6 ms·

There are different groups with vested interests that color a lot of AI discourse You have Tech CEOs that want work done cheaper and AI companies willing to se

There are different groups with vested interests that color a lot of AI discourse You have Tech CEOs that want work done cheaper and AI companies willing to sell it to them. They will give you crazy alarming narratives around AI replacing all developers, etc. Then you have tech employees who want to believe they’re irreplaceable. It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that. I don’t think people are doing this intentionally all the time. But there is so much money and social stature from all these groups on the line, there are very few able to give a neutral, disinterested perspective on a topic like AI coding. And to add to that, reasoned, boring, thoughtful middle of the road takes are just naturally going to get fewer eyeballs than extreme points of view.

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
> you have [ ... ]. then you have [ ... ] Those are groups defined by something other than actual LLM usage, which makes them both not particularly interesting. What is interesting: You have people who've tried using LLMs to generate code and found it utterly useless. Then you have people who've tried using LLMs to generate code and believe that it has worked very well for them.
- 0x500x79 1y ago
  I think this is an easy thing to wrap my mind around (since I have been in both camps): AI can generate lots of code very quickly. AI does not generate code that follows taste and or best practices. So in cases where the task is small, easily plannable, within the training corpus, or for a project that doesn't have high stakes it can produce something workable quickly. In larger projects or something that needs maintainability for the future code generation can fall apart or produce subpar results.
  - logicchains 1y ago
    Recent LLMs are fairly good at following instructions, so a lot of the difference comes down to the level of detail and quality of the instructions given. Written communication is a skill for which there's a huge amount of variance among developers, so it's not surprising that different developers get very different results. The relative quality of the LLM's output is determined primarily by the written communication skills of the individuals instructing it.
    - NoOn3 1y ago
      It seems to me If you know all these instructions clearly, then you know everything, and it's easy for you to write the code yourself, and you don't need an LLM.
      - logicchains 1y ago
        The amount of typing it takes to describe a solution in English text is often less than the amount of typing needed to actually implement it in code, especially after accounting for boilerplate and unit tests. Not to mention the time spent waiting for the compiler and test harness to run. As a concrete example, the HTTP2.0 spec is way fewer chars long than any HTTP2.0 server implementation, and the C spec is way fewer chars long than any compliant C compiler. The C++ spec is way, way fewer chars long than any compliant C++ compiler.
        no_wizard 1y ago
        >The amount of typing it takes to describe a solution in English text is often less than the amount of typing needed to actually implement it in code I don't find this to be true. I find describing a solution in English well to be slower than describing the problem in code (IE, by writing tests first) and having that be the structured data that the LLM uses to generate code. Its far faster, from the results I'm seeing plus my own personal experience, to write clear tests which benefit from being a form of structured data that the LLM can analyze. Its the guidance we have given to our engineers at my day job and it has made working with these tools dramatically easier. In some cases, I have found LLM performance to be subpar enough that it is indeed, faster to write it myself. If it has to hold many different pieces of information together, it starts to falter.
  - fhd2 1y ago
    That about sums it up from my experience as well. But as parent said, such takes unfortunately don't get a lot of eyeballs :(
    - fragmede 1y ago
      That was four short paragraphs with basically no details - there's basically nothing for eyeballs to see. If I wrote a history of the world that consisted of "Some people lived and died, some of them were bad, I guess", how many copies do you think I'd sell? Any? What's interesting is the details, and a post giving actual detail of building some app, and the benefits and shortcomings of a specific tool would be of great interest to many. If I ask an LLM to save the date to the database, and then ask it to save the time, do I get two variables in two columns? Does that make sense for my app? Do I have to ask it to refactor? Is it able to do that successfully? Does it drop tables during program initialization? How does the latest model do with designing the entire program? How often does it hallucinate for this set of libraries and prompts? There's quite a bit of variance! If it hallucinated libraries and APIs left and right it would be far less useful. Some people don't even get hallucinations because their prompts are so we'll trod. There are all sorts of interesting details to be learned and shared about these new tools that would get a ton of eyeballs.
  - fmbb 1y ago
    LLMs also don’t always generate code that works. And you don’t always know or understand what the product owner wants you to build. Writing code faster is very rarely what you need.
  - brazzy 1y ago
    I've just seen that change happen in the a pet project within less than 10 hours of work. I tried vibe-coding something for my own use, your classic "scratch your own itch" project. The first MVP was a one-shot success, really impressive. But as the code grew with every added feature, progress soon slowed down. The AI claimed to have fixed a bug when it didn't. It switched chest several timea back and forth between using a library function and rolling its own implementation, each time claiming to have "simplified" the code and made it "more reliable". With every change, it claimed to have "improved" the code, even when it just added a bunch of shamelessly duplicated shit. One effect I am sure AI will have is to massively excarbate the phenomenon of people who quickly produce a large amount of shitty, unmaintainable code that fulfills half the requirements, and then leave the mess behind for another greenfield project.
    - AaronAPU 1y ago
      We’re so unaccustomed to working with non-deterministic computer tech that rather than acknowledge they are hit-or-miss, everyone just picks one side and goes all-in on it. Which sounds an awful lot like politics.
      - skydhash 1y ago
        > We’re so unaccustomed to working with non-deterministic computer tech The whole history of computer history is about making computing deterministic, after we found out that having generative anything (Recursion, Context-Free grammar,...) is a double-edged sword. So for any known set of inputs, you want the output to be finite and non-zero, and all items having the correct properties.
        AaronAPU 1y ago
        All of physics was like that until QM
      - norm_namillu 1y ago
        "non-deterministic" is a weird way to say "mangles data 1/3 to 1/2 the time"
  - michaelhoney 1y ago
    You're not wrong, in July 2025. But it will get better, and it will not stop getting better when it reaches equal-to-the-best-human level.
    - norm_namillu 1y ago
      yeah and if my airplane keeps accelerating at the rate it does when taking off, it would reach the speed of light in a few months. "this software doesn't work but if we 10x the resources in r&d a couple more times surely it will" is quite the argument to be seen making in public
    - abalashov 1y ago
      No, but I think you're wrong. My child grew 3 inches in the last year alone, according to his latest physical. If I were to adopt your extrapolation methods, he'll soon not only be the tallest human alive, but the tallest structure on the planet.
- jandrese 1y ago
  I think there is a strong case that experienced developers can not be replaced by AI anytime soon. Where the danger lies is for junior developers fresh out of college. How are they supposed to become experienced developers if an AI can do the grunt work they normally get assigned? It really doesn't help that AI companies are hype machines full of salesmen trying to hype up their product so you buy it. There have been a lot of amazing AI "success stories" that don't hold up under scrutiny.
  - elktown 1y ago
    > Where the danger lies is for junior developers [...] if an AI can do the grunt work they normally get assigned? Just because "well, maybe true for junior devs!" is a compromise over "AI will make all programmers obsolete!" it doesn't make it reasonable. It's still an extraordinary claim.
- qsort 1y ago
  And then you have research that says they're both full of shit. The article is perhaps a bit shallow, but it's spiritually correct: there's a lot of uncertainty and people who claim they figured it all out are mostly spewing nonsense.
  - rapind 1y ago
    I mean it's working for me. It's definitely not living up to the hype IMO (market is way overvaluing), but I wouldn't want to work without it any more, which is actually saying a lot. This take is as a senior (greybeard) developer using paid claude-code in the terminal only (I use plain vim for my own code). I'm running my own business while wearing all of the hats, so I'm not as worried about becoming obsolete, but I also have zero motivation to get other businesses using it (I'm not invested into any AI companies)! To be honest, I could probably even be using it better, but I haven't spent much time yak shaving over my setup beyond zen mcp. That being said, I think anyone looking to invest into established AI companies right now is in for a rude awakening. I think it'll be a commodity / utility like cloud computing with tons of competition and not a ton of differentiating features. That's just my opinion though, and I could be horrendously wrong!
    - qsort 1y ago
      I'm also seeing benefits, and I'm on pretty much the same stack as you. The METR paper I'm citing was misquoted a lot (N was small, and it wasn't a favorable setup for AI tools), but the most important finding was that it's very easy to fool ourselves about productivity benefits. Am I going to cancel my Anthropic subscription? Certainly not, but I'm not going to pretend like my setup is The One True Way. The plural of anecdote isn't data. Nobody has this figured out, nobody.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  Or are those people biased by what they want to be true because of their current situation (the dev who dont wanna change how they work and therefore wants AI to not work or the non-technical person who dont wanna learn to code or be dependent on a developer and therefore want it to work)
- setr 1y ago
  I think the problem with this one is that LLMs are somehow both unreasonably effective as well as unreasonably ineffective. Letting the code editor llms do their suggestions, I’ve gotten a ton of useless boilerplate garbage suggestions, but periodically, a couple times of day, it suggests blocks of code that are far more complete, comprehensive and correct than it has any right to be. Whether you’ll get the high IQ or low IQ LLM on the next suggestion is a crapshoot; how much consideration you give to either outcome (focus on the random instances of brilliance, or the constant stream of bullshit) drives the final perception.
  - abalashov 1y ago
    > Whether you’ll get the high IQ or low IQ LLM on the next suggestion is a crapshoot I have heard theories from people--whose ideas I don't ordinarily consider to be in the realm of purely uninformed speculation--that this can vary depending on system-wide GPU load, and is throttled accordingly based on real-time demand by the major LLM providers. Whether it's true, I have no idea.
    - emp17344 1y ago
      Sounds like conspiratorial thinking to come to terms with the fact that LLMs are fundamentally non-deterministic text predictors. You can get dramatically different responses to the same question, and that’s just how the system works.
      - abalashov 1y ago
        That was my reaction as well, but I wondered.
  - awfulneutral 1y ago
    That has been my experience too. I recently turned it all off because I decided the amount of times it takes me 5x longer to accomplish something, in addition to the subtle increase of bugs, is not currently worth it. I guess I'll try it again in a few months.
no_wizard 1y ago
>Then you have tech employees who want to believe they’re irreplaceable. It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that. Eventually, things will stabilize to a point where we will know what the boundaries of all the new LLM based tooling is good for, and where humans add lots of value to that. That will then drive a maximalist hiring spree, as the more people you have working at an increase in velocity, the faster you ship, and for once, perhaps the quality of code won't substantially decrease, assuming LLMs improve another few leaps in output quality and engineering workflows adjust in a normalized way. Thats the hopeful side of the equation anyway. I feel incredibly bad about customer oriented jobs, like white glove customer service. I already saw a trend (especially since 2020 but certainly before as well) where these AI chat bots and AI support lines will decimate that job category. These are pretty common white collar jobs, lots of people even in our industry got their starts on support lines.
- Exoristos 1y ago
  I don't think any normal customer is going to want to talk to AI, once the novelty wears off. It's going to be "Let me talk to your supervisor" almost every time.
  - jgilias 1y ago
    Oh, but there’s something called “containment” that you measure and optimize on your chatbots.
  - abalashov 1y ago
    Maybe. It all depends on whether the AI can actually solve your problem.
    - danielbln 1y ago
      Yeah, if the AI isn't shite and has access to tools to solve my problem, I'll take it over some overworked and undermotivated human call center any day.
empath75 1y ago
There are also a large number of people who have a deep-seated philosophical objection to the entire project of ai. It's not just about their job, it's about their sense of who and what they are as a human being, their soul or whatever. They will insist that AI's do not think or know anything, no matter what evidence there is to contrary.
- emp17344 1y ago
  Everyone has an agenda. Similarly, groups like r/singularity and the rationalists have spent years predicting the oncoming advent of a machine god, and are desperately reading too much into every LLM advancement.
dijit 1y ago
idk, I'm not a software engineer. I'm a sysadmin. Or, am I a "devops engineer"? or.. a "SRE"... or... am I a platform engineer? You know what, I don't know. What I do know, is that people keep trying to make my job obsolete, only to hire me under a different title for more money later. The practices and the tools are the same too, yet to justify it to themselves they'll make shit up about how the work is "actually, a material difference from what came before" (except, it's really not). I'm still employable after 20 years of this. I'm not a software engineer, and I'm not a tech CEO - I don't care, but people have been trying to replace me my whole career (even myself: "Automate yourself out of a job” is a common sysadmin mantra after all). Yet, somehow, I'm still here.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- kshacker 1y ago
  Same here, but this time is different. Truly. Some of the easy jobs will be taken away and your job is not under threat. Right? But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Less supply more demand. Either the pay will come down or there are very few jobs. Fingers crossed.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Yes, and this is not shocking. This is how it is meant to work. You get a low level job because you're new and have a lot to learn. You learn more things as you work the low level job, and then you can get promoted or move to a new role that is not so low level. You keep growing until you eventually compete with the people that were senior level when you were working that low level job.
  - dijit 1y ago
    It always feels like “this time its different”. NoOps, NoSQL, Heroku, PaaS, IaaS. Maybe there are less people in operations than before, there are certainly some companies that do their best not to employ any operations focused people and use FaaS for everything and only hire feature developers… who, end up doing the operations work that crops up. shrug
dragonwriter 1y ago
> It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked There is no “how we’ve always worked”; there was no steady state. Constant evolution and progressive automation of the simpler parts has been the norm for software development forever. > with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that. It doesn't, though. Productivity multipliers don't reduce demand for the affected field or income in it. (Tight money policies and economic slowdowns, especially when they co-occur, do, though, especially in a field where much of the demand and high income levels are driven by speculative investment, either in startups or new ventures by established firms.)
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Thank you. This is the most accurate take of what’s going on. Though the overwhelming population of people aren’t CEOs. It’s people. That’s why the sentiment among most people and also HN is highly negative against AI. If you’re reading this you likely have that bias.
greenie_beans 1y ago
it has devalued the labor. i scoped a contract but they want me to do it in less time now that we have AI. this lets them pay me less for the same work. and AI CEOs sell it as "society will do less work" but instead now i'm expected to do more work because the work takes less time. same as it ever was with technology advances.
wincy 1y ago
Look, maybe I’m saying the quiet part out loud, but if software engineering isn’t where the money is at anymore, and those jobs go away, I’d be competent at something else. I’m a smart person. I work hard. I’m confident I’d be able to displace someone who isn’t as smart as me and just “take” their job. There’s going to be a need for smart people with a good work ethic unless literally everyone loses their jobs, and at that point we’re living past the singularly event horizon as far as I’m concerned and all bets are off.
o_nate 1y ago
Maybe it's too soon to say that autonomous LLM agents are the wave of the future and always will be, but that's basically where I'm at. AI code completion is awesome, but it's essentially a better Stack Overflow, and I don't remember people worrying that Stack Overflow was going to put developers out of work, so I'm not losing sleep that an improved version will.
- abalashov 1y ago
  The problem with the "agents" thing is that it's mostly hype, and doesn't reflect any real AI or model advances that makes them possible. Yes, there's a more streamlined interface to allow them to do things, but that's all it is. You could accomplish the same by copy-and-pasting a bunch of context into the LLM before and asking it what to do. MCP and other agent-enabling data channels now allow it to actually reach out and do that stuff, but this is not in itself a leap forward in capabilities, just in delivery mechanisms. I'm not saying it's irrelevant or doesn't matter. However, it does seem to me that as we've run out of low-hanging fruit in model advances, the hype machine has pivoted to "agents" and "agentic workflows" as the new VC-whetting sauce to keep the bubble growing.
  - o_nate 1y ago
    I don't want to blame Alan Turing for this mess, but his Turing Test maybe gave people that idea that something that can mimic a human in conversation is also going to be able to think like a human in every way. Turns out not to be the case.
    - abalashov 1y ago
      Well, I agree with you. But I'd be remiss not to say that this is a lively controversy in the world of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. To one camp in this discursive space, who of course see themselves to be ever the pragmatists, the essence of the polemic about whether LLMs can "think" is not about whether they think in exactly the same ways we do or capture the essence of human thinking, but whether it matters at all.
steveBK123 1y ago
Also judging by my LinkedIn, but all the senior tech execs on the job market are now Generative AI Experts, which is funny because I thought they were all Cryptocurrency Experts when I last saw them posting this much in 2020.
- jofla_net 1y ago
  The best is when you work with one, in a small enough company. During which they extoll some currently-hot grift, and then after the company goes under (maybe not due to thier poor leadership), you read about their huge successes there! Much win.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    This rhymes with the guys I am currently observing. Former cloud data lake enterprise architecture & agile development experts as well. True Renaissance Men.
lezojeda 1y ago
[dead]
happytoexplain 1y ago
(Note: This is an American take, and uses software jobs as the primary example, but a lot of this applies to other jobs) Yes, well said - with one caveat: "Money and social status" is subtly but crucially different from "livelihood". You correctly identify the group of people whose lives are affected, but lump those people along with CEOs and AI companies under the umbrella of "money and social status" in your summarization, which maybe undersells the role of the masses in this equation. The software job - traditionally one of the few good career options remaining for a large chunk of Americans - is falling. There are many different reasons, and AI, while not the apocalypse, is a small but crucial part of it. We need to get over the illusion that a large piece of that fall consists of wildly luxurious incomes reducing to simply cushy incomes - "boo hoo", we say, sarcastically. But the majority of software folks are going from "comfortable" to "unhappy but livable", while some are going from "livable" to "not livable", while others are no longer employed at all. There were already too many people across the job spectrum in these buckets, and throwing another gigantic chunk of citizens in there is going to eventually cause big, bad things to happen. We need to start giving a shit about our citizens, and part of that is avoiding the implication that just because something disruptive is inevitable, doesn't mean the affect isn't devastating and we should just do absolutely nothing about the situation. Another part of that is avoiding the implication that the average person can just successfully change careers without enormous suffering. We can ease, assist, REGULATE (which the party in power would like to make illegal), etc. It's important to understand that none of that means "stopping" AI or something ridiculous like that. We need to start giving a shit about our citizens. A third time: We need to start giving a shit about our citizens. And sorry, most of this was not directed personally at you. Just the first note about your wording.
skeeter2020 1y ago
Why don't Tech CEOs and CTOs see how AI is going to "disrupt" their jobs? If anyone can write code, why will I hire your company to create the software I use? I also see the non-development jobs as much more in peril from AI; I can go generate marketing copy, HR policies, and project plans of comparable (or better!) quality today.
- mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  Because it's meant to be a psyop more than a reflection of reality.
zozbot234 1y ago
AI is glorified autocomplete. Look at what happens when AI tries its hand at writing legal briefs, and you'll understand why it cannot possibly replace software developers.
- lincoln20xx 1y ago
  That may be true. But it's pretty great at generating lines of questioning for cross-examination.
  - epicureanideal 1y ago
    I wonder to what extent a non LLM system with access to the same original corpus of text would do, with some simple similarity search feature across the corpus?
- remich 1y ago
  As with all uses of current AI (meaning generative AI LLMs) context is everything. I say this as a person who is both a lawyer and a software engineer. It is not surprising that the general purpose models wouldn't be great at writing a legal brief -- the training data likely doesn't contain much of the relevant case law because while it is theoretically publicly available, practicing attorneys universally use proprietary databases like Lexis and WestLaw to surface it. The alternative is spelunking through public court websites that look like they were designed in the 90s or even having to pay for case records like on PACER. At the same time, even if you have access to proper context like if your model can engage with Lexis or WestLaw via tool-use, surfacing appropriate matches from caselaw requires more than just word/token matching. LLMs are statistical models that tend to reduce down to the most likely answer. But, typically, in the context of a legal brief, a lawyer isn't attempting to find the most likely answer or even the objectively correct answer, they are trying to find relevant precedent with which they can make an argument that supports the position they are trying to advance. An LLM by its nature can't do that without help. Where you're right, then, is that law and software engineering have a lot in common when it comes to how effective baseline LLM models are. Where you're wrong is in calling them glorified auto-complete. In the hands of a novice they will, yes, generate plausible but mostly incorrect or technically correct but unusable in some way answers. Properly configured with access to appropriate context in the hands of an expert who understands how to communicate what they want the tool to give them? Oh that's quite a different matter.

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago

> you have [ ... ]. then you have [ ... ] Those are groups defined by something other than actual LLM usage, which makes them both not particularly interesting. What is interesting: You have people who've tried using LLMs to generate code and found it utterly useless. Then you have people who've tried using LLMs to generate code and believe that it has worked very well for them.

0x500x79 1y ago
I think this is an easy thing to wrap my mind around (since I have been in both camps): AI can generate lots of code very quickly. AI does not generate code that follows taste and or best practices. So in cases where the task is small, easily plannable, within the training corpus, or for a project that doesn't have high stakes it can produce something workable quickly. In larger projects or something that needs maintainability for the future code generation can fall apart or produce subpar results.
- logicchains 1y ago
  Recent LLMs are fairly good at following instructions, so a lot of the difference comes down to the level of detail and quality of the instructions given. Written communication is a skill for which there's a huge amount of variance among developers, so it's not surprising that different developers get very different results. The relative quality of the LLM's output is determined primarily by the written communication skills of the individuals instructing it.
  - NoOn3 1y ago
    It seems to me If you know all these instructions clearly, then you know everything, and it's easy for you to write the code yourself, and you don't need an LLM.
    - logicchains 1y ago
      The amount of typing it takes to describe a solution in English text is often less than the amount of typing needed to actually implement it in code, especially after accounting for boilerplate and unit tests. Not to mention the time spent waiting for the compiler and test harness to run. As a concrete example, the HTTP2.0 spec is way fewer chars long than any HTTP2.0 server implementation, and the C spec is way fewer chars long than any compliant C compiler. The C++ spec is way, way fewer chars long than any compliant C++ compiler.
      - no_wizard 1y ago
        >The amount of typing it takes to describe a solution in English text is often less than the amount of typing needed to actually implement it in code I don't find this to be true. I find describing a solution in English well to be slower than describing the problem in code (IE, by writing tests first) and having that be the structured data that the LLM uses to generate code. Its far faster, from the results I'm seeing plus my own personal experience, to write clear tests which benefit from being a form of structured data that the LLM can analyze. Its the guidance we have given to our engineers at my day job and it has made working with these tools dramatically easier. In some cases, I have found LLM performance to be subpar enough that it is indeed, faster to write it myself. If it has to hold many different pieces of information together, it starts to falter.
- fhd2 1y ago
  That about sums it up from my experience as well. But as parent said, such takes unfortunately don't get a lot of eyeballs :(
  - fragmede 1y ago
    That was four short paragraphs with basically no details - there's basically nothing for eyeballs to see. If I wrote a history of the world that consisted of "Some people lived and died, some of them were bad, I guess", how many copies do you think I'd sell? Any? What's interesting is the details, and a post giving actual detail of building some app, and the benefits and shortcomings of a specific tool would be of great interest to many. If I ask an LLM to save the date to the database, and then ask it to save the time, do I get two variables in two columns? Does that make sense for my app? Do I have to ask it to refactor? Is it able to do that successfully? Does it drop tables during program initialization? How does the latest model do with designing the entire program? How often does it hallucinate for this set of libraries and prompts? There's quite a bit of variance! If it hallucinated libraries and APIs left and right it would be far less useful. Some people don't even get hallucinations because their prompts are so we'll trod. There are all sorts of interesting details to be learned and shared about these new tools that would get a ton of eyeballs.
- fmbb 1y ago
  LLMs also don’t always generate code that works. And you don’t always know or understand what the product owner wants you to build. Writing code faster is very rarely what you need.
- brazzy 1y ago
  I've just seen that change happen in the a pet project within less than 10 hours of work. I tried vibe-coding something for my own use, your classic "scratch your own itch" project. The first MVP was a one-shot success, really impressive. But as the code grew with every added feature, progress soon slowed down. The AI claimed to have fixed a bug when it didn't. It switched chest several timea back and forth between using a library function and rolling its own implementation, each time claiming to have "simplified" the code and made it "more reliable". With every change, it claimed to have "improved" the code, even when it just added a bunch of shamelessly duplicated shit. One effect I am sure AI will have is to massively excarbate the phenomenon of people who quickly produce a large amount of shitty, unmaintainable code that fulfills half the requirements, and then leave the mess behind for another greenfield project.
  - AaronAPU 1y ago
    We’re so unaccustomed to working with non-deterministic computer tech that rather than acknowledge they are hit-or-miss, everyone just picks one side and goes all-in on it. Which sounds an awful lot like politics.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      > We’re so unaccustomed to working with non-deterministic computer tech The whole history of computer history is about making computing deterministic, after we found out that having generative anything (Recursion, Context-Free grammar,...) is a double-edged sword. So for any known set of inputs, you want the output to be finite and non-zero, and all items having the correct properties.
      - AaronAPU 1y ago
        All of physics was like that until QM
    - norm_namillu 1y ago
      "non-deterministic" is a weird way to say "mangles data 1/3 to 1/2 the time"
- michaelhoney 1y ago
  You're not wrong, in July 2025. But it will get better, and it will not stop getting better when it reaches equal-to-the-best-human level.
  - norm_namillu 1y ago
    yeah and if my airplane keeps accelerating at the rate it does when taking off, it would reach the speed of light in a few months. "this software doesn't work but if we 10x the resources in r&d a couple more times surely it will" is quite the argument to be seen making in public
  - abalashov 1y ago
    No, but I think you're wrong. My child grew 3 inches in the last year alone, according to his latest physical. If I were to adopt your extrapolation methods, he'll soon not only be the tallest human alive, but the tallest structure on the planet.
jandrese 1y ago
I think there is a strong case that experienced developers can not be replaced by AI anytime soon. Where the danger lies is for junior developers fresh out of college. How are they supposed to become experienced developers if an AI can do the grunt work they normally get assigned? It really doesn't help that AI companies are hype machines full of salesmen trying to hype up their product so you buy it. There have been a lot of amazing AI "success stories" that don't hold up under scrutiny.
- elktown 1y ago
  > Where the danger lies is for junior developers [...] if an AI can do the grunt work they normally get assigned? Just because "well, maybe true for junior devs!" is a compromise over "AI will make all programmers obsolete!" it doesn't make it reasonable. It's still an extraordinary claim.
qsort 1y ago
And then you have research that says they're both full of shit. The article is perhaps a bit shallow, but it's spiritually correct: there's a lot of uncertainty and people who claim they figured it all out are mostly spewing nonsense.
- rapind 1y ago
  I mean it's working for me. It's definitely not living up to the hype IMO (market is way overvaluing), but I wouldn't want to work without it any more, which is actually saying a lot. This take is as a senior (greybeard) developer using paid claude-code in the terminal only (I use plain vim for my own code). I'm running my own business while wearing all of the hats, so I'm not as worried about becoming obsolete, but I also have zero motivation to get other businesses using it (I'm not invested into any AI companies)! To be honest, I could probably even be using it better, but I haven't spent much time yak shaving over my setup beyond zen mcp. That being said, I think anyone looking to invest into established AI companies right now is in for a rude awakening. I think it'll be a commodity / utility like cloud computing with tons of competition and not a ton of differentiating features. That's just my opinion though, and I could be horrendously wrong!
  - qsort 1y ago
    I'm also seeing benefits, and I'm on pretty much the same stack as you. The METR paper I'm citing was misquoted a lot (N was small, and it wasn't a favorable setup for AI tools), but the most important finding was that it's very easy to fool ourselves about productivity benefits. Am I going to cancel my Anthropic subscription? Certainly not, but I'm not going to pretend like my setup is The One True Way. The plural of anecdote isn't data. Nobody has this figured out, nobody.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
victorbjorklund 1y ago
Or are those people biased by what they want to be true because of their current situation (the dev who dont wanna change how they work and therefore wants AI to not work or the non-technical person who dont wanna learn to code or be dependent on a developer and therefore want it to work)
setr 1y ago
I think the problem with this one is that LLMs are somehow both unreasonably effective as well as unreasonably ineffective. Letting the code editor llms do their suggestions, I’ve gotten a ton of useless boilerplate garbage suggestions, but periodically, a couple times of day, it suggests blocks of code that are far more complete, comprehensive and correct than it has any right to be. Whether you’ll get the high IQ or low IQ LLM on the next suggestion is a crapshoot; how much consideration you give to either outcome (focus on the random instances of brilliance, or the constant stream of bullshit) drives the final perception.
- abalashov 1y ago
  > Whether you’ll get the high IQ or low IQ LLM on the next suggestion is a crapshoot I have heard theories from people--whose ideas I don't ordinarily consider to be in the realm of purely uninformed speculation--that this can vary depending on system-wide GPU load, and is throttled accordingly based on real-time demand by the major LLM providers. Whether it's true, I have no idea.
  - emp17344 1y ago
    Sounds like conspiratorial thinking to come to terms with the fact that LLMs are fundamentally non-deterministic text predictors. You can get dramatically different responses to the same question, and that’s just how the system works.
    - abalashov 1y ago
      That was my reaction as well, but I wondered.
- awfulneutral 1y ago
  That has been my experience too. I recently turned it all off because I decided the amount of times it takes me 5x longer to accomplish something, in addition to the subtle increase of bugs, is not currently worth it. I guess I'll try it again in a few months.

no_wizard 1y ago

>Then you have tech employees who want to believe they’re irreplaceable. It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that. Eventually, things will stabilize to a point where we will know what the boundaries of all the new LLM based tooling is good for, and where humans add lots of value to that. That will then drive a maximalist hiring spree, as the more people you have working at an increase in velocity, the faster you ship, and for once, perhaps the quality of code won't substantially decrease, assuming LLMs improve another few leaps in output quality and engineering workflows adjust in a normalized way. Thats the hopeful side of the equation anyway. I feel incredibly bad about customer oriented jobs, like white glove customer service. I already saw a trend (especially since 2020 but certainly before as well) where these AI chat bots and AI support lines will decimate that job category. These are pretty common white collar jobs, lots of people even in our industry got their starts on support lines.

Exoristos 1y ago
I don't think any normal customer is going to want to talk to AI, once the novelty wears off. It's going to be "Let me talk to your supervisor" almost every time.
- jgilias 1y ago
  Oh, but there’s something called “containment” that you measure and optimize on your chatbots.
- abalashov 1y ago
  Maybe. It all depends on whether the AI can actually solve your problem.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    Yeah, if the AI isn't shite and has access to tools to solve my problem, I'll take it over some overworked and undermotivated human call center any day.

empath75 1y ago

There are also a large number of people who have a deep-seated philosophical objection to the entire project of ai. It's not just about their job, it's about their sense of who and what they are as a human being, their soul or whatever. They will insist that AI's do not think or know anything, no matter what evidence there is to contrary.

emp17344 1y ago
Everyone has an agenda. Similarly, groups like r/singularity and the rationalists have spent years predicting the oncoming advent of a machine god, and are desperately reading too much into every LLM advancement.

dijit 1y ago

idk, I'm not a software engineer. I'm a sysadmin. Or, am I a "devops engineer"? or.. a "SRE"... or... am I a platform engineer? You know what, I don't know. What I do know, is that people keep trying to make my job obsolete, only to hire me under a different title for more money later. The practices and the tools are the same too, yet to justify it to themselves they'll make shit up about how the work is "actually, a material difference from what came before" (except, it's really not). I'm still employable after 20 years of this. I'm not a software engineer, and I'm not a tech CEO - I don't care, but people have been trying to replace me my whole career (even myself: "Automate yourself out of a job” is a common sysadmin mantra after all). Yet, somehow, I'm still here.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kshacker 1y ago
Same here, but this time is different. Truly. Some of the easy jobs will be taken away and your job is not under threat. Right? But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Less supply more demand. Either the pay will come down or there are very few jobs. Fingers crossed.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Yes, and this is not shocking. This is how it is meant to work. You get a low level job because you're new and have a lot to learn. You learn more things as you work the low level job, and then you can get promoted or move to a new role that is not so low level. You keep growing until you eventually compete with the people that were senior level when you were working that low level job.
- dijit 1y ago
  It always feels like “this time its different”. NoOps, NoSQL, Heroku, PaaS, IaaS. Maybe there are less people in operations than before, there are certainly some companies that do their best not to employ any operations focused people and use FaaS for everything and only hire feature developers… who, end up doing the operations work that crops up. shrug

dragonwriter 1y ago

> It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked There is no “how we’ve always worked”; there was no steady state. Constant evolution and progressive automation of the simpler parts has been the norm for software development forever. > with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that. It doesn't, though. Productivity multipliers don't reduce demand for the affected field or income in it. (Tight money policies and economic slowdowns, especially when they co-occur, do, though, especially in a field where much of the demand and high income levels are driven by speculative investment, either in startups or new ventures by established firms.)

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Thank you. This is the most accurate take of what’s going on. Though the overwhelming population of people aren’t CEOs. It’s people. That’s why the sentiment among most people and also HN is highly negative against AI. If you’re reading this you likely have that bias.

greenie_beans 1y ago

it has devalued the labor. i scoped a contract but they want me to do it in less time now that we have AI. this lets them pay me less for the same work. and AI CEOs sell it as "society will do less work" but instead now i'm expected to do more work because the work takes less time. same as it ever was with technology advances.

wincy 1y ago

Look, maybe I’m saying the quiet part out loud, but if software engineering isn’t where the money is at anymore, and those jobs go away, I’d be competent at something else. I’m a smart person. I work hard. I’m confident I’d be able to displace someone who isn’t as smart as me and just “take” their job. There’s going to be a need for smart people with a good work ethic unless literally everyone loses their jobs, and at that point we’re living past the singularly event horizon as far as I’m concerned and all bets are off.

o_nate 1y ago

Maybe it's too soon to say that autonomous LLM agents are the wave of the future and always will be, but that's basically where I'm at. AI code completion is awesome, but it's essentially a better Stack Overflow, and I don't remember people worrying that Stack Overflow was going to put developers out of work, so I'm not losing sleep that an improved version will.

abalashov 1y ago
The problem with the "agents" thing is that it's mostly hype, and doesn't reflect any real AI or model advances that makes them possible. Yes, there's a more streamlined interface to allow them to do things, but that's all it is. You could accomplish the same by copy-and-pasting a bunch of context into the LLM before and asking it what to do. MCP and other agent-enabling data channels now allow it to actually reach out and do that stuff, but this is not in itself a leap forward in capabilities, just in delivery mechanisms. I'm not saying it's irrelevant or doesn't matter. However, it does seem to me that as we've run out of low-hanging fruit in model advances, the hype machine has pivoted to "agents" and "agentic workflows" as the new VC-whetting sauce to keep the bubble growing.
- o_nate 1y ago
  I don't want to blame Alan Turing for this mess, but his Turing Test maybe gave people that idea that something that can mimic a human in conversation is also going to be able to think like a human in every way. Turns out not to be the case.
  - abalashov 1y ago
    Well, I agree with you. But I'd be remiss not to say that this is a lively controversy in the world of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. To one camp in this discursive space, who of course see themselves to be ever the pragmatists, the essence of the polemic about whether LLMs can "think" is not about whether they think in exactly the same ways we do or capture the essence of human thinking, but whether it matters at all.

steveBK123 1y ago

Also judging by my LinkedIn, but all the senior tech execs on the job market are now Generative AI Experts, which is funny because I thought they were all Cryptocurrency Experts when I last saw them posting this much in 2020.

jofla_net 1y ago
The best is when you work with one, in a small enough company. During which they extoll some currently-hot grift, and then after the company goes under (maybe not due to thier poor leadership), you read about their huge successes there! Much win.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  This rhymes with the guys I am currently observing. Former cloud data lake enterprise architecture & agile development experts as well. True Renaissance Men.

lezojeda 1y ago

[dead]

happytoexplain 1y ago

(Note: This is an American take, and uses software jobs as the primary example, but a lot of this applies to other jobs) Yes, well said - with one caveat: "Money and social status" is subtly but crucially different from "livelihood". You correctly identify the group of people whose lives are affected, but lump those people along with CEOs and AI companies under the umbrella of "money and social status" in your summarization, which maybe undersells the role of the masses in this equation. The software job - traditionally one of the few good career options remaining for a large chunk of Americans - is falling. There are many different reasons, and AI, while not the apocalypse, is a small but crucial part of it. We need to get over the illusion that a large piece of that fall consists of wildly luxurious incomes reducing to simply cushy incomes - "boo hoo", we say, sarcastically. But the majority of software folks are going from "comfortable" to "unhappy but livable", while some are going from "livable" to "not livable", while others are no longer employed at all. There were already too many people across the job spectrum in these buckets, and throwing another gigantic chunk of citizens in there is going to eventually cause big, bad things to happen. We need to start giving a shit about our citizens, and part of that is avoiding the implication that just because something disruptive is inevitable, doesn't mean the affect isn't devastating and we should just do absolutely nothing about the situation. Another part of that is avoiding the implication that the average person can just successfully change careers without enormous suffering. We can ease, assist, REGULATE (which the party in power would like to make illegal), etc. It's important to understand that none of that means "stopping" AI or something ridiculous like that. We need to start giving a shit about our citizens. A third time: We need to start giving a shit about our citizens. And sorry, most of this was not directed personally at you. Just the first note about your wording.

skeeter2020 1y ago

Why don't Tech CEOs and CTOs see how AI is going to "disrupt" their jobs? If anyone can write code, why will I hire your company to create the software I use? I also see the non-development jobs as much more in peril from AI; I can go generate marketing copy, HR policies, and project plans of comparable (or better!) quality today.

mattgreenrocks 1y ago
Because it's meant to be a psyop more than a reflection of reality.

zozbot234 1y ago

AI is glorified autocomplete. Look at what happens when AI tries its hand at writing legal briefs, and you'll understand why it cannot possibly replace software developers.

lincoln20xx 1y ago
That may be true. But it's pretty great at generating lines of questioning for cross-examination.
- epicureanideal 1y ago
  I wonder to what extent a non LLM system with access to the same original corpus of text would do, with some simple similarity search feature across the corpus?
remich 1y ago
As with all uses of current AI (meaning generative AI LLMs) context is everything. I say this as a person who is both a lawyer and a software engineer. It is not surprising that the general purpose models wouldn't be great at writing a legal brief -- the training data likely doesn't contain much of the relevant case law because while it is theoretically publicly available, practicing attorneys universally use proprietary databases like Lexis and WestLaw to surface it. The alternative is spelunking through public court websites that look like they were designed in the 90s or even having to pay for case records like on PACER. At the same time, even if you have access to proper context like if your model can engage with Lexis or WestLaw via tool-use, surfacing appropriate matches from caselaw requires more than just word/token matching. LLMs are statistical models that tend to reduce down to the most likely answer. But, typically, in the context of a legal brief, a lawyer isn't attempting to find the most likely answer or even the objectively correct answer, they are trying to find relevant precedent with which they can make an argument that supports the position they are trying to advance. An LLM by its nature can't do that without help. Where you're right, then, is that law and software engineering have a lot in common when it comes to how effective baseline LLM models are. Where you're wrong is in calling them glorified auto-complete. In the hands of a novice they will, yes, generate plausible but mostly incorrect or technically correct but unusable in some way answers. Properly configured with access to appropriate context in the hands of an expert who understands how to communicate what they want the tool to give them? Oh that's quite a different matter.