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I think this misses the forest for the trees. Working with ChatGPT is eerily similar to working with offshore Indian devs back in my enterprise days. Producti
by treis 5mo ago
I think this misses the forest for the trees. Working with ChatGPT is eerily similar to working with offshore Indian devs back in my enterprise days. Productive if guided explicitly but if let run wild there's lots of WTF moments.
LLMs are likely to replace outsourced devs because your employees that know the context can use LLMs to do what offshore devs did before.
- zwischenzug 5mo agoCertainly tracks with the number of outsourced teams begging for work on LinkedIn.
- lumost 5mo agoHow many of those wtf moments are simply from not “being in the room when it happened?” Most enterprise software is riddled with wtf moments demanded as one compromise or another.
- xcskier56 5mo agoThere's always wtf, why did we add this feature, but at least in my experience, once a week or so I run into something in this category. Me: "AI, please cleanup/refactor/improve this thing" AI: "Roger that! I deleted the file so now it's perfectly clean" ... insert W.T.F.
- dboreham 5mo agoNever seen that once.
- vorticalbox 5mo agoSame but I have seen it try and change my tests because it decided that it’s code was correct and my tests were incorrect. I saw it’s thinking tokens said something along the lines of “I have implemented it correctly but the test is failing. I’ll update the tests so the pipeline passes”
- ofjcihen 5mo agoYeah unfortunately you have to be careful with words like “clean up”. I’ve had it assume I meant the folder multiple times :/
- karl_gluck 5mo agoAt least some, but let me give an example. Request: “manual step X should not be part of the automated build script” Fulfilled as: build script is now split in two. X is still done as a manual step in between. Rather than prompting and waiting for it to be done, the documentation and scripts no longer mention X. Part poorly written requirements, part implementing under pressure, and part lack of engineering discipline. The main issue is catching stuff like this early enough to course-correct. Differences in time zone, language and cultural norms can make that a challenge, all of which LLMs have the advantage in.
- throwaway613746 5mo ago[dead]
- marcusholt 5mo ago[dead]
- spprashant 5mo ago"offshore Indian devs" are no slouches. They have access to the same GPT models and likely cost a tenth of the median US salary. Businesses are always looking to lower marginal cost. They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India to babysit 100 agents.
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoThis is short-sighted. The problem with offshore Indian devs is the communication friction/overhead. You're 9 hours offset, with people who have decent-but-not-great English skills and wildly different cultural priors. If the product people/decision makers are in the US, you're getting a ~50% savings to suffer all those issues, while the cost of tokens remains unchanged. That 50% savings doesn't look very impressive when you're taking a 20% productivity hit from comms friction and crossed wire, and 35% of your total cost is from tokens anyhow. Then it comes out to be a very marginal savings, at the cost of a VASTLY worse hiring experience and VERY high variance of outcomes. Offshore Indian devs make sense when you can have a large Indian division so you can amortize communication infrastructure/process management over a lot of heads, and you're building for international customers so you're not paying an English -> X tax inherently.
- mikeocool 5mo ago"They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India" is exactly what everyone said was going to happen in 2004 as software engineering outsourcing really started to gain traction. Malcolm Gladwell's The Earth Is Flat basically made the argument that software engineering in the US was going the way of manufacturing. And outsourcing certainly became a thing though not in the way everyone predicted. There are far more software engineers in the US today than there were in 2004.
- gedy 5mo agoWhile people will do what they need for money, that is a miserable type of role and the quality of architect will suffer from that.
- runtime_terror 5mo ago
- goosejuice 5mo agoThere are developers outside of your country that are talented, speak your language competently, and willing to work for less pay. There are plenty of reasons to believe that such devs will increase in numbers.
- HDBaseT 5mo ago[flagged]
- jujube3 5mo agoAre they willing to work for less pay than Claude?
- goosejuice 5mo agoWho claimed they would? Cost of labor dwarfs LLM costs.
- jujube3 5mo agoBecause if I want a low-cost, low-quality dev, and Claude fills that role better than an outsourced dev, such people will "decrease in numbers" due to supply and demand.
- goosejuice 5mo agoPerhaps my point wasn't clear. The article suggests humans are needed. So does the person here I responded to. Someone has to tell the LLM what to do and verify it. Outsourced can be anywhere and when you're referring to US, anywhere else is cheaper. Commonwealth devs for example are at least 20% the cost of a US dev. That 20% more than covers the cost of access to a frontier model that this dev could drive. Thinking of LLMs in human units is super strange and if you wish to consider the economics you have to also account for the lowering of barriers to entry.
- jujube3 4mo ago