4 ms·

I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argume

by reedf1 1y ago

I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument, imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. When the demand eventually catches up (if it exists), the hiring will begin again.

elmean 1y ago
omg 4x scrum master inbound we are gonna be so agile
- ai-christianson 1y ago
  Moving very fast, but going nowhere.
ai-christianson 1y ago
We just shipped a major feature on our SaaS product. We, of course, used AI extensively. The thing is, this feature leaned on every bit of experience and wisdom we had as a team --things like making sure the model is right, making sure the system makes sense overall and all the pieces fit together properly. I don't know that "4x" is how it works --in this case, the AI let us really tap into the experience and skill we already had. It made us faster, but if we were missing the experience and wisdom part, we'd just be more prolific at creating messes.
- MajimasEyepatch 1y ago
  But presumably you could have built it before, just slower, which is the point. For now, that speed-up just looks like a win because it’s novel, but eventually the speed-up will be baked into people’s expectations.
  - ai-christianson 1y ago
    Right, I'm just pointing out that if you're "never going to get there anyway," then going 4x faster isn't going to help.
    - lazide 1y ago
      The biggest issue at most companies is making a lot of heat and noise while not actually delivering effectively, so I expect AI to make this problem worse. Usually, companies benefit more from slowing down and prioritizing, not ‘going faster’.
  - eru 1y ago
    > For now, that speed-up just looks like a win because it’s novel, but eventually the speed-up will be baked into people’s expectations. It will still be a win: the rewards for the new productivity have to go somewhere in the economy. Just like other productivity improvements in the past, it will likely be shared amongst various stakeholders depending on a variety of factors. The workers will get the lion's share.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > rewards for the new productivity have to go somewhere in the economy Unless it goes to me I'm not entirely sure why I should care I'll keep doing things the old way thanks, unless I personally get some benefit from it "You are more productive but compensated the same" just shows how many of you are suckers
      - eru 1y ago
        Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
    - layer8 1y ago
      > The workers will get the lion's share. This doesn’t seem to be supported by history.
TheDong 1y ago
I've personally managed to produce roughly 8x the production outages and show-stopper bugs than I did before LLMs, so thing are looking pretty good!
- pseufaux 1y ago
  And yet, you can still claim 100% of your code to be bug free :D
- Aperocky 1y ago
  The competitive edge is now knowing how to debug all of those issues. Unfortunately not usually a skill possessed for entry level.
- postalrat 1y ago
  So 4x more productive from WFH and 8x more from LLMs. The standard is now 32x more productive than 5 years ago.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    And yet the sprint estimates haven't budged Weird
j1elo 1y ago
Things should get even out with the 4x salary increases we'll also get thanks to that extra productivity, right?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  No, all there is in the future is 4x as many layoffs
TSiege 1y ago
I am not asking this as a gotcha, but a genuine curiosity for you or other people who find AI is helping them in terms of multiples. What is your workflow like? Where do you lean on AI vs not? Is it agentic stuff is tab by cursor? I find AI helpful but no where near a multiplier in my day to day development experience. Converting a csv to json or vis-versa great, but AI writing code for me has been less helpful. Beyond boiler plate, it introduces subtle bugs that are a pain in the ass to deal with. For complicated things, it struggles and does too much and because I didn't write it I don't know where the bad spots are. And AI code review often gets hung up on nits and misses real mistakes. So what are you doing and what are the resources you'd recommend?
- reedf1 1y ago
  4x is a number I pulled out of thin air. I'm not sure I even yet believe there is a net positive effect of using AI on productivity. What I am sure about in my own workflow is that is saves me time writing boilerplate code - it is good at this for me. So I would say it has saved me time in the short-term. Now does not writing this boilerplate slow me down long-term? It's possible, I could forget how to do this myself, some part of my brain could atrophy (as the MIT study suggests). How it affects large teams, systems and the transfer of knowledge is also not clear.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    I read this sentiment a lot, and it is true for me too as a completely average software engineer. Makes it seem like the actual problem to be solved is reducing the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written, not using an LLM to do it. I'm not smart enough to write a language or modify one, so this opinion is strongly spoken, weakly held.
  - eru 1y ago
    I wouldn't be too worried about the atrophy. Or at least not much more than you already were: you get the same atrophy effect just from IDEs and compiler errors and warnings. To give a concrete example: I'm pretty good at doing Python coding on a whiteboard, because that's what I practiced for job interviews, and when I first learned Python I used Vim without setting up any Python integration. I'm pretty terrible at doing Rust on a whiteboard, because I only learned it when I had a decent IDE and later even AI support. Nevertheless, I don't think I'm a better programmer in Python.
vevoe 1y ago
That makes sense to me. There's another post on the front page right now talking about shortening the work week (I haven't read it yet tbf, so I could be wrong about it's content) because of AI. People have been talking about shorter work weeks for a long time now, it just doesn't happen. What does happen is we get more done and the GDP goes even higher.
- landl0rd 1y ago
  “Shortening the workweek” sounds pretty bad… some people will suggest literally anything before higher wages.
  - eru 1y ago
    Real wages are going up all the time.
  - bachmeier 1y ago
    I think that in countries with longer workweeks, that would be an incredible thing. There was recently a story about Denmark raising the retirement age to 70. If you graduate college at 22 and work the average number of hours until age 70 in Denmark, that's the same as working until 59 in the US and 52 in Mexico. Shorter workweeks will almost certainly translate into longer careers. (https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html Mexico 2226 hours/week, US 1804, Denmark 1394)
- eru 1y ago
  You can already take a job with a shorter work week or move a region or country where shorter work weeks are common.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
am17an 1y ago
With all the tools around, I think I've maybe become 20% more productive, but 50% less happy in arguing and babysitting the LLMs.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  This is a net negative. Especially if you aren't 20% more paid at the same time Sounds like AI has landed you on burnout treadmill
Workaccount2 1y ago
>That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. The absolute best outcome of LLMs, and frankly where it seems to be headed, is the death of bloated one-stop-shop-for-everyone software. Instead people will be able to use their computers more directly than ever, without having to use/figure out complicated unintuitive swiss army knife software to solve their problems. LLMs today can already make people the exact tools they need with no extra feature bloat or useless expansive packages. An print shop who just resizes their photos and does some minor adjustments not available from free tier software is no longer a slave to paying adobe $40/mo to use <1% of Photoshop's capabilities. They now can have their own tailor made in-house program for free. LLM's will not be slotted in to replace devs on adobes dev teams. They can't work on a photoshop size codebase. However they will likely cut demand for Photoshop. Very few people will mourn the death of having to pay monthly for software just because there is a language barrier between them and their computer.
bborud 1y ago
It would be interesting to see some research on exactly how much sustained productivity boost programmers can get by using LLMs. The reason this is a bit complicated is that the code would have to pass certain quality metrics. In particular when it comes to structural soundness -- whether a piece of code is something you can build on and evolve, or if it is disposable. I think different generations of programmers have different opinions on what is quality output. Which makes judging the quality of code very context dependent. If I were to guess I probably get somewhere in the range 10% to 20% productivity boost from LLMs. I think those are pretty astonishing numbers. The last time I got this kind of boost was when we got web search engines and sites like stack exchange. I would suspect that if people experience 100% or more productivity boost from LLMs, something is off. Either we have very different ideas about quality, or we are talking about people who were not very productive to begin with. I also think that LLMs are probably more useful if you are already a senior developer. You will have a better idea of what to ask for. You will also be in a better position to guide de LLM towards good answers. ...which kind of hints at my biggest worry: I think the gen-z programmers are facing a tough future. They'll have a harder time finding jobs with good mentors. They're faced with unrealistic expectations in terms of productivity. And they have to deal with the unrealistic expectations from "muggles" who understand neither AI nor programming. They will lack the knowledge to get the most from LLMs while having to deal with the expectation that they perform at senior levels. We already see this in the job market. There has been a slight contraction and there are still a significant portion of senior developers available. Of course employers will prefer more experienced developers. And if younger developers believe in the hype that they can just vibe-code their way to success, this is just going to get worse.

by reedf1 1y ago

elmean 1y ago

omg 4x scrum master inbound we are gonna be so agile

ai-christianson 1y ago
Moving very fast, but going nowhere.

ai-christianson 1y ago

We just shipped a major feature on our SaaS product. We, of course, used AI extensively. The thing is, this feature leaned on every bit of experience and wisdom we had as a team --things like making sure the model is right, making sure the system makes sense overall and all the pieces fit together properly. I don't know that "4x" is how it works --in this case, the AI let us really tap into the experience and skill we already had. It made us faster, but if we were missing the experience and wisdom part, we'd just be more prolific at creating messes.

MajimasEyepatch 1y ago
But presumably you could have built it before, just slower, which is the point. For now, that speed-up just looks like a win because it’s novel, but eventually the speed-up will be baked into people’s expectations.
- ai-christianson 1y ago
  Right, I'm just pointing out that if you're "never going to get there anyway," then going 4x faster isn't going to help.
  - lazide 1y ago
    The biggest issue at most companies is making a lot of heat and noise while not actually delivering effectively, so I expect AI to make this problem worse. Usually, companies benefit more from slowing down and prioritizing, not ‘going faster’.
- eru 1y ago
  > For now, that speed-up just looks like a win because it’s novel, but eventually the speed-up will be baked into people’s expectations. It will still be a win: the rewards for the new productivity have to go somewhere in the economy. Just like other productivity improvements in the past, it will likely be shared amongst various stakeholders depending on a variety of factors. The workers will get the lion's share.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > rewards for the new productivity have to go somewhere in the economy Unless it goes to me I'm not entirely sure why I should care I'll keep doing things the old way thanks, unless I personally get some benefit from it "You are more productive but compensated the same" just shows how many of you are suckers
    - eru 1y ago
      Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
  - layer8 1y ago
    > The workers will get the lion's share. This doesn’t seem to be supported by history.

TheDong 1y ago

I've personally managed to produce roughly 8x the production outages and show-stopper bugs than I did before LLMs, so thing are looking pretty good!

pseufaux 1y ago
And yet, you can still claim 100% of your code to be bug free :D
Aperocky 1y ago
The competitive edge is now knowing how to debug all of those issues. Unfortunately not usually a skill possessed for entry level.
postalrat 1y ago
So 4x more productive from WFH and 8x more from LLMs. The standard is now 32x more productive than 5 years ago.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  And yet the sprint estimates haven't budged Weird

j1elo 1y ago

Things should get even out with the 4x salary increases we'll also get thanks to that extra productivity, right?

bluefirebrand 1y ago
No, all there is in the future is 4x as many layoffs

TSiege 1y ago

I am not asking this as a gotcha, but a genuine curiosity for you or other people who find AI is helping them in terms of multiples. What is your workflow like? Where do you lean on AI vs not? Is it agentic stuff is tab by cursor? I find AI helpful but no where near a multiplier in my day to day development experience. Converting a csv to json or vis-versa great, but AI writing code for me has been less helpful. Beyond boiler plate, it introduces subtle bugs that are a pain in the ass to deal with. For complicated things, it struggles and does too much and because I didn't write it I don't know where the bad spots are. And AI code review often gets hung up on nits and misses real mistakes. So what are you doing and what are the resources you'd recommend?

reedf1 1y ago
4x is a number I pulled out of thin air. I'm not sure I even yet believe there is a net positive effect of using AI on productivity. What I am sure about in my own workflow is that is saves me time writing boilerplate code - it is good at this for me. So I would say it has saved me time in the short-term. Now does not writing this boilerplate slow me down long-term? It's possible, I could forget how to do this myself, some part of my brain could atrophy (as the MIT study suggests). How it affects large teams, systems and the transfer of knowledge is also not clear.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  I read this sentiment a lot, and it is true for me too as a completely average software engineer. Makes it seem like the actual problem to be solved is reducing the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written, not using an LLM to do it. I'm not smart enough to write a language or modify one, so this opinion is strongly spoken, weakly held.
- eru 1y ago
  I wouldn't be too worried about the atrophy. Or at least not much more than you already were: you get the same atrophy effect just from IDEs and compiler errors and warnings. To give a concrete example: I'm pretty good at doing Python coding on a whiteboard, because that's what I practiced for job interviews, and when I first learned Python I used Vim without setting up any Python integration. I'm pretty terrible at doing Rust on a whiteboard, because I only learned it when I had a decent IDE and later even AI support. Nevertheless, I don't think I'm a better programmer in Python.

vevoe 1y ago

That makes sense to me. There's another post on the front page right now talking about shortening the work week (I haven't read it yet tbf, so I could be wrong about it's content) because of AI. People have been talking about shorter work weeks for a long time now, it just doesn't happen. What does happen is we get more done and the GDP goes even higher.

landl0rd 1y ago
“Shortening the workweek” sounds pretty bad… some people will suggest literally anything before higher wages.
- eru 1y ago
  Real wages are going up all the time.
- bachmeier 1y ago
  I think that in countries with longer workweeks, that would be an incredible thing. There was recently a story about Denmark raising the retirement age to 70. If you graduate college at 22 and work the average number of hours until age 70 in Denmark, that's the same as working until 59 in the US and 52 in Mexico. Shorter workweeks will almost certainly translate into longer careers. (https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html Mexico 2226 hours/week, US 1804, Denmark 1394)
eru 1y ago
You can already take a job with a shorter work week or move a region or country where shorter work weeks are common.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

am17an 1y ago

With all the tools around, I think I've maybe become 20% more productive, but 50% less happy in arguing and babysitting the LLMs.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
This is a net negative. Especially if you aren't 20% more paid at the same time Sounds like AI has landed you on burnout treadmill

Workaccount2 1y ago

>That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. The absolute best outcome of LLMs, and frankly where it seems to be headed, is the death of bloated one-stop-shop-for-everyone software. Instead people will be able to use their computers more directly than ever, without having to use/figure out complicated unintuitive swiss army knife software to solve their problems. LLMs today can already make people the exact tools they need with no extra feature bloat or useless expansive packages. An print shop who just resizes their photos and does some minor adjustments not available from free tier software is no longer a slave to paying adobe $40/mo to use <1% of Photoshop's capabilities. They now can have their own tailor made in-house program for free. LLM's will not be slotted in to replace devs on adobes dev teams. They can't work on a photoshop size codebase. However they will likely cut demand for Photoshop. Very few people will mourn the death of having to pay monthly for software just because there is a language barrier between them and their computer.

bborud 1y ago

It would be interesting to see some research on exactly how much sustained productivity boost programmers can get by using LLMs. The reason this is a bit complicated is that the code would have to pass certain quality metrics. In particular when it comes to structural soundness -- whether a piece of code is something you can build on and evolve, or if it is disposable. I think different generations of programmers have different opinions on what is quality output. Which makes judging the quality of code very context dependent. If I were to guess I probably get somewhere in the range 10% to 20% productivity boost from LLMs. I think those are pretty astonishing numbers. The last time I got this kind of boost was when we got web search engines and sites like stack exchange. I would suspect that if people experience 100% or more productivity boost from LLMs, something is off. Either we have very different ideas about quality, or we are talking about people who were not very productive to begin with. I also think that LLMs are probably more useful if you are already a senior developer. You will have a better idea of what to ask for. You will also be in a better position to guide de LLM towards good answers. ...which kind of hints at my biggest worry: I think the gen-z programmers are facing a tough future. They'll have a harder time finding jobs with good mentors. They're faced with unrealistic expectations in terms of productivity. And they have to deal with the unrealistic expectations from "muggles" who understand neither AI nor programming. They will lack the knowledge to get the most from LLMs while having to deal with the expectation that they perform at senior levels. We already see this in the job market. There has been a slight contraction and there are still a significant portion of senior developers available. Of course employers will prefer more experienced developers. And if younger developers believe in the hype that they can just vibe-code their way to success, this is just going to get worse.