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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.

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.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Sophistication doesn't imply any increase or decrease in "boringness".
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      The dictionary definition of 'sophisticated' is "changed in a deceptive or misleading way; not genuine or pure; unrefined, adulterated, impure." Pretty much the polar opposite of "boring" in a technology context.
      - rcxdude 2y ago
        That is an extremely archaic definition that's pretty far from modern usage, especially in a tech context
      - whstl 2y ago
        No, this is not "the" dictionary definition. This definition is obsolete according to Wikitionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sophisticated https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sophisticated (Wikitionary is the first result that shows when I type your words)
      - Timwi 2y ago
        No clue what dictionary you looked at but this is not at all what dictionaries actually say.
  - sophacles 2y ago
    That's great advice when you're building a simple CRUD app - use the paved roads for the 10^9th instance. It's terrible advice when you're building something that will cause that boring tech to fall over. Or when you've reached the limits of that boring tech and are still growing. Or when the sophisticated tech lowers CPU usage by 1% and saves your company millions of dollars. Or when that sophisticate tech saves your engineers hours and your company 10s of millions. Or just: when the boring tech doesn't actually do the things you need it to do.
- gorjusborg 2y ago
  > I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen. So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits production, will require skilled people to figure out how to support it.
  - kmoser 2y ago
    We will see both: lots of poor code, lots of neutral code (LLMs cranking out reasonably well written boilerplate), and even some improved code (by devs who use LLMs to ferret out inefficiencies and bugs in their existing, human-written codebase). This is no different from what we see with any tool or language: the results are highly dependent on the experience and skills of the operator.
    - gorjusborg 2y ago
      You've missed my core point if you think those isn't different. Before AI there was always someone who understood the code/system. In the a world where people are having machines build the entire system, there is potentially no human that has ever understood it. Now, we are talking about a yet unseen future; I have yet to see a real world system that did not have a human driving the design. But, maintaining a system that nobody has ever understood could be ultra-hardmode.
      - kmoser 2y ago
        Humans will always have a hand in the design because they need to explain the real-world constraints to the AI. Sure, the code it produces may be complex, but if the AI is really as smart as you're claiming it will eventually be, then it will also have the ability to explain how the code works in plain English (or your human language of choice). Even today, LLMs are remarkably good at summarizing what code does. Philosophical question: how is LLM-produced code that nobody has ever understood any different from human-written legacy code that nobody alive today understands?
- thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
  I agree with this stance. Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it. I know that is confronting for a lot of people, but I think it is better to accept it, and spend time thinking about what your experience is worth. (A lot!)
  - zahlman 2y ago
    >Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it. I would have agreed, until I started seeing the kinds of questions they're asking.
  - Glawen 2y ago
    > Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it. How? Students now are handing out LLM homework left and right. They are not nurturing the resolve to learn. We are training a cohort of youngs who will give up without trying hard, and end learning nothing
MattGaiser 2y ago
Or assuming software needs to be of a certain quality. Software engineers 15 years ago would have thought it crazy to ship a full browser with every desktop app. That’s now routine. Wasteful? Sure. But it works. The need for low level knowledge dramatically decreased.
lolinder 2y ago
> Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? I feel like it's a bit different this time because LLMs aren't just an abstraction. To make an analogy: Ruby on Rails serves a similar role as highways—it's a quick path to get where you're going, but once you learn the major highways in a metro area you can very easily break out and explore and learn the surface streets. LLMs are a GPS, not a highway. They tell you what to do and where to go, and if you follow them blindly you will not learn the layout of the city, you'll just learn how to use the GPS. I find myself unable to navigate a city by myself until I consciously force myself off of Google Maps, and I don't find that having used GPS directions gives me a leg up in understanding the city—I'm starting from scratch no matter how many GPS-assisted trips I've taken. I think the analogy helps both in that the weaknesses in LLM coding are similar and also that it's not the end of the world. I don't need to know how to navigate most cities by memory, so most of the time Google Maps is exactly what I need. But I need to recognize that leaning on it too much for cities that I really do benefit from knowing by heart is a problem, and intentionally force myself to do it the old-fashioned way in those cases.
- abeppu 2y ago
  I think also a critical weakness is that LLMs are trained on the code people write ... and our code doesn't annotate what was written by a human and what was suggested by a tool. In your analogy, this would be like if your sat nav system suggests that you turn right where other people have turned right ... because they were directed to turn by their sat nav.
  - thedanbob 2y ago
    In fact, I'm pretty sure this already happens and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Some of the "alternate routes" Google Maps has suggested for me in the past are almost certainly due to other people making unscheduled detours for gas or whatever, and the algorithm thinks "oh this random loop on a side street is popular, let's suggest it". And then anyone silly enough to follow the suggestion just adds more signal to the noise.
    - 2y ago
Capricorn2481 2y ago
> But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long That's the difference. This is how you feel because you like programming to some extent. Having worked closely with them, I can tell you there are many people going into bootcamps that flat out dislike programming and just heard it pays well. Some of them get jobs, but they don't want to learn anything. They just want to do as much that doesn't get them fired. They are not curious even with tasks they are supposed to do. I don't think this is inherently wrong, as I don't feel like gatekeeping the profession if their bosses feel they add value. But this is a classic case of losing the junior > expert pipeline. We could easily find ourselves in a spot in 30 years where AI coding is rampant but there's no experts to actually know what it does.
- ytpete 2y ago
  There have been people entering the profession for (purported) money and not love of the craft for at least as long as the 20 years I've been in it. So long as there are also people who still genuinely enjoy it and take pride in doing the job well, then the junior->expert pipeline isn't lost. I buy that LLMs may shift the proportion of those two camps. But doubt it will really eliminate those who genuinely love building things with code.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    I'm not sure it takes more than a shift, though. There aren't 0 people in training to be a doctor, but we have a shortage for sure and it causes huge problems.
unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
> 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. The article is right in a zoomed-in view (fundamental skills will be rare and essential), but in the big picture the critique in the comment is better (folks rarely start on nand gates). Programmers of the future will have less need to know code syntax the same way current programmers don't have to fuss with hardware-specific machine code. The people who still do hardware-specific code, are they currently in demand? The marketplace is smaller, so results will vary and probably like the article suggests, be less satisfactory for the participant with the time-critical need or demand.
- raducu 2y ago
  > The article is right in a zoomed-in view. First of all, I think the problems of the industry were long overdue. It started with Twitter and it proved it can be done. AI just made it easier psychologically because it's much easier to explore and modify existing code and not freak out "omg, omg, omg, we've lost this guy and ony he understands the code and we're so lost without him". AI just removes the incentives to hoard talent. I also think of excel/spreadsheets and how it did in fact change accounting industry forever. Every claim the author makes about software developers could have been made about accounting after the advent of electronic spreadsheets. I don't want to even get started on the huge waste and politics in the industry. I'm on the 3rd re-write of a simple task that removes metrics in Grafana which saves the team maybe 50$ monthly. If the team was cut in half, I'm sure we'd simply not do half the bullshit "improvements" we do.
jayd16 2y ago
That's fine and all but I'm not sure the nand-gate folks are out of a job either.
geodel 2y ago
Great points. I see my journey from an offshore application support contractor to full time engineer and learning a lot along the way. Along the journey I've seen folks who held good/senior engineering roles just stagnated or moved to management role. Industry is now large enough to have all sort of people. Growing, stagnating, moving out, moving in, laid off, retiring early, or just plain retiring etc.
catlover76 2y ago
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amanda99 2y ago
I agree, and I also share your experience (guess I was a bit earlier with PHP). I think what's left out though is that this is the experience of those who are really interested and for whom "it's not satisfying" to stay there. As tech has turned into a money-maker, people aren't doing it for the satisfaction, they are doing it for the money. That appears to cause more corner cutting and less learning what's underneath instead of just doing the quickest fix that SO/LLM/whatever gives you.
tgv 2y ago
> And then they backfill their knowledge over time. If only. There are too many devs who've learnt to write JS or Python, and simply won't change. I've seen one case where someone ported an existing 20k C++ app to a browser app in the most unsuitable way with emscripten, where a 1100 lines of typescript do a much better job.
britzkopf 2y ago
Who the hell, in today's market, is going to hire an engineer with a tenuous grasp on foundational technological systems, with the hope that one day they will backfill?!
- deleted 2y ago
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- Terr_ 2y ago
  Yeah, my recollection of the past couple decades is many companies felt like: "Someone else will surely train up the junior developers, we'll just hire them away after they know what they're doing." This often went with an oddly-bewildered: "Wow, why is it so hard to find good candidates?" I don't see how that trend would change much just because junior developers can use LLMs as a crutch. (Well, except when it helps them cheat at an interview that wasn't predictive of what the job really needed.)
peoplefromibiza 2y ago
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csmpltn 2y ago
> "But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long" It's not about satisfaction: it's literally dangerous and can bankrupt your employer, cause immense harm to your customers and people at home, and make you unhirable as an engineer. Let's take your example of "an S3 avatar upload system", which you consider finished after writing 2 lines of code and a couple of packages installed. What makes sure this can't be abused by an attacker to DDOS your system, leading to massive bills from AWS? What happens after an attacker abuses this system and takes control of your machines? What makes sure those avatars are "safe-for-work" and legal to host in your S3 bucket? People using LLMs and feeling all confident about it are the equivalent of hobby carpenters after watching a DIY video on YouTube and building a garden shed over the weekend. You're telling me they're now qualified to go build buildings and bridges? > "It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that." I meet people like this during job interviews all of the time, if I'm hiring for a position. Can't tell you how many people with 10+ years of industry experience I met recently that can't explain how to read data from a local file, from the machine's file system.
askonomm 2y ago
Difference here being that you actually learned the information about Ruby on Rails, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a clipboard-like vessel that passes information from an LLM onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the code. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the code, they debug the LLM for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here never gets stored in the brain, making any future learning or evolving impossible. I've had to work with developers that are over dependent on LLM's, one didn't even know how to undo code, they had to ask an LLM to undo. Almost as if the person is a zombie or something. It's scary to witness. And as soon as you ask them to explain their rationale for the solution they came up with - dead silence. They can't, because they never actually _thought_.
- Kerrick 2y ago
  Difference here being that you actually learned the information about computers, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a typist-like vessel that passes information from an architect onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the compiled instructions. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the machine code, they complain about the compiler for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here never gets stored in the brain, making any future learning or evolving impossible. I've had to work with developers that are over dependent on high-level languages. One didn't even know how to trace execution in machine code; they had to ask a debugger. Almost as if the person is a zombie or something. It's scary to witness. And as soon as you explain them to explain their memory segmentation strategy - dead silence. They can't, because they never actually _thought_.
  - floatrock 2y ago
    Abstractions on top of abstractions on top of turtles... It'll be interesting to see what kinds of new tools come out of this AI boom. I think we're still figuring out what the new abstraction tier is going to be, but I don't think the tools to really work at that tier have been written yet.
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sevensor 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. Well put. There’s a similar phenomenon in industrial maintenance. The “grey tsunami.” Skilled electricians, pipefitters, and technicians of all stripes are aging out of the workforce. They’re not being replaced, and instead of fixing the pipeline, many factories are going out of business, and many others are opting to replace equipment wholesale rather than attempt repairs. Everybody loses, even the equipment vendors, who in the long run have fewer customers left to sell to.
sterlind 2y ago
At present, LLMs are basically Stack Overflow with infinite answers on demand... of Stack Overflow quality and relevance. Prompting is the new Googling. It's a critical base skill, but it's not sufficient. The models I've tried aren't that great at algorithm design. They're abysmal at generating highly specific, correct code (e.g. kernel drivers, consensus protocols, locking constructs.) They're good plumbers. A lot of programming is plumbing, so I'm happy to have the help, but they have trouble doing actual computer science. And most relevantly, they currently don't scale to large codebases. They're not autonomous enough to pull a work item off the queue, make changes across a 100kloc codebase, debug and iterate, and submit a PR. But they can help a lot with each individual part of that workflow when focused, so we end up in the perverse situation where junior devs act as the machine's secretary, while the model does most of the actual programming. So we end up de-skilling the junior devs, but the models still can't replace the principal devs and researchers, so where are the principal devs going to come from?
- zahlman 2y ago
  >The models I've tried aren't that great at algorithm design. They're abysmal at generating highly specific, correct code (e.g. kernel drivers, consensus protocols, locking constructs.) They're good plumbers. A lot of programming is plumbing, so I'm happy to have the help, but they have trouble doing actual computer science. I tend towards tool development, so this suggests a fringe benefit of LLMs to me: if my users are asking LLMs to help with a specific part of my API, I know that's the part that sucks and needs to be redesigned.
zahlman 2y ago
>Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? Because of the mode of interaction. When you dive into a framework that provides a ton of scaffolding, and "backfill your knowledge over time" (guilty! using Nikola as a SSG has been my entry point to relearn modern CSS, for example), you're forced to proceed by creating your own loop of experimentation and research. When you interact with an LLM, and use forums to figure out problems the LLM didn't successfully explain to you (about its own output), you're in chat mode the whole time. Even if people are willing to teach you to fish, they won't voluntarily start the lesson, because you haven't shown any interest in it. And the fish are all over the place - for now - so why would you want to learn? >It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that. Of course nobody on HN would relate to that first-hand. But as someone with extensive experience curating Stack Overflow, I can assure you I have seen it second-hand many times.
ropable 2y ago
I very much relate to the sentiment of starting out with simple tools and then backfilling knowledge gaps as I went. For me it was Excel -> Access shared DB forms -> Django web application framework -> etc. From spreadsheets, to database design, to web application development, to scaling HTTP services, and on and on it goes.
jjav 2y ago
> But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long I agree, but have found that for a lot of people that is totally satisfying enough. Most people don't care to really understand how the code works.
pipes 2y ago
I'm not so sure, I think a junior dev on my team might be being held back by AI, he's good at using it. However he was really struggling to do something very basic. In my view he just needs to learn that syntax and play around with it in a throw away console app. But I think AI is crutch that may distract from doing that. Then again it is utterly fantastic at explaining small bits of code so it could be an excellent teacher too.
markisus 2y ago
This is a great point. I remember my first computer programming class was Java. The teacher said “just type public static void main( string[] args) at the top”. I asked why and he said it didn’t matter for now just memorize that part. That was great advice. At that point it was more important to get a feel for how computers behave and how programs are structured on a high level. I just kept typing that cryptic line mindlessly on top of all my programs so that I could get to the other stuff. Only many months later I looked into the mysterious line and understood what all the keywords meant. It’s funny now that I haven’t programmed Java for more than a decade and the “public static void main” incantation is still burned into my memory.

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.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Sophistication doesn't imply any increase or decrease in "boringness".
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    The dictionary definition of 'sophisticated' is "changed in a deceptive or misleading way; not genuine or pure; unrefined, adulterated, impure." Pretty much the polar opposite of "boring" in a technology context.
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      That is an extremely archaic definition that's pretty far from modern usage, especially in a tech context
    - whstl 2y ago
      No, this is not "the" dictionary definition. This definition is obsolete according to Wikitionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sophisticated https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sophisticated (Wikitionary is the first result that shows when I type your words)
    - Timwi 2y ago
      No clue what dictionary you looked at but this is not at all what dictionaries actually say.
- sophacles 2y ago
  That's great advice when you're building a simple CRUD app - use the paved roads for the 10^9th instance. It's terrible advice when you're building something that will cause that boring tech to fall over. Or when you've reached the limits of that boring tech and are still growing. Or when the sophisticated tech lowers CPU usage by 1% and saves your company millions of dollars. Or when that sophisticate tech saves your engineers hours and your company 10s of millions. Or just: when the boring tech doesn't actually do the things you need it to do.
gorjusborg 2y ago
> I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen. So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits production, will require skilled people to figure out how to support it.
- kmoser 2y ago
  We will see both: lots of poor code, lots of neutral code (LLMs cranking out reasonably well written boilerplate), and even some improved code (by devs who use LLMs to ferret out inefficiencies and bugs in their existing, human-written codebase). This is no different from what we see with any tool or language: the results are highly dependent on the experience and skills of the operator.
  - gorjusborg 2y ago
    You've missed my core point if you think those isn't different. Before AI there was always someone who understood the code/system. In the a world where people are having machines build the entire system, there is potentially no human that has ever understood it. Now, we are talking about a yet unseen future; I have yet to see a real world system that did not have a human driving the design. But, maintaining a system that nobody has ever understood could be ultra-hardmode.
    - kmoser 2y ago
      Humans will always have a hand in the design because they need to explain the real-world constraints to the AI. Sure, the code it produces may be complex, but if the AI is really as smart as you're claiming it will eventually be, then it will also have the ability to explain how the code works in plain English (or your human language of choice). Even today, LLMs are remarkably good at summarizing what code does. Philosophical question: how is LLM-produced code that nobody has ever understood any different from human-written legacy code that nobody alive today understands?
thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
I agree with this stance. Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it. I know that is confronting for a lot of people, but I think it is better to accept it, and spend time thinking about what your experience is worth. (A lot!)
- zahlman 2y ago
  >Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it. I would have agreed, until I started seeing the kinds of questions they're asking.
- Glawen 2y ago
  > Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it. How? Students now are handing out LLM homework left and right. They are not nurturing the resolve to learn. We are training a cohort of youngs who will give up without trying hard, and end learning nothing

MattGaiser 2y ago

Or assuming software needs to be of a certain quality. Software engineers 15 years ago would have thought it crazy to ship a full browser with every desktop app. That’s now routine. Wasteful? Sure. But it works. The need for low level knowledge dramatically decreased.

lolinder 2y ago

> Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? I feel like it's a bit different this time because LLMs aren't just an abstraction. To make an analogy: Ruby on Rails serves a similar role as highways—it's a quick path to get where you're going, but once you learn the major highways in a metro area you can very easily break out and explore and learn the surface streets. LLMs are a GPS, not a highway. They tell you what to do and where to go, and if you follow them blindly you will not learn the layout of the city, you'll just learn how to use the GPS. I find myself unable to navigate a city by myself until I consciously force myself off of Google Maps, and I don't find that having used GPS directions gives me a leg up in understanding the city—I'm starting from scratch no matter how many GPS-assisted trips I've taken. I think the analogy helps both in that the weaknesses in LLM coding are similar and also that it's not the end of the world. I don't need to know how to navigate most cities by memory, so most of the time Google Maps is exactly what I need. But I need to recognize that leaning on it too much for cities that I really do benefit from knowing by heart is a problem, and intentionally force myself to do it the old-fashioned way in those cases.

abeppu 2y ago
I think also a critical weakness is that LLMs are trained on the code people write ... and our code doesn't annotate what was written by a human and what was suggested by a tool. In your analogy, this would be like if your sat nav system suggests that you turn right where other people have turned right ... because they were directed to turn by their sat nav.
- thedanbob 2y ago
  In fact, I'm pretty sure this already happens and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Some of the "alternate routes" Google Maps has suggested for me in the past are almost certainly due to other people making unscheduled detours for gas or whatever, and the algorithm thinks "oh this random loop on a side street is popular, let's suggest it". And then anyone silly enough to follow the suggestion just adds more signal to the noise.
  - 2y ago

Capricorn2481 2y ago

> But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long That's the difference. This is how you feel because you like programming to some extent. Having worked closely with them, I can tell you there are many people going into bootcamps that flat out dislike programming and just heard it pays well. Some of them get jobs, but they don't want to learn anything. They just want to do as much that doesn't get them fired. They are not curious even with tasks they are supposed to do. I don't think this is inherently wrong, as I don't feel like gatekeeping the profession if their bosses feel they add value. But this is a classic case of losing the junior > expert pipeline. We could easily find ourselves in a spot in 30 years where AI coding is rampant but there's no experts to actually know what it does.

ytpete 2y ago
There have been people entering the profession for (purported) money and not love of the craft for at least as long as the 20 years I've been in it. So long as there are also people who still genuinely enjoy it and take pride in doing the job well, then the junior->expert pipeline isn't lost. I buy that LLMs may shift the proportion of those two camps. But doubt it will really eliminate those who genuinely love building things with code.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  I'm not sure it takes more than a shift, though. There aren't 0 people in training to be a doctor, but we have a shortage for sure and it causes huge problems.

unyttigfjelltol 2y ago

> 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. The article is right in a zoomed-in view (fundamental skills will be rare and essential), but in the big picture the critique in the comment is better (folks rarely start on nand gates). Programmers of the future will have less need to know code syntax the same way current programmers don't have to fuss with hardware-specific machine code. The people who still do hardware-specific code, are they currently in demand? The marketplace is smaller, so results will vary and probably like the article suggests, be less satisfactory for the participant with the time-critical need or demand.

raducu 2y ago
> The article is right in a zoomed-in view. First of all, I think the problems of the industry were long overdue. It started with Twitter and it proved it can be done. AI just made it easier psychologically because it's much easier to explore and modify existing code and not freak out "omg, omg, omg, we've lost this guy and ony he understands the code and we're so lost without him". AI just removes the incentives to hoard talent. I also think of excel/spreadsheets and how it did in fact change accounting industry forever. Every claim the author makes about software developers could have been made about accounting after the advent of electronic spreadsheets. I don't want to even get started on the huge waste and politics in the industry. I'm on the 3rd re-write of a simple task that removes metrics in Grafana which saves the team maybe 50$ monthly. If the team was cut in half, I'm sure we'd simply not do half the bullshit "improvements" we do.

jayd16 2y ago

That's fine and all but I'm not sure the nand-gate folks are out of a job either.

geodel 2y ago

Great points. I see my journey from an offshore application support contractor to full time engineer and learning a lot along the way. Along the journey I've seen folks who held good/senior engineering roles just stagnated or moved to management role. Industry is now large enough to have all sort of people. Growing, stagnating, moving out, moving in, laid off, retiring early, or just plain retiring etc.

catlover76 2y ago

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amanda99 2y ago

I agree, and I also share your experience (guess I was a bit earlier with PHP). I think what's left out though is that this is the experience of those who are really interested and for whom "it's not satisfying" to stay there. As tech has turned into a money-maker, people aren't doing it for the satisfaction, they are doing it for the money. That appears to cause more corner cutting and less learning what's underneath instead of just doing the quickest fix that SO/LLM/whatever gives you.

tgv 2y ago

> And then they backfill their knowledge over time. If only. There are too many devs who've learnt to write JS or Python, and simply won't change. I've seen one case where someone ported an existing 20k C++ app to a browser app in the most unsuitable way with emscripten, where a 1100 lines of typescript do a much better job.

britzkopf 2y ago

Who the hell, in today's market, is going to hire an engineer with a tenuous grasp on foundational technological systems, with the hope that one day they will backfill?!

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Terr_ 2y ago
Yeah, my recollection of the past couple decades is many companies felt like: "Someone else will surely train up the junior developers, we'll just hire them away after they know what they're doing." This often went with an oddly-bewildered: "Wow, why is it so hard to find good candidates?" I don't see how that trend would change much just because junior developers can use LLMs as a crutch. (Well, except when it helps them cheat at an interview that wasn't predictive of what the job really needed.)

peoplefromibiza 2y ago

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csmpltn 2y ago

> "But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long" It's not about satisfaction: it's literally dangerous and can bankrupt your employer, cause immense harm to your customers and people at home, and make you unhirable as an engineer. Let's take your example of "an S3 avatar upload system", which you consider finished after writing 2 lines of code and a couple of packages installed. What makes sure this can't be abused by an attacker to DDOS your system, leading to massive bills from AWS? What happens after an attacker abuses this system and takes control of your machines? What makes sure those avatars are "safe-for-work" and legal to host in your S3 bucket? People using LLMs and feeling all confident about it are the equivalent of hobby carpenters after watching a DIY video on YouTube and building a garden shed over the weekend. You're telling me they're now qualified to go build buildings and bridges? > "It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that." I meet people like this during job interviews all of the time, if I'm hiring for a position. Can't tell you how many people with 10+ years of industry experience I met recently that can't explain how to read data from a local file, from the machine's file system.

askonomm 2y ago

Difference here being that you actually learned the information about Ruby on Rails, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a clipboard-like vessel that passes information from an LLM onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the code. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the code, they debug the LLM for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here never gets stored in the brain, making any future learning or evolving impossible. I've had to work with developers that are over dependent on LLM's, one didn't even know how to undo code, they had to ask an LLM to undo. Almost as if the person is a zombie or something. It's scary to witness. And as soon as you ask them to explain their rationale for the solution they came up with - dead silence. They can't, because they never actually _thought_.

Kerrick 2y ago
Difference here being that you actually learned the information about computers, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a typist-like vessel that passes information from an architect onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the compiled instructions. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the machine code, they complain about the compiler for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here never gets stored in the brain, making any future learning or evolving impossible. I've had to work with developers that are over dependent on high-level languages. One didn't even know how to trace execution in machine code; they had to ask a debugger. Almost as if the person is a zombie or something. It's scary to witness. And as soon as you explain them to explain their memory segmentation strategy - dead silence. They can't, because they never actually _thought_.
- floatrock 2y ago
  Abstractions on top of abstractions on top of turtles... It'll be interesting to see what kinds of new tools come out of this AI boom. I think we're still figuring out what the new abstraction tier is going to be, but I don't think the tools to really work at that tier have been written yet.
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sevensor 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. Well put. There’s a similar phenomenon in industrial maintenance. The “grey tsunami.” Skilled electricians, pipefitters, and technicians of all stripes are aging out of the workforce. They’re not being replaced, and instead of fixing the pipeline, many factories are going out of business, and many others are opting to replace equipment wholesale rather than attempt repairs. Everybody loses, even the equipment vendors, who in the long run have fewer customers left to sell to.

sterlind 2y ago

At present, LLMs are basically Stack Overflow with infinite answers on demand... of Stack Overflow quality and relevance. Prompting is the new Googling. It's a critical base skill, but it's not sufficient. The models I've tried aren't that great at algorithm design. They're abysmal at generating highly specific, correct code (e.g. kernel drivers, consensus protocols, locking constructs.) They're good plumbers. A lot of programming is plumbing, so I'm happy to have the help, but they have trouble doing actual computer science. And most relevantly, they currently don't scale to large codebases. They're not autonomous enough to pull a work item off the queue, make changes across a 100kloc codebase, debug and iterate, and submit a PR. But they can help a lot with each individual part of that workflow when focused, so we end up in the perverse situation where junior devs act as the machine's secretary, while the model does most of the actual programming. So we end up de-skilling the junior devs, but the models still can't replace the principal devs and researchers, so where are the principal devs going to come from?

zahlman 2y ago
>The models I've tried aren't that great at algorithm design. They're abysmal at generating highly specific, correct code (e.g. kernel drivers, consensus protocols, locking constructs.) They're good plumbers. A lot of programming is plumbing, so I'm happy to have the help, but they have trouble doing actual computer science. I tend towards tool development, so this suggests a fringe benefit of LLMs to me: if my users are asking LLMs to help with a specific part of my API, I know that's the part that sucks and needs to be redesigned.

zahlman 2y ago

>Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? Because of the mode of interaction. When you dive into a framework that provides a ton of scaffolding, and "backfill your knowledge over time" (guilty! using Nikola as a SSG has been my entry point to relearn modern CSS, for example), you're forced to proceed by creating your own loop of experimentation and research. When you interact with an LLM, and use forums to figure out problems the LLM didn't successfully explain to you (about its own output), you're in chat mode the whole time. Even if people are willing to teach you to fish, they won't voluntarily start the lesson, because you haven't shown any interest in it. And the fish are all over the place - for now - so why would you want to learn? >It's like presuming that StackOverflow will keep you as a question-asker your whole life when nobody here would relate to that. Of course nobody on HN would relate to that first-hand. But as someone with extensive experience curating Stack Overflow, I can assure you I have seen it second-hand many times.

ropable 2y ago

I very much relate to the sentiment of starting out with simple tools and then backfilling knowledge gaps as I went. For me it was Excel -> Access shared DB forms -> Django web application framework -> etc. From spreadsheets, to database design, to web application development, to scaling HTTP services, and on and on it goes.

jjav 2y ago

> But it's not satisfying to stay at that level of ignorance very long I agree, but have found that for a lot of people that is totally satisfying enough. Most people don't care to really understand how the code works.

pipes 2y ago

I'm not so sure, I think a junior dev on my team might be being held back by AI, he's good at using it. However he was really struggling to do something very basic. In my view he just needs to learn that syntax and play around with it in a throw away console app. But I think AI is crutch that may distract from doing that. Then again it is utterly fantastic at explaining small bits of code so it could be an excellent teacher too.

markisus 2y ago

This is a great point. I remember my first computer programming class was Java. The teacher said “just type public static void main( string[] args) at the top”. I asked why and he said it didn’t matter for now just memorize that part. That was great advice. At that point it was more important to get a feel for how computers behave and how programs are structured on a high level. I just kept typing that cryptic line mindlessly on top of all my programs so that I could get to the other stuff. Only many months later I looked into the mysterious line and understood what all the keywords meant. It’s funny now that I haven’t programmed Java for more than a decade and the “public static void main” incantation is still burned into my memory.