDEs 20 years ago? Yet we still have people in the industry using vim or emacs, and are successful. I will occasionally ask Copilot for something when I’m in a hurry, and the there is some minor thing I don’t care about that someone is telling me needs to get done. The other 99% of the time, I’m doing it myself. Any time I reach for AI instead of doing it myself, I’m learning less, growing less, and understanding my code less. Why would anyone want this?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lz400 2y ago
  I think it's more like the move to cloud. It didn't make developers obsolete but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps.
  - dboreham 2y ago
    People are still being sysadmins and dbas, with new titles. It's just the MBAs that think they're gone.
    - majormajor 2y ago
      Now you get to pay a team of system engineers AND you get to pay Amazon crazy monthly bills! But you get multiple availability zones and regions with much lower capital cost! (But do you need them?)
  - gregjor 2y ago
    No. Moving to cloud computing only obsoleted managing physical hardware. System admins and DBAs just as necessary as before. In my experience even more necessary because managers and programmers think they don’t need sysadmins or DBAs until they have messed things up so bad they have to call in an expert.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > but it DID make some types of jobs semi-obsolete like sysadmins and dbas. It also created new jobs like DevOps. Er, that's the same thing. The only change is that HR thinks my position is labeled "devops engineer" now instead of "sysadmin", but it's the same job.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  once you realize you are 30-40-50..% slower than your peers you will not only want it but need it to keep being employed. saying “i am learning less, growing less…” is just so amazingly shortsighted, like farmers when first tractors arrived going “fuck this, imma walk this field in 100 degree weather - doing it myself”(sound familiar?).
  - grayhatter 2y ago
    I reject the assertion that it's slower. But even if I didn't, I'd still choose the team that delivers 1 month later with high quality code, over the team that cranks out dozens of half broken features they have no idea how to support. Mandating I spend the same amount on a team able to barely maintain that team's mistakes. I know I'm just making the "buy once, cry once" argument, and I understand that's "not how business works" but I'm an engineer, not a manager trading company interest for a promo.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      sounds fun but your days are numbered, much like the farmer I mentioned in the previous comment were when the first tractors rolled into town…
      - aspenmayer 2y ago
        To extend the analogy, I'm reminded of the pets vs cattle debate in the context of managing computer systems, and how that distinction continues to shake out. I suspect that as personal computing moves toward cloud computing, following businesses, we will see tension between local-first AI solutions and cloud AI products. Seeing as how the same megacorps that build personal computer pets and pet products are building cloud computing AI cattle products with AI that gives the benefits of pets with some of the upsides of cattle as well. Local compute vs cloud compute is not the same distinction as that between pets vs cattle, but it has many of the same market participants, and with both Microsoft and Apple making moves to bundle AI capabilities with other cloud products for free with subscription value-add-on features is interesting. These features entice users into the vendor walled gardens, nudging users subtly away from local-first pets. https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/ https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of...
- greenhat76 2y ago
  I still use vim, has all the features "modern ides" use. It just isn't a gui.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Well, it's actually different. The impact of the "modern" IDEs of 20 years ago was distinctly measurable, and sensibly perceptible by anyone that tried them. At the same time, it's not even clear if the gain from LLMs is even positive. But if your claim was that neither was relevant enough to change the overall noisy productivity of developers, than yeah. At least not positively.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows because they bundle the compiler and text editor and debugger together, and installing and configuring anything on windows is a pain of wizards and menus, especially if you want those programs to talk to each other correctly. I've had jobs where we have spent entire days configuring and installing visual studio and related software and activating all of the licenses and connecting all the databases. But on linux you can just can just figure it out once and "su install compiler-version text-editor-version debugger-version && cp dotfiles ~/.config"
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      > modern IDEs are nice on operating systems like windows Nah, the turn of the century IDEs were better enough that almost all the text editors adopted the relevant feature. We mostly do not have pure text editors like there were back then. There's nano, and notepad++, but on the traditional holdouts, vi became an IDE, and emacs, that was already an IDE turned into a multi-language one too. That said, those features were compelling enough for every editor to adopt, but didn't change the picture enough so that people had no choice but to use them. It is still perfectly viable to not use the IDE features of your favorite editor.
grayhatter 2y ago
funny, I recently switched back to vim, and delayed enabling many IDE features such that I don't even use tab complete anymore. I'm actually enjoying writing code again. It's easier to get into the flow state, and generally I find the code I do write to be a higher quality. While the last bit might be completely subjective, and likely a bit of not just sample, but also confirmation bias. I have no interest in any flavor of code complete, or other advanced IDE features. For me, it's seems to be a net loss. I understand how generative AI works better than most of the SWEs I work with, but I have absolutely no desire to incorporate it into my workflow. I like that I understand how the code I wrote works, but even if I didn't, I wouldn't trade this rediscovered enjoyment for anything, including the "promised" career velocity.
- dboreham 2y ago
  vim would be a luxury for the likes of me. Still using ed here...
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Not for writing code, no. If you're experienced enough it's going to slow you down.
the_gorilla 2y ago
It's important for low skill developers. I never understood why everyone was afraid of the shit chatgpt output, until I finally realized it actually surpassed many "software engineers" in skill. Sobering!
gerdesj 2y ago
Your comment is rather prescriptive without any working. Why do I need to ... ? So far, I have managed to work out how to spot a hallucinating ChatGPT derived "organic blog post" but it is bloody annoying. Back in the day, Linux related queries would generally end up in Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu, Mint (int al) forums or wikis or perhaps Reddit and co, sometimes it would end up in TLDP by accident. Now we have a plethora of wankery "blogs" that clog up the search returns. Mostly very pretty and mostly following the same old pattern and mostly correctish and wrong at some crucial point. I have to deal with a lot of pretty complicated and quite niche stuff, for example HA Proxy, Apache Guacamole, on Linux which itself (despite running mostly everything on our lovely planet) is also considered niche. Windows related queries normally end up with a post on an MS site with a response that suggests that "SFC /SCANNOW" will fix everything from stiffness in the joints to cancer. That has always been the way since around the late noughties, thanks to a rather lax hiring policy becoming the norm in a large part of the world using internet points as a score for hiring. That is understandable and humans being lazy and abrogating responsibility is not a new thing. Now we have multi zillion <currency> things happening that claim intelligence and what looks suspiciously tulip flavoured. Oh dear!
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Only if it provides value, which at this point I wouldn't agree it does.
fzeroracer 2y ago
Honestly, when I see stuff like this I laugh all the way to the bank knowing how many developers and teams are opening themselves up to massive security holes and/or bugs by trying to incorporate LLMs into their toolsets. People are just willingly leaving massive landmines across their codebase waiting to blow their feet off and don't even have the experience to know when the code generated by the AI is bad or not.
rsynnott 2y ago
> need to understand To some extent. > and incorporate into their daily work life. No, not necessarily. Frankly it's of no use, or is actively counterproductive, in many fields.

NBJack 2y ago

Honestly, this opinion is borderline tinfoil hat territory, but I'd like to point out that between the sudden market expectation that fired hundreds of thousands of developers across multiple companies (in a very close time period!) and constant "LLMs that replace humans are just around the corner" marketing drivel, it almost appears as if The Market (tm) wants to really just drive down the costs of developers more than anything else. Perhaps it's all a completely legit market turn, and I'm the one in the dark. But I continue to be pessimistic that LLMs are truly going to change anything for the better.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
There's already a type of search that is much better now than 3 years ago.
- skeptrune 2y ago
  I made an HN search engine which I think is better than the existing - https://hn.trieve.ai https://hn.trieve.ai and I still agree with the above comment. Tinfoil hat vibes all around for me too with the LLM's taking Dev jobs.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  For people not actively dipping their toes in the field, which type of search do you have in mind ?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    Predictive search: i.e. What will the greenhouse gas emissions of China be in 2032?
majormajor 2y ago
2020 bubble hiring was weird enough that I mostly throw out the 2020 hiring and the 2022 layoffs both and just look at things compared to 2018/2019. That ramp-up in the 2010s was called a bubble for years even before Covid but has never popped yet. The expected product bar just keeps getting hire instead.

faangguyindia 2y ago

80% coders, just make CRUD apps. Those working in specialized fields will hold on for much longer. But CRUD apps, apps requiring gluing bunch of APIs with backend and database wil go away. Most apps do not need much scaling so highly specialized scaling masters aren't really needed Currently using zed editor, I am blown away by its Ai integration. Though completion via FIM throut custom LLMs is lacking And there are other problems like lacking git integration, I prefer vscode for that!

kordlessagain 2y ago
So an agentic system can handle git. Would you be willing to use that to manage those processes for you? What about Docker?
selcuka 2y ago
> But CRUD apps, apps requiring gluing bunch of APIs with backend and database wil go away. They were already going away with the improvements in no-code tools, Zapier, scaffolding frameworks etc. LLMs are just another automated tool in this context.
majormajor 2y ago
CRUD isn't the complexity with CRUD apps. Working with the rest of the business to make sure the processes get built out in ways that make sense and are actually worthwhile is. So maybe one dev can handle writing five or ten times as many CRUD services as before. The idea that the biz person is gonna get rid of those devs entirely and babysit the coding agents/deploys/etc themselves strikes me as wildly unrealistic, though. Nor is it realistic that SAAS as a market will just dry up because individuals will just have their own coder agents that do everything for them. Question is if there's going to be an "enough is enough" point feature/change-wise. But I can't think of the last time I worked at a company where the product team and senior management threw up their hands and said "we did it, we finally cleared the entire product development backlog" as opposed to generating ideas at a rate many multiples of the rate of implementation. The baseline "here's what you can get with a shoestring team" level of output will get higher. But it will also get higher for your competitors. So expectations will just be much higher. So you just gotta move that much faster now.

123yawaworht456 2y ago

95% of real dev work is digging through piles of brownfield spaghetti to fix a bug or implement a feature. human-provided descriptions of the bug to fix or the feature to implement are often so vague that even a human developer can barely comprehend them. also more often than not, a visual link is required between the developer and the product being fixed/improved. hypothetical AI will replace humans, sure. LLMs probably won't. original GPT4 was the best coding LLM I dealt with, and it was 1.5+ years ago. the context size was pitiful, yes, but it was a lot smarter than the current crop of big models.

015a 2y ago
> original GPT4 was the best coding LLM I dealt with, and it was 1.5+ years ago. the context size was pitiful, yes, but it was a lot smarter than the current crop of big models. Anytime someone says "this is the worst it'll ever be" I can't help but think "oh sweet summer child"; and then I ask them, what's your favorite operating system you've ever used? The answer heavily depends on the person's age. Windows 10 or 7 dominates the conversation, and for slightly older folks, XP. "MacOS Snow Leopard" gets said a lot, that was a beloved MacOS release because they very famously said "no new features we're just fixing the old ones" and they actually did it. No one ever says "MacOS Sequoia" or "Windows 11". Man, the discourse surrounding the new iOS 18 Photos app is reaching a fever pitch. Sorry for the weird music on this, but its the first clip I could find of even, gasp, Elon Musk, stating this very real fact [1]: Technology does not automatically improve. In fact, it seems like especially software loves to get worse, and it takes a focused effort, from talented individuals, as far removed from money and business and agilescrum as possible to keep things operationally stable. But, sure, definitely the new metaversecryptoai bubblescam will escape that and be built to the highest possible quality. There definitely won't be investors and men in suits in every room saying "we're losing billions is there a knob we can turn to reduce electricity usage?" OpenAI is definitely raising billions to fund the R&D of the next level of intelligence, and certainly not because without that capital they'd be bankrupt in three months. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDC6kWC8y2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDC6kWC8y2Y
- shepherdjerred 2y ago

jti107 2y ago

our company uses them LLM's extensively for coding and it was something that was optional the company paid for. we got training on how to use it and was told don't blame the LLM for shitty code, you're responsible for the work you push to the branch. most people ended up using it...our superstar dev uses it and he think he is way more productive with it.

Ferret7446 2y ago

Senior devs, no. Junior devs? Uh... I've been seeing the same thing Steve Yegge has with AI. It could very well replace all of the grunt work in software engineering.

mattlutze 2y ago
If teams are hiring Junior developers to give them "grunt work," they're doing something wrong to begin with.
- jerf 2y ago
  That probably felt very nice to say, but it's wrong. Everyone starts somewhere. Nobody can start out architecting the login infrastructure for the 250 applications at a major company, all of which already have their own login system and local considerations. Everybody starts out on some simple work. They have to. It's all they can do on day one. It's all I could do. It's all anyone can do. I'm fairly worried that AI as it is developing now is going to be the most effective ladder pull in the world. While a new dev is grappling with "grunt work", they're learning. I'm working with them, explaining why this was done and why that was done, and why, yeah, that's busted, but actually not for the reason you think, and they're learning a lot more than just how to accomplish the specific task nominally laid out in the specific ticket they are working on. If they do the work by just asking an LLM for the answer and they actually get it, they may finish the task today... but what of their progress in five years? Ten? I'm very concerned that juniors leaning on AI will discover that in five years, the easy stuff is still easy, but the hard stuff is still as incomprehensible as it was five years ago.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    "All of which have their own login system" You do realize that SAML has been around for a long time? If anything what you want is an executive to tell everyone to use SAML rather than a "senior architect".
    - jerf 2y ago

hindsightbias 2y ago

Given all these news articles are Ai generated I think they’re shouting at clouds now. The Ai knows how to generate clicks better than you do.

dbetteridge 2y ago

I personally like the idea of a "companion AI", it comes up a lot in video games and sci-fi stories (funnily enough ones where capitalism has been taken out back and shot.) But the concept of a second brain that you can use to rubber duck concepts, decipher documentation and save your wrists from carpal tunnel when dealing with boilerplate is very useful. With that all said, as a senior dev my day is only about 50-75% coding (on a good day) and the rest is often meetings/planning boards/bug triage/helping juniors and just plain translating product requirements into meaningful pieces of work for Devs, which I've not had much luck using an LLM to replace.

kgilpin 2y ago

I think people / the market have gotten a little too excited about something AI is actually pretty bad at - making changes to existing code (which is, after all, most of the code). AI software devs don’t understand requirements well, and they don’t write code that confirms to established architecture practices. They will happily create redundant functions and routes and tables, in order to deliver “working code”. So AI coding is bunk? No, it’s just that the primary value lies elsewhere than code generation. You can stuff A LOT of context into an LLM and ask it to explain how the system works. You can ask it to create a design that emulates existing patterns. You can feed it a diff of code and ask it to look for common problems and anti-patterns. You can ask it create custom diagrams, documentation and descriptions and it will do so quickly and accurately. These are all use cases that assist with coding, yet don’t involve actually writing code. They make developers more knowledgeable and they assist with decision making and situational awareness. They reduce tedium and drudgery without turning developers into mindless “clickers of the Tab key”.

rohansood15 2y ago
Could not agree more. Plus, even for all of those tasks it takes a couple of iterations if not more.
j45 2y ago
I'm finding different tools can do this to different degrees of success. Aider, for example, has been pretty decent at finding where to do what, as long as it's guided there in a certain way. Still, it's far from perfect, but in more and more cases, doable.

aussieguy1234 2y ago

By the time AI can replace Human Devs, it'll also be able to replace almost all jobs that involve working on a computer. That will trigger mass unemployment and our current economic system could collapse and need replacing with a new system, hopefully one where the profits of AI are shared around more equally. As far as the jobs that could be automated away soon go, I'd say that being a developer is one of the least likely to be automated away in the short term and it may be one of the last to be automated.

intelVISA 2y ago
I prefer the Alternate Reality where businesses are now finally run as they should be: managers describing issues using technical terms that are fed into a machine to produce desired outputs. Not to be confused with legacy arts like coding, or programming, which required Very Important project management frameworks... I guess we don't need PMs now either... or anyon-

kaushikc 2y ago

I don't care about writing code, all I care is that my work (non-tech) needs to be done. I code out of necessity to save more time, reduce labour and errors. LLM has made a non-programmer like myself and given me super powers, all I have to do is ask the right questions and I am directed to somewhat of a reasonable place to look for a solution and create ones. I can create CRUD apps, use api's and various stacks from multiple programming languages while referencing documentation to build and practice building pretty much what I desire which could have costed me a fortune and a lot of time from professional coders, some work I could not give to anyone else for maintaining confidentiality.

alphabettsy 2y ago
How is it different for you than using StackOverflow and GitHub?
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  LLM + search is far more powerful and intuitive than searching alone. I can actually explain what I want, what problems I have, and what I don’t want and it will (kinda) follow the directions laid out. It doesn’t always work, but it also hasn’t been too difficult to troubleshoot either. It absolutely cannot fix itself though, so if you can’t find the problem then you‘re very much stuck. All in all, it‘s different because it lets me delegate writing the code while I can focus on designing the program/problem solving, which I enjoy more anyway. It doesn’t make non-programmers programmers, and it doesn’t make junior devs into senior devs, but at least for more basic problems/well-defined projects it can help turn a night of typing away into a night of development.
bruce511 2y ago
I've spent my career working in and on a low-code tool. For 30 years we've been doing what you describe; allowing non-coders to generate working applications that solve business problems. It's similar to the way that Excel exposed non programmers to data manipulation. Lots of people had very successful careers building software this way. They created a valuable product with mostly just domain knowledge and not programming knowledge. But there are boundaries to this approach. Because they lack the fundamentals, they're (mostly) unable to understand what something is doing or how something works. So there's a skilled group providing assistance (paid) whenever they hit a boundary. AI won't make programmers go away. But it will both expand the reach of "writing programs" to more people, and simultaneously replace "unskilled" programmers. As more joe public writes code, more programmers will ultimately be needed to support those Joe's. And in some cases, just like spreadsheets, the help might be "we need to throw all this away and build it correctly."

tocs3 2y ago

I am curious to see how all this plays out. I am not a developer but have played some with chatGPT to write some simple python. It has done an OK job. When it works it is sometime easier than other cut and paste methods. That is a long way from replacing those that know what they are doing (even at a junior level). On the other hand I remember hearing the old electrical engineers saying "you do not need a microcontroller for that. Just use a resistor and capacitor, or a 555". As an aside, is my Firefox spell check worse? Are they getting ready to replace it with a LLM?

benreesman 2y ago

LLM coding stuff is interesting. Sonnet is a class apart and I think I’ve upgraded it to unqualified “useful” on certain tasks. But good luck trying to measure or even speculate about the impact that has on the market for software people. The big picture is geopolitics (which is crazy right now), and then monetary policy (which has been all over the place for years and years), then politics and fiscal policy implications (which is crazy as hell right now), then this recent trend towards just brutally bare-fanged go-for-broke class warfare Thiel shit where FAANG is “tightening its belt” and smashing EPS simultaneously (boomeranging people for less RSUs and shit) with products that are now basically loathed but sticky like a stalker. And all the quasi-consensus benchmarks of who’s even good are shot to hell: YC is funding Pear, Google can’t ship an LLM anyone wants, Amazon is just dark patterns and price fixing, they legendary shops just aren’t good anymore. Some of the best hackers I’ve met in decades are under-appreciated if they even have work, and “culture fit” (sociopath) knuckleheads are turning down windfalls. It’s a fucking casino in 2024 and AI coding is a blip on this scale.

throwaway-snek 2y ago
[dead]
benreesman 2y ago
@dang what is with sibling getting flagged dead for saying he agrees with (my) parent. We’re both right but I understand that moderation has constraints that comments don’t. Please either un-flag sibling or flag me.
benreesman 2y ago
@dang I hate to push the point but I’m a real stickler for the vulnerable getting signal boosted rather than shouted down. Maybe it is just legit flags that bury everything from Garry Tan tweeting “die motherfucker die” to elected officials, or Mike Seibel defrauding Autodesk with claims that SocialCam had novel technology before vesting in Thailand and ignoring emails for a year, or Emmett cashing out just in time for Twitch to fly into the side of a mountain, or for Altman to have been rescued from his abject incompetence via pg and Conway rigging up Green Dot. It goes on and on, and that’s for people who dismiss out of hand the allegations of sexual assault. I’ve not only lived in the same building as Drew Houston, I’ve held his head when he was vomitting up mystery pills in Tahoe: and there is no evidence I’ve ever seen that any of these people are any good at anything other than “becoming powerful” to quote Paul. I’ve just barely scratched the surface of the perversity, criminality, and sociopathy of the Culture Fit in 2024. You’re one of the good guys, and I don’t envy the head that wears the crown on being both scrupulously fair and painting YC in a good light. I know that it’s a small moderation team and that 3 humans don’t have the speed and clarity of an Azure IPv4 block. But if you tell me that 3-5 is still the right number of people who can flag something dead while the community has grown by 7 orders of magnitude, no sir. Flags are OP as fuck because you can count on the lie that comp.lang.lisp being hostile in bytes was worse than the contemporary fact that the Valley ends people’s livelihoods and smiles the whole time.

mattfrommars 2y ago

Neal Wu recently posted a video of him attending Meta Hack Coding challenge. This time around, Meta has two score board, one for all human and the other one, I believe is AI assisted. Shockingly, the leader board for human was significantly faster than leaderboard for folks who used AI. We have a long way to go before AI surpasses human.

discordance 2y ago
A competition like that is for the top 1% and very difficult problems. For most people and most problems, AI is very helpful and speeds up the process. As an example, I made a browser extension in 5 minutes this weekend using chatgpt by telling it what I wanted. I didn't know how to make a browser extension before that, so you could say AI surpassed this human quite easily.
- krater23 2y ago
  So AI is the next way to give people that don't know what they do new tools to generate and release shit where they don't know what it does to customers that don't know how much shit they got. I'm sure this will bring the mankind further...
  - Ozzie_osman 2y ago
    People said similar stuff about the printing press.
- jppope 2y ago
  As expected, AI is great for stuff thats been done a million times. AI will slow you down for anything even slightly novel.
  - 93po 2y ago
    for now
    - 2y ago

yashvg 2y ago

While I understand the desire to reassure developers, I think this perspective seriously underestimates the pace of progress in AI. Just 3-4 years ago, the idea of AI writing any functional code seemed far-fetched. Now they can handle many coding tasks competently. The author lists specific tasks LLMs can't do today. But there's no fundamental reason they won't be able to in the near future. Domain expertise, understanding downstream effects, configuring CI pipelines - these are all learnable patterns. As models get larger, are trained on more diverse datasets, size of context window increases, and new architectures emerge, these capabilities will come online rapidly. The jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was substantial, and we should expect continued leaps. This doesn't mean human developers will become obsolete overnight. But it does mean the nature of software development work is likely to change significantly. Lower-level coding tasks may be increasingly automated, shifting focus to higher-level design, architecture, and problem framing. Rather than dismissing the potential impact, we should be preparing for a world where AI significantly augments or even replaces many current development tasks. This might involve focusing more on skills that complement AI capabilities or exploring new areas where human creativity and insight remain critical.

Aeolun 2y ago
Maybe we should instead do those things when that time actually comes. Premature optimization and all that.
lurking_swe 2y ago
current AI is already stressing the power grid, and much of it will need to be redeveloped and improved just to keep pushing the limits of LLM’s. Power is the limiting factor with scaling here, so i’m rather unconvinced with your hypothesis. The improvements in the last 2-3 years are in no way indicative of the next 2-3 years. I agree with your sentiment by the way, developers should find ways to use LLM’s to improve their development process. But the drama is getting old.

zubairq 2y ago

I “wish” AI would replace me so that I could do other stuff than coding

93po 2y ago
ive loved the past two weeks of working on a project where cursor is doing 98% of the coding, i have a sweet project at 20x the normal speed i could do it
- zubairq 2y ago
  Thanks. I've tried Cursor, but probably more useful on smaller codebases I found and for simple code changes. Can you share the github repo that you use it on, or give me an indication of the codebase size that you use it on?
  - 93po 2y ago
    It's a React project with less than a hundred files made by me/claude. Not really sure of lines of code. It's not overly complex but somewhat novel - it's recreating a game interface and engine and not really a traditional web app. Don't really want to associate my github with my HN username because I used to be a bit more adversarial when posting anonymously on the internet and I'm not super proud of that and don't necessarily want it tied to my real name :)
    - zubairq 2y ago
      Ok I'm using cursor again. It is helping me with about 10% of the autocomplete on a very simple one file NodeJS project, but anything more complex it definitely messes it up.
      - 93po 2y ago
        my use is mostly with the chat window, i tell it what i want or the changes i want and it generates the file for me. i rarely use the auto complete

Aeolun 2y ago

> I'm a developer myself (2k+ commits 3yrs in a row) What a completely weird thing to identify yourself by number of commits. I can make 5k+ commits in 3 days. Does that make me a better developer?

purple-leafy 2y ago
Yeah, low number of commits too if they are trying to brag. I did a PR the other day that was ~50 commits, and I only took a few hours. At that speed working 40 days I’m already blasting this guys number of commits every year lol Stupid metric, stupid post
lispisok 2y ago
I could see it as being a metric like lines of code written. The days I make more commits is usually because I coding poorly and having to fix my bugs and fix missed edge cases. Fewer well thought out tested changes are better

noobermin 2y ago

All I'll say is if you for the past few years were chiming in with how this will change everything only to join the rest of us skeptics in the last year or so, you don't get to turn around and pretend you were right all along about the limitations, that AGI was never going to happen with LLMs only, etc, etc. I just wish some of you , who let's be real, just jumped off the crypto bandwagon a few years ago, would do some introspection first. Btw, if you do agree with OP about development, extend that to art, writing, etc. The same kind of deep domain specific knowledge is required in almost all things that humans do.

segmondy 2y ago

Well, it's not a matter of if AI will replace human devs, it will. The question is WHEN and HOW many devs? Not all devs will be replaced, but how much will be replaced and when will it start? If you take your AI and your prompt it to build an app, are you not a dev? I believe the same way we have redefined AI and AGI numerous times, we will redefine what it means to be a developer.

owenpalmer 2y ago

> LLMs cannot update the SDK code to V2 response types in the first place Why not? Isn't it just a matter of adding the new V2 response type to the context window and asking it to update those types in another file? > LLMs cannot successfully configure a CI action such that I won't have to publish myself Why can't it do this? I'd like to see your prompt. > LLMs do not understand the downstream effect of fixing the problem will be updating yournextstore's code I suppose I don't understand the specifics enough to analyze why this isn't doable with an LLM. However, it seems like the theme is that code almost always relies on other code, and if one part breaks, it's hard to get it agreeing again. To solve this, you could have the LLM agent routinely add changelogs to the context window when making maintenance changes. If you can't get an LLM to do something, you probably aren't thinking creatively enough.

leshenka 2y ago
No amount of "please don't use features that do not exist" will stop LLM from making stuff up

kkfx 2y ago

Anyone who have ever tried to generate code via LLMs know that. The main hype point though it's selling something that can't work but people believe it do to hide a very simple phenomenon: after DECADES of technical possibility and opportunity IT automation timidly became a bit spread, so finally people have discovered they do not need to physically go to a bank to operate with it, since web-banking is here since decades, they discover they do not need an insurance broker for 99% of insurances instead they choose some on-line offer comparison portal, they do not even need an office to do office works since without paper we can WFH. This obviously means many jobs are not needed anymore. Much of ETL, office frontline etc for instance. But if you tell anyone this is not new, it's decade old stuff you are clearly a bad manager because you could makes things much better much before, of you simply state that most people are ignorant of IT and that's a dramatic problem for the society because if we know IT we can create new jobs, if not we can only dismiss many and so on. So "hej, it's AI!" [and obviously that's new eh]... Aside the office use of LLM could led to interesting nightmares in infosec terms, so brace yourself...

ookblah 2y ago

currently AI focus is very narrow. I treat it like a junior dev where it can repeat structure it's given and then I basically "approve" it or I use it like a super robust autocomplete where it knows what I'm writing next like 80% of the time. also good for bouncing ideas to see if there's something someone else had done similarly. there is no way in hell I would tell it to "generate X feature" or "fix X bug" wholesale. half the time it is just dead wrong in it's approach and it's more time consuming to grok what it did exactly and then either 1) suggest an alternate approach and 2) fix what it did wrong. like i get it, in the end if it generates the right code and it works then most people will call it a day. but longevity is in being able to understand and maintain your codebase and at this point i can't trust it to do that. it some sense it reminds me of (and still reminds me of) those wysiwyg site builders where sure, your output might be fine for 90% of those cases like a simple landing page but the code underneath is a big pile of shit. good luck if you need to break out of that box at any point. i guess all to say AI will start replacing low level static site facing stuff. for instance if you're selling cookie cutter WP themes i'd be worried at some point. for everything else it's a non-factor right now.

ristos 2y ago

I feel like the hype around LLMs replacing dev work is similar to what happened years ago when they were saying the same thing about scripting languages and WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver... What ended up happening in practice is just that time was saved on grunt work, and really engineers just ended up working on composing and debugging higher level components, optimization, or low level work.

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