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$2k is way way cheaper than a junior developer which, if I had to guess their thinking, is who the Thought Leaders think it'll replace. Our Thought Leaders th

$2k is way way cheaper than a junior developer which, if I had to guess their thinking, is who the Thought Leaders think it'll replace. Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Which thought leader is telling you to use AI or get fired?
- switch007 2y ago
  My CTO (C level is automatically a Thought Leader)
CamperBob2 2y ago
It's premature to think you can replace a junior developer with current technology, but it seems fairly obvious that it'll be possible within 5-10 years at most. We're well past the proof-of-concept stage IMO, based on extensive (and growing) personal experience with ML-authored code. Anyone who argues that the traditional junior-developer role isn't about to change drastically is whistling past the graveyard. Your C-suite execs are paid to skate where that particular puck is going. If they didn't, people would complain about their unhealthy fixation on the next quarter's revenue. Of course, if the junior-developer role is on the chopping block, then more experienced developers will be next. Finally, the so-called "thought leaders" will find themselves outcompeted by AI. The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage.
- actsasbuffoon 2y ago
  Unless I’ve missed some major development then I have to strenuously disagree. AI is primarily good at writing isolated scripts that are no more than a few pages long. 99% of the work I do happens in a large codebase, far bigger than anything that you can feed into an AI. Tickets come in that say something like, “Users should be able to select multiple receipts to associate with their reports so long as they have the management role.” That ticket will involve digging through a whole bunch of files to figure out what needs to be done. The resolution will ultimately involve changes to multiple models, the database schema, a few controllers, a bunch of React components, and even a few changes in a micro service that’s not inside this repo. Then the AI is going to fail over and over again because it’s not familiar with the APIs for our internal libraries and tools, etc. AI is useful, but I don’t feel like we’re any closer to replacing software developers now than we were a few years ago. All of the same showstoppers remain.
  - luckydata 2y ago
    Google's LLM can ingest humongous contexts. Check it out.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    All of the code you mention implements business logic, and you're right, it's probably not going to be practical to delegate maintenance of existing code to an ML model. What will happen, probably sooner than you think, is that that code will go away and be replaced by script(s) that describe the business logic in something close to declarative English. The AI model will then generate the code that implements the business logic, along with the necessary tests. So when maintenance is required, it will be done by adding phrases like "Users should be able to select multiple receipts" to the existing script, and re-running it to regenerate the code from scratch. Don't confuse the practical limitations of current models with conceptual ones. The latter exist, certainly, but they will either be overcome or worked around. People are just not as good at writing code as machines are, just as they are not as good at playing strategy games. The models will continue to improve, but we will not.
    - prewett 2y ago
      The problem is, the feature is never actually "users should be able to select multiple receipts". It's "users should be able to select multiple receipts, but not receipts for which they only have read access and not write access, and not when editing a receipt, and should persist when navigating between the paginated data but not persist if the user goes to a different 'page' within the webapp. The selection should be a thick border around the receipt, using the webapp selection color and the selection border thickness, except when using the low-bandwidth interface, in which case it should be a checkbox on the left (or on the right if the user is using a RTL language). Selection should adhere to standard semantics: shift selects all items from the last selection, ctrl/cmd toggles selection of that item, and clicking creates a new, one-receipt selection. ..." By the time you get all that, it's clearer in code. I will observe that there have been at least three natural-language attempts in the past, none of which succeeded in being "just write it down". COBOL is just as code-y as any other programming language. SQL is similar, although I know a fair amount of non-programmers who can write SQL (but then, back in the day my Mom taught be about autoexec.bat, and she could care less about programming). Anyway, SQL is definitely not just adding phrases and it just works. Finally, Donald Knuth's WEB is a mixture, more like a software blog entry, where you put the pieces of the software inamongst the explanatory writeup. It has caught on even less, unless you count software blogs.
- l33t7332273 2y ago
  You would think thought leaders would be the first to be replaced by AI. > The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage. [citation needed]
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    If you can drag a 9-dan grandmaster up and down the Go ban, you can write a computer program or run a company.
srockets 2y ago
I found those tools to resemble an intern: they can do some tasks pretty well, when explained just right, but others you'd spend more time guiding than it would have taken you to do it yourself. And rarely can you or the model/intern can tell ahead of time which tasks are in each of those categories. The difference is, interns grow and become useful in months: the current rate of improvements in those tools isn't even close to that of most interns.
- luckydata 2y ago
  I have a slightly different view. IMHO LLMs are excellent rubber ducks or pair programmers. The rate at which I can try ideas and get them back is much higher than what I would be doing by myself. It gets me unstuck in places where I might have spent the best part of a day in the past.
  - srockets 2y ago
    My experience differs: if at all, they get me unstuck by trying to shove bad ideas, which allows me to realize "oh, that's bad, let's not do that". But it's also extremely frustrating, because a stream of bad ideas from a human has some hope they'll learn, but here I know I'll get the same BS, only with an annoying and inhumane apology boilerplate.
    - Kiro 2y ago
      Not my experience at all. What kind of code are you using it for?
      - guappa 2y ago
        Not everyone does CRUD applications.
kergonath 2y ago
> Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired Ours told us not to use LLMs because they are worried about leaking IP and confidential data.
- switch007 2y ago
  I think Enterprise plans mostly solve this. And Copilot is quite aggressive with blocking public code (haven't looked in to what that really means and what we've configured, I just get the error often)
  - guappa 2y ago
    Ah yes, because microsoft never had a leak right? I can absolutely not go on the internet and download the source code for windows, because microsoft's security is impeccable.
guappa 2y ago
A junior developer gets better every day (hopefully), an AI is a blank slate every time more or less.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Which thought leader is telling you to use AI or get fired?

switch007 2y ago
My CTO (C level is automatically a Thought Leader)

CamperBob2 2y ago

It's premature to think you can replace a junior developer with current technology, but it seems fairly obvious that it'll be possible within 5-10 years at most. We're well past the proof-of-concept stage IMO, based on extensive (and growing) personal experience with ML-authored code. Anyone who argues that the traditional junior-developer role isn't about to change drastically is whistling past the graveyard. Your C-suite execs are paid to skate where that particular puck is going. If they didn't, people would complain about their unhealthy fixation on the next quarter's revenue. Of course, if the junior-developer role is on the chopping block, then more experienced developers will be next. Finally, the so-called "thought leaders" will find themselves outcompeted by AI. The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage.

actsasbuffoon 2y ago
Unless I’ve missed some major development then I have to strenuously disagree. AI is primarily good at writing isolated scripts that are no more than a few pages long. 99% of the work I do happens in a large codebase, far bigger than anything that you can feed into an AI. Tickets come in that say something like, “Users should be able to select multiple receipts to associate with their reports so long as they have the management role.” That ticket will involve digging through a whole bunch of files to figure out what needs to be done. The resolution will ultimately involve changes to multiple models, the database schema, a few controllers, a bunch of React components, and even a few changes in a micro service that’s not inside this repo. Then the AI is going to fail over and over again because it’s not familiar with the APIs for our internal libraries and tools, etc. AI is useful, but I don’t feel like we’re any closer to replacing software developers now than we were a few years ago. All of the same showstoppers remain.
- luckydata 2y ago
  Google's LLM can ingest humongous contexts. Check it out.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  All of the code you mention implements business logic, and you're right, it's probably not going to be practical to delegate maintenance of existing code to an ML model. What will happen, probably sooner than you think, is that that code will go away and be replaced by script(s) that describe the business logic in something close to declarative English. The AI model will then generate the code that implements the business logic, along with the necessary tests. So when maintenance is required, it will be done by adding phrases like "Users should be able to select multiple receipts" to the existing script, and re-running it to regenerate the code from scratch. Don't confuse the practical limitations of current models with conceptual ones. The latter exist, certainly, but they will either be overcome or worked around. People are just not as good at writing code as machines are, just as they are not as good at playing strategy games. The models will continue to improve, but we will not.
  - prewett 2y ago
    The problem is, the feature is never actually "users should be able to select multiple receipts". It's "users should be able to select multiple receipts, but not receipts for which they only have read access and not write access, and not when editing a receipt, and should persist when navigating between the paginated data but not persist if the user goes to a different 'page' within the webapp. The selection should be a thick border around the receipt, using the webapp selection color and the selection border thickness, except when using the low-bandwidth interface, in which case it should be a checkbox on the left (or on the right if the user is using a RTL language). Selection should adhere to standard semantics: shift selects all items from the last selection, ctrl/cmd toggles selection of that item, and clicking creates a new, one-receipt selection. ..." By the time you get all that, it's clearer in code. I will observe that there have been at least three natural-language attempts in the past, none of which succeeded in being "just write it down". COBOL is just as code-y as any other programming language. SQL is similar, although I know a fair amount of non-programmers who can write SQL (but then, back in the day my Mom taught be about autoexec.bat, and she could care less about programming). Anyway, SQL is definitely not just adding phrases and it just works. Finally, Donald Knuth's WEB is a mixture, more like a software blog entry, where you put the pieces of the software inamongst the explanatory writeup. It has caught on even less, unless you count software blogs.
l33t7332273 2y ago
You would think thought leaders would be the first to be replaced by AI. > The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage. [citation needed]
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  If you can drag a 9-dan grandmaster up and down the Go ban, you can write a computer program or run a company.

srockets 2y ago

I found those tools to resemble an intern: they can do some tasks pretty well, when explained just right, but others you'd spend more time guiding than it would have taken you to do it yourself. And rarely can you or the model/intern can tell ahead of time which tasks are in each of those categories. The difference is, interns grow and become useful in months: the current rate of improvements in those tools isn't even close to that of most interns.

luckydata 2y ago
I have a slightly different view. IMHO LLMs are excellent rubber ducks or pair programmers. The rate at which I can try ideas and get them back is much higher than what I would be doing by myself. It gets me unstuck in places where I might have spent the best part of a day in the past.
- srockets 2y ago
  My experience differs: if at all, they get me unstuck by trying to shove bad ideas, which allows me to realize "oh, that's bad, let's not do that". But it's also extremely frustrating, because a stream of bad ideas from a human has some hope they'll learn, but here I know I'll get the same BS, only with an annoying and inhumane apology boilerplate.
  - Kiro 2y ago
    Not my experience at all. What kind of code are you using it for?
    - guappa 2y ago
      Not everyone does CRUD applications.

kergonath 2y ago

> Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired Ours told us not to use LLMs because they are worried about leaking IP and confidential data.

switch007 2y ago
I think Enterprise plans mostly solve this. And Copilot is quite aggressive with blocking public code (haven't looked in to what that really means and what we've configured, I just get the error often)
- guappa 2y ago
  Ah yes, because microsoft never had a leak right? I can absolutely not go on the internet and download the source code for windows, because microsoft's security is impeccable.

guappa 2y ago

A junior developer gets better every day (hopefully), an AI is a blank slate every time more or less.