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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 privileg
by 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 agoI see it more as replacing shitty code monkeys because it leaves the hard parts behind.
- closewith 1y agoBut you of course with your superior skills are above that risk?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- soraminazuki 1y agoNo. 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]
- dang 1y ago> shitty code monkeys Please don't put others down like that on HN. It's mean and degrades the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoFor this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
- layer8 1y agoSo it does make sense?
- locococo 1y agoManagement has different layers with different goals. A middle manager and a director certainly care a lot about accomplishing short term goals and are ok with tech debt to meet the goals.
- timkam 1y agoThe narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
- neom 1y agoWhy are you using the word "demoting"?
- closewith 1y agoThe skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.
- timkam 1y agoWell, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.
- locococo 1y agoA lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.
- datavirtue 1y agoIt's been like this for decades.
- selfselfgo 1y agoYeah that’s what really worries me, many people have been clinging to this ability as something that’s really special and AI is really going to disillusion them.
- cmiles74 1y agoWhen I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements. Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person. I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
- mr_toad 1y agoI worry a bit about people who like writing code but don’t like reading and debugging it. There are enough “throw it over the wall” coders.
- 1y ago
- Nasrudith 1y agoOrganizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.
- specialist 1y agoYes and (adjacently): Seeing Like a State by James Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State Explains a lot of the confusing stuff I've experienced, in that eureka sort of way.
- zkry 1y agoI feel like managers are having a heyday over tools like cursor having a user-by-user breakdown on AI code generation stats. I feel this is only the beginning and a whole new world of in-editor workplace monitoring will pop up.
- xkjyeah 1y agoThe number of organizations that continue to use tedious languages like Java 8 and Golang... Like, they hadn't realized they were turning humans into compilers for abstract concepts, yet now they are telling humans to get tf out of the way of AI
- gerdesj 1y agoPlease give some worked examples. I'm not sure what: "'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures" ... means. I'm the Managing Director of a small company and I'm pretty sure you are digging at the likes of me (int al) - so what am I doing wrong?
- apical_dendrite 1y agoAre you familiar with Taylorism? From the 19th century onwards, businesses have wanted to replace high-skilled craftsmen with low-skilled workers who would simply follow a repeatable process. A famous example is Ford. Ford didn't want an army of craftsmen, who each knew how to build a car. He wanted workers to stay at one station and perform the same single action all day. The knowledge of how to build a car would be in the system itself, the individual workers didn't have to know anything. This way, the workers have limited leverage because they are all replaceable, and the output is all standardized. You can see this same approach everywhere. McDonalds for instance, or Amazon warehouses, or call centers.
- stock_toaster 1y agoI wonder about codebase maintainability over time. I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality. So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.
- greyadept 1y agoI’m concerned that it might not be easy to vibecode a security fix for a complex codebase, especially when the flaw was introduced by vibecoding.
- agentultra 1y agoMy new favourite genre of schadenfreude are solo-preneur SaaS vibe-coders. They burn a pile of money. Maybe it’s their life savings, their parents’ money or their friends or some unlucky investors. But they go in thinking they’re going to join the privileged labourers without putting any of the time to develop the skills and without paying for that labour. GenAI the whole thing. And they post about it on socials like they’re special or something. Then boom. A month later. “Can everyone stop hacking me already, I can’t make this stop. Why is this happening?” Mostly I feel sorry for the people who get duped into paying for this crap and have their data stolen. There’s like almost zero liability for messing around like this.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- doug_durham 1y agoUp until now large software systems required thousands of hours of work and efforts of bright engineers. We take established code as something to be preserved because it embeds so my knowledge and took so long to develop. If it rots then it takes too long to repair or never gets repaired. Imagine a future where the prompts become the precious artifact. That we regularly `rm -rf *` the entire code base and regenerate it with the original prompts perhaps when a better model becomes available. We stop fretting about code structure or hygiene because it won't be maintained by developers. Code is written for readability and audibility. So instead of finding the right abstractions that allow the problem to be elegantly implemented the focus is on allowing people to read the code to audit that it does what it says it does. No DSLs just plain readable code.
- aprilthird2021 1y agoYes, big-tech-internally I also see a lot of desire to get us to come up with some great AI achievements, but they are so far not achieving far far more than already existing automations and bots and code generators can do for us
- inadequatespace 1y agoRight. What the article is unsurprisingly glossing over (per usual) is that just because AI is perceived (by higher-ups that don’t actually do the work) to speed up coding work doesn't mean it actually does. and that probably to some extent all involved (depending on how delusional they are) know that it's simply an excuse to do layoffs (replaced by offshoring) by artificially so-called raising the bar to what is unrealistic for most people