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> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to fo

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not even the majority of devs. People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.

oblio 6mo ago
>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions > The AI is coming for that too. In that case all [1] non manual work is doomed, until robotics has an LLM moment. [1] With the exception of all fields protected by politics or nepotism.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago
  > all non manual work is doomed All work in general. Knowledge workers can still do manual work, and will compete to do so when there is no option to continue what they do today.
dmazzoni 6mo ago
There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities. However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"? AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  >AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback What part of those you think it doesn't help with?
  - malfist 6mo ago
    There is no shortcut to understanding. No one can understand things for you
    - Animats 6mo ago
      They can make it unnecessary for you to understand. Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks? A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get above 90% full before they have to expand. Who keeps Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms handy any more? I own both the original edition and the revised edition. They're boxed up in the garage. I once read that book cover to cover. That was a long time ago. That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.
      - malfist 6mo ago
        That's obviously not what I'm talking about. If you're asking an AI to write an optimal hash table algorithm, something is clearly wrong. I'm talking specifically about understanding the business domain and problem you are trying to solve.
        coldtea 6mo ago
bborud 6mo ago
> The AI is coming for that too. To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need. This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs and suchlike. He spent 6 months working in the company. On the factory floor, in the logistics department, in procurement, in accounting and even shadowing the board. Then he delivered a proposal for how to restructure the parts of the company, change manufacturing processes, and show how logistics and procurement could be optimized if you saw them as two parts in a bigger dance. He redesigned the company so that it could a) be automated, and b) leverage automation to increase the efficiency of several parts of the business. THEN, he started planning how to write the software (this was the 80s after all), and then we started implementing it. Now think about what went into this. For instance we changed a lot of what happened on the factory floor. Because my boss had actually worked it. So he knew what pain points existed. Pain points even the factory workers didn't know how to address because they didn't know that they could be addressed. I was naive. I thought this was how everyone approached "software projects". People generally don't. But it did teach me that the job isn't writing code. It is reasoning about complex systems that often are not even known to those who are parts of it. And this is for _boring_ software that requires very little creativity and mostly zero novelty. Now imagine how you do novel things. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up. You make it sound like it is a bad thing that certain tasks become easier. I spent a lot of time writing CRUD stuff. Because the things i really want to work on depend on them. I don't enjoy what is essentially boilerplate. Who does? If you can do the same job in 1/20 the time, then how is this a bad thing? It is only a bad thing if writing CRUD webapps is the limit of your ability. We don't argue for banning excavators because it puts people with shovels out of work. We find more meaningful things for them to do and become more productive. New classes of work becomes low-skilled jobs. If you have been doing software for a while, you are probably doing some subset of this. But these things are hard to articulate. It is hard to articulate because it is not something we think about. Like walking: easy for us to do, hard to program a robot to do it.
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
> The AI is coming for that too. Current AI tech giants prove over and over and over again that this is not the case
- cromka 6mo ago
  We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?
  - luckystarr 6mo ago
    Discovery of the best solution in a problem space is not generative but only verificative. Meaning: the LLM can see if a solution is better than another, but it can't generate the best one from the start. If you trust it, you'll get sub-par solutions. This is definitely an agent problem instead of an LLM problem. Anybody got something explorative like this working?
    - coldtea 6mo ago
      So? Hundreds of millions of office and devel jobs are about for developing "optimal solutions" to begin with.
  - ASalazarMX 6mo ago
    Hype cycles, AI has made developers obsolete like a dozen times in the las couple of years, at least according to their developers.
  - malfist 6mo ago
    I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.
    - kakacik 6mo ago
      It feels its just around the corner. But when you turn 20th corner and its still behind the next one, maybe things are a bit different than they seem / clueless emotions make us believe. Long term its bleak, but short/medium term - not so much, if I get fired it won't be llm replacing me but rather company politics, budget changes etc. Which was the only real (very real) risk for past 15 years too, consistently. But it helps to not work for US company.
LPisGood 6mo ago
> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.
- ge96 6mo ago
  I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.
  - smrq 6mo ago
    People didn't leap from jQuery to React. It's a lot easier to imagine an AI looking at jQuery and [insert any server side MVC framework] and inventing Backbone.
  - ASalazarMX 6mo ago
    News: "AGI refuses to make another JS framework, rages on the follies of misguided developers and their wateful JS crutches" Developer community: Wow, we truly have become obsolete now!
    - ge96 6mo ago
      Who will be the disrupters when there is nothing to disrupt
    - notpachet 6mo ago
      In a shocking twist, it turns out that Mootools is the agents' preferred framework
  - scj 6mo ago
    A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like? My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly. That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.
vga1 6mo ago
>bosses The AI is coming for those too.
- snozolli 6mo ago
  Something like five to ten years ago, when AI hype was starting to hit media, one of the claims was that AI would come for middle-management first. Since middle-management can generally be described as collecting information from underlings and reporting information to upper management, their work was supposed to be easy to automate with AI. As far as I can tell, this hasn't proven to be true at all, and we software engineers proudly wrote ourselves out of work by constantly publishing our source code and discussing it openly.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
geodel 6mo ago
Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing. One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability. Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends and other copy/paste junk. But as per industry classification they are just part of same Coder/Developer/IT Engineer group. And their bleak prospects is not some future scenario, it is playing out right now with tons of them getting laid off. And whole lot of people with IT degrees, certifications are not finding any jobs in this field.
- hjort-e 6mo ago
  What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?
  - evilduck 6mo ago
    Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front ends but everything else is still easy pickings.
    - skydhash 6mo ago
      > I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend That is not hard. It’s just tedious and very slow to do manually. The hard part would be about designing a usb dongle and ensuring that the associated software has good UX. The reason you don’t see kernel devs REing devices is not because it’s impossible or that it requires expert knowledge. It’s because it’s like counting sands on the beach.
thisisit 6mo ago
Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good. I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.
- lostmsu 6mo ago
  No, I never believed in fully automated tale by Tesla, but as the LLMs improve my personal estimate for the date of human-level AGI is rapidly moving to "present". Before GPT-2 I had it somewhere in 2100, at GPT-2 I thought maybe by 2060 if we are lucky. Now I think it is 2035 or maybe even sooner.
  - rootusrootus 6mo ago
    I like to see the optimism, even if I don't share it. I think it's incredible hubris that humans think we are about to reinvent our own level of intelligence, just because we made a machine that talks pretty.
    - lostmsu 6mo ago
      Your own comment in my timeline is 7 years out of date. GPT-2 talked pretty, that was its whole thing. If you are trying to claim there's no difference between 5.5 and 2 you are delusional (hallucinating?).
      - rootusrootus 6mo ago
        I think I was fairly clear, I said that I think it is hubris to think what we have created is anything even slightly like human intelligence. It talks very pretty (a lot of work has gone into this aspect in particular), and it does demonstrate the extent to which, as individuals, most of us do not have especially unique thoughts nor problems to solve. It exposes how quickly humans jump to anthropomorphizing pretty much anything. Is it a handy tool? Yep! I use it every day. But it is laughable to think this is the path to AGI. The most common counterargument on HN is some variation of "but you can't prove that this isn't just like how a human thinks". A conspiracy theory at best, just reinforcing the fact that we know very little about how even simple non-human brains function.
Aperocky 6mo ago
> The AI is coming for that too. That's where we fundamentally disagree about. Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM parameter count.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  >but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. And the human mind is not?
  - nothinkjustai 6mo ago
    It’s not.
  - KalMann 6mo ago
    I can give you the exact mathematical formula used to statistically optimize the output of a neural network from input examples. Can you do the same for the brain?
    - coldtea 6mo ago
      Not atm, but does it matter? Is it similar, even if much simpler, of the sort of process that goes on there too? That's the important question.
- bel8 6mo ago
  > because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. So are humans. Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?) And I argue that current LLMs have surpassed many of my capabilities already. For example GPT/Opus can understand and document some ancient legacy project I never saw before in minutes. I would take a week+ to do the same and my report would probably have more mistakes and oversights than the one generated by the LLM.
tjwebbnorfolk 6mo ago
>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions > The AI is coming for that too. If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. I'm still not convinced by that. But I am convinced that the part of software development that involves typing code manually into an IDE all day is likely gone forever.
- itsafarqueue 6mo ago
  > If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. Now you’re getting it
- flatline 6mo ago
  It really doesn't have to come for everything to feel like it's taking everything. If it eliminates 10% of white collar jobs over the next decade, the impact will be felt everywhere.
  - tjwebbnorfolk 6mo ago
    Sure, but who doesn't think that 10% of white collar jobs are mostly bullshit anyway?
    - esafak 6mo ago
      The only thing worse than a bullshit job is no job.
    - jplusequalt 6mo ago
      The roughly 15-20 million people who would suddenly be without a job?
  - bonesss 6mo ago
    I struggle to understand the logic (in general, the way people are talking), normally efficiencies come with increases in production and scale and use-cases. So of 10% of lawyers get AI-d away, let’s say, the remaining 90% are 1.1x+ efficient and also up against other lawyers enjoying the same… work might go up. And on the customer side there is sooooo much BS with lawyers, but if both lawyer and customer can communicate faster or better with the LLMs, we should see more better cases with better dialog and case handling. Again, the total amount of lawyering could go up a lot. And then we have the cases prohibitive without the LLMs, now possible for big money. Better LLM empowered lawyers should be able to create new and more lawyer work. As it stands I see people selling services that are subsidized by VC, template jobs we’d be doing faster with copy paste but it’s not copyright infringement when OpenAI does it, and a rush for valuations to soak up VC because the business model isn’t there. I’m seeing a huge uptick in visual bugs on large commercial platforms and customer facing apps, and don’t feel OpenAI is gonna kill Office anytime soon… or Chromium… or Steam… or emacs… Call me an optimist, but I think those LLM pump and dumpers are creating a wave of fear that would be quite different if they weren’t lying and trying to boost an IPO. Chat GPT 2 was too dangerous to release, lul, and the class action suits are just getting started. An actual lawyer replacing tech company should sell lawyering for infini-money, not pens that’ll totally 10x your lawyering (bro).
no_op 6mo ago
Even if AI advances continue, for quite a while there's likely still going to be the 'Steve Jobs' role. That is, even if AI coding agents can, in the future, replace entire teams of SWEs, competently making all implementation decisions with no guidance from a tech-savvy human, the best software will likely still involve a human deciding what should be built and being very picky about how, exactly, it should externally behave. I don't know if it makes sense to call that person an SWE, and some people currently employed as SWEs either won't be good at this or aren't interested in doing it. But the existing pool of SWEs is probably the largest concentration of people who'll end up doing this job, because it's the largest concentration of people who've thought a lot about, and developed taste with respect to, how software should work.
- bmiedlar 6mo ago
  This matches what I'm seeing. I've been building software for a long time, but building more now with AI than I ever could with a traditional team. But the throughput that's helpful is from knowing what to build and what tradeoffs matter. The AI doesn't have that. It's a force multiplier on experience, not a replacement for it.
- laughing_man 6mo ago
  How many Steve Jobses do we need as a percentage of people developing software?
at-fates-hands 6mo ago
>> Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up. Anecdotal evidence to support this. I work with both dev and design teams. Upper management has already gone through several layoffs and offshoring of the two dev teams I work with. The devs they did keep were exactly what you said. The capable ones who reliably closed their Jira tickets. Never missed a deadline for building their features or components. And now? Their work has tripled and now the only help they get from management? "Start to figure out how to leverage AI, we're going to be a in hiring freeze for the next 10 months." The double whammy of losing onshore team members and not getting any help from management to fix the problem they just created and essentially just telling them to figure out how to use AI to keep up is pretty staggering. I would echo what one of the devs told me, "If this is the new "AI era" than you can count me right the fuck out of it."
nitwit005 6mo ago
> The AI is coming for that too. Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. I'm not sure anyone is actually working on those. People talk about spending all day writing CRUD apps here, but if you suggest there are already low code tools to build those, they will promptly tell you it's too complex for that to work.
- laughing_man 6mo ago
  >Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. Yes. Yes, that's exactly what we're going to see, and more swiftly than people are generally comfortable with. What are we going to do with all those cubicle dwellers?
  - dvsfish 6mo ago
    a new paradigm of 3 day work weeks. share the salary of the days off with those less automatable, and work to automate everyone. I wish some sort of dicussion like this could happen where the workers of the world get to see some of the gains of a new technology more immediately. If "the state" wants to maintain legitimacy and protect its citizenry (one of the primary promises of a state) to avoid a period of social unrest, the likes of which has been unheard of for several generations, I think something like this should at least be a part of the discussion.
    - laughing_man 6mo ago
      I don't think it will happen. For one thing, it hasn't in the US since the introduction of the forty hour work week in 1940. But beyond that, I don't think most people want a three day work week. They would rather work five days and get the extra money. I worked at a company that did government contracting. We had a couple quarters without much in the way of orders, so instead of laying people off like you'd normally see in that situation, the company decided to go to a four day week, with a commensurate cut in pay. I was thrilled, as a young single guy, to get Fridays off. I rented a room in someone's house and hit my monthly nut in about two weeks. But most of the people I worked with hated it. Some of them quit. A lot of them both needed the money and also had no idea what to do with themselves on that extra day.
wiseowise 6mo ago
[flagged]

oblio 6mo ago

>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions > The AI is coming for that too. In that case all [1] non manual work is doomed, until robotics has an LLM moment. [1] With the exception of all fields protected by politics or nepotism.

rootusrootus 6mo ago
> all non manual work is doomed All work in general. Knowledge workers can still do manual work, and will compete to do so when there is no option to continue what they do today.

dmazzoni 6mo ago

There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities. However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"? AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.

coldtea 6mo ago
>AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback What part of those you think it doesn't help with?
- malfist 6mo ago
  There is no shortcut to understanding. No one can understand things for you
  - Animats 6mo ago
    They can make it unnecessary for you to understand. Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks? A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get above 90% full before they have to expand. Who keeps Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms handy any more? I own both the original edition and the revised edition. They're boxed up in the garage. I once read that book cover to cover. That was a long time ago. That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.
    - malfist 6mo ago
      That's obviously not what I'm talking about. If you're asking an AI to write an optimal hash table algorithm, something is clearly wrong. I'm talking specifically about understanding the business domain and problem you are trying to solve.
      - coldtea 6mo ago

bborud 6mo ago

> The AI is coming for that too. To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need. This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs and suchlike. He spent 6 months working in the company. On the factory floor, in the logistics department, in procurement, in accounting and even shadowing the board. Then he delivered a proposal for how to restructure the parts of the company, change manufacturing processes, and show how logistics and procurement could be optimized if you saw them as two parts in a bigger dance. He redesigned the company so that it could a) be automated, and b) leverage automation to increase the efficiency of several parts of the business. THEN, he started planning how to write the software (this was the 80s after all), and then we started implementing it. Now think about what went into this. For instance we changed a lot of what happened on the factory floor. Because my boss had actually worked it. So he knew what pain points existed. Pain points even the factory workers didn't know how to address because they didn't know that they could be addressed. I was naive. I thought this was how everyone approached "software projects". People generally don't. But it did teach me that the job isn't writing code. It is reasoning about complex systems that often are not even known to those who are parts of it. And this is for _boring_ software that requires very little creativity and mostly zero novelty. Now imagine how you do novel things. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up. You make it sound like it is a bad thing that certain tasks become easier. I spent a lot of time writing CRUD stuff. Because the things i really want to work on depend on them. I don't enjoy what is essentially boilerplate. Who does? If you can do the same job in 1/20 the time, then how is this a bad thing? It is only a bad thing if writing CRUD webapps is the limit of your ability. We don't argue for banning excavators because it puts people with shovels out of work. We find more meaningful things for them to do and become more productive. New classes of work becomes low-skilled jobs. If you have been doing software for a while, you are probably doing some subset of this. But these things are hard to articulate. It is hard to articulate because it is not something we think about. Like walking: easy for us to do, hard to program a robot to do it.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

> The AI is coming for that too. Current AI tech giants prove over and over and over again that this is not the case

cromka 6mo ago
We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?
- luckystarr 6mo ago
  Discovery of the best solution in a problem space is not generative but only verificative. Meaning: the LLM can see if a solution is better than another, but it can't generate the best one from the start. If you trust it, you'll get sub-par solutions. This is definitely an agent problem instead of an LLM problem. Anybody got something explorative like this working?
  - coldtea 6mo ago
    So? Hundreds of millions of office and devel jobs are about for developing "optimal solutions" to begin with.
- ASalazarMX 6mo ago
  Hype cycles, AI has made developers obsolete like a dozen times in the las couple of years, at least according to their developers.
- malfist 6mo ago
  I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.
  - kakacik 6mo ago
    It feels its just around the corner. But when you turn 20th corner and its still behind the next one, maybe things are a bit different than they seem / clueless emotions make us believe. Long term its bleak, but short/medium term - not so much, if I get fired it won't be llm replacing me but rather company politics, budget changes etc. Which was the only real (very real) risk for past 15 years too, consistently. But it helps to not work for US company.

LPisGood 6mo ago

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

ge96 6mo ago
I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.
- smrq 6mo ago
  People didn't leap from jQuery to React. It's a lot easier to imagine an AI looking at jQuery and [insert any server side MVC framework] and inventing Backbone.
- ASalazarMX 6mo ago
  News: "AGI refuses to make another JS framework, rages on the follies of misguided developers and their wateful JS crutches" Developer community: Wow, we truly have become obsolete now!
  - ge96 6mo ago
    Who will be the disrupters when there is nothing to disrupt
  - notpachet 6mo ago
    In a shocking twist, it turns out that Mootools is the agents' preferred framework
- scj 6mo ago
  A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like? My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly. That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.

vga1 6mo ago

>bosses The AI is coming for those too.

snozolli 6mo ago
Something like five to ten years ago, when AI hype was starting to hit media, one of the claims was that AI would come for middle-management first. Since middle-management can generally be described as collecting information from underlings and reporting information to upper management, their work was supposed to be easy to automate with AI. As far as I can tell, this hasn't proven to be true at all, and we software engineers proudly wrote ourselves out of work by constantly publishing our source code and discussing it openly.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]

geodel 6mo ago

Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing. One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability. Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends and other copy/paste junk. But as per industry classification they are just part of same Coder/Developer/IT Engineer group. And their bleak prospects is not some future scenario, it is playing out right now with tons of them getting laid off. And whole lot of people with IT degrees, certifications are not finding any jobs in this field.

hjort-e 6mo ago
What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?
- evilduck 6mo ago
  Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front ends but everything else is still easy pickings.
  - skydhash 6mo ago
    > I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend That is not hard. It’s just tedious and very slow to do manually. The hard part would be about designing a usb dongle and ensuring that the associated software has good UX. The reason you don’t see kernel devs REing devices is not because it’s impossible or that it requires expert knowledge. It’s because it’s like counting sands on the beach.

thisisit 6mo ago

Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good. I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.

lostmsu 6mo ago
No, I never believed in fully automated tale by Tesla, but as the LLMs improve my personal estimate for the date of human-level AGI is rapidly moving to "present". Before GPT-2 I had it somewhere in 2100, at GPT-2 I thought maybe by 2060 if we are lucky. Now I think it is 2035 or maybe even sooner.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago
  I like to see the optimism, even if I don't share it. I think it's incredible hubris that humans think we are about to reinvent our own level of intelligence, just because we made a machine that talks pretty.
  - lostmsu 6mo ago
    Your own comment in my timeline is 7 years out of date. GPT-2 talked pretty, that was its whole thing. If you are trying to claim there's no difference between 5.5 and 2 you are delusional (hallucinating?).
    - rootusrootus 6mo ago
      I think I was fairly clear, I said that I think it is hubris to think what we have created is anything even slightly like human intelligence. It talks very pretty (a lot of work has gone into this aspect in particular), and it does demonstrate the extent to which, as individuals, most of us do not have especially unique thoughts nor problems to solve. It exposes how quickly humans jump to anthropomorphizing pretty much anything. Is it a handy tool? Yep! I use it every day. But it is laughable to think this is the path to AGI. The most common counterargument on HN is some variation of "but you can't prove that this isn't just like how a human thinks". A conspiracy theory at best, just reinforcing the fact that we know very little about how even simple non-human brains function.

Aperocky 6mo ago

> The AI is coming for that too. That's where we fundamentally disagree about. Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM parameter count.

coldtea 6mo ago
>but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. And the human mind is not?
- nothinkjustai 6mo ago
  It’s not.
- KalMann 6mo ago
  I can give you the exact mathematical formula used to statistically optimize the output of a neural network from input examples. Can you do the same for the brain?
  - coldtea 6mo ago
    Not atm, but does it matter? Is it similar, even if much simpler, of the sort of process that goes on there too? That's the important question.
bel8 6mo ago
> because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. So are humans. Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?) And I argue that current LLMs have surpassed many of my capabilities already. For example GPT/Opus can understand and document some ancient legacy project I never saw before in minutes. I would take a week+ to do the same and my report would probably have more mistakes and oversights than the one generated by the LLM.

tjwebbnorfolk 6mo ago

>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions > The AI is coming for that too. If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. I'm still not convinced by that. But I am convinced that the part of software development that involves typing code manually into an IDE all day is likely gone forever.

itsafarqueue 6mo ago
> If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. Now you’re getting it
flatline 6mo ago
It really doesn't have to come for everything to feel like it's taking everything. If it eliminates 10% of white collar jobs over the next decade, the impact will be felt everywhere.
- tjwebbnorfolk 6mo ago
  Sure, but who doesn't think that 10% of white collar jobs are mostly bullshit anyway?
  - esafak 6mo ago
    The only thing worse than a bullshit job is no job.
  - jplusequalt 6mo ago
    The roughly 15-20 million people who would suddenly be without a job?
- bonesss 6mo ago
  I struggle to understand the logic (in general, the way people are talking), normally efficiencies come with increases in production and scale and use-cases. So of 10% of lawyers get AI-d away, let’s say, the remaining 90% are 1.1x+ efficient and also up against other lawyers enjoying the same… work might go up. And on the customer side there is sooooo much BS with lawyers, but if both lawyer and customer can communicate faster or better with the LLMs, we should see more better cases with better dialog and case handling. Again, the total amount of lawyering could go up a lot. And then we have the cases prohibitive without the LLMs, now possible for big money. Better LLM empowered lawyers should be able to create new and more lawyer work. As it stands I see people selling services that are subsidized by VC, template jobs we’d be doing faster with copy paste but it’s not copyright infringement when OpenAI does it, and a rush for valuations to soak up VC because the business model isn’t there. I’m seeing a huge uptick in visual bugs on large commercial platforms and customer facing apps, and don’t feel OpenAI is gonna kill Office anytime soon… or Chromium… or Steam… or emacs… Call me an optimist, but I think those LLM pump and dumpers are creating a wave of fear that would be quite different if they weren’t lying and trying to boost an IPO. Chat GPT 2 was too dangerous to release, lul, and the class action suits are just getting started. An actual lawyer replacing tech company should sell lawyering for infini-money, not pens that’ll totally 10x your lawyering (bro).

no_op 6mo ago

Even if AI advances continue, for quite a while there's likely still going to be the 'Steve Jobs' role. That is, even if AI coding agents can, in the future, replace entire teams of SWEs, competently making all implementation decisions with no guidance from a tech-savvy human, the best software will likely still involve a human deciding what should be built and being very picky about how, exactly, it should externally behave. I don't know if it makes sense to call that person an SWE, and some people currently employed as SWEs either won't be good at this or aren't interested in doing it. But the existing pool of SWEs is probably the largest concentration of people who'll end up doing this job, because it's the largest concentration of people who've thought a lot about, and developed taste with respect to, how software should work.

bmiedlar 6mo ago
This matches what I'm seeing. I've been building software for a long time, but building more now with AI than I ever could with a traditional team. But the throughput that's helpful is from knowing what to build and what tradeoffs matter. The AI doesn't have that. It's a force multiplier on experience, not a replacement for it.
laughing_man 6mo ago
How many Steve Jobses do we need as a percentage of people developing software?

at-fates-hands 6mo ago

>> Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up. Anecdotal evidence to support this. I work with both dev and design teams. Upper management has already gone through several layoffs and offshoring of the two dev teams I work with. The devs they did keep were exactly what you said. The capable ones who reliably closed their Jira tickets. Never missed a deadline for building their features or components. And now? Their work has tripled and now the only help they get from management? "Start to figure out how to leverage AI, we're going to be a in hiring freeze for the next 10 months." The double whammy of losing onshore team members and not getting any help from management to fix the problem they just created and essentially just telling them to figure out how to use AI to keep up is pretty staggering. I would echo what one of the devs told me, "If this is the new "AI era" than you can count me right the fuck out of it."

nitwit005 6mo ago

> The AI is coming for that too. Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. I'm not sure anyone is actually working on those. People talk about spending all day writing CRUD apps here, but if you suggest there are already low code tools to build those, they will promptly tell you it's too complex for that to work.

laughing_man 6mo ago
>Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. Yes. Yes, that's exactly what we're going to see, and more swiftly than people are generally comfortable with. What are we going to do with all those cubicle dwellers?
- dvsfish 6mo ago
  a new paradigm of 3 day work weeks. share the salary of the days off with those less automatable, and work to automate everyone. I wish some sort of dicussion like this could happen where the workers of the world get to see some of the gains of a new technology more immediately. If "the state" wants to maintain legitimacy and protect its citizenry (one of the primary promises of a state) to avoid a period of social unrest, the likes of which has been unheard of for several generations, I think something like this should at least be a part of the discussion.
  - laughing_man 6mo ago
    I don't think it will happen. For one thing, it hasn't in the US since the introduction of the forty hour work week in 1940. But beyond that, I don't think most people want a three day work week. They would rather work five days and get the extra money. I worked at a company that did government contracting. We had a couple quarters without much in the way of orders, so instead of laying people off like you'd normally see in that situation, the company decided to go to a four day week, with a commensurate cut in pay. I was thrilled, as a young single guy, to get Fridays off. I rented a room in someone's house and hit my monthly nut in about two weeks. But most of the people I worked with hated it. Some of them quit. A lot of them both needed the money and also had no idea what to do with themselves on that extra day.

wiseowise 6mo ago

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