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We are now a few years into this latest "AI revolution." I keep hearing about how AI is coming for all our jobs. But people who actually try to use AI for codin

We are now a few years into this latest "AI revolution." I keep hearing about how AI is coming for all our jobs. But people who actually try to use AI for coding largely don't seem convinced. Can anyone cite any smashing successes for AI? Are there any unicorn startups, or candidates to become one, that are staffed by say 5 really savvy users of AI? A story like that could be convincing of these claims about software engineering becoming a domain of prompt engineering.

bongodongobob 2y ago
People aren't getting fired and 1-1 replaced by an AI agent. It's making people more productive so you can do more with less. I don't know why this needs to be constantly repeated.
- furyofantares 2y ago
  Programming has a very long history of tools that make people more productive so they can do more with less, with it always leading to more programming jobs. This is also constantly repeated.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  > People aren't getting fired and 1-1 replaced by an AI agent. Tell that to all the customer service AI chatbots. They don't need as many real CS agents anymore because one chatbot can reply to hundreds or thousands of tickets with useless garbage copy-pasted from the FAQ. Given that even most real CS agents also only do that nowadays anyway, yeah they've been replaced. This tends to be incredibly effective at CS's real job, which is to make customers with problems go away from being able to make it to bothering the actual consumer-unfriendly-decision-makers. If you start looking for this you will see it absolutely everywhere. Chatbots are really really good at making people too frustrated and exhausted to pursue other routes. There are a few companies whose CS actually still is good (like Mila Cares!!!) but in my experience most CS just wants to get rid of the annoying customer. Also, sort of related (to me, blame my autism), I've heard that the practical effect of a suicide hotline can be annoying the caller enough for them not to do the thing. I've had at least one or two friends told me that this was the effect it had on them. (they're doing better nowadays)
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    (Shrug) Well, those people can go do something else now. We'll all end up better off. Most anti-AI arguments can be dispensed with by recasting them in terms of the broken-window fallacy. This is certainly one of them.
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      > Most anti-AI arguments can be dispensed with by recasting them in terms of the broken-window fallacy. This is certainly one of them. Could you explain how and what fits the broken-window fallacy here? Is it the AI abolitionists? (I know at least one person who violently hates AI and anything relating to AI and firmly believes that there is absolutely no place for AI or LLMs anywhere in the world and that any usage at all for any reason whatsoever is utterly deplorable. I don't talk to this person since they tend to flame at others for using or talking about AI for any reason.)
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        The people working in CS now, as you originally pointed out, are already under strict orders not to say anything an AI chatbot wouldn't say, and are not empowered to do anything the company wouldn't empower an AI chatbot to do. So why are we employing humans to do a chatbot's job? Just to give them something to do? That's where the broken-window fallacy comes in. It's not just a matter of paying someone to break all the glass in town to make work for the glaziers, it's like responding to the invention of cheap shatterproof glass with the same flawed zero-sum reasoning. (I'm rate-limited so can't reply, but my position is basically that 100% unemployment is a good thing, not a bad one. We can't get to a post-scarcity society by doing things the same way we've been doing them, or by retrying the same alternatives that have failed before.)
        LoganDark 2y ago
        IME, simple labor farms (that you get paid actual money for, anyway...) are hard to find in the US because of like, worker protections. Are there any entry-level jobs besides CS that can be done with essentially no thought or reasoning whatsoever? I'm not asking this to be insulting, I'm saying there is a type of person who could be good at that type of CS but doesn't have the skill, attention, or energy to do much of anything more. Those people still deserve a way to be useful to the world, I think. I keep seeing cashiers replaced by self-checkout machines at stores, fast food jobs might be too complicated for certain people (like me - I couldn't do it), places like say the Apple Genius Bar require you to know what you're doing, etc. Maybe I'm super naive and first-world by missing something super obvious, but if I am then maybe I could learn something today.
- PessimalDecimal 2y ago
  You might be repeating it because it's a baseless assertion. Where's the proof? OpenAI seems to be hiring lots of people [1]. Should they at least be able to do more with less? Can you answer my question about an "AI native" company that never even had people to replace? [1] https://openai.com/careers/search/ https://openai.com/careers/search/
  - jack_pp 2y ago
    Ah so the company that produced the most cutting edge technology needs to hire more people to stay ahead.. and that's proof LLMs aren't making most of the programmers in the trenches more productive. Let's see if an LLM can reason better than you do. (You're Alice btw) : Alice's response has a few issues: Shifts the Goalpost: Bob's point was about AI's impact on existing jobs—he's arguing that AI increases productivity, not that companies like OpenAI don't need people. Alice shifts the discussion to whether OpenAI, an AI company, is hiring people, which isn't directly relevant to Bob's claim. Strawman Argument: She implies that if AI is truly productive, OpenAI shouldn't need to hire. But OpenAI is in a high-growth phase, likely hiring to build and maintain the technology, not to replace traditional roles with AI. AI productivity doesn't mean zero hiring—it often means hiring in different areas or scaling faster. Burden of Proof Misstep: Alice demands proof from Bob while making her own claim ("baseless assertion") without providing evidence that AI is directly causing 1:1 replacements. Weak "AI Native" Point: The question about "AI native" companies might sound clever, but it doesn't address Bob's core argument about existing companies using AI to do more with fewer people. Alice's frustration is understandable, but her argument misses the mark because it's more about OpenAI's hiring practices than the broader point of productivity gains through AI.
    - PessimalDecimal 2y ago
      I can't tell if you even read through these or just pasted them. I (Alice) supposedly made my own claim without providing evident that AI is directly causing 1:1 replacements. I think you (really whatever "AI" tool you used without much critique of its output) have this entirely backwards. That's the most glaring, but not only issue with all of this. Sort of proving my point here...
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  If you think trying to debug a hallucinated code block is more productive than understanding how to write it in the first place is a good thing I have to think you're one of the stupid ones.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    Personal anecdote but I don't debug hallucinated code blocks. I only use LLM to speed up what I would've already written myself. I'm autistic enough to where it's not easy for it to introduce subtle bugs because I still have all the constraints in my head. Rather than having it solve any problem for me I approach it from the angle of just save me some typing of what I already know I want to write.
    - sieabahlpark 2y ago
      [dead]
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
The problem isn't what AI can do today, the problem is that it isn't slowing down in what it can do. We keep hearing that AI will stop advancing any year now, but it just keeps getting better. But ya, I see the future for SWEs as not only being able code, but being able to review code created by AI, and being able to write prompts to get AI to generate code.
Natsu 2y ago
These things only get better with time, not worse, and they can already do a lot. Otherwise we might as well predict that when all is said and done, AI will have no more impact than the fax machine, which is what someone once thought of the internet, and which seemed a lot more reasonable on dial-up AOL than in today's world.
soneca 2y ago
There is this tweet about impressive companies with short headcount: https://x.com/benln/status/1889388151770325427?s=46&t=tl870zcOakLGmMgtaq_uZw https://x.com/benln/status/1889388151770325427?s=46&t=tl870z... But I don’t think the advent of LLM is responsible for any job cut in these companies. The overall startup ecosystem is (Stripe, cloud computing, efficient customer support software, etc). But the fact that Cursor is one of those impressive companies shows the demand for AI assistance is huge
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Instagram was 10 people and $1B at acquisition. Cursor is a modified version of an existing monolith maintained by Microsoft. Much of their AI is offloaded and their own bespoke model is relatively light (cursor-tab). It's not surprising it can be ran with 20 people. I can totally see an incompetent CEO running today's cursor with 300 people. But it's a leadership style, not so much down to programming efficiency. I will concede that the programmers at Cursor are more efficient than they would be without access to LLMs.
NikolaNovak 2y ago
Coding is a specific use case. It's more common to see obvious shrinkage in e.g. HR and customer service departments. It didn't start with the LLM flavour of AI, but it has been accelerated. In other places, look for hiring freezes and re-orgs, rather than straight and obvious message from management: "Say bye to Bob, he's been replaced with this AI agent". To everybody's point, not a new thing - automation, including what may of us have worked on for decades, by definition is simplifying, making more efficient, or reducing human effort. But to your specific question - HN seems to have a couple of excited stories a week about a person saying "I don't really know coding, but I've started my tiny niche SaaS with help of AI". Which is not necessarily a bad thing, and more along the curve of all the other advancements - perhaps the question is the speed of improvement(replacement) and change on this particular one.
- thefz 2y ago
  > "I don't really know coding, but I've started my tiny niche SaaS with help of AI" How are you going to debug/extend the code if you don't know how it works?
  - NikolaNovak 2y ago
    I'm not the expert / one of those people who have done it, but my thoughts FWIW: The phrase "don't really know" is kind of doing the heavy lifting here - for example, I myself haven't done professional programming in 20 years, but I know the basics. Enough to be structured in my design / requirements / direction to LLM, and to read and comprehend the advice others have discovered and shared. With that in mind, extending the code seems to work fairly well - start with basic requirements and extend them through LLM. Having not done coding in 2 decades, I've asked ChatGPT to create a python script to interact with a website's API and retrieve an object; then I've extended it to retrieve and store multiple objects, then to input for parameters, etc. it was fun! Anyhoo, the use case discussed is not necessarily a complex enterprise resourcing application; but a little niche webapp with simple requirements, created by somebody who understands the domain itself more than coding, and which may be exciting to a target requirement, seems eminently doable with today's LLMs -- again, the proof is in the pudding of people who have done it, rather than my claims :)
pizzafeelsright 2y ago
We aren't hiring new software engineers. Anyone skilled enough to code can now codes in any language. Jobs aren't being replaced but no longer added. I also demonstrated how an intern (1st year) was able to replace a 5 year experience position after six weeks of working with AI. We're seeing a 5x acceleration in shipping after our first year with limited exposure.
- XorNot 2y ago
  What is your company? Because honestly: I straight up do not believe this.
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    Software engineering is 10% knowing how to code and 90% knowing what to code. So I don't buy it either. I use LLMs daily for programming. Sometimes they're helpful. But I see them like one of our first power tools (comparable to the language servers and compilers in our toolbelt).
    - seanp2k2 2y ago
      At BigCos, software engineering is also spending 70% of your day in meetings or handling housekeeping chores in JIRA / Monday / Airtable / Notion / GDocs. I’d love to send an AI agent to meet with PMs to give status updates and take notes if any of their needs change if it could actually do those things efficiently and reliably. Right now, it’d be about the equivalent of having a PM call a phone tree system and leave a voicemail that might get transcribed 85% correctly.
      - SR2Z 2y ago
        This sounds like you want an AI to turn bullet points into text so that the PM's AI can turn it back into bullet points and vice-versa. Don't you think that it might be more efficient to just communicate with the bullet points?
trod1234 2y ago
The nature of the thing is that people are dis-incentivized to share their trade secrets when there is competitive advantage in not sharing. What the competent people are saying is often overshadowed by the echo chamber of misleading information, since there is profit in driving people towards chaos.
shsbdncudx 2y ago
I use ai “voraciously” coding every day. Even the best models are not very good. I found that if something is hard to do it’s because it’s not documented properly, and therefore it’s not in the data anyway so the model can’t out, just guess. If it is documented properly then I don’t need its help so much. I barely get 1 line of code that I’d actually ship unchanged. It’s really useful but still has a long way to go

bongodongobob 2y ago

People aren't getting fired and 1-1 replaced by an AI agent. It's making people more productive so you can do more with less. I don't know why this needs to be constantly repeated.

furyofantares 2y ago
Programming has a very long history of tools that make people more productive so they can do more with less, with it always leading to more programming jobs. This is also constantly repeated.
LoganDark 2y ago
> People aren't getting fired and 1-1 replaced by an AI agent. Tell that to all the customer service AI chatbots. They don't need as many real CS agents anymore because one chatbot can reply to hundreds or thousands of tickets with useless garbage copy-pasted from the FAQ. Given that even most real CS agents also only do that nowadays anyway, yeah they've been replaced. This tends to be incredibly effective at CS's real job, which is to make customers with problems go away from being able to make it to bothering the actual consumer-unfriendly-decision-makers. If you start looking for this you will see it absolutely everywhere. Chatbots are really really good at making people too frustrated and exhausted to pursue other routes. There are a few companies whose CS actually still is good (like Mila Cares!!!) but in my experience most CS just wants to get rid of the annoying customer. Also, sort of related (to me, blame my autism), I've heard that the practical effect of a suicide hotline can be annoying the caller enough for them not to do the thing. I've had at least one or two friends told me that this was the effect it had on them. (they're doing better nowadays)
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  (Shrug) Well, those people can go do something else now. We'll all end up better off. Most anti-AI arguments can be dispensed with by recasting them in terms of the broken-window fallacy. This is certainly one of them.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    > Most anti-AI arguments can be dispensed with by recasting them in terms of the broken-window fallacy. This is certainly one of them. Could you explain how and what fits the broken-window fallacy here? Is it the AI abolitionists? (I know at least one person who violently hates AI and anything relating to AI and firmly believes that there is absolutely no place for AI or LLMs anywhere in the world and that any usage at all for any reason whatsoever is utterly deplorable. I don't talk to this person since they tend to flame at others for using or talking about AI for any reason.)
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      The people working in CS now, as you originally pointed out, are already under strict orders not to say anything an AI chatbot wouldn't say, and are not empowered to do anything the company wouldn't empower an AI chatbot to do. So why are we employing humans to do a chatbot's job? Just to give them something to do? That's where the broken-window fallacy comes in. It's not just a matter of paying someone to break all the glass in town to make work for the glaziers, it's like responding to the invention of cheap shatterproof glass with the same flawed zero-sum reasoning. (I'm rate-limited so can't reply, but my position is basically that 100% unemployment is a good thing, not a bad one. We can't get to a post-scarcity society by doing things the same way we've been doing them, or by retrying the same alternatives that have failed before.)
      - LoganDark 2y ago
        IME, simple labor farms (that you get paid actual money for, anyway...) are hard to find in the US because of like, worker protections. Are there any entry-level jobs besides CS that can be done with essentially no thought or reasoning whatsoever? I'm not asking this to be insulting, I'm saying there is a type of person who could be good at that type of CS but doesn't have the skill, attention, or energy to do much of anything more. Those people still deserve a way to be useful to the world, I think. I keep seeing cashiers replaced by self-checkout machines at stores, fast food jobs might be too complicated for certain people (like me - I couldn't do it), places like say the Apple Genius Bar require you to know what you're doing, etc. Maybe I'm super naive and first-world by missing something super obvious, but if I am then maybe I could learn something today.
PessimalDecimal 2y ago
You might be repeating it because it's a baseless assertion. Where's the proof? OpenAI seems to be hiring lots of people [1]. Should they at least be able to do more with less? Can you answer my question about an "AI native" company that never even had people to replace? [1] https://openai.com/careers/search/ https://openai.com/careers/search/
- jack_pp 2y ago
  Ah so the company that produced the most cutting edge technology needs to hire more people to stay ahead.. and that's proof LLMs aren't making most of the programmers in the trenches more productive. Let's see if an LLM can reason better than you do. (You're Alice btw) : Alice's response has a few issues: Shifts the Goalpost: Bob's point was about AI's impact on existing jobs—he's arguing that AI increases productivity, not that companies like OpenAI don't need people. Alice shifts the discussion to whether OpenAI, an AI company, is hiring people, which isn't directly relevant to Bob's claim. Strawman Argument: She implies that if AI is truly productive, OpenAI shouldn't need to hire. But OpenAI is in a high-growth phase, likely hiring to build and maintain the technology, not to replace traditional roles with AI. AI productivity doesn't mean zero hiring—it often means hiring in different areas or scaling faster. Burden of Proof Misstep: Alice demands proof from Bob while making her own claim ("baseless assertion") without providing evidence that AI is directly causing 1:1 replacements. Weak "AI Native" Point: The question about "AI native" companies might sound clever, but it doesn't address Bob's core argument about existing companies using AI to do more with fewer people. Alice's frustration is understandable, but her argument misses the mark because it's more about OpenAI's hiring practices than the broader point of productivity gains through AI.
  - PessimalDecimal 2y ago
    I can't tell if you even read through these or just pasted them. I (Alice) supposedly made my own claim without providing evident that AI is directly causing 1:1 replacements. I think you (really whatever "AI" tool you used without much critique of its output) have this entirely backwards. That's the most glaring, but not only issue with all of this. Sort of proving my point here...
sieabahlpark 2y ago
If you think trying to debug a hallucinated code block is more productive than understanding how to write it in the first place is a good thing I have to think you're one of the stupid ones.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  Personal anecdote but I don't debug hallucinated code blocks. I only use LLM to speed up what I would've already written myself. I'm autistic enough to where it's not easy for it to introduce subtle bugs because I still have all the constraints in my head. Rather than having it solve any problem for me I approach it from the angle of just save me some typing of what I already know I want to write.
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

The problem isn't what AI can do today, the problem is that it isn't slowing down in what it can do. We keep hearing that AI will stop advancing any year now, but it just keeps getting better. But ya, I see the future for SWEs as not only being able code, but being able to review code created by AI, and being able to write prompts to get AI to generate code.

Natsu 2y ago

These things only get better with time, not worse, and they can already do a lot. Otherwise we might as well predict that when all is said and done, AI will have no more impact than the fax machine, which is what someone once thought of the internet, and which seemed a lot more reasonable on dial-up AOL than in today's world.

soneca 2y ago

There is this tweet about impressive companies with short headcount: https://x.com/benln/status/1889388151770325427?s=46&t=tl870zcOakLGmMgtaq_uZw https://x.com/benln/status/1889388151770325427?s=46&t=tl870z... But I don’t think the advent of LLM is responsible for any job cut in these companies. The overall startup ecosystem is (Stripe, cloud computing, efficient customer support software, etc). But the fact that Cursor is one of those impressive companies shows the demand for AI assistance is huge

teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Instagram was 10 people and $1B at acquisition. Cursor is a modified version of an existing monolith maintained by Microsoft. Much of their AI is offloaded and their own bespoke model is relatively light (cursor-tab). It's not surprising it can be ran with 20 people. I can totally see an incompetent CEO running today's cursor with 300 people. But it's a leadership style, not so much down to programming efficiency. I will concede that the programmers at Cursor are more efficient than they would be without access to LLMs.

NikolaNovak 2y ago

Coding is a specific use case. It's more common to see obvious shrinkage in e.g. HR and customer service departments. It didn't start with the LLM flavour of AI, but it has been accelerated. In other places, look for hiring freezes and re-orgs, rather than straight and obvious message from management: "Say bye to Bob, he's been replaced with this AI agent". To everybody's point, not a new thing - automation, including what may of us have worked on for decades, by definition is simplifying, making more efficient, or reducing human effort. But to your specific question - HN seems to have a couple of excited stories a week about a person saying "I don't really know coding, but I've started my tiny niche SaaS with help of AI". Which is not necessarily a bad thing, and more along the curve of all the other advancements - perhaps the question is the speed of improvement(replacement) and change on this particular one.

thefz 2y ago
> "I don't really know coding, but I've started my tiny niche SaaS with help of AI" How are you going to debug/extend the code if you don't know how it works?
- NikolaNovak 2y ago
  I'm not the expert / one of those people who have done it, but my thoughts FWIW: The phrase "don't really know" is kind of doing the heavy lifting here - for example, I myself haven't done professional programming in 20 years, but I know the basics. Enough to be structured in my design / requirements / direction to LLM, and to read and comprehend the advice others have discovered and shared. With that in mind, extending the code seems to work fairly well - start with basic requirements and extend them through LLM. Having not done coding in 2 decades, I've asked ChatGPT to create a python script to interact with a website's API and retrieve an object; then I've extended it to retrieve and store multiple objects, then to input for parameters, etc. it was fun! Anyhoo, the use case discussed is not necessarily a complex enterprise resourcing application; but a little niche webapp with simple requirements, created by somebody who understands the domain itself more than coding, and which may be exciting to a target requirement, seems eminently doable with today's LLMs -- again, the proof is in the pudding of people who have done it, rather than my claims :)

pizzafeelsright 2y ago

We aren't hiring new software engineers. Anyone skilled enough to code can now codes in any language. Jobs aren't being replaced but no longer added. I also demonstrated how an intern (1st year) was able to replace a 5 year experience position after six weeks of working with AI. We're seeing a 5x acceleration in shipping after our first year with limited exposure.

XorNot 2y ago
What is your company? Because honestly: I straight up do not believe this.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Software engineering is 10% knowing how to code and 90% knowing what to code. So I don't buy it either. I use LLMs daily for programming. Sometimes they're helpful. But I see them like one of our first power tools (comparable to the language servers and compilers in our toolbelt).
  - seanp2k2 2y ago
    At BigCos, software engineering is also spending 70% of your day in meetings or handling housekeeping chores in JIRA / Monday / Airtable / Notion / GDocs. I’d love to send an AI agent to meet with PMs to give status updates and take notes if any of their needs change if it could actually do those things efficiently and reliably. Right now, it’d be about the equivalent of having a PM call a phone tree system and leave a voicemail that might get transcribed 85% correctly.
    - SR2Z 2y ago
      This sounds like you want an AI to turn bullet points into text so that the PM's AI can turn it back into bullet points and vice-versa. Don't you think that it might be more efficient to just communicate with the bullet points?

trod1234 2y ago

The nature of the thing is that people are dis-incentivized to share their trade secrets when there is competitive advantage in not sharing. What the competent people are saying is often overshadowed by the echo chamber of misleading information, since there is profit in driving people towards chaos.

shsbdncudx 2y ago

I use ai “voraciously” coding every day. Even the best models are not very good. I found that if something is hard to do it’s because it’s not documented properly, and therefore it’s not in the data anyway so the model can’t out, just guess. If it is documented properly then I don’t need its help so much. I barely get 1 line of code that I’d actually ship unchanged. It’s really useful but still has a long way to go