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It's all fun and games until the infra crashes and you can't work out why, because a machine has written all of the code, no one understands how it works or wha

It's all fun and games until the infra crashes and you can't work out why, because a machine has written all of the code, no one understands how it works or what it's doing. Or - worse - there is no accessible code anywhere, and you have to prompt your way out of "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that," while nothing works. And a human-free economy does... what? For whom? When 99% of the population is unemployed, what are the 1% doing while the planet's ecosystems collapse around them?

sirsinsalot 2y ago
It honestly borders on psychopathic the way engineers are treating humans in this context. People talking like this also, in the back of their minds like to think they'll be OK. They're smart enough to be still needed. They're a human, but they'll be OK even while working to make genAI out perform them at their own work. I wonder how they'll feel about their own hubris when they struggle to feed their family. The US can barely make healthcare work without disgusting consequences for the sick. I wonder what mass unemployment looks like.
- a2800276 2y ago
  But when Sam Altman owns all the money in the world surely he'll distribute some it via his not-for-profit AI company?
- bnj 2y ago
  For the moment the displacement is asymmetrical; AI replacing employees, but not AI replacing consumers. If AI causes mass unemployment, the pool of consumers (profit to companies) will shrink. I wonder what the ripple effects of that will be.
  - sirsinsalot 2y ago
    There's no point being rich in a world where the economy is unhealthy.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  It honestly borders on midwit to constantly introduce a false dichotomy of AI vs humans. It's just stupid base animal logic. There is absolutely no reason a programmer should expect to write code as they do now forever, just as ASM experts had to move on. And there's no reason (no precedent and no indicators) to expect that a well-educated, even-moderately-experienced technologist will suddenly find themselves without a way to feed their family - unless they stubbornly refuse to reskill or change their workflows. I do believe the days of "everyone makes 100k+" are nearly over, and we're headed towards a severely bimodal distribution, but I do not see how, for the next 10-15 years at least, we can't all become productive building the tools that will obviate our own jobs while we do them - and get comfortably retired in the mean time.
  - losteric 2y ago
    There is no comfortable retirement if the process of obviating our own jobs is not coupled with appropriate socioeconomic changes.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      I don't see it. Don't you have a 401k or EU style pension? Aren't you saving some money? If not, why are you in software? I don't make as much as I thought I might, but I make enough to consider the possibility of surviving a career change.
  - twh270 2y ago
    Reskill to what? When AI can do software development, it will also be able to do pretty much any other job that requires some learning.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      Even if one refuses to move on from software dev to something like AI deployer or AI validator or AI steerer, there might be a need. If innovation ceases, then AI is king - push existing knowledge into your dataset, train, and exploit. If innovation continues, there's always a gap. It takes time for a new thing to be made public "enough" for it to be ingested and synthesized. Who does this? Who finds the new knowledge? Who creates the direction and asks the questions? Who determines what to build in the first place? Who synthesizes the daily experience of everyone around them to decide what tool needs to exist to make our lives easier? Maybe I'm grasping at straws here, but the world in which all scientific discovery, synthesis, direction and vision setting, etc, is determined by AI seems really far away when we talk about code generation and symbolic math manipulation. These tools are self driving cars, and we're drivers of the software fleet. We need to embrace the fact that we might end up watching 10 cars self operate rather than driving one car, or maybe we're just setting destinations, but there simply isn't an absolutist zero sum game here unless all one thinks about is keeping the car on the road. AND even if there were, repeating doom and feeling helpless is the last thing you want. Maybe it's not good truth that we can all adapt and should try, but it's certainly good policy.
exhaze 2y ago
You misunderstand the fundamentals. I've built a type-safe code generation pipeline using TypeScript that enforces compile-time and runtime safety. Everything generates from a single source of truth - structured JSON containing the business logic. The output is deterministic, inspectable, and version controlled. Your concerns about mysterious AI code and system crashes are backwards. This approach eliminates integration bugs and maintenance issues by design. The generated TypeScript is readable, fully typed, and consistently updated across the entire stack when business logic changes. If you're struggling with AI-generated code maintainability, that's an implementation problem, not a fundamental issue with code generation. Proper type safety and schema validation create more reliable systems, not less. This is automation making developers more productive - just like compilers and IDEs did - not replacing them. The code works because it's built on sound software engineering principles: type safety, single source of truth, and deterministic generation. That's verifiable fact, not speculation.
- 8note 2y ago
  > deterministic generation what are you using for deterministic generation? the last i heard even with temperature=0 theres non determinism introduced by float uncertainty/approximation
  - exhaze 2y ago
    Hey, that's a great question. I should have been more clear: for deterministic generation that's not done using an LLM. It's done using just regular execution of TypeScript. The code generators that were created using an LLM and that I manually checked for correctness, they're the ones that are generating the other code - most of the code. So that's where the determinism comes in.

sirsinsalot 2y ago

It honestly borders on psychopathic the way engineers are treating humans in this context. People talking like this also, in the back of their minds like to think they'll be OK. They're smart enough to be still needed. They're a human, but they'll be OK even while working to make genAI out perform them at their own work. I wonder how they'll feel about their own hubris when they struggle to feed their family. The US can barely make healthcare work without disgusting consequences for the sick. I wonder what mass unemployment looks like.

a2800276 2y ago
But when Sam Altman owns all the money in the world surely he'll distribute some it via his not-for-profit AI company?
bnj 2y ago
For the moment the displacement is asymmetrical; AI replacing employees, but not AI replacing consumers. If AI causes mass unemployment, the pool of consumers (profit to companies) will shrink. I wonder what the ripple effects of that will be.
- sirsinsalot 2y ago
  There's no point being rich in a world where the economy is unhealthy.
jvanderbot 2y ago
It honestly borders on midwit to constantly introduce a false dichotomy of AI vs humans. It's just stupid base animal logic. There is absolutely no reason a programmer should expect to write code as they do now forever, just as ASM experts had to move on. And there's no reason (no precedent and no indicators) to expect that a well-educated, even-moderately-experienced technologist will suddenly find themselves without a way to feed their family - unless they stubbornly refuse to reskill or change their workflows. I do believe the days of "everyone makes 100k+" are nearly over, and we're headed towards a severely bimodal distribution, but I do not see how, for the next 10-15 years at least, we can't all become productive building the tools that will obviate our own jobs while we do them - and get comfortably retired in the mean time.
- losteric 2y ago
  There is no comfortable retirement if the process of obviating our own jobs is not coupled with appropriate socioeconomic changes.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    I don't see it. Don't you have a 401k or EU style pension? Aren't you saving some money? If not, why are you in software? I don't make as much as I thought I might, but I make enough to consider the possibility of surviving a career change.
- twh270 2y ago
  Reskill to what? When AI can do software development, it will also be able to do pretty much any other job that requires some learning.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Even if one refuses to move on from software dev to something like AI deployer or AI validator or AI steerer, there might be a need. If innovation ceases, then AI is king - push existing knowledge into your dataset, train, and exploit. If innovation continues, there's always a gap. It takes time for a new thing to be made public "enough" for it to be ingested and synthesized. Who does this? Who finds the new knowledge? Who creates the direction and asks the questions? Who determines what to build in the first place? Who synthesizes the daily experience of everyone around them to decide what tool needs to exist to make our lives easier? Maybe I'm grasping at straws here, but the world in which all scientific discovery, synthesis, direction and vision setting, etc, is determined by AI seems really far away when we talk about code generation and symbolic math manipulation. These tools are self driving cars, and we're drivers of the software fleet. We need to embrace the fact that we might end up watching 10 cars self operate rather than driving one car, or maybe we're just setting destinations, but there simply isn't an absolutist zero sum game here unless all one thinks about is keeping the car on the road. AND even if there were, repeating doom and feeling helpless is the last thing you want. Maybe it's not good truth that we can all adapt and should try, but it's certainly good policy.

exhaze 2y ago

You misunderstand the fundamentals. I've built a type-safe code generation pipeline using TypeScript that enforces compile-time and runtime safety. Everything generates from a single source of truth - structured JSON containing the business logic. The output is deterministic, inspectable, and version controlled. Your concerns about mysterious AI code and system crashes are backwards. This approach eliminates integration bugs and maintenance issues by design. The generated TypeScript is readable, fully typed, and consistently updated across the entire stack when business logic changes. If you're struggling with AI-generated code maintainability, that's an implementation problem, not a fundamental issue with code generation. Proper type safety and schema validation create more reliable systems, not less. This is automation making developers more productive - just like compilers and IDEs did - not replacing them. The code works because it's built on sound software engineering principles: type safety, single source of truth, and deterministic generation. That's verifiable fact, not speculation.

8note 2y ago
> deterministic generation what are you using for deterministic generation? the last i heard even with temperature=0 theres non determinism introduced by float uncertainty/approximation
- exhaze 2y ago
  Hey, that's a great question. I should have been more clear: for deterministic generation that's not done using an LLM. It's done using just regular execution of TypeScript. The code generators that were created using an LLM and that I manually checked for correctness, they're the ones that are generating the other code - most of the code. So that's where the determinism comes in.