6 ms·

If a LLM (or any other tool) makes so that team of 8 can get the same results in the same time as it used to take a team of 10 to do, then I would count that as

If a LLM (or any other tool) makes so that team of 8 can get the same results in the same time as it used to take a team of 10 to do, then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" - even if there's no particular person for which the whole job has been replaced, that's not a meaningful practical difference, replacing a significant fraction of every programmer's job has the same outcomes and impacts as replacing a significant fraction of programmers.

RangerScience 2y ago
Fav anecdote from ages ago: When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools. Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered). I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger job.”
- sigmarule 2y ago
  This could very well prove to be the case in software engineering, but also could very well not; what is the equivalent of "larger sets" in our domain, and is that something that is even preferable to begin with? Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_? I'd say likely not, while it does make sense to build larger/more elaborate movie sets because they could. Also, a piece missing from this comparison is a set of people who don't believe the new tool will actually have a measurable impact on their domain. I assume few-to-none could argue that power tools would have no impact on their profession.
  - ska 2y ago
    > Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_? The history of software production as a profession (as against computer science) is essentially a series of incremental increases in the size and complexity of systems (and teams) that don't fall apart under their own weight. There isn't much evidence we have approached the limit here, so it's a pretty good bet for at least the medium term. But focusing on system size is perhaps a red herring. There is an almost unfathomably vast pool of potential software systems (or customization of systems) that aren't realized today because they aren't cost effective...
  - danenania 2y ago
    Have you ever worked on a product in production use without a long backlog of features/improvements/tests/refactors/optimizations desired by users, managers, engineers, and everyone else involved in any way with the project? The demand for software improvements is effectively inexhaustible. It’s not a zero sum game.
- pixeltechie 2y ago
  This is a good example of what could happen to software development as a whole. In my experience large companies tend to more often buy software rather than make it. Ai could drastically change the "make or buy" decision in favour of make. Because you need less developers to create a perfect tailored solution that directly fits the needs of the company. So "make" becomes affordable and more attractive.
  - F-W-M 2y ago
    I work for a large european power utility. We are moving away from buying to in-house development. LLMs have nothing to do with it.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Another anecdote: when mechanical looms became a thing, textile workers were afraid that the new tools would replace them, and they were right.
  - kbelder 2y ago
    And that was good. Workers being replaced by tools is good for society, although temporarily disruptive.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
    430 million people currently work in textiles[0]; how big was the industry before mechanical looms? [0] https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-industry-statistics https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-indu...
    - fragmede 2y ago
      How many worked in America and Western Europe and were paid a living wage in their respective countries, and how many of those 430 million people currently work making textiles in America and Western Europe today, and how many are lower paid positions in poorer countries, under worse living conditions? (Like being locked into the sweatshop, and bathroom breaks being regulated?) Computers aren't going anywhere, so the whole field of programming will continue to grow, but will there still be FAANG salaries to be had?
      - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
        i heard the same shit when people were talking about outsourcing to India after the dotcom bubble burst. programmer salaries would cap out at $60k because of international competition. if you're afraid of salaries shrinking due to LLMs, then i implore you, get out of software development. it'll help me a lot!
      - 2y ago
- nidnogg 2y ago
  This is a real thing. LLMs are tools, not humans. They truly do bring interesting, bigger problems. Have people seen some of the recent software being churned out? Hint, it's not all GenAI bubblespit. A lot of it is killer, legitimately good stuff.
- esmevane 2y ago
  It's always played out like this in software, by the way. Famously, animation shops hoped to save money on production by switching over to computer rendered cartoons. What happened instead is that a whole new industry took shape, and brought along with it entire cottage industries of support workers. Server farms required IT, renders required more advanced chips, some kinds of animation required entirely new rendering techniques in the software, etc. A few hundred animators turned into a few thousand computer animators & their new support crew, in most shops. And new, smaller shops took form! But the shops didn't go away, at least not the ones who changed. It basically boils down to this: some shops will act with haste and purge their experts in order to replace them with LLMs, and others will adopt the LLMs, bring on the new support staff they need, and find a way to synthesize a new process that involves experts and LLMs. Shops who've abandoned their experts will immediately begin to stagnate and produce more and more mediocre slop (we're seeing it already!) and the shops who metamorphose into the new model you're speculating at will, meanwhile, create a whole new era of process and production. Right now, you really want to be in that second camp - the synthesizers. Eventually the incumbents will have no choice but to buy up those new players in order to coup their process.
  - rendaw 2y ago
    And 3D animation still requires hand animation! Nobody starts with 3D animation, the senior animators are doing storyboards and keyframes which they _then_ use as a guide for 3D animation.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  The saddle, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the wagon, the plough, and the drawbar all enhanced the productivity of horses and we only ended up employing more of them. Then the steam engine and internal combustion engine came around and work horses all but disappeared. There's no economic law that says a new productivity-enhancing programming tool is always a stirrup and never a steam engine.
  - RangerScience 2y ago
    I think you raise an excellent point, and can use your point to figure out how it could apply in this case. All the tools that are stirrups were used "by the horse" (you get what I mean); that implies to me that so long as the AI tools are used by the programmers (what we've currently got), they're stirrups. The steam engines were used by the people "employing the horse" - ala, "people don't buy drills they buy holes" (people don't employ horses, they move stuff) - so that's what to look for to see what's a steam engine. IMHO, as long as all this is "telling the computer what to do", it's stirrups, because that's what we've been doing. If it becomes something else, then maybe it's a steam engine. And, to repeat - thank you for this point, it's an excellent one, and provides some good language for talking about it.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Thanks for the warm feedback! Maybe another interesting case would be secretaries. It used to be very common that even middle management positions at small to medium companies would have personal human secretaries and assistants, but now they're very rare. Maybe some senior executives at large corporations and government agencies still have them, but I have never met one in North America who does. Below that level it's become the standard that people do their own typing, manage their own appointments and answer their own emails. I think that's mainly because computers made it easy and automated enough that it doesn't take a full time staffer, and computer literacy got widespread enough that anyone could do it themselves without specialized skills. So if programming got easy enough that you don't need programmers to do the work, then perhaps we could see the profession hollow out. Alternatively we could run out of demand for software but that seems less likely! (a related article: https://archive.is/cAKmu https://archive.is/cAKmu )
IshKebab 2y ago
> then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" Well then you can count IDEs, static typing, debuggers, version control etc. as replacing programmers too. But I don't think any of those performance enhancers have really reduced the number of programmers needed. In fact it's a well known paradox that making a job more efficient can increase the number of people doing that job. It's called the Jevons paradox (thanks ChatGPT - probably wouldn't have been able to find that with Google!) Making people 20% more efficient is very different to entirely replacing them.
- fragmede 2y ago
  I know it's popular to hate on Google, but a link to the Wikipedia is the first result I get for a Google search of "efficiency paradox".
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
That's actually not accurate. See Jevons paradox, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. In the short term, LLMs should have the effect of making programmers more productive, which means more customers will end up demanding software that was previously uneconomic to build (this is not theoretical - e.g. I work with some non-profits who would love a comprehensive software solution, they simply can't afford it, or the risk, at present).
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous. you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      Every company that builds software has dozens of things they want but can't prioritize because they're too busy building other things. It's not about a discrete product or project, but continuous improvement upon that which already exists is what makes up most of the volume of "what would happen if we had more people".
    - a_bonobo 2y ago
      some ideas from my own work: - a good LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) that incorporates bioinformatics results. LIMS come from a pure lab, benchwork background, and rarely support the inclusion of bioinformatics analyses on samples included in the system. I have yet to see a lab that uses an off-the-shelf LIMS unmodified - they never do what they say they do. (And the amount of labs running on something built on age-old software still in use is... horrific. I know one US lab running some abomination built on Filemaker Pro) - Software to manage grants. Who is being owed what, what are the milestones, who's looking after this, who are the contact persons, what are the milestones and when to remind, due diligence on potential partners etc. I worked for a grant-giving body and they came up with a weird mix of PowerBI and a pile of Excel sheets and PDFs. - A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.
akircher 2y ago
As a founder, I think that this viewpoint misses the reality of a fixed budget. If I can make my team of 8 as productive as 10 with LLMs then I will. But that doesn’t mean that without LLMs I could afford to hire 2 more engineers. And in fact if LLMs make my startup successful then it could create more jobs in the future.

RangerScience 2y ago

Fav anecdote from ages ago: When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools. Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered). I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger job.”

sigmarule 2y ago
This could very well prove to be the case in software engineering, but also could very well not; what is the equivalent of "larger sets" in our domain, and is that something that is even preferable to begin with? Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_? I'd say likely not, while it does make sense to build larger/more elaborate movie sets because they could. Also, a piece missing from this comparison is a set of people who don't believe the new tool will actually have a measurable impact on their domain. I assume few-to-none could argue that power tools would have no impact on their profession.
- ska 2y ago
  > Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_? The history of software production as a profession (as against computer science) is essentially a series of incremental increases in the size and complexity of systems (and teams) that don't fall apart under their own weight. There isn't much evidence we have approached the limit here, so it's a pretty good bet for at least the medium term. But focusing on system size is perhaps a red herring. There is an almost unfathomably vast pool of potential software systems (or customization of systems) that aren't realized today because they aren't cost effective...
- danenania 2y ago
  Have you ever worked on a product in production use without a long backlog of features/improvements/tests/refactors/optimizations desired by users, managers, engineers, and everyone else involved in any way with the project? The demand for software improvements is effectively inexhaustible. It’s not a zero sum game.
pixeltechie 2y ago
This is a good example of what could happen to software development as a whole. In my experience large companies tend to more often buy software rather than make it. Ai could drastically change the "make or buy" decision in favour of make. Because you need less developers to create a perfect tailored solution that directly fits the needs of the company. So "make" becomes affordable and more attractive.
- F-W-M 2y ago
  I work for a large european power utility. We are moving away from buying to in-house development. LLMs have nothing to do with it.
karaterobot 2y ago
Another anecdote: when mechanical looms became a thing, textile workers were afraid that the new tools would replace them, and they were right.
- kbelder 2y ago
  And that was good. Workers being replaced by tools is good for society, although temporarily disruptive.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  430 million people currently work in textiles[0]; how big was the industry before mechanical looms? [0] https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-industry-statistics https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-indu...
  - fragmede 2y ago
    How many worked in America and Western Europe and were paid a living wage in their respective countries, and how many of those 430 million people currently work making textiles in America and Western Europe today, and how many are lower paid positions in poorer countries, under worse living conditions? (Like being locked into the sweatshop, and bathroom breaks being regulated?) Computers aren't going anywhere, so the whole field of programming will continue to grow, but will there still be FAANG salaries to be had?
    - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
      i heard the same shit when people were talking about outsourcing to India after the dotcom bubble burst. programmer salaries would cap out at $60k because of international competition. if you're afraid of salaries shrinking due to LLMs, then i implore you, get out of software development. it'll help me a lot!
    - 2y ago
nidnogg 2y ago
This is a real thing. LLMs are tools, not humans. They truly do bring interesting, bigger problems. Have people seen some of the recent software being churned out? Hint, it's not all GenAI bubblespit. A lot of it is killer, legitimately good stuff.
esmevane 2y ago
It's always played out like this in software, by the way. Famously, animation shops hoped to save money on production by switching over to computer rendered cartoons. What happened instead is that a whole new industry took shape, and brought along with it entire cottage industries of support workers. Server farms required IT, renders required more advanced chips, some kinds of animation required entirely new rendering techniques in the software, etc. A few hundred animators turned into a few thousand computer animators & their new support crew, in most shops. And new, smaller shops took form! But the shops didn't go away, at least not the ones who changed. It basically boils down to this: some shops will act with haste and purge their experts in order to replace them with LLMs, and others will adopt the LLMs, bring on the new support staff they need, and find a way to synthesize a new process that involves experts and LLMs. Shops who've abandoned their experts will immediately begin to stagnate and produce more and more mediocre slop (we're seeing it already!) and the shops who metamorphose into the new model you're speculating at will, meanwhile, create a whole new era of process and production. Right now, you really want to be in that second camp - the synthesizers. Eventually the incumbents will have no choice but to buy up those new players in order to coup their process.
- rendaw 2y ago
  And 3D animation still requires hand animation! Nobody starts with 3D animation, the senior animators are doing storyboards and keyframes which they _then_ use as a guide for 3D animation.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
The saddle, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the wagon, the plough, and the drawbar all enhanced the productivity of horses and we only ended up employing more of them. Then the steam engine and internal combustion engine came around and work horses all but disappeared. There's no economic law that says a new productivity-enhancing programming tool is always a stirrup and never a steam engine.
- RangerScience 2y ago
  I think you raise an excellent point, and can use your point to figure out how it could apply in this case. All the tools that are stirrups were used "by the horse" (you get what I mean); that implies to me that so long as the AI tools are used by the programmers (what we've currently got), they're stirrups. The steam engines were used by the people "employing the horse" - ala, "people don't buy drills they buy holes" (people don't employ horses, they move stuff) - so that's what to look for to see what's a steam engine. IMHO, as long as all this is "telling the computer what to do", it's stirrups, because that's what we've been doing. If it becomes something else, then maybe it's a steam engine. And, to repeat - thank you for this point, it's an excellent one, and provides some good language for talking about it.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Thanks for the warm feedback! Maybe another interesting case would be secretaries. It used to be very common that even middle management positions at small to medium companies would have personal human secretaries and assistants, but now they're very rare. Maybe some senior executives at large corporations and government agencies still have them, but I have never met one in North America who does. Below that level it's become the standard that people do their own typing, manage their own appointments and answer their own emails. I think that's mainly because computers made it easy and automated enough that it doesn't take a full time staffer, and computer literacy got widespread enough that anyone could do it themselves without specialized skills. So if programming got easy enough that you don't need programmers to do the work, then perhaps we could see the profession hollow out. Alternatively we could run out of demand for software but that seems less likely! (a related article: https://archive.is/cAKmu https://archive.is/cAKmu )

IshKebab 2y ago

> then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" Well then you can count IDEs, static typing, debuggers, version control etc. as replacing programmers too. But I don't think any of those performance enhancers have really reduced the number of programmers needed. In fact it's a well known paradox that making a job more efficient can increase the number of people doing that job. It's called the Jevons paradox (thanks ChatGPT - probably wouldn't have been able to find that with Google!) Making people 20% more efficient is very different to entirely replacing them.

fragmede 2y ago
I know it's popular to hate on Google, but a link to the Wikipedia is the first result I get for a Google search of "efficiency paradox".

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

That's actually not accurate. See Jevons paradox, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. In the short term, LLMs should have the effect of making programmers more productive, which means more customers will end up demanding software that was previously uneconomic to build (this is not theoretical - e.g. I work with some non-profits who would love a comprehensive software solution, they simply can't afford it, or the risk, at present).

hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous. you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    Every company that builds software has dozens of things they want but can't prioritize because they're too busy building other things. It's not about a discrete product or project, but continuous improvement upon that which already exists is what makes up most of the volume of "what would happen if we had more people".
  - a_bonobo 2y ago
    some ideas from my own work: - a good LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) that incorporates bioinformatics results. LIMS come from a pure lab, benchwork background, and rarely support the inclusion of bioinformatics analyses on samples included in the system. I have yet to see a lab that uses an off-the-shelf LIMS unmodified - they never do what they say they do. (And the amount of labs running on something built on age-old software still in use is... horrific. I know one US lab running some abomination built on Filemaker Pro) - Software to manage grants. Who is being owed what, what are the milestones, who's looking after this, who are the contact persons, what are the milestones and when to remind, due diligence on potential partners etc. I worked for a grant-giving body and they came up with a weird mix of PowerBI and a pile of Excel sheets and PDFs. - A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.

akircher 2y ago

As a founder, I think that this viewpoint misses the reality of a fixed budget. If I can make my team of 8 as productive as 10 with LLMs then I will. But that doesn’t mean that without LLMs I could afford to hire 2 more engineers. And in fact if LLMs make my startup successful then it could create more jobs in the future.