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I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineer

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to write that operating system the LLM runs on. Or your bank's backend system that securely stores your money. Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality.

whynotminot 2y ago
Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though? Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory. Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software Design. I actually sort of agree with the old C hands to some extent. I think people don’t understand how a lot of things actually work. And it also doesn’t really seem to matter 95% of the time.
- deleted 2y ago
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- chucky_z 2y ago
  $1 for the pencil, $1000 for the line. That’s the 5% when it does matter.
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    Yes this is what people like to think. It’s not really true in practice.
- shafyy 2y ago
  Just because there are these abstractions layers that happened in the past does not mean that it will continue to happen that way. For example, many no-code tools promised just that, but they never caught on. I believe that there's a "optimal" level of abstraction, which, for the web, seems to be something like the modern web stack of HTML, JavaScript and some server-side language like Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript. Now, there might be tools that make a developer's life easier, like a nice IDE, debugging tools, linters, autocomplete and also LLMs to a certain degree (which, for me, still is a fancy autocomplete), but they are not abstraction layers in that sense.
  - neom 2y ago
    I love that you brought no-code tools into this because I think it's interesting it never worked correctly. My guess is: on one side, things like squarespace and wix get super super good for building sites that don't feel like squarespace and wix, (I'm not sure I'd want to be a pure "website dev" right now - although I think squarespace squashed a lot of that long ago) - and then very very nice tooling for "real engineers" (whatever that means). I'm pretty handy with tech, I mean last time I built anything real was the 90s but I know how most things work pretty well. I sat down to ship an app last weekend, no sleep and Monday rolling around GCP was giving me errors and I hadn't realized one of the files the LLMs wrote looked like code but was all placeholder. I think this is basically what the anthropic report says, automation issues happen via displacement, and displacement is typically fine, except the displacement this time is happening very rapidly (I read in different report, expecting traditionally ~80 years of displacement happens in ~10 years with AI)
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it. Of course, sometimes it tampers with your data in horrifying ways because something you entered (or imported into the system from elsewhere) just happened to look kinda like a date, even though it was intended to be something completely different. So there's that.
      - 2y ago
- fuy 2y ago
  And also these old C hands don't seem to get paid (significantly) more than a regular web-dev who doesn't care about hardware, memory, performance etc. Go figure.
  - jackcosgrove 2y ago
    Pay is determined by the supply and demand for labor, which encompass many factors beyond the difficulty of the work. Being a game developer is harder than being an enterprise web services developer. Who gets paid more, especially per hour?
  - bigfishrunning 2y ago
    They do where I'm from, and spend most of their time cleaning up the messes that the regular web-devs create...
- SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  And that last 5% is what you're paying for
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    But not really. Looking around my shop, I’m probably the only one around who used to write a lot of C code. No one is coming to ask me about obscure memory bugs. I’m certainly not getting paid better than my peers. The knowledge I have is personally gratifying to me because I like having a deeper understanding of things. But I have to tell you I thought knowing more would give me a deeper advantage than it has in actual practice.
    - kmoser 2y ago
      Is that because the languages being used at your shop have largely abstracted away memory bug issues? If you were to get a job writing embedded systems, or compilers, or OSes, wouldn't your knowledge be more highly valued and sought after (assuming you were one of the more senior devs)?
    - abnercoimbre 2y ago
      If you have genuine systems programming knowledge, usually the answer is to innovate on a particular toolchain or ship your own product (I understand you may not like business stuff though.)
    - rootnod3 2y ago
      I would argue that your advantage right now is that YOU are the one position they can't replace with LLMs, because your knowledge requires exact fine detail on pointers and everything and needs that exact expertise. You might have toughen the same pay as your peers, but you also carry additional stability.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      You're providing value every time you kill a bad idea "because things don't actually work that way" or shave a loop, you're just not tracking the value and neither is your boss. To your employer, hiring people who know things (i.e. you) has giving them a deeper advantage in actual practice.
- deadlast2 2y ago
  The programming is an interface to the machine. The AI even what we know now (LLM's, Agents, RAG) will absorb all that. It has many flaws but is still much better than most programmers. All future programmers will be using it. For the programmers that don't want to use it. I think there will be literally billions of lines of unbelievably bad code generated by these 1-100 generation Ai's and junior programmers that need to be corrected and fixed.
  - bigfishrunning 2y ago
    > It has many flaws but is still much better than most programmers. This says more about most programmers then about any given LLM
- SteveNuts 2y ago
  > Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work Everything has a place, you most likely wouldn't write an HPC database in Python, and you wouldn't write a simple CRUD recipe app in C. I think the same thing applies to using LLMS, you don't use the code it generates to control a power plant or fly an airplane. You use it for building the simple CRUD recipe app where the stakes are essentially zero.
- bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
  Yea, every progeammer should write at least a cpu emulator in their language of choice, its such a undervalued exercise that will teach you so much about how stuff really works.
  - lizknope 2y ago
    You can go to the next step. I studied computer engineering not computer science in college. We designed our own CPU and then implemented it in an FPGA. You can go further and design it out of discrete logic gates. Then write it in Verilog. Compare the differences and which made you think more about optimizations.
    - chasd00 2y ago
      "in order to bake a pie you must first create the universe", at some point, reaching to lower and lower levels stops being useful.
      - lizknope 2y ago
        Sure. Older people are always going to complain about younger people not learning something that they did. When I graduated in 1997 and started working I remember some topics that were not taught but the older engineers were shocked I didn't know it from college. We keep creating new knowledge. It is impossible to fit everything into a 4 year curriculum without deemphasizing some other topic. I learned Motorola 68000 assembly language in college. I talked to a recent computer science graduate and he had never seen assembly before. I also showed him how I write static HTML in vi the same way I did in 1994 for my simple web site and he laughed. He showed me the back end to their web site and how it interacts with all their databases to generate all the HTML dynamically.
      - halfcat 2y ago
        In fairness, creating a universe is pretty useful.
      - bigfishrunning 2y ago
- ragle 2y ago
  I wonder about this too - and also wonder what the difference of order is between the historical shifts you mention and the one we're seeing now (or will see soon). Is it 10 times the "abstracting away complexity and understanding"? 100, 1000, [...]? This seems important. There must be some threshold beyond which (assuming most new developers are learning using these tools) fundamental ability to understand how the machine works and thus ability to "dive in and figure things out" when something goes wrong is pretty much completely lost.
  - TOGoS 2y ago
    > There must be some threshold beyond which (assuming most new developers are learning using these tools) fundamental ability to understand how the machine works and thus ability to "dive in and figure things out" when something goes wrong is pretty much completely lost. For me this happened when working on some Spring Boot codebase thrown together by people who obviously had no idea what they were doing (which maybe is the point of Spring Boot; it seems to encourage slopping a bunch of annotations together in the hope that it will do something useful). I used to be able to fix things when they went wrong, but this thing is just so mysterious and broken in such ridiculous ways that I can never seem to get to the bottom of it,
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Notably, I don't think there was a mass disemployment of "old C hands". They just work on different things.
- commandlinefan 2y ago
  My son is a CS major right now, and since I've been programming my whole adult life, I've been keeping an eye on his curriculum. They do still teach CS majors from the "ground up" - he took system architecture, assembly language and operating systems classes. While I kind of get the sense that most of them memorize enough to pass the tests and get their degree, I have to believe that they end up retaining some of it.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Yes, they remember the concepts, mostly. Not the details. But that's often enough to help with reasoning about higher-level problems.
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    I think this is still true of a solid CS curriculum. But it’s also true that your son will probably end up working with boot camp grads who didn’t have that education. Your son will have a deeper understanding of the world he’s operating in, but what I’m saying is that from what I’ve seen it largely hasn’t mattered all that much. The bootcampers seem to do just fine for the most part.
  - jbeninger 2y ago
    I always considered my education to be a "Table of Contents" listing for what I'd actually learn later
- rcpt 2y ago
  LLMs are a much bigger jump in productivity than moving to a high level language.
  - coffeecat 2y ago
    Lately, I've been asking ChatGPT for answers to problems that I've gotten stuck on. I have yet to receive a correct answer from it that actually increases my productivity.
    - rcpt 2y ago
      I don't know what to say. I've been able to get code working in libraries that I'm wholly unfamiliar with pretty rapidly by asking the LLM what to do. As an example, this weekend I got a new mechanical keyboard. I like to use caps+hjkl as arrows and don't want to remap in software because I'll connect to multiple computers. Turns out there's a whole open source system for this called QMK that requires one to write C to configure the keyboard. It's been over a decade since I touched a Makefile and I never really knew C anyway but I was able get the keyboard configured and also have some custom RGB lighting on it pretty easily by going back and forth with the LLM.
      - psytrancefan 2y ago
        It is just very random. LLMs help me write a synthesizer using an odd synth technique in an obscure musical programming language with no problem, help me fix my broken linux system no problem but then can't do anything right with the python library pyro. I think it is why people have such different experiences. It all depends randomly on how what you want to solve lines up with what the models are good at.
  - o_nate 2y ago
    At least for the type of coding I do, if someone gave me the choice between continuing to work in a modern high-level language (such as C#) without LLM assistance, or switching to a low-level language like C with LLM assistance, I know which one I would choose.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  The real hardcore experts should be writing libraries anyway, to fully take advantage of their expertise in a tiny niche and to amortize the cost of studying their subproblem across many projects. It has never been easier to get people to call your C library, right? As long as somebody can write the Python interface… Numpy has delivered so many FLOPs for BLAS libraries to work on. Does anyone really care if you call their optimized library from C or Python? It seems like a sophomoric concern.
  - rootnod3 2y ago
    I think the problem is that with the over-reliance on LLMs, that expertise of writing the foundational libraries that even other languages rely on, is going away. That is exactly the problem.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software Design. The real issue here is that a lot of the modern tech stacks are crap, but won for other reasons, e.g. JavaScript is a terrible language but became popular because it was the only one available in browsers. Then you got a lot of people who knew JavaScript so they started putting it in places outside the browser because they didn't want to learn another language. You get a similar story with Python. It's essentially a scripting language and poorly suited to large projects, but sometimes large projects start out as small ones, or people (especially e.g. mathematicians in machine learning) choose a language for their initial small projects and then lean on it again because it's what they know even when the project size exceeds what the language is suitable for. To slay these beasts we need to get languages that are actually good in general but also good at the things that cause languages to become popular, e.g. to get something better than JavaScript to be able to run in browsers, and to make languages with good support for large projects to be easier to use for novices and small ones, so people don't keep starting out in a place they don't want to end up.
  - DrFalkyn 2y ago
    With Web Assembly you can write in any language, even C++. Unfortunately it doesn’t expose the DOM, so you still need JavaScript
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  I don't think the value of senior developers is so much in knowing how more things work, but rather that they've learnt (over many projects of increasing complexity) how to design and build larger more complex systems, and this knowledge mostly isn't documented for LLMs to learn from. An LLM can do the LLM thing and copy designs it has seen, but this is cargo-cult behavior - copy the surface form of something without understanding why it was built that way, and when a different design would have been better for a myriad of reasons. This is really an issue for all jobs, not just software development, where there is a large planning and reasoning component. Most of the artifacts available to train an LLM on are the end result of reasoning, not the reasoning process themselves (the day by day, hour by hour, diary of the thought process of someone exercising their journeyman skills). As far as software is concerned, even the end result of reasoning is going to have very limited availability when it comes to large projects since there are relatively few large projects that are open source (things like Linux, gcc, etc). Most large software projects are commercial and proprietary. This is really one of the major weaknesses of LLM-as-AGI, or LLM-as-human-worker-replacement - their lack of ability to learn on the job and pick up a skill for themselves as opposed to needing to have been pre-trained on it (with the corresponding need for training data). In-context learning is ephemeral and anyways no substitute for weight updates where new knowledge and capabilities have been integrated with existing knowledge into a consistent whole.
arrowsmith 2y ago
> I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. This is exactly what the article says in point 3.
threetonesun 2y ago
It’s the “CTO’s nephew” trope but at 100x the cost.
bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
Yea, i agree fully. real programming of course wont go away. But in the public eye it lost its mysticism as seemingly anyone can code now. Of course that aint true and noone managed to create anything of substance by prompting alone.
- weatherlite 2y ago
  How do we define real programming? I'm working on python and JS codebases in my startup. So very high level stuff. However to reason well about everything that goes on in our code is no small feat for an LLM (or a human), if its able to take our requirements , understand the business logic and just start refactoring and creating new features on a codebase that is quite big, well yeah, that sounds like AGI to me. In that case I don't see why it won't be able to hack on kernels.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    The fact that you don't see why is the issue. Both python and JS are very permissive and their runtime env is very good. More often than not, you're just dealing with logic bugs and malformed domain data. A kernel codebase like Linux is one where there are many motivated individual trying every trick to get the computer to do something. And you're usually dealing with leaner abstractions because general safety logic is not performant enough. It's a bit like the difference between a children playground and a construction site.
    - weatherlite 2y ago
      > More often than not, you're just dealing with logic bugs Definitely. More often than not you're dealing with logic bugs. So the thing solving them will sometimes have to be able to reason quite well across large code bases (not every bug of course, but quite often) to the point I don't really see how it's different than general intelligence if it can do that well. And if it gets to the point its AGIish , I don't see why it can't do Kernel work (or in the very least - reduce the amount of jobs dramatically in that space as well). Perhaps you can automate 50% of the job where we're not really thinking at all as programmers, but the other 50% (or less, or more, debatable) involves planning, reasoning, debugging, thinking. Even if all you do is python and js.
hombre_fatal 2y ago
I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It was Ruby on Rails. I built some popular services without knowing how anything worked. There was always a gem (lib) for it. And Rails especially insulated the workings of anything. An S3 avatar upload system was `gem install carrierwave` and then `mount_uploader :avatar, AvatarUploader`. It added an avatar <input type="file"> control to the User form. But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long, especially once you've built a few things, and you keep learning new things. And you keep wanting to build different things. Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that. You get better, you learn more, and you become the question-answerer. And one day you sheepishly look at your question history in amazement at how far you've come.
- thechao 2y ago
  I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    > more sophisticated tech stacks Please don't do this, pick more boring tech stacks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 instead. "Sophisticated" tech stacks are a huge waste, so please save the sophisticated stuff for the 0.1% of the time where you actually need it.
    - 2y ago
weatherlite 2y ago
There's no need for tens of millions of OS Kernel devs , most of us are writing business logic CRUD apps. Also, it's not entirely clear to me why LLMs should get extremely good in web app development but not OS development, as far as I can see it's the amount and quality of training data that counts.
- wesselbindt 2y ago
  > as far as I can see it's the amount and quality of training data that counts Well there's your reason. OS code is not as in demand or prevalent as crud web app code, so there's less relevant data to train your models on.
  - woah 2y ago
    The OS code that exists is much higher quality so the signal to noise ratio is much better
    - wesselbindt 2y ago
      I think arguably there's still a quantity issue, but I'm no expert on LLMs. Plus I hear the windows source code is a bit of a nightmare. But for every windows there's a TempleOS I suppose.
eitally 2y ago
I agree. It's the current generation's version of what happened with the advent of Javascript frameworks about 15 years ago, when suddenly web devs stopped learning how computers actually work. There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing, can debug complex code bases, and can make appropriate decisions about how to apply technology to business problems. That said, AI agents are absolutely going to put a bunch of lower end devs out of work in the near term. I wouldn't want to be entering the job market in the next couple of years....
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  > There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing Unfortunately they won’t be found due to horrible tech interviews focused on “culture” (*-isms), leetcode under the gun, or resume thrown in trash at first sight from lack of full degree. AMHIK.
- chasd00 2y ago
  > I wouldn't want to be entering the job market in the next couple of years.... I bet there's a software dev employment boom about 5 years away once it becomes obvious competent people are needed to unwind and rework all the llm generated code.
  - atlintots 2y ago
    Except juniors are not going to be the competent people you're looking for to unwind those systems. Personally, no matter how it plays out, I feel like the entry-level market in this field is going to take a hit. It will become much more difficult and competitive.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wesselbindt 2y ago
> Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality. Airplane manufacturers have proved themselves more than willing to sacrifice safety for profits. What makes you think they would stop short of using LLMs?
AlexCoventry 2y ago
> people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering Perhaps Python will become the new assembly code. :-)
x86hacker1010 2y ago
You think this like newcomers can’t use the LLM to more deeply understand these topics in addition to glue. This mindset is a fallacy as newcomers are more adept and passionate as any other generation. They have better tools and can compete just the same.
tharne 2y ago
> Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality. Found the guy who's never worked for a large publicly-traded company :) Do you know what's out of touch with reality? Thinking that $BIG_CORP execs who are compensated based on the last three months of stock performance will do anything other than take shortcuts and cut corners given the chance.
SoftTalker 2y ago
We've been in this world for decades. Most developers couldn't write an operating system to save their life. Most could not write more than a simple SQL query. They sling code in some opinionated dev stack that abstracts the database and don't think too hard about the low-level details.
- aussieguy1234 2y ago
  They'll probably go a step further and use an ORM instead of writing queries. Since ORMs generally write crap unoptimized sql for all but the simplest of queries, this will lead to performance issues once things scale up.
rapind 2y ago
> Somebody needs to write that operating system the LLM runs on. Or your bank's backend system that securely stores your money. Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality. When they do this, I really want to know they did this. Like an organic food label. Right now AI is this buzzword that companies self-label with for marketing, but when that changes, I still want to see who's using AI to handle my data.
dartos 2y ago
I don’t think “prompt engineering” will remain its own field. It’s just modern SEO and SEO will eat it, eventually. Prompt engineering as a service makes more sense than having on-staff people anyway, since your prompt’s effectiveness can change from model to model. Have someone else deal with platform inconsistencies, like always.
ljm 2y ago
The enshittification will come for the software engineers themselves eventually, because so many businesses out there only have their shareholders in mind and not their customers, and if a broken product or a promise of a product is enough to boost the stock then why bother investing in the talent to build it properly? Look at Google and Facebook - absolute shithouse services now that completely fail to meet the basic functionality they had ~20 years ago. Google still rakes in billions rendering ads in the style of a search engine and Facebook the same for rendering ads in the format of a social news feed. Why even bother with engineering anything except total slop?
hintymad 2y ago
Would technical depth change the fundamental supply and demand, though? If we view AI as a powerful automation tool, it's possible that the overall demand will be lowered so much that the demand of the deep technical expertise will go down as well. Take EE industry, for instance, the technical expertise required to get things done is vast and deep, yet the demand has not been so good, compared to the software industry.
shortrounddev2 2y ago
> younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together This was true before LLMs though. A lot of people just glue javascript libraries together
KerrAvon 2y ago
yup. the good news is this should make interviewing easier; bad news is there'll be fewer qualified candidates. the other thing, though, is that you and I know that LLMs can't write or debug operating systems, but the people who pay us and see LLMs writing prose and songs? hmm
efitz 2y ago
On a recent AllIn podcast[1], there was a fascinating discussion between Aaron Levie and Chamath Palihapitiya about how LLMs will (or will not) supplant software developers, which industries, total addressable markets (TAMs), and current obstacles preventing tech CEOs from firing all the developers right now. It seemed pretty obvious to me that Chamath was looking forward to breaking his dependence on software developers, and predicts AI will lead to a 90% reduction in the market for software-as-a-service (and the related jobs). Regardless of point of view, it was an eye opening discussion to hear a business leader discussing this so frankly, but I guess not so surprising since most of his income these days is from VC investments. [1] https://youtu.be/hY_glSDyGUU?t=4333 https://youtu.be/hY_glSDyGUU?t=4333
devoutsalsa 2y ago
I hired a junior developer for a couple months and was incredibly impressed with what he was able to accomplish with a paid ChatGPT subscription on a greenfield project for me. He’d definitely struggle with a mature code base, it you have to start somewhere!
foota 2y ago
I think I've seen the comparison with respect to training data, but it's interesting to think of the presence of LLMs as a sort of barrier to developing skills akin to pre-WW2 low background radiation steel (which, fun fact, isn't actually that relevant anymore, since background radiation levels have dropped significantly since the partial end of nuclear testing)
brightball 2y ago
One of my first bosses was a big Perl guy. I checked on what he was doing 15 years later and he was one of 3 people at Windstream handling backbone packet management rules. You just don’t run into many people comfortable with that technology anymore. It’s one of the big reasons I go out of my way to recruit talks on “old” languages to be included at the Carolina Code Conference every year.
benatkin 2y ago
When I see people trying to define which programmers will enjoy continued success as AI continues to improve, I often see One True Scotsman used. I wish more would try to describe what the differentiating skills and circumstances are instead of just saying that real programmers should still be in demand. I think maybe raw talent is more important than how much you "genuinely love coding" (https://x.com/AdamRackis/status/1888965636833083416 https://x.com/AdamRackis/status/1888965636833083416) or how much of a real programmer you are. This essay captures raw talent pretty well IMO: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
zahlman 2y ago
>I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. My experience with Stack Overflow, the Python forums, etc. etc. suggests that we've been there for a year or so already. On the one hand, it's revolutionary that it works at all (and I have to admit it works better than "at all"). But when it doesn't work, a significant fraction of those users will try to get experienced humans to fix the problem for them, for free - while also deluding themselves that they're "learning programming" through this exercise.
trod1234 2y ago
It is far more likely that everything, and not just IT, but everything collapses than we make it to the point you mention. LLMs replace entry level people who invested in education. They would have the beginning knowledge, but there's no means to become better because opportunities are non-existent because they replaced these positions. Its a sequential pipeline failure of talent development. In the meantime you have the mid and senior level people who cannot pass their knowledge on, they age out, and die. What happens when you hit a criticality point where production which is dependent on these systems, and it can no longer continue. The knowledge implicit in production is lost, the economic incentives have been poisoned. The distribution systems are destroyed. How do you bootstrap recovery for something that effectively took several centuries to build in the first place, but not in centuries but in weeks/months. If this isn't sufficient enough to explain the core of the issue. Check out the Atari/Nintendo crash, which isn't nearly as large as this but goes into the dangers of destroying your distributor networks. If you pay attention to the details, you'll see Atari's crash was fueled by debt financing, and in the process they destroyed their distributor networks with catastrophic losses. After that crash, Nintendo couldn't get shelf-space; no distributor would risk the loss without a guarantee. They couldn't advertise as video games. They had to trojan horse the perception of what they were selling, and guarantee it. There is a documentary on Amazon which covers this, playing with power. Check it out.
yodsanklai 2y ago
> as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. I'm not worried about that at all. Many young people are passionate, eager to learn and build things. They won't become suddenly dumb and lazy because they have this extra tool available to them. I think it's the opposite. They'll be better than their seniors because they'll have AI help them improving and learn faster.
- AgentK20 2y ago
  Have you _seen_ the tragedy that is occurring in primary and secondary education right now with students using LLMs for the bulk of their coursework? Humans, and most forms of life in general, are lazy. They take the lowest energy route to a solution that works, whether that solution is food, shelter, or the answer to a homework question or problem at work. To some degree, this is good: An experienced <animal/student/engineer> has well-defined mental pathways towards getting what they need in as little time/energy as possible. I myself have dozens of things that I don't remember offhand, but that I remember a particular google query will get me to what I need (chmod args being the one that comes to mind). This leaves mental resources available for more important or difficult-to-acquire knowledge, like the subtle nuances of a complex system or cat pictures. The problem is a lack of balance, and in some instances skipping the entirety of Critical Reasoning. Why go through the effort of working your way through a problem when you would rather be doing <literally anything else> with your time. Iterate on this to the extreme, with what feels like a magic bullet that can solve anything, and your skills *will* atrophy. Of course there are exceptions to this trend. Star pupils exist in any generation who will go out of their way to discover answers to questions they have, re-derive understanding of things just for the sake of it, and apply their passions towards solving problems they decide are worth solving. The issue is the _average_ person, given an _average_ (e.g. if in America, under-funded) education, with an _average_ mentor, will likely choose the path of least resistance.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
Governor Gavin Newsom proposed to use AI agents to manage the California budget. Using ai to write critical code doesn't seem far stretched to me. Doing it right now would be suicidal of course, but in a few years when ai is even better ? It sure is coming. We're already speaking seriously about ai surgeon, we are already using ai to do radiography doctors job and found it to be more reliable. Some job are really at risk in the near future, that's obvious. I'm no developer so I got no bias towards it.
aussieguy1234 2y ago
I'm aware of a designer, no coding skills, who is going to turn his startup idea into an MVP using LLMs. If that ever got serious, they would need an actual engineer to maintain and improve things.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
The "prompt" engineering is also going to create a ton of cargocult tips and tricks- endless shell scripts, that do nothing but look spectacular, with one or two important commands at the end. Fractal classes, that nobody knows why they exist. Endless boilerplate. And the ai will be trained on this- and thus cluelessness reinforced and baked in. Omnissiah, hear our prayers in the terminal for we are but -h less man (bashes keyboard with a ritual wrench).
jerpint 2y ago
I think a good analogy is being able to drive a car vs understanding the engine of a car. Both are useful, but you wouldn’t hire a mechanic drive you around
- bigfishrunning 2y ago
  If cars were as unreliable as most software, you'd need a mechanic to drive you around.
justanotherunit 2y ago
This is so on point IMO, I feel like there is no better time than to learn more low level languages than now. Since the hype will in the end resolve around insanely technical people carrying all the major weight.

whynotminot 2y ago

Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though? Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory. Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software Design. I actually sort of agree with the old C hands to some extent. I think people don’t understand how a lot of things actually work. And it also doesn’t really seem to matter 95% of the time.

deleted 2y ago
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chucky_z 2y ago
$1 for the pencil, $1000 for the line. That’s the 5% when it does matter.
- whynotminot 2y ago
  Yes this is what people like to think. It’s not really true in practice.
shafyy 2y ago
Just because there are these abstractions layers that happened in the past does not mean that it will continue to happen that way. For example, many no-code tools promised just that, but they never caught on. I believe that there's a "optimal" level of abstraction, which, for the web, seems to be something like the modern web stack of HTML, JavaScript and some server-side language like Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript. Now, there might be tools that make a developer's life easier, like a nice IDE, debugging tools, linters, autocomplete and also LLMs to a certain degree (which, for me, still is a fancy autocomplete), but they are not abstraction layers in that sense.
- neom 2y ago
  I love that you brought no-code tools into this because I think it's interesting it never worked correctly. My guess is: on one side, things like squarespace and wix get super super good for building sites that don't feel like squarespace and wix, (I'm not sure I'd want to be a pure "website dev" right now - although I think squarespace squashed a lot of that long ago) - and then very very nice tooling for "real engineers" (whatever that means). I'm pretty handy with tech, I mean last time I built anything real was the 90s but I know how most things work pretty well. I sat down to ship an app last weekend, no sleep and Monday rolling around GCP was giving me errors and I hadn't realized one of the files the LLMs wrote looked like code but was all placeholder. I think this is basically what the anthropic report says, automation issues happen via displacement, and displacement is typically fine, except the displacement this time is happening very rapidly (I read in different report, expecting traditionally ~80 years of displacement happens in ~10 years with AI)
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    Excel is a "no-code" system and people seem to like it. Of course, sometimes it tampers with your data in horrifying ways because something you entered (or imported into the system from elsewhere) just happened to look kinda like a date, even though it was intended to be something completely different. So there's that.
    - 2y ago
fuy 2y ago
And also these old C hands don't seem to get paid (significantly) more than a regular web-dev who doesn't care about hardware, memory, performance etc. Go figure.
- jackcosgrove 2y ago
  Pay is determined by the supply and demand for labor, which encompass many factors beyond the difficulty of the work. Being a game developer is harder than being an enterprise web services developer. Who gets paid more, especially per hour?
- bigfishrunning 2y ago
  They do where I'm from, and spend most of their time cleaning up the messes that the regular web-devs create...
SJC_Hacker 2y ago
And that last 5% is what you're paying for
- whynotminot 2y ago
  But not really. Looking around my shop, I’m probably the only one around who used to write a lot of C code. No one is coming to ask me about obscure memory bugs. I’m certainly not getting paid better than my peers. The knowledge I have is personally gratifying to me because I like having a deeper understanding of things. But I have to tell you I thought knowing more would give me a deeper advantage than it has in actual practice.
  - kmoser 2y ago
    Is that because the languages being used at your shop have largely abstracted away memory bug issues? If you were to get a job writing embedded systems, or compilers, or OSes, wouldn't your knowledge be more highly valued and sought after (assuming you were one of the more senior devs)?
  - abnercoimbre 2y ago
    If you have genuine systems programming knowledge, usually the answer is to innovate on a particular toolchain or ship your own product (I understand you may not like business stuff though.)
  - rootnod3 2y ago
    I would argue that your advantage right now is that YOU are the one position they can't replace with LLMs, because your knowledge requires exact fine detail on pointers and everything and needs that exact expertise. You might have toughen the same pay as your peers, but you also carry additional stability.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    You're providing value every time you kill a bad idea "because things don't actually work that way" or shave a loop, you're just not tracking the value and neither is your boss. To your employer, hiring people who know things (i.e. you) has giving them a deeper advantage in actual practice.
deadlast2 2y ago
The programming is an interface to the machine. The AI even what we know now (LLM's, Agents, RAG) will absorb all that. It has many flaws but is still much better than most programmers. All future programmers will be using it. For the programmers that don't want to use it. I think there will be literally billions of lines of unbelievably bad code generated by these 1-100 generation Ai's and junior programmers that need to be corrected and fixed.
- bigfishrunning 2y ago
  > It has many flaws but is still much better than most programmers. This says more about most programmers then about any given LLM
SteveNuts 2y ago
> Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work Everything has a place, you most likely wouldn't write an HPC database in Python, and you wouldn't write a simple CRUD recipe app in C. I think the same thing applies to using LLMS, you don't use the code it generates to control a power plant or fly an airplane. You use it for building the simple CRUD recipe app where the stakes are essentially zero.
bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
Yea, every progeammer should write at least a cpu emulator in their language of choice, its such a undervalued exercise that will teach you so much about how stuff really works.
- lizknope 2y ago
  You can go to the next step. I studied computer engineering not computer science in college. We designed our own CPU and then implemented it in an FPGA. You can go further and design it out of discrete logic gates. Then write it in Verilog. Compare the differences and which made you think more about optimizations.
  - chasd00 2y ago
    "in order to bake a pie you must first create the universe", at some point, reaching to lower and lower levels stops being useful.
    - lizknope 2y ago
      Sure. Older people are always going to complain about younger people not learning something that they did. When I graduated in 1997 and started working I remember some topics that were not taught but the older engineers were shocked I didn't know it from college. We keep creating new knowledge. It is impossible to fit everything into a 4 year curriculum without deemphasizing some other topic. I learned Motorola 68000 assembly language in college. I talked to a recent computer science graduate and he had never seen assembly before. I also showed him how I write static HTML in vi the same way I did in 1994 for my simple web site and he laughed. He showed me the back end to their web site and how it interacts with all their databases to generate all the HTML dynamically.
    - halfcat 2y ago
      In fairness, creating a universe is pretty useful.
    - bigfishrunning 2y ago
ragle 2y ago
I wonder about this too - and also wonder what the difference of order is between the historical shifts you mention and the one we're seeing now (or will see soon). Is it 10 times the "abstracting away complexity and understanding"? 100, 1000, [...]? This seems important. There must be some threshold beyond which (assuming most new developers are learning using these tools) fundamental ability to understand how the machine works and thus ability to "dive in and figure things out" when something goes wrong is pretty much completely lost.
- TOGoS 2y ago
  > There must be some threshold beyond which (assuming most new developers are learning using these tools) fundamental ability to understand how the machine works and thus ability to "dive in and figure things out" when something goes wrong is pretty much completely lost. For me this happened when working on some Spring Boot codebase thrown together by people who obviously had no idea what they were doing (which maybe is the point of Spring Boot; it seems to encourage slopping a bunch of annotations together in the hope that it will do something useful). I used to be able to fix things when they went wrong, but this thing is just so mysterious and broken in such ridiculous ways that I can never seem to get to the bottom of it,
sanderjd 2y ago
Notably, I don't think there was a mass disemployment of "old C hands". They just work on different things.
commandlinefan 2y ago
My son is a CS major right now, and since I've been programming my whole adult life, I've been keeping an eye on his curriculum. They do still teach CS majors from the "ground up" - he took system architecture, assembly language and operating systems classes. While I kind of get the sense that most of them memorize enough to pass the tests and get their degree, I have to believe that they end up retaining some of it.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Yes, they remember the concepts, mostly. Not the details. But that's often enough to help with reasoning about higher-level problems.
- whynotminot 2y ago
  I think this is still true of a solid CS curriculum. But it’s also true that your son will probably end up working with boot camp grads who didn’t have that education. Your son will have a deeper understanding of the world he’s operating in, but what I’m saying is that from what I’ve seen it largely hasn’t mattered all that much. The bootcampers seem to do just fine for the most part.
- jbeninger 2y ago
  I always considered my education to be a "Table of Contents" listing for what I'd actually learn later
rcpt 2y ago
LLMs are a much bigger jump in productivity than moving to a high level language.
- coffeecat 2y ago
  Lately, I've been asking ChatGPT for answers to problems that I've gotten stuck on. I have yet to receive a correct answer from it that actually increases my productivity.
  - rcpt 2y ago
    I don't know what to say. I've been able to get code working in libraries that I'm wholly unfamiliar with pretty rapidly by asking the LLM what to do. As an example, this weekend I got a new mechanical keyboard. I like to use caps+hjkl as arrows and don't want to remap in software because I'll connect to multiple computers. Turns out there's a whole open source system for this called QMK that requires one to write C to configure the keyboard. It's been over a decade since I touched a Makefile and I never really knew C anyway but I was able get the keyboard configured and also have some custom RGB lighting on it pretty easily by going back and forth with the LLM.
    - psytrancefan 2y ago
      It is just very random. LLMs help me write a synthesizer using an odd synth technique in an obscure musical programming language with no problem, help me fix my broken linux system no problem but then can't do anything right with the python library pyro. I think it is why people have such different experiences. It all depends randomly on how what you want to solve lines up with what the models are good at.
- o_nate 2y ago
  At least for the type of coding I do, if someone gave me the choice between continuing to work in a modern high-level language (such as C#) without LLM assistance, or switching to a low-level language like C with LLM assistance, I know which one I would choose.
bee_rider 2y ago
The real hardcore experts should be writing libraries anyway, to fully take advantage of their expertise in a tiny niche and to amortize the cost of studying their subproblem across many projects. It has never been easier to get people to call your C library, right? As long as somebody can write the Python interface… Numpy has delivered so many FLOPs for BLAS libraries to work on. Does anyone really care if you call their optimized library from C or Python? It seems like a sophomoric concern.
- rootnod3 2y ago
  I think the problem is that with the over-reliance on LLMs, that expertise of writing the foundational libraries that even other languages rely on, is going away. That is exactly the problem.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software Design. The real issue here is that a lot of the modern tech stacks are crap, but won for other reasons, e.g. JavaScript is a terrible language but became popular because it was the only one available in browsers. Then you got a lot of people who knew JavaScript so they started putting it in places outside the browser because they didn't want to learn another language. You get a similar story with Python. It's essentially a scripting language and poorly suited to large projects, but sometimes large projects start out as small ones, or people (especially e.g. mathematicians in machine learning) choose a language for their initial small projects and then lean on it again because it's what they know even when the project size exceeds what the language is suitable for. To slay these beasts we need to get languages that are actually good in general but also good at the things that cause languages to become popular, e.g. to get something better than JavaScript to be able to run in browsers, and to make languages with good support for large projects to be easier to use for novices and small ones, so people don't keep starting out in a place they don't want to end up.
- DrFalkyn 2y ago
  With Web Assembly you can write in any language, even C++. Unfortunately it doesn’t expose the DOM, so you still need JavaScript
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
I don't think the value of senior developers is so much in knowing how more things work, but rather that they've learnt (over many projects of increasing complexity) how to design and build larger more complex systems, and this knowledge mostly isn't documented for LLMs to learn from. An LLM can do the LLM thing and copy designs it has seen, but this is cargo-cult behavior - copy the surface form of something without understanding why it was built that way, and when a different design would have been better for a myriad of reasons. This is really an issue for all jobs, not just software development, where there is a large planning and reasoning component. Most of the artifacts available to train an LLM on are the end result of reasoning, not the reasoning process themselves (the day by day, hour by hour, diary of the thought process of someone exercising their journeyman skills). As far as software is concerned, even the end result of reasoning is going to have very limited availability when it comes to large projects since there are relatively few large projects that are open source (things like Linux, gcc, etc). Most large software projects are commercial and proprietary. This is really one of the major weaknesses of LLM-as-AGI, or LLM-as-human-worker-replacement - their lack of ability to learn on the job and pick up a skill for themselves as opposed to needing to have been pre-trained on it (with the corresponding need for training data). In-context learning is ephemeral and anyways no substitute for weight updates where new knowledge and capabilities have been integrated with existing knowledge into a consistent whole.

arrowsmith 2y ago

threetonesun 2y ago

It’s the “CTO’s nephew” trope but at 100x the cost.

bdhcuidbebe 2y ago

Yea, i agree fully. real programming of course wont go away. But in the public eye it lost its mysticism as seemingly anyone can code now. Of course that aint true and noone managed to create anything of substance by prompting alone.

weatherlite 2y ago
How do we define real programming? I'm working on python and JS codebases in my startup. So very high level stuff. However to reason well about everything that goes on in our code is no small feat for an LLM (or a human), if its able to take our requirements , understand the business logic and just start refactoring and creating new features on a codebase that is quite big, well yeah, that sounds like AGI to me. In that case I don't see why it won't be able to hack on kernels.
- skydhash 2y ago
  The fact that you don't see why is the issue. Both python and JS are very permissive and their runtime env is very good. More often than not, you're just dealing with logic bugs and malformed domain data. A kernel codebase like Linux is one where there are many motivated individual trying every trick to get the computer to do something. And you're usually dealing with leaner abstractions because general safety logic is not performant enough. It's a bit like the difference between a children playground and a construction site.
  - weatherlite 2y ago
    > More often than not, you're just dealing with logic bugs Definitely. More often than not you're dealing with logic bugs. So the thing solving them will sometimes have to be able to reason quite well across large code bases (not every bug of course, but quite often) to the point I don't really see how it's different than general intelligence if it can do that well. And if it gets to the point its AGIish , I don't see why it can't do Kernel work (or in the very least - reduce the amount of jobs dramatically in that space as well). Perhaps you can automate 50% of the job where we're not really thinking at all as programmers, but the other 50% (or less, or more, debatable) involves planning, reasoning, debugging, thinking. Even if all you do is python and js.

hombre_fatal 2y ago

I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It was Ruby on Rails. I built some popular services without knowing how anything worked. There was always a gem (lib) for it. And Rails especially insulated the workings of anything. An S3 avatar upload system was `gem install carrierwave` and then `mount_uploader :avatar, AvatarUploader`. It added an avatar <input type="file"> control to the User form. But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long, especially once you've built a few things, and you keep learning new things. And you keep wanting to build different things. Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that. You get better, you learn more, and you become the question-answerer. And one day you sheepishly look at your question history in amazement at how far you've come.

thechao 2y ago
I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  > more sophisticated tech stacks Please don't do this, pick more boring tech stacks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 instead. "Sophisticated" tech stacks are a huge waste, so please save the sophisticated stuff for the 0.1% of the time where you actually need it.
  - 2y ago

weatherlite 2y ago

There's no need for tens of millions of OS Kernel devs , most of us are writing business logic CRUD apps. Also, it's not entirely clear to me why LLMs should get extremely good in web app development but not OS development, as far as I can see it's the amount and quality of training data that counts.

wesselbindt 2y ago
> as far as I can see it's the amount and quality of training data that counts Well there's your reason. OS code is not as in demand or prevalent as crud web app code, so there's less relevant data to train your models on.
- woah 2y ago
  The OS code that exists is much higher quality so the signal to noise ratio is much better
  - wesselbindt 2y ago
    I think arguably there's still a quantity issue, but I'm no expert on LLMs. Plus I hear the windows source code is a bit of a nightmare. But for every windows there's a TempleOS I suppose.

eitally 2y ago

I agree. It's the current generation's version of what happened with the advent of Javascript frameworks about 15 years ago, when suddenly web devs stopped learning how computers actually work. There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing, can debug complex code bases, and can make appropriate decisions about how to apply technology to business problems. That said, AI agents are absolutely going to put a bunch of lower end devs out of work in the near term. I wouldn't want to be entering the job market in the next couple of years....

mixmastamyk 2y ago
> There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing Unfortunately they won’t be found due to horrible tech interviews focused on “culture” (*-isms), leetcode under the gun, or resume thrown in trash at first sight from lack of full degree. AMHIK.
chasd00 2y ago
> I wouldn't want to be entering the job market in the next couple of years.... I bet there's a software dev employment boom about 5 years away once it becomes obvious competent people are needed to unwind and rework all the llm generated code.
- atlintots 2y ago
  Except juniors are not going to be the competent people you're looking for to unwind those systems. Personally, no matter how it plays out, I feel like the entry-level market in this field is going to take a hit. It will become much more difficult and competitive.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wesselbindt 2y ago

> Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality. Airplane manufacturers have proved themselves more than willing to sacrifice safety for profits. What makes you think they would stop short of using LLMs?

AlexCoventry 2y ago

> people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering Perhaps Python will become the new assembly code. :-)

x86hacker1010 2y ago

You think this like newcomers can’t use the LLM to more deeply understand these topics in addition to glue. This mindset is a fallacy as newcomers are more adept and passionate as any other generation. They have better tools and can compete just the same.

tharne 2y ago

> Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality. Found the guy who's never worked for a large publicly-traded company :) Do you know what's out of touch with reality? Thinking that $BIG_CORP execs who are compensated based on the last three months of stock performance will do anything other than take shortcuts and cut corners given the chance.

SoftTalker 2y ago

We've been in this world for decades. Most developers couldn't write an operating system to save their life. Most could not write more than a simple SQL query. They sling code in some opinionated dev stack that abstracts the database and don't think too hard about the low-level details.

aussieguy1234 2y ago
They'll probably go a step further and use an ORM instead of writing queries. Since ORMs generally write crap unoptimized sql for all but the simplest of queries, this will lead to performance issues once things scale up.

rapind 2y ago

> Somebody needs to write that operating system the LLM runs on. Or your bank's backend system that securely stores your money. Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality. When they do this, I really want to know they did this. Like an organic food label. Right now AI is this buzzword that companies self-label with for marketing, but when that changes, I still want to see who's using AI to handle my data.

dartos 2y ago

I don’t think “prompt engineering” will remain its own field. It’s just modern SEO and SEO will eat it, eventually. Prompt engineering as a service makes more sense than having on-staff people anyway, since your prompt’s effectiveness can change from model to model. Have someone else deal with platform inconsistencies, like always.

ljm 2y ago

The enshittification will come for the software engineers themselves eventually, because so many businesses out there only have their shareholders in mind and not their customers, and if a broken product or a promise of a product is enough to boost the stock then why bother investing in the talent to build it properly? Look at Google and Facebook - absolute shithouse services now that completely fail to meet the basic functionality they had ~20 years ago. Google still rakes in billions rendering ads in the style of a search engine and Facebook the same for rendering ads in the format of a social news feed. Why even bother with engineering anything except total slop?

hintymad 2y ago

Would technical depth change the fundamental supply and demand, though? If we view AI as a powerful automation tool, it's possible that the overall demand will be lowered so much that the demand of the deep technical expertise will go down as well. Take EE industry, for instance, the technical expertise required to get things done is vast and deep, yet the demand has not been so good, compared to the software industry.

shortrounddev2 2y ago

> younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together This was true before LLMs though. A lot of people just glue javascript libraries together

KerrAvon 2y ago

yup. the good news is this should make interviewing easier; bad news is there'll be fewer qualified candidates. the other thing, though, is that you and I know that LLMs can't write or debug operating systems, but the people who pay us and see LLMs writing prose and songs? hmm

efitz 2y ago

On a recent AllIn podcast[1], there was a fascinating discussion between Aaron Levie and Chamath Palihapitiya about how LLMs will (or will not) supplant software developers, which industries, total addressable markets (TAMs), and current obstacles preventing tech CEOs from firing all the developers right now. It seemed pretty obvious to me that Chamath was looking forward to breaking his dependence on software developers, and predicts AI will lead to a 90% reduction in the market for software-as-a-service (and the related jobs). Regardless of point of view, it was an eye opening discussion to hear a business leader discussing this so frankly, but I guess not so surprising since most of his income these days is from VC investments. [1] https://youtu.be/hY_glSDyGUU?t=4333 https://youtu.be/hY_glSDyGUU?t=4333

devoutsalsa 2y ago

I hired a junior developer for a couple months and was incredibly impressed with what he was able to accomplish with a paid ChatGPT subscription on a greenfield project for me. He’d definitely struggle with a mature code base, it you have to start somewhere!

foota 2y ago

I think I've seen the comparison with respect to training data, but it's interesting to think of the presence of LLMs as a sort of barrier to developing skills akin to pre-WW2 low background radiation steel (which, fun fact, isn't actually that relevant anymore, since background radiation levels have dropped significantly since the partial end of nuclear testing)

brightball 2y ago

One of my first bosses was a big Perl guy. I checked on what he was doing 15 years later and he was one of 3 people at Windstream handling backbone packet management rules. You just don’t run into many people comfortable with that technology anymore. It’s one of the big reasons I go out of my way to recruit talks on “old” languages to be included at the Carolina Code Conference every year.

benatkin 2y ago

When I see people trying to define which programmers will enjoy continued success as AI continues to improve, I often see One True Scotsman used. I wish more would try to describe what the differentiating skills and circumstances are instead of just saying that real programmers should still be in demand. I think maybe raw talent is more important than how much you "genuinely love coding" (https://x.com/AdamRackis/status/1888965636833083416 https://x.com/AdamRackis/status/1888965636833083416) or how much of a real programmer you are. This essay captures raw talent pretty well IMO: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...

zahlman 2y ago

>I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. My experience with Stack Overflow, the Python forums, etc. etc. suggests that we've been there for a year or so already. On the one hand, it's revolutionary that it works at all (and I have to admit it works better than "at all"). But when it doesn't work, a significant fraction of those users will try to get experienced humans to fix the problem for them, for free - while also deluding themselves that they're "learning programming" through this exercise.

trod1234 2y ago

It is far more likely that everything, and not just IT, but everything collapses than we make it to the point you mention. LLMs replace entry level people who invested in education. They would have the beginning knowledge, but there's no means to become better because opportunities are non-existent because they replaced these positions. Its a sequential pipeline failure of talent development. In the meantime you have the mid and senior level people who cannot pass their knowledge on, they age out, and die. What happens when you hit a criticality point where production which is dependent on these systems, and it can no longer continue. The knowledge implicit in production is lost, the economic incentives have been poisoned. The distribution systems are destroyed. How do you bootstrap recovery for something that effectively took several centuries to build in the first place, but not in centuries but in weeks/months. If this isn't sufficient enough to explain the core of the issue. Check out the Atari/Nintendo crash, which isn't nearly as large as this but goes into the dangers of destroying your distributor networks. If you pay attention to the details, you'll see Atari's crash was fueled by debt financing, and in the process they destroyed their distributor networks with catastrophic losses. After that crash, Nintendo couldn't get shelf-space; no distributor would risk the loss without a guarantee. They couldn't advertise as video games. They had to trojan horse the perception of what they were selling, and guarantee it. There is a documentary on Amazon which covers this, playing with power. Check it out.

yodsanklai 2y ago

> as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. I'm not worried about that at all. Many young people are passionate, eager to learn and build things. They won't become suddenly dumb and lazy because they have this extra tool available to them. I think it's the opposite. They'll be better than their seniors because they'll have AI help them improving and learn faster.

AgentK20 2y ago
Have you _seen_ the tragedy that is occurring in primary and secondary education right now with students using LLMs for the bulk of their coursework? Humans, and most forms of life in general, are lazy. They take the lowest energy route to a solution that works, whether that solution is food, shelter, or the answer to a homework question or problem at work. To some degree, this is good: An experienced <animal/student/engineer> has well-defined mental pathways towards getting what they need in as little time/energy as possible. I myself have dozens of things that I don't remember offhand, but that I remember a particular google query will get me to what I need (chmod args being the one that comes to mind). This leaves mental resources available for more important or difficult-to-acquire knowledge, like the subtle nuances of a complex system or cat pictures. The problem is a lack of balance, and in some instances skipping the entirety of Critical Reasoning. Why go through the effort of working your way through a problem when you would rather be doing <literally anything else> with your time. Iterate on this to the extreme, with what feels like a magic bullet that can solve anything, and your skills *will* atrophy. Of course there are exceptions to this trend. Star pupils exist in any generation who will go out of their way to discover answers to questions they have, re-derive understanding of things just for the sake of it, and apply their passions towards solving problems they decide are worth solving. The issue is the _average_ person, given an _average_ (e.g. if in America, under-funded) education, with an _average_ mentor, will likely choose the path of least resistance.

aucisson_masque 2y ago

Governor Gavin Newsom proposed to use AI agents to manage the California budget. Using ai to write critical code doesn't seem far stretched to me. Doing it right now would be suicidal of course, but in a few years when ai is even better ? It sure is coming. We're already speaking seriously about ai surgeon, we are already using ai to do radiography doctors job and found it to be more reliable. Some job are really at risk in the near future, that's obvious. I'm no developer so I got no bias towards it.

aussieguy1234 2y ago

I'm aware of a designer, no coding skills, who is going to turn his startup idea into an MVP using LLMs. If that ever got serious, they would need an actual engineer to maintain and improve things.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

The "prompt" engineering is also going to create a ton of cargocult tips and tricks- endless shell scripts, that do nothing but look spectacular, with one or two important commands at the end. Fractal classes, that nobody knows why they exist. Endless boilerplate. And the ai will be trained on this- and thus cluelessness reinforced and baked in. Omnissiah, hear our prayers in the terminal for we are but -h less man (bashes keyboard with a ritual wrench).

jerpint 2y ago

I think a good analogy is being able to drive a car vs understanding the engine of a car. Both are useful, but you wouldn’t hire a mechanic drive you around

bigfishrunning 2y ago
If cars were as unreliable as most software, you'd need a mechanic to drive you around.

justanotherunit 2y ago

This is so on point IMO, I feel like there is no better time than to learn more low level languages than now. Since the hype will in the end resolve around insanely technical people carrying all the major weight.