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At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

• Suppafly 1y ago
  >At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work Only because the people responding have never done warehouse work.
  • Shocka1 1y ago
    As someone who packed pears for my first job in a warehouse at 15 1/2 years old for 10 hours a week, this comment is great. Working in a warehouse for pennies is about as worse as it gets. Now, as a well paid software engineer, a very bad day doesn't even come close to that experience.
• jrs235 1y ago
  https://archive.ph/HVZRL https://archive.ph/HVZRL
• g0db1t 1y ago
  [dead]
• jt2190 1y ago
  This is interesting: > “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.” > This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts. > They also use A.I. to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding.
  • timr 1y ago
    I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs. Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly boring now. I'd rather do just about anything than write another iteration of a web form or connect some javascript widget to some other javascript widget in the framework flavor of the week. To some extent, then, working with LLMs has restored some of the fun of coding because it takes care of the tedious part, and I get to solve the interesting problems.
    • danielbln 1y ago
      I'm with you. I love solving puzzles to make something go. In the past that involved writing code, but it's not the code writing that I love, it's the problem solving and building. And I get plenty of that now, in a post-LLM world.
    • ape4 1y ago
      Fixing bugs in my own code is fine. In other's code its less fun.
      • notyourwork 1y ago
        That’s the wrong mentality. You and your team own all the code. A bugs peer is your bug too.
        • SonOfKyuss 1y ago
          Not OP but I’ll give my perspective. I have no problem fixing someone else’s bugs up to a point, but I also don’t want to be the one cleaning up someone else’s mess who didn’t take time to do proper testing but is getting rated higher than me for clearing more tasks last month because they cut corners
      • 1y ago
• FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Welcome to the club. Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions? I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.
  • rvz 1y ago
    > Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions? Yes. We don't need to pay $$$ for simply changing elements on a page or adopting the next web framework to replace another. The hype in many web technologies that lots of developers that have fell for also contributed to the low quality of the software that you use right now. All of this work to pay developers to over-engineer inefficient solutions and to give a false sense of meaningful work contributed to the "psyop" of how highly inflated their salaries were to do their jobs in the ZIRP era. And AI has shown which developer jobs it is really good at, and it is consistently good at web developer roles. So I'd expect those roles to be significantly less valuable.
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      Software development is a lot more than web development.
    • layer8 1y ago
      AI is good at web developer roles because that’s what has been most prevalent in the training material.
  • danielbln 1y ago
    This begins the golden age of creative generalists (until that's also in the chopping block).
    • bix6 1y ago
• chongli 1y ago
  What even are most programmers at Amazon doing? It seems like all the interesting bits (the MVP of Amazon's major products) was developed long ago. All the low-hanging fruit is gone so the task is now focused on squeezing the few remaining drops of efficiency out of the stone.
  • John23832 1y ago
    That’s most major tech companies at this point. The fun was building closer to the mvp of the core product. Once that’s done, it’s just corporate druggery with computers.
    • Bombthecat 1y ago
      Yeah, most of the things in IT are just in maintenance mode now. You need way way less people for that.
  • iLoveOncall 1y ago
    Until you join a FAANG you simply cannot imagine the complexity of the systems and how much has not been automated and how much there is to build. I've been in Amazon for close to a decade, and I constantly think "I can't believe X hasn't been automated in the 30 years that Amazon has existed and is still done on Excel". Most engineers will work on new features for at least half of the year, and I personally work on brand new projects or at least features constantly.
    • hellzbellz123 1y ago
      working in a warehouse, just recently built over the last 4 years, and the pallet management is done via excel. im pretty sure the scanner app is just a frontend. horrified to think the totes are done the same way.
    • saratogacx 1y ago
      Doing work that helps another team will rarely result in getting any credit and is a great way to get stuck in the bottom of the stack rank (top grading or whatever they call it now). So automating anything that integrates across the org chart won't happen because the incentive structure is against it.
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  “OK Andrew, we’re looking for someone for this senior developer and they’ve got to be really really great at copying and pasting between Claude and an IDE. Now we’re going to set up a whiteboard test here and you can demonstrate to us your best copying and pasting.” “errrr, do I do any actual coding in the job?” “Well, yes, inasmuch as anyone does these days. It’s mostly copying and pasting though, but hey that’s what coding IS now, right?” “OK are you ready for your coding test, here it is: what key is COPY? And what key is PASTE?”
  • eitally 1y ago
    But for about ten years, at least, the majority of Google swe rules have been talked about as "just moving protobufs", which is effectively the same. If your job is just plumbing other people's designs for existing products, how fun can it be?
    • biorach 1y ago
      I think you do not understand what A Google SWE actually does
      • NBJack 1y ago
        It's a running joke internally. But not always far from the truth. Translating business level protobufs into solution level protobufs is indeed the job of entire teams sometimes.
        • xarope 1y ago
          to a certain extent, this is correct: “Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.” — Linus Torvalds
• ath3nd 1y ago
  The place known for: - High degree of warehouse injuries (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-injuries.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/business/economy/amazon-w...) - Making its delivery drivers piss in bottles (https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/delivery-drivers-sue-amazon-for-being-forced-to-pee-in-bottles/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...) - Illegally busting unions (https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/amazon-union-busting-north-carolina/ https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/amazon-union-bust...) - Forcing people back into their offices on five day RTO (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-5-day-rto-mandate-policy-employees-experiences-2025-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-5-day-rto-mandate-pol...) Is now making its white-collar employees' life resemble ...warehouse work? Unthinkable!
  • NBJack 1y ago
    Ruby/Dawson in SLU even looks like a warehouse on the inside, complete with chain link fence decor, exposed concrete floors with a splash of paint, exposed ceiling infrastructure, and spartan decorations. And it was built over a decade ago.
• pbiggar 1y ago
  About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say. I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity and autonomy. Coding was always solving problems, and never felt like some sort of assembly line. But in a lot of companies, this is how it was constructed, with PMs setting up sprints and points, etc. Similarly, I spoke to a doctor about how much they loved being able to work remotely at their role - with 2-3 days a week where they just responded to email and saw patients over telehealth. It felt very "ticket" focused and not at all the high status doctor role I imagined. I suspect that both those roles will be lost to AI. If your role is taking a ticket that says "the box should be green, not red", and nothing more, that's the sort of thing that AI is very capable of.
  • randallsquared 1y ago
    > They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. Based on my experience with sprint teams, breaking things down into just a couple hours of work per ticket implies that someone else is doing an enormous amount of prep work to create a dozen tickets per feature. I agree that your friend is performing the work of a development system. I've heard this called "programming in Developer" as opposed to whatever language the developer is using.
  • leoedin 1y ago
    I've had plenty of colleagues who expect the job to be that. Just working on a small ticket and moving it to "to test" when done. It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.
  • wiseowise 1y ago
    > They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. Where do I sign up?
• usrnm 1y ago
  I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.
  • Braxton1980 1y ago
    How is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation?
    • Mistletoe 1y ago
      You were writing all the code for automation.
      • devnullbrain 1y ago
        This is the message between the lines of much of the anti-dev schadenfreude, but actually spelling it out makes it obvious: it's not true. Only a minority of dev jobs are automating people out of work. There are entirely new industries like game dev that can't exist without it. Software development has gained such a political whipping-boy status, you'd be forgiven for forgetting it's been the route to the middle classes for a lot of people who would otherwise be too common, weird or foreign.
      • exe34 1y ago
        The kind of automation I write is stuff that wouldn't get done if person had to do it. But with automation, it becomes possible and profitable.
        • sokoloff 1y ago
          I think a lot of genAI coding efficiency will have the same property: costs will go down to the point where things that couldn’t be done affordably in software in 2020 will be affordable in 2030. That could well result in a net increase in tech employment.
• picardo 1y ago
  Sure, AI makes writing code easy, but code review remains a bottleneck. The individual coders are finding ways to use AI to improve their workflows, but as long as organizational culture remains stuck in the old ways of reviewing code, the overall throughput will not improve significantly. That's been my personal experience at Amazon. I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long. You need to have high degrees of trust within a team for this to work at scale, and that's very rarely the case in my group.
  • iLoveOncall 1y ago
    > I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long. Hum yeah, because it's insanely hard to properly review a CR that's more than a few pages long?
    • nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
      Username checks out. Bio even more so. Don't want to be oncall when a LGTM 1000-liner got dumped on prod.
  • Anamon 1y ago
    Stuck in the old ways of reviewing code? In other words, what you're suggesting should be the new way is to simply accept the LLM's code salad and push it to production as soon as the pipeline lights up green?
• rvz 1y ago
  Well if the majority of developers are mostly using web-based technologies such as JS, TS, HTML and CSS, and all you're doing is modifying the site and shuffling around elements + a11y addition, etc that is something an AI can do in seconds. Seems indeed to be like Warehouse work, which is why Web developers will be the first to be affected by AI. Doesn't matter if you are "senior" or "staff" in Web development. AI is already senior staff level in that.
• timkam 1y ago
  Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely enough to keep the narrative alive.
  • codr7 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • Pet_Ant 1y ago
      I see it more as replacing shitty code monkeys because it leaves the hard parts behind.
    • closewith 1y ago
      But you of course with your superior skills are above that risk?
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • soraminazuki 1y ago
        No. The actual competency of AI won't matter. Lots of corporate executives will prioritize short-term cost savings, with little concern for the degradation for essential systems. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining the systems that users and society rely on. That's part of the reason why the current hype is blown way out of proportion by these people. Because who has faced consequences for behaving this way?
      • codr7 1y ago
        [flagged]
• dpflan 1y ago
  How is the impact of this assessed? How is system quality / performance changed? Is there an increase in high severity defects as more code gets pushed out more quickly?
• Havoc 1y ago
  Feels like this could be part of a broader shift towards dis-empowering knowledge workers. The cog in machine effect has always been there in the corporate world, but somehow it feels like the technique has been refined in the last couple of years.
  • bgwalter 1y ago
    The solution is a no-commercial use enhanced GPL license. Corporations are actively using our open source against us, so we have to fight back. All these narratives about user freedom, for any purpose etc. are just propaganda these days.
• pbw 1y ago
  Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
  • jampekka 1y ago
    Another game is to distribute the gains from increased productivity more equally. E.g. in Europe as late as early 2000s working hours were reduced in response to technological development. But since then the response even from workers seems to be to demand increasingly shittier bullshit jobs to keep people busy.
  • almostgotcaught 1y ago
    Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
    • pbw 1y ago
      “I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.” Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed?
      • Supermancho 1y ago
        > Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed? Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.
• iLoveOncall 1y ago
  I'm a software engineer at Amazon and I'm directly and indirectly involved a lot in programs related to GenAI tooling. I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere, and everyone is free to completely ignore them. That said, is there an increase in expectations? Yes. But that's just normal Amazon in an employer's market, and has nothing to do with LLMs and GenAI. The comparison to Microsoft where we can witness in public the .Net maintainers fighting with the shit code generated by Copilot on their repos is ridiculous. Amazon is probably one of the companies pushing the least and being the most prudent about GenAI adoption.
  • placardloop 1y ago
    If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening. Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many teams are being told they must use AI every single day (some VPs have sent out org-wide emails saying that AI must be used), and engineers have to tell their managers how they are making use of it day-to-day. In my org, OP1 docs must include at least one section about how the team will increase use of AI. Hackathons aren’t allowed to happen anymore unless they are AI-themed. I could keep going. Amazon is absolutely forcing AI usage, and the article undersells how egregious it is.
    • iLoveOncall 1y ago
      Somehow you're dismissing my post saying it's based on my own anecdotical experience while providing your own anecdotical experience and just hearsay. There is absolutely no company-wide mandate to use GenAI. If some SDM is pushing it on his SDEs, that's an outlier and on that person alone.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  Amazon is going down. 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now they are violating EU laws and cheat the gmp developers out of a CPU replacement: https://gmplib.org/ https://gmplib.org/ Granlund's gcc optimizations probably save Amazon millions in electricity each year. But evidently they don't care about real programmers.
  • mananaysiempre 1y ago
    > 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now ... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)
    • bgwalter 1y ago
      For the EU, use this search engine: https://geizhals.eu/ https://geizhals.eu/ Amazon is not nearly the cheapest or most reliable one for hardware.
      • biosboiii 1y ago
        I am sorry but this is insane cope, Amazon is still on-top everywhere, also in Europe.
        • bgwalter 1y ago
          Nonsense. Literally the first random example I chose: https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-h13ssl-n-bulk-mbd-h13ssl-n-b-a2952743.html?hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=eu&hloc=pl&hloc=uk https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-h13ssl-n-bulk-mbd-h13ssl-n-b-... Cheapest price: EUR 675 Amazon price: EUR 875 The vendors with the cheapest price have good customer reviews as well, unlike Amazon, which has terrible ones.
        • nicolaslem 1y ago
          In Poland and neighboring countries, Amazon has some serious competition from Allegro.
• baxtr 1y ago
  >This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts. This feels like we are forcing people who rather look at code to start talking in plain language, which not every dev likes or is proficient in. Devs won’t be replaced by AI. Devs will be replaced by people that can (and want to) speak to LLMs.
• gortok 1y ago
  > Companies seem to be persuaded that, like assembly lines of old, A.I. can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent. > The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. There are two issues this article brings to mind: 1. Feels like we are back when lines of code was a measure of productivity. 2. We’ve heard this tune before, and the problem we have now is that you don’t understand what you didn’t write. Software development is in large part about understanding the system from the highest level to its smallest details, and this takes away a key part of how our world works, in favor of a “cattle not pets” view of code. Now, if you don’t expect your programmers to have an understanding of the system they built, and you treat code as disposable, then you’ll center around a world where folks aren’t trained to learn a system, and I don’t see that as a world that is compatible with increased reliance on A.I.
• giantg2 1y ago
  I'm seeing the speed up and it's forcing out people with disabilities who are able to do the work at the previous slower speeds. I wonder if there are any solutions to this or if people like me are just expected to be walmart greeters.
  • selfselfgo 1y ago
    [dead]
• osigurdson 1y ago
  Why would any company want to pay a software engineer to do repetitive / factory like work? It would be better to automate that and not have any engineers from the company's perspective.
  • hbartab 1y ago
    Because engineers train the AI that'll replace them.
    • osigurdson 1y ago
      Probably better just to replace them now if they are just doing simple / repetitive tasks.
• telesilla 1y ago
  Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
  • sidibe 1y ago
    > won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI? No why would there be? Unless you are spiritual, there isn't any reason any of the physical processes that make up human thought can't be done artificially, probably much more efficiently. Society needs to confront the myth that automation is going to always open up more jobs that need human labor. It's comforting for people who hate the idea of UBI or other safety nets that people can keep "retraining". Eventually there's going to be nothing to retrain to (at least of nothing of economic value)
  • TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    I keep meaning to experiment with vibe-coded VSTs. The shell and UI parts should be easy to automate, because they're basically boilerplate. But I doubt AI knows enough about DSP to design an incredible new reverb algorithm, or is an expert on bandwidth-limited oscillator design. Or maybe it is? When I have some time, I'll find out.
    • telesilla 1y ago
      I'm sure it could replicate any existing algorithm or riff on combinations, but a good plugin is made carefully by hand by an artisan who knows what they are looking to achieve, who knows what to listen for. I'm skeptical that a pure AI algorithm would be anything but plagiarism on existing designs.
    • jwitthuhn 1y ago
      You might be interested in this video, which is about a physical guitar pedal someone made using a chatgpt-based design. Same idea but all analog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PTzq1bv9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PTzq1bv9M
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced. Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.
  • xtracto 1y ago
    You raise a good point. Ba k in the early 90s when i started with programming, my source of knowledge were magazines with code, a "programming with C/C++" book, and a lot of time. Then the internet came, and it felt like 'cheating'. Then forums came and it felt like cheating, Then SO, and so on and so forth. Now AI is eating the [software] world, and to a lot of people, it feels like cheating. I am just amazed of what i can build. In 10-15 years software will become a commodity, along with books/stories and maybe even music/art. I don't know how it looks like. But darn im excited to be here to experience it.
    • physicles 1y ago
      I was there for those changes too (I taught myself programming a couple years before we got internet), and I disagree that the internet and SO felt like cheating. No matter what resources you had, you could never get very far if you didn’t understand what your code was doing. That’s no longer true. And that democratizes these skills, which I agree could be a great thing. But do you agree that it’s important for kids to learn to think critically and systematically? Because it’s super hard to stay motivated to learn those things when LLMs do that for you (and you’re too young to tell when they’re doing a bad job of it).
  • crabl 1y ago
    As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".
• vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing. I am sure there will always be devs who are doing interesting work but I feel these opportunities will be less and less. In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,
  • pbw 1y ago
    I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular. But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff. At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.
    • pbw 1y ago
      Another datapoint is working earlier eras sound bad to me: punchcards, assembly, COBOL, FORTRAN. Yes I suspect those people had a blast.
      • s5fs 1y ago
        Ex-cobol guy here, the work was a blast! I was working on the Lawson erp for a non-profit, mostly customizing the software for their specific use case. I loved it because the tools were crazy, the language limited, and the system itself was high value to the org. Debugging took forever but the fixes were often really small changes. I often had to go into the database (oracle) and clean up the data by hand. Such fun! I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!
• curiousgal 1y ago
  > One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I. I am sick of these verbose articles that boil down to nothing basically. What the f does it mean to "produce code"? Like are we just churning out LoCs daily just for the sake of doing so?
• ManBeardPc 1y ago
  I feel my job in the future will be more secure than ever. Tons and tons of AI generated garbage code (trained on more and more existing garbage code) that the „developer“ will at a certain point no longer be able to maintain or fix. Not even speaking about trusting the output. Feels similar to all the outsourced development to cheap suppliers that inevitably collapse or create horrible maintenance overhead.
  • nlitened 1y ago
    Do you feel you would be able to “maintain and fix” LLM-generated 100-megabyte source code blobs? And if you could, do you think it would be a job you’d want to do?
    • ManBeardPc 1y ago
      No, writing a replacement. Either part by part or a whole new software system.
    • petesergeant 1y ago
      I spent 2000-2015ish as a Perl programmer, which meant I spent most of that time working for a small number of e-commerce and SaaS companies who had large codebases that had mostly been written around 2005 with some hair-raising tech practices. Nursing a nasty codebase to health bit by bit can be very rewarding.
      • wiseowise 1y ago
        > Perl programmer Perl programmers are as always ahead of the curve. Writing code that looks like LLM slop before LLMs!
      • nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
        As long as you don't have pressure to just ship X Y Z as you are doing it, in a team of 20 so any nursing you do is quickly undone by the team and its pressure to ship some half thought out feature.
  • 1y ago
• talles 1y ago
  It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job. AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.
  • SonOfKyuss 1y ago
    Agreed. I spend maybe 20% of my time writing code. The rest is gathering requirements, design, testing, scheduling. Maybe if that 20% now takes half as long, I might have time to actually write some tests and documentation
  • mk89 1y ago
    Yes, because from my observations these are the people who cannot write anymore code today - they really don't understand the newer paradigms or technologies. So Copilot enabled a lot of people to write POCs and ship them to production fast, without thinking too much about edge cases, HA, etc. And these people have become advocates in their respective companies, so that everyone is actually following inaccurate claims about productivity improvements. These are the same people quoting Google's ceo who say that 30% of newly generated code at Google is written by AI, without possibility to deny or validate it. Just blindly quote a company that has a huge conflict of interests in this field and you'll look smarter than you are. This is where we're at today. I understand these are great tools, but all I am seeing madness around. And who works with these tools on a daily basis knows it. Knows what it means, how they can be misleading, etc. But hey, everyone says we must use them ...
    • Shocka1 1y ago
      Not that I disagree, but Anthropic put out some usage statistics for their products a few months ago and IIRC, something like 40% was used for software engineering.
  • maxnevermind 1y ago
    > It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job. Exactly, but I would go further, anyone who worked in big corps know that other non 'generating new code' part is usually pretty inefficient and I would argue AI is going to change that too. So there will be much less of that abstract yapping in endless meetings or there will be less people involved in that.
• julkali 1y ago
  I think there is a fundamental misconception of the benefit / performance-improvement of LLM-aided programming: Without sacrificing code quality, it only makes coding more productive _if you already know_ what you're doing. This means that while it has a big potential for experienced programmers (making them push out more good code), you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good software.
  • neom 1y ago
    I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do think they're a bit slow, but I'm not looking for fast.
    • philipwhiuk 1y ago
      You're paying $1000 a month to build a web app for fun? This seems like a crazy solution to a situation.
      • neom 1y ago
        ...wait till you find out how much my one friend spends on golf a year!!!!! Hobbies are expensive. This will take about 3 maybe 4 months, and I think i'll enjoy playing it with and so will all my friends and family, so it's worth it I think.
        • zeroonetwothree 1y ago
          Well… many hobbies are not that expensive. But sure, $1k/month for enjoyment is totally reasonable.
        • da02 1y ago
          What type of work does he do that allow him to spend on hobbies? (In other words, "What can I do to be wealthy like your friend?".)
• tom_m 1y ago
  Hasn't that always been the case at Amazon?
  • levocardia 1y ago
    Indeed, I have heard that Amazon is a grindhouse many times before. It's understandable, in a sense: unlike other big tech companies, Amazon lives and dies on low margins. They're more like Walmart than Google, in terms of the business model at least. So they need to push devs hard and get lots of productivity out of them.
• neom 1y ago
  From the business side of the house, I only ever look at it as what can do the right job for the right money to very quickly deliver continuous value to customers. In an employee base: Experience around is always good for growing and improving my people, but it isn't necessarily tied directly to the work to be done. The shift I feel is happening is how I place the value here. Where I can imagine I would land if I was actively running a startup right now is making sure I have amazing production teams (whatever that looks like, age, location, LLM powered or otherwise) book ended by great people growers as all cogs start to squeak if they're not oiled, and experience is the best lubricant on teams, you need both.
• bookofjoe 1y ago
  I note less hostility to AI/LLM etc in the comments on this post than in previous months. Is the needle shifting?
  • bgwalter 1y ago
    There were many more throwaway accounts before (I think) the new moderation efforts. Many people cannot speak freely on this topic.
  • 000ooo000 1y ago
    Can't think of a post I've seen that was in any way dubious or critical of AI that wasn't also flagged. HN is heavily biased toward AI.
• QuiEgo 1y ago
  Amazon’s entry level SDEs are hired to answer pages and grind sev2s at 3am. AI seems set to make that worse, not better.
• tushar-r 1y ago
  20 years ago, when I first started working, Wipro and HCL Tech had been talking about making the outsourcing model into "factory-like assembly lines." This fizzled out very quickly back then, but I guess it is now coming to fruition :-|
• overgard 1y ago
  You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.) The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that's written code knows that writing code is a lot more fun than reading code, but for some reason we're delegating to the AI the actual enjoyable task and turning ourselves into glorified code reviewers. Except we don't actually review the code, it seems, we just go on with bug ridden monstrosities. I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code. I don't want my job to be reviewing LLM slop to find hallucinations and security vulnerabilities, only to try to tweak the 20,000 word salad prompt.
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    I personally find debugging and fixing code to be the most rewarding. That way you know you're (usually) strictly making an improvement.
    • overgard 1y ago
      I know I'm making an improvement by features I've shipped to customers. Bugs prevent me from shipping more features until they're fixed. I do not enjoy bugs.
  • cj 1y ago
    > I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code. IME there's an inverse relationship between how excited the person is about AI coding and their seniority as an engineer. Juniors (and non-coders) love it because now they can suddenly do things they didn't know how to do before. Seniors don't love it because it gets in their way, causes coworkers to put up low-quality AI-generated code for peer review, and struggles with any level of complexity or nuance. My fear is that AI code assistants will inadvertently stop people from progressing from Junior --> Senior since it's easier to put out work without really understanding what you're doing. Although I guess I could have said the same thing about Stack Overflow 10 years ago.
• overgard 1y ago
  This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees well. (That said I'm all for more dystopian stories so we can get past this AI-replacing-coders fad)
  • nagisa 1y ago
    Amazon pays really well. Amazon also has a number of interesting projects (e.g. a number of contributors to the rust compiler are employed by Amazon to work on rustc.) It also looks nice enough on a resume to give people a nice stepping stone towards even better opportunities.
    • lazystar 1y ago
      > Amazon pays really well maybe 10 years ago. HR is like a rabid dog, fighting for every dollar.
      • const_cast 1y ago
        They, the HR and bean counters of the world, don't see the big picture. It's optimize optimize optimize, but then they don't consider what they're actually trying to achieve. Typically if you squeeze every penny, you end up with shit. You can do it, but those costs don't just - poof - disappear. They might, and often do, become more difficult to measure. So if you're the measuring guy, it might look great to you.
        • bb88 1y ago
          Humans are fungible, typically -- or at least that's the thought process of management. Sometimes management are literally removing an unnecessary department or need to merge departments because of market conditions -- and they really don't have time to get into the nitty gritty about how that's going to affect your job. But also humans are messy apparently, so rather than try to introspect about what went wrong to make themselves a better manager, or improve their hiring process, or figure out how to remove bad managers, they punt: "Humans are messy. Metrics are actionable. Humans aren't metrics. shrug." Humans can be replaced, sure, but you can't replace a surgeon with a landscaper -- but that's not going to stop some managers from trying!
• OptionOfT 1y ago
  To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded. It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and extract more common patterns. And once you reach the limit of the context window you're essentially suck, as the LLM can no longer keep track of its patches. English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do, and more importantly, a lot of time and experience precedes code that a senior developer writes. If you want to have this senior developer 'vibe' code, then you'll need to have a way to be more precise in your prompts, and be able to articulate all learnings from your past mistakes and experience. And that is incredibly heavy. Remember, this is opposite from answering 'why did you write it like this'. This is an endless list of items that say 'don't do this, but this, in this highly specific context'.
  • torben-friis 1y ago
    Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern. The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinking about long term architecture and craftsmanship. It’s a laziness enhancer.
    • codr7 1y ago
      And once AI is not there anymore, you're back on square one. It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation. It's the wrong tool for the job, that's what it is.
      • swat535 1y ago
        How is it the wrong tool for the job? In this particular case it's excellent, it can help you find proper abstractions.. without them you wouldn't realize. I kind of view this use case as enhanced code linters
• rwyinuse 1y ago
  I'm wondering whether most other white collar jobs will turn like this as well. I see lots of articles that have been at least partially written by AI - so there goes most of your average journalist's job. Then there's stuff like marketing and communications, where your output is mostly text and media. Again, something AI can mostly handle based on initial requirements. Personally I find babysitting AI quite boring. It's easy to just stop caring about the quality of the output when one just is wage slaving it, and the process itself is no longer satisfying.
• tehjoker 1y ago
  This article features a study claiming 25% productivity gains form co-pilot. I wonder what a similar study would say about developers with and without access to internet search. In the study, it seems, as I expected, less experienced people found more value from it. My experience has been AI tools are more helpful when I don't know the domain, and then their benefit declines as I familiarize. I also looked at the study and noticed a few aspects that were surprising: (a) some of the 95% CIs crossed zero, meaning no benefit is a possible interpretation in figures 6 and 7 (b) did anyone account for what happens when two workers are in different experimental groups and sit next to each other? I imagine it was likely common people in the experimental group to use co-pilot queries for their friends. (c) for experienced workers, the mean value is actually negative (lol) in the unweighted data in Figure 7 There are a lot of other subtleties in the interpretation of this paper. "...developers who were less productive before the experiment are significantly more likely to accept any given suggestion...." ...curious lol https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566
  • zeroonetwothree 1y ago
    Yeah out of all the studies I’ve seen about actual productivity gains from LLMs the median estimate is probably in the low single digits (possibly including 0). Not exactly earth shattering yet.
• neilv 1y ago
  You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly. So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you. Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to launder it. Google had too much class (and comfortable market position) to launch the sleazy "AI" gold rush. But plenty of upstarts currently see an irresistible opportunity to get rich, by leveraging automated mass copyright violation, while handwaving "AI".
  • tkzed49 1y ago
    I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".
    • neilv 1y ago
      I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code. But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor). For one reason, code is important, and valuable... There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc. A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working. There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow. Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI". We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution. In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important. I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.
• dehrmann 1y ago
  > Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year. Three?
• _pdp_ 1y ago
  AI coding assistants are a force multiplier. It can multiply good things and bad things equally and without discrimination.
• pessimizer 1y ago
  The Amazon site search and at least some product pages seem to be down right now, although I'm hesitant to say that because I don't remember Amazon ever breaking. I'm getting 503s ("Sorry! Something went wrong on our end") on searches and "We're sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again" on product pages. The AIs should probably fix that.
• 0x445442 1y ago
  Fast, good, cheap; pick two. It's the single immutable law in software development and the one thing management has been trying to circumvent for decades. This is just their latest incantation.
• canxerian 1y ago
  With or without LLMs, the culture of Amazon would eventually lead to all of their positions feeling like warehouse work. Source: I worked there.
• shadowdev1 1y ago
  Bugs. Bugs everywhere.
• tengbretson 1y ago
  I think the author simply wanted to write this story now. Like when in the last 10 years could you not have found a handful of Amazon devs to corroborate this claim?
• black_13 1y ago
  [dead]
• agarren 1y ago
  > [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works. That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification of “if it compiles, ship it!” > “It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct,” he said, since machines now do the work. “It’s not as important as when it was group of ten people pounding out the metal.” Except that the machines doing that work aren’t regularly hallucinating angles, spurious welding joints, etc.
  • lolinder 1y ago
    Also, you know who did measure every angle to make sure it was correct? The engineers who put together the initial design. They sure as hell took their time getting every detail of the design right before it ever made it to the assembly line. Who's filling that role in this brave new world?
    • mrheosuper 1y ago
      it would be the SA guy, but look like he will also be replaced by a bunch of "vibe coder"
    • alpaca128 1y ago
      They took their time precisely specifying the robot movements so they're always repeatable. Almost like...some sort of carefully crafted code.
      • close04 1y ago
        You misconstrue the analogy. The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy. It’s the thing that generates the code. The robot operates deterministically, it has a fixed input and a fixed output. This is what makes it reliable. Your “AI coder” is nothing like that. It’s non deterministic on its best day, and it gets everything thrown at it so even more of a coin toss. This seriously undermines any expectation of reliability. The guy’s comparison shows a lack of understanding of either of the systems.
• nicetryguy 1y ago
  > Andy Jassy ... said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.” Bruh, no competitor is going to set up an army of datacenters and warehouses on the gargantuan scale of amazon anytime soon... What do customers want? How about fixing your search function accuracy and policing the disgusting influx of scam products with fake reviews!!! Ugh. How about you get AI working on THAT jackknife...
  • echelon 1y ago
    > Bruh, firstly, no competitor is going to set up an army of datacenters and warehouses on the gargantuan scale of amazon anytime soon. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI covet what AWS has. They are absolutely coming for AWS.
    • nicetryguy 1y ago
      AWS? Possibly. They have a huge head start and haven't lost much ground yet. The warehouses and physical delivery? No way in hell. Any competing physical infrastructure would take a decade from the first shovel hitting the ground today.
  • Izikiel43 1y ago
    AWS has competition in Azure and Google Cloud, and AWS is the money maker for Amazon, everything else is incidental.
    • nicetryguy 1y ago
      > AWS is the money maker ... everything else is incidental. Considering Amazon kills and steals all kinds of small businesses and ideas that would be a godsend for Americans.
• tho234j234234 1y ago
  What has been the experience with using these tools for folks on HN. I'm generally amazed at the JS stuff it can come up with from scratch, but asking it to implement features is often not quite great. Far more often it can't even use the damn edit tool given to the LLM! I have to take some of the "excrement" left behind; may be do a git reset; and then carefully fix the code. I'm not surprised the managerial class has gotten high on the kool-aid of replacing workers...
  • _ink_ 1y ago
    My experience has been poor. My last attempt was with copilot. I gave it the structure of a psql table and a DTO and asked it to create java code to write to the dB using a prepared statement. It failed and the errors were hard to spot. Not sure if it saved time. That was 4o.
• ozim 1y ago
  As a software dev I always felt like working warehouse - sprints, strony points being held on productivity metrics. people think all devs work FAANG like companies when there is loads of companies where devs are treated like dirt only now one FAANG company catches up with reality. Where business people seem to never be measured in any way. If requirements were shitty - well dev team did a bad job - not that business made up stupid decisions on stupider time lines.
  • tho234j234234 1y ago
    I thought devs were always treated like dirt at Amazon ? I've tried interviewing at that place, and have't felt that kind of hostility ever - one guy even wanted me to prove that K-means in 2d is in P. This I later found was a was the topic of a key paper in this niche of ML theory.
    • bubblyworld 1y ago
      That can't be right - planar k-means is well known to be NP-complete.
  • rs186 1y ago
    Amazon is a well known sweatshop -- instead of producing clothes they produce code.
• rand17 1y ago
  I'm afraid software development will soon be about fixing code hallucinated up by AIs - and standups, retrospectives, reviews, demos, plannings etc.
  • microtherion 1y ago
    Yes, it's all the wrong way around. I'd rather have an AI attending standups and planning meetings for me. It's supposed to understand my code perfectly, so why can't it report on it for me?
• baalimago 1y ago
  Seems to me like FANG is primarily sacrificing QA to increase productivity, with AI as the reason. Will be interesting to see if they too are 'peeing their pants' (warm and nice -> cold and not so nice), or if it actually will be sustainable. LLM's were trailed as customer service bots, which backfired (for the most part). Now they're exploring different areas.
  • tho234j234234 1y ago
    May be it's easier in FAANG because a lot of the work comes from the sheer (and unnecessary IMO) complexity of the stack/tools. In fact, a common meme within Google is that Engineers are mere plumbers routing protos from one place to another. (Given how brittle these systems are though, I'm not sure if I trust LLMs to be better; but they may be more suited for dealing with un-interactive delayed-feedback baroque systems that are the norm in such places.)
• surfingdino 1y ago
  I'm so glad I wound down all of my AWS accounts and pay ~$1.5 for them per month. I'll close the rest this month.
• misja111 1y ago
  My experience with AI so far is exactly the opposite. It can help me with finding configurations to set up software packages, with syntax of programming languages that I use only occasionally so am not too familiar with, or it can give suggestions for improvement for code that I have written. It's like having a personal assistant. But the interesting work: thinking about software architecture, about implementation strategies for large projects, or about finding a good debugging strategy for bugs in large code bases, that work is still for me.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • dragandj 1y ago
    In other words, AI is just a replacement for google search and Stack Overflow, automated and served as an IDE plugin...
    • looofooo0 1y ago
      Also serves as a manual on steroids, where you can find example of library usage for your problem.
      • dragandj 1y ago
        Or a false manual, with wrong or far from optimal examples...
      • s1mplicissimus 1y ago
        It's such a good manual too, that it will make up entries for whole libraries if they don't exist. So convenient to waste time discovering those cases!
• Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
  While the writing seems to be on the wall for entry level developer positions, there's going to have to be a pathway for Amazon and others to have junior devs become senior devs, and be able up fill in whenever the machines fail.
• cess11 1y ago
  '“It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”' I don't recognise this at all, not in myself, neither in the well functioning teams I've been a part of. Executing and reviewing code is the job. That's the core thing we do. Writing code is just a fluent activity, like walking or absentmindedly spinning a pen between the fingers.
  • simonw 1y ago
    Yeah, I agree. I said that because I've heard other programmers say it - which I guess is hinted at by the "channeling the objections of other programmers" part of that quote.
• whatever1 1y ago
  An example from today: I have some scientific calculations that run in a Django app. One specific endpoint has a function that takes 2-3 minutes to execute. When I was hitting the endpoint I was getting a timeout error. I asked Claude to fix it, and it came up with a huge change in the front end (polling) and backend (celery) to support asynchronous operations. I instead increased the nginx timeout from 1 minute to 5 minutes. Problem solved without introducing 100x the complexity.
  • rafaelmn 1y ago
    You didn't specify how you asked Claude to fix it here so hard to evaluate if it's giving you what you asked for or just choosing the wrong approach. It's one of the things these models will do - they will narrow down on what you asked them to do - so for example if you just gave it your code without the deployment and said fix it on code level that would bias it to go in that direction, etc. Disclaimer: not one of those "you didn't prompt right whenever LLMs fail" people, but just something I've noticed in my use of LLMs - they usually don't have the problem context so can't really tell you "should we even be going down this path"
    • whatever1 1y ago
      I am pretty sure that if I hinted the direction of the solution the model would come up with the simple proxy config fix. I will try it for fun. But I was trying to simulate the vibe coding experience where you are completely clueless and rely exclusively on the LLM. It works, but it creates even more work (we call it debt) for the future. PS I was using Claude within Copilot, so it could definitely see the docker & nginx configuration.
      • alonsonic 1y ago
        Sounds like you asked Claude for a fix and it gave you a proper fix to your badly designed api endpoint. If it's an operation that's taking that long then yes, implementing it asynchronously is a good idea. If what you wanted was a simple ductape quick fix I'm sure you could have asked for that and Claude would have recommended what you did, increasing the timeout window which I guess "fixes" the problem.
• wolvesechoes 1y ago
  Some software "engineers" are discovering they never actually did engineering and are surprised.
• gsky 1y ago
  Investing in AI companies is the best thing one could do now
  • nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
    You just need to figure out which companies capture the value, if any. My bet is on Amazon, funny enough.
• thih9 1y ago
  > The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts. Why generate that memo at all - maybe scattered thoughts would be enough and the AI could help managers understand them. Then again, if the goal is to replace the engineers and not the other way round, then this makes sense.
  • physicles 1y ago
    My hot take is if you’re writing a memo or a spec for internal consumption, using AI is an anti-pattern. The doc isn’t the important product, the act of writing the doc is, because that’s how you clarify your own thinking. We know AIs are fine for bouncing ideas off of, but they’re not senior-level architects yet.
• fedeb95 1y ago
  we'll see if this increased return for companies will stay there in the long term, or create unforeseen consequences.
• alkonaut 1y ago
  I love that I never even jumped on the whole "internet" thing when it arrived to software development in the 90s. After that, dodging blockchains and later AI was even simpler.
• n_ary 1y ago
  > Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.” Like what exactly is Amazon giving us here? I don't get it. Also, I want to see Andy Jassy start writing some codes or fixing issues/bugs for next 5-10 years and have those reviewed by anonymous engineers before I take any word from him. These marketers/sales sleezy dudes claim garbage about things they do not do or know how to do but media picks up everything they say. It is like my grandmother who never went to school starts telling me about how brain surgery is slow and needs productivity else more people will die and those doctors need to adapt. Shameless behavior of these marketing/sales idiots as well as the dark side of media has reached new extreme in this AI bubble. Meanwhile, I can see from comments how a lot of HNers totally agree everything this salesy guy says as holy bible verse and my colleague is sending me freaked out texts about how he is planning to switch career as Amazon Super Boss is talking about vibe coding now but became calm after I told him, these dudes are mostly sales/MBA who never wrote code of fixed issues, same way our PO doesn't know the diff between var and const.
  • wavemode 1y ago
    Jassy is one of the most anti-employee CEOs I've ever seen. Which is remarkable, considering who he is the successor of.
    • akudha 1y ago
      Why is this surprising? Isn't being anti-employee and being a psycho the most basic requirement for being a CEO of huge companies these days?
      • sealeck 1y ago
        Think about who his predecessor was.
• LightBug1 1y ago
  Do they have timed toilet breaks?
• rybosworld 1y ago
  Hard to feel bad for any dev that agrees to work at Amazon. They’ve opted into shitty working conditions for years and played a pretty big part in spreading those conditions to other places. I have found that former Amazon employees can get jobs at other FAANG companies. But smaller/medium companies that compete on culture rather than pay, don’t tend to want to hire those folks.
• ken47 1y ago
  As expected, shallow analysis from people who don’t understand our craft and/or are all too happy to feed a hype train.
• jbs789 1y ago
  > “It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct,” he said, since machines now do the work. Am I accountable for the angles or not? Don’t think so! My job is just to bolt it on. Is a developer not accountable for the code, regardless of how it was created?
• chaosbolt 1y ago
  This is good, it means they'll optimize for this kind of coding to have less coders to save pennies here and there and please the shareholders short term, and get left behind in the long term once an old school startup that tries to do everything better comes up. Of course I'm fantasizing and we sadly don't live in this kind of world (Amazon or Google would stomp you if you come for their users) but hey a man can dream.
• leibnitz27 1y ago
  If it compiles, ship it. Even if it's subtly broken..... I, for one, look forward to the contracting gigs fixing garbage code. :) The pull back on this will be brutal.
• jongjong 1y ago
  The trend towards increasingly low-quality, mass-produced code started long before AI but AI has greatly accelerated the trend and taken it to levels not previously possible. Short-term, this is destroying software dev jobs, long-term, it's going to create a lot of software dev jobs when people have to maintain or rewrite the mess (unless AGI can fill the gap). It will create a lot of jobs in cyber-security also because complex code, rushed out hastily, with less context awareness, opens the door to more potential vulnerabilities. It's interesting how the trend which took over manufacturing is now also taking over software development. This trends towards low-quality, mass-production is taking over everything.
• snowstormsun 1y ago
  So who will be held accountable if things break? "Sorry dear customer, it's not our fault, this code was AI generated and it worked in our tests."
• hdb385 1y ago
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• fsfsa3 1y ago
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• zettapwn 1y ago
  No one is free until everyone is free. Thinking you’re insulated because you do white collar work is idiotic.
• steve76 1y ago
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• major505 1y ago
  This seens like a recipe for disaster on the making. Well, thats why we need brave people. To show us the way, or serve as a cautionary tale.
• yapyap 1y ago
  Sounds like employees have just started turning into accountability sinks, you let the AI do all the work, give the employee not enough time to really read / understand it all and then blame the employee who “pushed” it for not catching a bug instead of being accountable yourself if you let an AI code it all.
• rassalas 1y ago
  This kind of thinking is exactly why a lot of Americans buy only foreign made vehicles.The American auto industry is a failure propped up by government subsidies. Please don't use them as an example of anything good.
• vijucat 1y ago
  Not directly related, but an anecdote: well before AI, I was talking to a Portfolio Solutions Manager or something from JP Morgan. He was an MD at the firm and very full of himself. He told me, "You guys, your job is....you just Google search your problem and copy paste a solution, right?". What I found hilarious is that he also told me, "The quants, I hate that they keep their C++ code secret. I opened up the executable in Notepad to read it and it was just gibberish". Lesson: people with grave incompetence at programming feel completely competent to judge what programming is and should be.
  • game_the0ry 1y ago
    > Lesson: people with grave incompetence at programming feel completely competent to judge what programming is and should be. As an employee at a company with a similar attitude, I cannot agree more with this.
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    My own tangential gripe (a bit related to yours though): the factory work began when Agile crept into the workplace. Additionally, lint, unit tests, code reviews... all this crap just piled on making programming worse still. It stopped being fun to code around that point. Too many i's to dot to make management happy.
    • thinkingtoilet 1y ago
      What's wrong with writing tests? I sleep well at night when we push to production because of our robust test suite.
      • whatwhaaaaat 1y ago
        Becuase builds are gated by test coverage people write tests for coverage and not for functionality. I’d say a good portion of the inherited tests I’ve ran in to wouldn’t catch anything meaningfully breaking in the function being tested.
        • 1y ago
• tlogan 1y ago
  At the end of the day, coding with AI is still coding. LLMs need to get better at it - more precision, less hallucination, larger context windows, and stricter reasoning. We also need a clearer and more domain-specific vocabulary when working with them. In short LLM will end up as one more programming language - but one that’s easier for humans to understand, since it operates using the terminology of the problem domain. But humans will still need to do the thinking: the what-ifs, the abstractions, the reasoning. That’s where AI becomes unsettling - too many people have been trained not to think at all.
• assimpleaspossi 1y ago
  I'm glad I'm a programmer and not just a coder.
• coliveira 1y ago
  > A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent. Study paid by MS finds that MS tool is improving productivity...
• awinter-py 1y ago
  ah yes, how the kiva robot lifts a mobile shelf full of Codes and brings them to me for my inspection. I use my left hand to reach for the Code I need and place it in the tote, because my right shoulder is injured from repeating this motion. The tote goes onto a conveyor where it is shot forwards, backwards and sideways, all around the warehouse until it reaches the compiler station. There, another worker will lint each Code with a lint roller and compile them by selecting the appropriately sized cardboard box. Next, this executable bundle will be linked with its customer, possibly by means of a plane or 18-wheeler truck, with last-mile linking performed by a smaller vehicle suitable for urban traffic ...
• icedogma 1y ago
  I worked at Amazon Robotics low level software team, as a contractor, for a few months. This article sounds about right. Crazy pace of work with no room for reflection or — especially — groundbreaking invention, is given. And that was a year ago, when AI was totally optional. The engineers are smart and fast folks, which helps a great deal. But don’t seek true creativity and deep expertise at Amazon, unless we’re talking about legacy L6+ (or likely even L7+) level engineers who get to have the leeway needed. The picker robots I had been working with were created, originally, by a Netherlands company, not Amazon. Amazon’s job was scaling it all up for their massive warehouse operation. It was a bunch of hacks on top of hacks. Heck, not even Harel state machines (which is kind of what one would expect to have on a properly designed event-driven robot that’s not overly tied to its PLC implementation, where things can be modularized, in and out, as needed). Just a bunch of switch statements and a menagerie of globals, with only two key people intimately familiar with most of its key code structure, one of whom decided to leave the group in frustration. In fairness, the mess didn’t originate just at Amazon, but there never was a technical push at Amazon to have the initial work done in the right way. Not the software part anyway. I can see that the craziness not only didn’t abate but has gotten worse. The money was good but it’s not worth the stress and other frustrations IMO, unless you’re a noncontractor and at least a technical program manager or above, where you won’t be coding as much as reviewing others’ code anyway. Otherwise, I can totally understand why people just work there for a couple years, to get their resume looking good and then leave
• storus 1y ago
  The same complaints come from my doctor friends - they are now also being run as a factory where each procedure has a certain allotted time and they need to fit each patient into it. Like you have 10 minutes for a GP task, 15 minutes for psychotherapy, 3 minutes for X-Ray etc. They are complaining about it a lot, it makes them feel like robots.
• iwontberude 1y ago
  This is why I quit Google many years ago
• cleandreams 1y ago
  This type of thing really incentivizes founding a startup. If you are a very senior developer, who needs the corporate stupid factory? You can do a lot of work with half the people and work for yourself.
• DrNosferatu 1y ago
  But they mean general warehouse work, or “Amazon Warehouse” work? Because it’s quite different…
• bustling-noose 1y ago
  I want to know if I can use an LLM during problem solving at an interview for SDE jobs at Amazon, Google and Microsoft who have boldly claimed lot of their work is done by LLMs. I will be able to point out the algorithm and explain how it works including the time complexity, but I will need the LLM first to solve it. Will SDE interviews change ? Are these companies gearing up to let AI engineers in ? I highly doubt this is ever going to happen. There is a quote by buffet that I think applies to a lot of scenarios not just investing : 'to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.' ML IoT 5G blockchain etc. so many technologies are great that had their gaussian curve moment during greed. But these things take a back seat after that.
• Anamon 1y ago
  "In a memo to employees in April, the chief executive of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that “A.I. usage is now a baseline expectation” and that the company would “add A.I. usage questions” to performance reviews." Usage of a tool becoming a performance metric is a clear sign that the tool isn't doing what it's promised to do. This is managers desperately trying to prevent their investment in GenAI from blowing up in their faces. This is as clear an admission as any that the supposed productivity or quality gains from LLM coding aren't showing up in the results. If a tool is effective, management generally doesn't have to micromanage and force employees into using it.