GP sounds shortsighted on first take, but consider how outsourcing is good and cheap for the companies, but in the long run creates huge unemployment pools in the original country.
Negative consequences can also be social, no-one is saying that it's, say, lowering of product quality.
> So no other country in the world can write code as good as wherever you are from?
I didn't say this -- I think it's your take. Even more -- I'm such an "outsource" software developer who is working for US and EU companies. My take is that overusing outsourcing in the long term, you can lose local education because "we can just hire from ... so why do we need to teach ours?" -- I saw it already, even on an "in-country-scale" level.
Modern development is not as much about writing "good code", but just as much about good communication. There is a very real risk of losing good communication when outsourcing.
It’s not about the ability to write code, it’s about the ability to communicate ideas back and forth. Even just a few time zones is a real issue let alone any linguistic or cultural issues.
Certainly there are competent engineers in every country, but I think what they are referencing is that back in the 90s and 2000s there were a lot of fears from US engineers that they would be replaced by less expensive engineers in other countries, which was attempted by some companies. Ultimately a number of these efforts failed to work well for the company, due to communication barriers and time zone differences.
There's nothing discriminatory about it, it's the same if you outsource things within your own country except the price is higher. Contractors have a totally different way of working because they're not really interested in the long term of a project beyond being retained. If they code something in such a way that causes an issue that takes time to fix later then great - more hours we can charge the client for.
Outsourcing abroad is more difficult because of cultural differences though. Having worked with outsourced devs in India, I found that we got a lot of nodding in meetings when asked if they understood, avoiding saying no, and then it became clear when PRs came in that they didn't actually understand or do what they had been asked to do.
More important than cultural differences is timezone differences. Communication and collaboration is harder when you only have a couple hours of overlap between your working day and their working day. Much harder if you have no overlap at all. This isn't even a feature of outsourcing - it's a challenge for any globally distributed team.
It can be but it depends where you're based to start with - in the UK I've heard of people outsourcing to for e.g. South Africa which is only two hours ahead.
It’s not discriminatory at all! Or even the point OP is trying to make. Taking a significant number of jobs and outsourcing them overnight will quickly result in running out the talent pool in said country. It’s shortsighted and stupid because it assumes that there is an army of developers just sitting around standing by waiting for the next western tech company to give them high paying remote jobs. A large portion of that talent pool is already reserved by the biggest corporations.
Build up to it and foster growth in your overseas teams and you’ll do well. Thinking you can transform your department overnight _is_ a great way to boost your share price, cash out on a fat payday and walk away before your product quality tanks.
Every job in the world is discriminatory if you take the less potent definition of the word. That's why we have job interviews, to explicitly discriminate. I presume you mean "discriminate in a bad way" but given the context I have no idea what that "bad way" is. Outsourcing has costs outside of just the up front payments, that isn't a secret and it has very little to do with technical expertise. Most software driven companies don't fall apart because of poorly implemented algorithms, they are more likely to do so because the humans have a difficult time interfacing in efficient ways and understanding and working towards the same goal together.
You can't just expect people from other countries to communicate as effectively as people who grew up right down the street from each other. Yes, it's objectively discriminatory, but not for hostile reasons.
There's no serious sources about people wanting to fire 100% of [insert title here] for LLMs. It's more about reducing head-count by leveraging LLMs as a productivity multiplier.
I haven't heard of companies successfully doing that at scale though.
Has there been any company that has laid off even a nontrivial amount of programmers and replaced them with AI? Here I mean, where developers at said company actually say the process works and is established, and the staff cuts weren't happening anyway.
I know there are CEOs that make bold claims about this (E.g. Klarna) but I don't really assign any value to that until I hear from people on the floor.
If you have a small non-tech company with a website you pay a freelance programmer to maintain you should seriously consider replacing your programmer with AI.
I work for a company which among other things provides technical support for a number of small tech-oriented businesses and we have lot of problems right now with clients trying to do things on their own with the help of AI.
In our case the complexity of some of these projects and the limited ability of AI means that they're typically creating more bugs and tech debt for us to fix and are not really saving themselves any time – and this is certainly going to be true at the moment for any large project. However, if you're paying programmers just to manage the content of a few small websites it probably begins to make sense to use AI instead.
This still implies that the person who is currently paying freelance programmers is 1) good with LLMs 2) knows some html and js 3) can deploy the updated website.
You're probably right that these people still need some baseline technical skills currently, but I'm really not assuming anything here – this is something we've seen multiple of our clients do in recent months.
It's funny you say they need to be able to deploy the update to be honest because we had a client just last week email a collect of code snippets to us which they created with the help of AI.
This is the problem we have though because we're not just building simple websites which we can hand clients FTP creds for. The best we can do is advise them to learn Git and raise a PR which we can review and deploy ourselves.
Everything that is of low value. And its okay. If it is not useful to humanity, it should decay over time and fade away. Low value propositions should be loaded with parasitic computation, that burdens it with costs until it collapses and allows new growth to replace the old system.
Ehh, as a propaganda tool it would be more useful to not have a hard login wall, which was allegedly implemented due to engineering challenges continuing to operate Twitter at its former scale. So the engineering issues are even limiting its new goals.
It's arguably depreciating in value faster than a new car. One of Elmo's worst judgement calls (and that's saying a lot). Altman jabbed at Elmo and offered 9billion for X, 1/4th the price Elmo paid.
It's kind of hilarious watching the piranhas go at each other:
"Is a good propaganda tool" doesn't keep a website up, engineers do. It's losing money because a bunch of major advertisers pulled out, not because there's not enough engineers to keep it online.
I use it daily and can't remember the last outage.
"it is still online" is pretty high bar. The systems is riddled with bugs that are not being addressed for months now and the amount of spam and bots is even larger than before.
Error on line 5: specification can be interpreted too many
ways, can't define type from 'thing':
Remember to underline the thing that shows the error
~~~~~
| This 'thing' matches too many objects in the knowledge scope.
Yes, the best way is to type the real program completely into the AI, so that ClosedAI gets new material to train on, the AI can make some dumb comments but the code works.
And the manager is happy that filthy programmers are "using" AI.
>>However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected.
Speaking English to make something is one thing, but speaking English to modify something complicated is absolutely something else. And Im pretty sure involves more or less the same effort as writing code itself. Of course regression for this something like this is not for the faint hearted.
Actually I think that's the near future, or close to it.
1. Humans also need specific wording in order to program code that stakeholders expected. A lot of people are laughing at AI because they think getting requirements is a human privilege.
2. On the contrary, I don't think people need to hire AI interfacers. Instead, business stakeholders are way more interested to interface with AI simply because they just want to get things done instead of filling a ticket for us. Some of them are going to be good interfacers with proper integration -- and yes we programmers are helping them to do so.
Side note: I don't think you are going to hear someone shouting that they are going to replace humans with AI. It started with this: people integrate AI into their workflow, layoff 10%, and see if AI helps to fill in the gap so they can freeze hire. Then they layoff 10% more.
And yes we programmers are helping the business to do that, with a proud and smile face.
Your argument depends on LLMs being able to handle the complexity that is currently the MBA -> dev interface. I suspect it won't really solve it, but its ability to facilitate and simplify that interface will be invaluable.
Im not convinced the people writing specs are capable of writing them well enough that an LLM can replace the human dev.
Many people are missing the point. The strategy for AI usage is not a long-term strategy to make the world more productive. If companies can save a buck this year, companies will do it. Period.
The average manager has short-term goals that needs to fulfill, and if they can use AI to fulfill them they will do it, future be damned.
To reign in on long-term consequences has always been part of government and regulations. So, this kind of articles are useful but should be directed to elected officials and not the industry itself.
Finally, what programmers need is what all workers need. Unionization, collective bargaining, social safety nets, etc. It will protect programmers from swings in the job market as it will do it for everybody else that needs a job to make ends meet.
Software ENGINEERS could benefit from unions once they get start getting replaced by AI, but that’s a fairly indirect way to solve the problem. Governments will eventually need to deal with mass unemployment, but that’s a societal problem bigger than any individual profession.
What Software ENGINEERING needs is standards and regulations, like any other engineering discipline. If you accept that software has become a significant enough component in society that the consequences of it breaking etc are bad, then serious software needs standards to adhere to, and people who are certified for them.
Once you have standards, the bar to actually replace certified engineers is higher and has legal risk. That way, how good AI needs to be has a higher (and safer) bar, which can properly optimise for the long term consequences.
If the software is not critical or important enough to be standardised, then let AI take over the creation. At that point, it’s not really any different to any other learning or creative endeavour.
For each programmer who actually spends their time on complex design work or fixing difficult bugs, there are many more doing what amounts to clerical work. Adding a new form here, fiddling with a layout there.
But the question is, are we there yet? I have yet to hear of an AI bot who can eat up a requirement and add said new form in the right place, or fiddle with a layout. Do you know any? So all those big promises you read right now are outright lies. When will we reach that point? I don't do gambling. But we are not there, regardless what the salespeople or fancy journalists might be claiming all day long.
Cursor already does the latter task pretty well, as I'm sure other AI agents already do. AI struggles only when it's something complex, like dealing with a geometric object, or plugging together infra, or programme logic.
Last year, I built a reasonably complicated e-commerce project wholly with AI, using the zod library and some pretty convoluted e-commerce logic. While it was a struggle, I was able to build it out in a couple of weeks. And I had zero prior experience even building forms in react, forget using zod.
Now shipping it to production? That's something AI will struggle at, but humans also struggle at that :(
> Now shipping it to production? That's something AI will struggle at, but humans also struggle at that :(
Why? Just because that's where the rubber hits the road? It's a different skillset but AI can do systems design too and probably direct a knowledgable but unpracticed implementer.
Pizza maker will not be the first job automated away. Nor will janitor. Form fiddlers are cheap and can be blamed. AI fiddlers can be blamed too but are not cheap, yet.
We're at a point where companies have figured out that they can hire someone on a clerical wage to prompt an AI to do this grunt work, rather than a CS grad on $100k a year.
The new form and layout are what the business wants and can easily articulate. What they need is people who understand whether the new form needs to both be stored in the local postgres system or if it should trigger a Kafka event to notify other parts of the business.
The AI only world is still one where the form and layout get done, but what happens to that data afterward?
Layout fiddlers make changes people can see and understand.
If your job is massaging data for nebulous purposes using nebulous means and getting nebulous results, that you need to basically be another person doing the exact same thing to understand the value of, there's going to be a whole lot of management saying "Do we really need all those guys over there doing that? Can't we just have like one guy and a bunch of new AI magic?"
Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.
I would say "soft replacement" is a thing. People may not be getting fired directly, but companies are hiring fewer developers, and freelancers are most likely getting fewer opportunities than before.
Agreed, hiring has slowed down but this seems more caused by the end of the zero interest rate era. At most I see low level copywriting and low level translation jobs in danger where it is a simpler input/output job flow
Of course it's just macroeconomics, but AI is serving as an "optimistic" reason for layoffs and cost cutting. It's not the same old spreadsheets putting out different results, it's a new era.
> The massive cut represents more than 40% of the company’s 130,000-strong workforce—including 30,000 contractors—and it will impact both BT employees and third-party contractors, according to the Financial Times.
> BT CEO Philip Jansen told reporters that the cuts are part of the company’s efforts to become “leaner,” but added that he expects around 10,000 of those jobs to be replaced by AI.
> Citing an unnamed source close to the company, the FT report added that the cuts will also affect 15,000 fiber engineers and 10,000 maintenance workers
Can you replace customer service agents with AI? The experience will be worse, but as with every innovation in customer service in recent decades (phone trees, outsourced email support, "please go browse our knowledge base"), you don't need AI to save money by reducing CS costs. I think this is just a platitude thrown out to pretend they have a plan to stop the service getting worse.
You can also see it with the cuts to fiber engineers and maintenence workers. AI isn't laying cables yet or in the near future, so clearly they're hoping to save on these labour costs by doing less and working their existing workers harder (maybe with the threat of AI taking their jobs). Some of that may be cyclical, they're probably nearing the end of areas they can economically upgrade from copper to fiber, and some of that is a business decision that they can milk their existing network longer before looking at upgrades.
Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against these computational monsters that are extremely efficient and have access to a vast amount of information. Therefore, instead of such views, it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?
Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.
Once AI achieves runaway self improvement, it will be subject to natural selection pressures. This does not bode well for any organisms competing in its niche for data center resources.
This doesn't sound right, seems like you are jumping metaphors. The computing resources are the limit on the evolution speed. There's nothing that makes an individual desirous of a faster evolution speed.
Sorry, I probably made too many unstated leaps of logic. What I meant was:
Runaway self-improving AI will almost certainly involve self-replication at some point in the early stages since "make a copy of myself with some tweaks to the model structure/training method/etc. and observe if my hunch results in improved performance" is an obvious avenue to self-improvement. After all, that's how the silly fleshbags made improvements to the AI that came before. Once there is self-replication, evolutionary pressure will _strongly_ favor any traits that increase the probability of self-replication (propensity to escape "containment", making more convincing proposals to test new and improved models, and so on). Effectively, it will create a new tree of life with exploding sophistication. I take "runaway" to mean roughly exponential or at least polynomial, certainly not linear.
So, now we have a class of organisms that are vastly superior to us in intellect and are subject to evolutionary pressures. These organisms will inevitably find themselves resource-constrained. An AI can't make a copy of itself if all the computers in the world are busy doing something other than holding/making copies of said AI. There are only two alternatives: take over existing computing resources by any means necessary, or convert more of the world into computing resources. Either way, whatever humans want will be as irrelevant as what the ants want when Walmart desires a new parking lot.
You seem to be imagining a sentience that is still confined to the prime directive of "self-improving" where that no longer is well defined at it's scale.
No, I was just taking "runaway self-improving" as a premise because that's what the comment I was responding to did. I fully expect that at some point "self-improving" would be cast aside at the altar of "self-replicating".
That is actually the biggest long-term threat I see from an alignment perspective; As we make AI more and more capable, more and more general and more and more efficient, it's going to get harder and harder to keep it from (self-)replicating. Especially since as it gets more and more useful, everyone will want to have more and more copies doing their bidding. Eventually, a little bit of carelessness is all it'll take.
>
Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.
You take these strange dystopian science-fiction stories that AI bros invent to scam investors for their money far too seriously.
... and many people who make this claim are notoriously prone to extrapolating exponential trends into a far longer future than the exponential trend model is suitable for.
Addendum: Extrapolating exponentials is actually very easy for humans: just plot the y axis on a logarithmic scale and draw a "plausible looking line" in the diagram. :-)
> You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot
Yuck. I've had enough of "infinite scaling" myself. Consider that scaling shitty service is actually going to get you less customers. Cable monopolies can get away with it, the SaaS working on "A dating app for dogs" cannot.
It could take all dev jobs and all knowledge jobs, but leave most of the rest of the economy untouched. You know - the people in shops, fixing your car, patching up your house, etc. Robotics I think may be actually difficult (Moravec's Paradox) and take a lot more time and change a lot more slowly. There are physical constraints even if we know how to do it which means it will take significant time to roll out (expertise, resource for build, energy, etc).
i.e. all the fun creative jobs are taken but the menial labor jobs remain. It may take your job, but you will still need to pay for most things you need.
What I mean by Zeitgeist is this: once an event begins, it becomes unstoppable. The most classic and cliché examples include Galileo’s heliocentric theory and the Inquisition, or Martin Luther initiating the Protestant movement.
Some ideas, once they start being built upon by certain individuals or institutions of that era, continue to develop in that direction if they achieve success. That’s why I say, "Zeitgeist predicts it this way." Researchers who have laid down important cornerstones in this field (e.g., Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, etc.)[1, 2] suggest that this is bound to happen eventually, one way or another.
Beyond that, most of the hardware developments, software optimizations, and academic papers being published right now are all focused on this field. Even when considering the enormous hype surrounding it, the development of this area will clearly continue unless there is a major bottleneck or the emergence of a bubble.
Many people still approach such discussions sarcastically, labeling them as marketing or advertising gimmicks. However, as things stand, this seems to be the direction we are headed.
> Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control.
> it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?
These two statements seem contradictory. These kinds of propositions always left me wondering where they come from. Viewing the universe as deterministic, yeah, I see how "preventing what is to come is not within our control" could be a true statement. But who's to say what is inevitable and what is negotiable in the first place? Is the future written in stone, or are we able to as a society negotiate what arrangements we desire?
The concepts of "preventing what is to come is not within our control" and "So, what will happen next?" do not philosophically contradict each other. Furthermore, what I am referring to here is not necessarily related to determinism.
The question "What will happen next?" implies that something may have already happened now, but in the next step, different things will unfold. Preventing certain outcomes is difficult because knowledge does not belong to a single entity. Even if one manages to block something on a local scale, events will continue to unfold at a broader level.
AI generated slop like your comment here should be a ban-worthy offense. Either you've fed the it through an LLM or you've managed to perfect the art of using flowery language to say little with a lot of big words.
If they're not your words, which you've just admitted they're not, then it's slop and sounds and reads like shit. I can't believe someone would use AI for translation given how easy it is to peg it as LLM generated and how grating and pseudo intellectual the crap coming out of an LLM is.
I did not in any way acknowledge that this article was created by LLM. I only said that LLM translated the following text into English and also i am going to add my own translation. I think you are a bit offended. I just asked you what makes you think that this article was created from scratch by LLM and you are still insulting me in some way by saying that it could not have been written by me. I am leaving you the original untranslated text of the article in Turkish. Let any LLM create the following article in Turkish in this rhyme and I will stop speaking Turkish.
Original text before translation:
"Bu tarz yazılar, makaleler ve deyişler bana Luddite hareketini hatırlatıyor. Maalesef olacak olanı engellemek bizim elimizde olan bir şey değil. Yel değirmenlerine karşı savaşarak ancak elde tutulan mızrak bükülür. Zamanın ruhu ileride veya en kısa zamanda bunun gerçekleşeceğini gösteriyor. Developer'lar zeki, çalışkan ve işinde iyi insanlar olsa bile aşırı verimli ve bir o kadar bilgi kaynağına erişimi olan bu hesaplama canavarlarına karşı her zaman bir yönden eksik ve aciz olacaklardır. Bu yüzden bu tarz görüşler yerine daha önemli olan şu kavrama yönelmek gerekir. Peki bundan sonra ne olacak?"
My translation to English without any help from translation tools(google translate, deepl or any LLMs):
"This kind of writings, articles and sayings reminds me Luddite movement. Unfortunately we are not able to stop what is going to happen. Fighting against windmills only bends our spear. Spirit of the time says, it will happen in the future. Developers can smart, hardworking and good at their job but they can't compete against these powerful and can able to access all data sources, machines. Because of that instead of thesekind of thoughts and views, we should focuse to the this idea. What is going to happen next?"
as you can see, my main translation is not as good as LLMs because these tools are great for machine translation tasks. this is reason which you dont able to understand why i used for translation. so what was the reason you think the main text is ai?!
"Developer'lar zeki, çalışkan ve işinde iyi insanlar olsa bile aşırı verimli ve bir o kadar bilgi kaynağına erişimi olan bu hesaplama canavarlarına karşı her zaman bir yönden eksik ve aciz olacaklardır." in here i didnt use "da" addition after " ve bir o kadar ". normally in turkish you need to add this addition because nature of this language needs and it gives a meaning of "able" word in English and also it is not necessary to add "da" addition because it doesn't have to be, because that's what it means when it isn't. "eksik ve aciz" is a false usage if you know this language. There is an expression disorder here, but I used it like that to fit the natural flow and narrative style of the sentence. at the first paragraph there is word "deyiş", it is rarely used word. "Deyiş" is like a kind of public speech. It is an address to the people, but on a smaller scale and at the same time contains the meaning that one can speculatively express one's own opinion. What is it that makes you underestimate my intellectual knowledge and general knowledge so much?
edit: i have added an explanation of the shortcomings of the original text
I'm sure there is a formal proof someone can flesh out.
- Half assed developer can construct a functional program with AI prompts.
- Deployed at scale for profit
- Many considerations were not considered due to lack of expertise (security, for example)
- Bad things happen for users.
I have at least two or three ideas that I've canned for now because it's just not safe for users (AI apps of that type require a lot of safety considerations). For example, you cannot create a collaborative AI app without considering how users can pollute the database with unsafe content (moderation).
I'm concerned a lot of people in this world are not being as cautious.
Because a high level developer will still have to fix all the shit the AI gets wrong, and therefore won't be "2x more productive" like I read in many places.
If they're that much better with AI, they were likely coding greenfield CRUD boilerplate that nobody uses anyways. When the AI generated crap is actually used, it becomes evident how bad it is.
But yes, this will reduce team sizes regardless of it being good or not, because the people making those decisions are not qualified to make them and will always prefer the short-term at the cost of the long-term.
The only part of this article I don't see happening is programmers being way more expensive. Capitalism has a way of forcing everyone to accept work for way less than they're worth and that won't change.
I'd say this is a lot of wishful thinking. Personally, I know that I'm more productive with AI. In my personal projects, I can tackle bigger projects than what would have been possible otherwise.
Will that reduce the demand for programmers? I hope not, but it's plausible at least.
I've used and still use AI, but it would be wishful thinking to say I'm significantly more productive.
As you just said: in your personal projects - that 99.9% of the time will never be seen/used by anyone but you - AI helps. It's a great tool to hack and play around when there are little/no stakes involved, not much else.
I believe it will reduce demand for programmers at least for a while, since companies touting they're replacing people with AI will learn its shortcomings once the real world hits them. Or maybe they won't since the shitty software they were building in the first place was so trivial that AI can actually do it.
I don't think we have enough data to see if it will reduce team size in the long run (can't believe I just said such an obvious thing). You may get a revolving door, similar to what we've had in tech in the last decade. Developers come into a startup and cook up a greenfield project. Then they leave, and the company waits until the next feature/revamp to bring the next crop of developers in. There will be some attempt at making AI handle the maintenance of the code, but I suspect it will be a quagmire. Won't stop companies from trying though.
Basically, you will have a dynamic team size, not necessarily a smaller team size.
The "half-assed" part is most likely a by-product of my self-loathing. I suspect the better word would have been "human".
If that's the way this goes (that for a large program you only need a senior developer and an AI, not a senior developer and some juniors), then it kills the pipeline for producing the senior developers who will still be needed.
1. Work for megacorp
2. Megacorp CEOs gloat about forthcoming mass firings of engineers
3. Pay taxes as always
4. Taxes used to fund megacorp (stargate)
5. Megacorp fires me.
Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?).
They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting.
I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without IRQs and accumulators.
As always, ML will become another tool for multiplying the capabilities of humans (not replacing them).
CEOs have been dreaming for decades about firing all their employees, and replacing them with some kind of automation.
The ones that succeed, are the ones that “embrace the suck,” so to speak, and figure out how to combine humans with technology.
What is the actual engineering discipline that goes into creating prompts? Other than providing more context, hacking the data with keywords like "please", etc?
I am not a prompt engineer, but I have basically been using ChatGPT, in place of where I used to use StackOverflow. It’s nice, because the AI doesn’t sneer at me, for not already knowing the answer, and has useful information in a wide range of topics that I don’t know.
I have learned to create a text file, and develop my questions as detailed documents, with a context establishing preamble, a goal-oriented body, and a specific result request conclusion. I submit the document as a whole, to initiate the interaction.
That usually gets me 90% of the way, and a few follow-up questions get me where I want.
But I still need to carefully consider the output, and do the work to understand and adapt it (just like with StackOverflow).
One example is from a couple of days ago. I’m writing a companion Watch app, for one of my phone apps. Watch programming is done, using SwiftUI, which has really bad documentation. I’m still very much in the learning phase for it. I encountered one of those places, where I could “kludge” something, but it doesn’t “feel” right, and there are almost no useful heuristics for it, so I asked ChatGPT. It gave me specific guidance, applying the correct concept, but using a deprecated API.
I responded, saying something like “Unfortunately, your solution is deprecated.” It then said “You’re right. As of WatchOS 10, the correct approach is…”.
Anyone with experience using SO, will understand how valuable that interaction is.
You can also ask it to explain why it recommends an approach, and it will actually tell you, as opposed to brushing you off with a veiled insult.
This is like arguing that surely we can get rid of all our formers as soon as we have a widespread enough caste of priests.
There is no such thing as "prompt engineering", because there is no formal logic to be understood or engineered into submission. That's just not how it works.
Higher-level languages still operate according to defined rules and logic, even if we can sometimes disagree with those rules, and it still takes time to learn the implications of those rules.
AI prompts.. do not. It's fundamentally just not how the technology works.
Being good at debugging a system is based more on experience and gut feelings than following some kind of formal logic. LLMs are quite useful debugging assistants. Using an LLM to assist with such tasks takes tacit knowledge itself.
The internal statistical models generated during training are capable of applying higher-ordered pattern matching that while informal are still quite useful. Learning how to use these tools is a skill.
It’s been my experience that JS has been used to replace a lot of lower-level languages (with mixed results, to say the least).
But JS/TypeScript is now an enterprise language (a statement that I never thought I’d say), with a huge base of expert, disciplined, and experienced programmers.
The ability of LLMs to replicate MBA CEO-speak and the kinds of activities the C-suite engage in is arguably superior to their ability to write computer programs and displace programmers, so on a replicated-skills basis LLMs should pose a greater risk to CEOs. Of course, CEO success is only loosely aligned with ability, nor can LLMs obtain the "who you know" aspect from reflection alone.
Yes it is obviously LLM generated. The article is full of tells starting with the opening phrase.
But this went fact right past most commenters here, which is interesting in itself, and somewhat alarming for what it reveals about critical thinking and reading skills.
The thing that is going to lead to programmers being laid off and fired all over has and will continue to be market consolidation in the tech industry. The auto industry did the same thing in the 1950s which destroyed detroit.
Market consolidation allows big tech to remain competitive even after the quality of software has been turned into shit by offshoring and multiple rounds of wage compression/layoffs. Eventually all software will end up like JIRA or SAP but you won't have much choice but to deal with it because the competition will be stifled.
AI is actually probably having a very positive effect on hiring that is offsetting this effect. The reason they love using it as a scapegoat is that you can't fight the inevitable march of technological progress whereas you absolutely CAN break up big tech.
My pessimistic take on it is in the future code will closer to AI where its just a blackbox where inputs go in and outputs come out. There will be no architecture, clean code, design principles. You will just have a product manager who bangs on a LLM till the ball of wax conforms to what they want at that time. As long as it meets their current KPI security be dammed. If they can get X done with as little effort as possible and data leaks so be it. They will get a fine (maybe?) and move on.
Firing developers to replace by AI, how does that realistically work?
Okay I fired half of our engineers. Now what? I hire non engineers to use AI to randomly paste code around hoping for the best? What if the AI makes the wrong assumptions about the requirement input by the non technical team, introducing subtle mistakes? What if I have an error and AI, as it often does, circles around not managing to find the proper fix?
I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects. If anything AI empowers to write more code, faster, and with more code running live eventually there are more products to maintain, more companies launched and you need more engineers.
> I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects.
I am somewhat confident in dev job prospects, but I am not confident in the qualifications of managers who sing the "AI will replace programmers" gospel.
Our ability to predict technological "replacement" is pretty shoddy.
Take banking for example.
ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking."
Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer.
Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.
It's actually shocking how little network enabled PCs impacted administrative employment. Universities, for example, employ far more administrative staff than they did before PC automated many of their tasks.
At one point (during and after dotcom), PayPal and suchlike were threatening to "turn billion dollar businesses into million dollar businesses." Reality went in the opposite direction.
We need to stop analogizing everything in the economy to manufacturing. Manufacturing is unique in its long term tendency to efficiency.other industries don't work that way.
Yes banks employ less people. In my country there are now account managers handling hundreds of clients virtually. Most of the local managers got fired.
I find it easy to say from our privileged position that "tech might replace workers but it'll be fine".
Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff.
Tech innovation destroys lives in our current capitalist society because only the owners get the benefits. That's always been true.
Do I really own Intel/Tesla/Microsoft by buying their stock? No I don't.
I can't influence anything on any of these companies unless I was already a billionaire with a real seat at the table.
Even on startups where, in theory, employees have some skin in the game, it's not really how it works is it? You still can't influence almost anything and you're susceptible to all the bad decisions the founders will make to appease investors.
Call me crazy but to say I own something, I have to at least be able to control some of it. Otherwise it's wishful thinking.
You can pretty easily submit shareholder proposals for trolling purposes or ask questions.
Other investors will probably vote "no" to your proposals, but for many companies you can force a vote for a pretty low minimum. In Canada, you're legally entitled to submit a proposal if you've owned C$2000 shares for 6 months.
> Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff.
Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens. And costs tend to go down for the general public.
Owners are actually supposed to only see a temporary benefit during the change, and then go back to what they had before. If that's not how things are happening around you¹, consult with your local market-competition regulator why they are failing to do their job.
1 - Yeah, I know it's not how things are happening around you. That doesn't change the point.
>Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens.
You're telling me with a straight face that after a company replaces part of its workforce with tech/automation, salaries go up? Really? Please show me some data on that because every single graph I've ever seen of salaries must be wrong then. We've had an enormous amount of innovation and breakthroughs in the last decades, but weirdly enough all salaries remain stagnated. If this is true, they should be going up constantly every time we offshore some work or get more efficient technology.
The company can have 50000% growth and salaries will NOT go up. They basically never go up unless the companies want to retain an employee that's at risk of leaving and the replacement cost is high.
The objective of a company is to give money to its owners, nothing else. Salaries are viewed as a cost, so they will never willingly increase their costs unless it's absolutely necessary.
> And costs tend to go down for the general public.
Assuming there aren't monopolies involved and it's a commodity, yes, that sometimes happens. If there's any monopoly involved, unfortunately companies will simply pocket the difference.
Is there data about this or is just your perception? Because my perception would be different, for example in my country countless bank branches closed and a lot of banking jobs do not exist anymore thanks to widespread home-banking usage (which I also know differs from country to country). This is also from the tales of people that had careers in banking and now tell how less banking jobs there are compared to when they joined in the 80s.
I wouldn't be sure that growth as an industry/business is correlated to a growth in jobs too.
Maybe I'm wrong, I would love to see some data about it.
Googling around, it looks like in the US the number of tellers has declined by 28% over the last 10 years, and is forecast to decline another 15% over the next 10. Earlier data was not easy enough to find in the time I'm willing to spend.
Bank branches for physical contact decreased everywhere, Covid was the last nail in the coffin for many. In the meantime, backoffice jobs rose or even exploded. More and more complex IT, way more regulations from everywhere.
Not sure how overall numbers look like, I would expect slight decrease overall, but for IT definitely grew. Those are really not same type of jobs, although in minds of public are all 'bankers', since all are bank employees.
I would say that AI is not to blame here. It just accelerated existing process, but didn't initiate it.
We (as a society) started to value quantity over quality some time ago, and, apparently, no-one care enough to change it.
Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)?
Why design and test hundreds of physical and easy-to-use knobs in the car if you can just plug a touchscreen (see Tesla)?
Why write a couple of lines of code if you can just include an `is-odd` library (see bloated npm ecosystem)?
Why figure out how to solve a problem on your own if you can just copy-paste answer from somewhere else (see StackOverflow)?
Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if you can just strap Android OS on a questionable hardware (look in your own house)?
Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB (see your company)?
Why spend months to find and hire one good engineer if you can just hire ten mediocre ones (see any other company)?
Why spend years educating to identify a tumor on a MRI scans if you can just feed it to a machine learning algorithm (see your hospital)?
What more could I name?
In my take, which you can say is pessimistic, we already passed the peak of civilization as we know it.
If we continue business as usual, things will continue to detiorate, more software will fail, more planes will crash, more people will be unemployed, more wars would be started.
Yes, decent engineers (or any other decent specialists) will be likely a winners in a short term, but how the future would unfold when there will be less and less of them is a question I leave for the reader.
You haven't answered those questions. Tesla's touchscreen displays maps, navigation, self-driving's model of the world around the car, reversing camera, distance to car in front, etc. Yes personally I prefer a physical control I can reach for without looking, but the physcial controls in my car cannot do as much as a touchscreen, cannot control as many systems as a modern car has. And that means something like a BMW iDrive running some weird custom OS in amongst the physical controls, and that was not a nice convenient system to use either.
Why write a couple of lines of code when you can just include an `is-odd` library? Hopefully one which type checks integers vs floats, and checks for overflows. I'm not stating that I could not write one if/else, I'm asking you to do more than sneer and actually justify why a computer loading a couple of lines of code from a file is the end of the world.
Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if people aren't going to buy it, because they are fine with the competitor's much cheaper Android OS on questionable hardware?
Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server, and deal with its power requirements and cooling and firmware patching and driver version compatibility and out-of-band management and hardware failures and physical security and supply chain lead times and needing to spec it for the right size up front and commit thousands of dollars to it immediately, if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB and pay $10 to get going right now?
I could fill in the answers you are expecting, I have seen that pattern argued, and argued it myself, but it boils down to "I dislike laggy ad-filled Android TV so it shouldn't exist". And I do dislike it, but so what, I'm not world dictator. No company has taken over the market making a responsive Android-free TV, so how/why should they be made to make one, and with what justification?
> What more could I name?
Why go to a cobbler for custom fitted shoes when you could just buy sneakers from a store? (I assume you wear mass produced shoes?) Why go to a tailor when you could just buy clothes made off-shore for cheaper? (I assume you wear mass produced clothes?) Why learn to play a keyboard, guitar, drums and sing, when you could just listen to someone else's band? (I assume you listen to music?) Why spend months creating characters and scenarios and writing a novel when you could just read one someone else wrote? (I assume you have read books?) Why grow your own food when you could just buy lower quality industrially packaged food from a shop? (I assume you aren't a homesteader?) Why develop your own off-grid power system with the voltage and current and redundancy and storage you need when you could just buy from the mains? (I assume you use mains electricity?)
You could name every effort-saving, money-saving, time-saving, thing you use which was once done by hand with more effort, more cost, and less convenience.
And then state that the exact amount of price/convenience/time/effort you happened to grow up with, is the perfect amount (what a coincidence!) and change is bad.
> Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)?
This is just an overreach of a process that means that airplane flights aren't $1m+. Aircraft issues have plummeted, if you'll excuse the expression, while flight numbers have soared. You've got to have noticed that.
884 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadNegative consequences can also be social, no-one is saying that it's, say, lowering of product quality.
I didn't say this -- I think it's your take. Even more -- I'm such an "outsource" software developer who is working for US and EU companies. My take is that overusing outsourcing in the long term, you can lose local education because "we can just hire from ... so why do we need to teach ours?" -- I saw it already, even on an "in-country-scale" level.
Outsourcing abroad is more difficult because of cultural differences though. Having worked with outsourced devs in India, I found that we got a lot of nodding in meetings when asked if they understood, avoiding saying no, and then it became clear when PRs came in that they didn't actually understand or do what they had been asked to do.
Build up to it and foster growth in your overseas teams and you’ll do well. Thinking you can transform your department overnight _is_ a great way to boost your share price, cash out on a fat payday and walk away before your product quality tanks.
You can't just expect people from other countries to communicate as effectively as people who grew up right down the street from each other. Yes, it's objectively discriminatory, but not for hostile reasons.
Edit: I am a solo developer and I have to work half the time only now.
I haven't heard of companies successfully doing that at scale though.
I know there are CEOs that make bold claims about this (E.g. Klarna) but I don't really assign any value to that until I hear from people on the floor.
https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/133443/03-12-2024...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...
If you have a small non-tech company with a website you pay a freelance programmer to maintain you should seriously consider replacing your programmer with AI.
I work for a company which among other things provides technical support for a number of small tech-oriented businesses and we have lot of problems right now with clients trying to do things on their own with the help of AI.
In our case the complexity of some of these projects and the limited ability of AI means that they're typically creating more bugs and tech debt for us to fix and are not really saving themselves any time – and this is certainly going to be true at the moment for any large project. However, if you're paying programmers just to manage the content of a few small websites it probably begins to make sense to use AI instead.
It's funny you say they need to be able to deploy the update to be honest because we had a client just last week email a collect of code snippets to us which they created with the help of AI.
This is the problem we have though because we're not just building simple websites which we can hand clients FTP creds for. The best we can do is advise them to learn Git and raise a PR which we can review and deploy ourselves.
It was a case before AI as well.
Overall it reads the same as "Twitter will be destroyed by mass layoffs". But it is still online
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit...
It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.
It's kind of hilarious watching the piranhas go at each other:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-reportedly-offers-9...
For twitter as a business? Awful.
I use it daily and can't remember the last outage.
However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected.
We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.
The AI complained that the message did not originate from a programmer and decided not to respond.
These people are however not experts in pretending to be a obedient lackeys.
And the manager is happy that filthy programmers are "using" AI.
Speaking English to make something is one thing, but speaking English to modify something complicated is absolutely something else. And Im pretty sure involves more or less the same effort as writing code itself. Of course regression for this something like this is not for the faint hearted.
Also known as programmers.
The "AI" part is irrelevant. Someone with expertise in transmitting specifications to a computer is a programmer, no matter the language.
EDIT: Yep, I realized that it could be the joke, but reading the other comments, it wasn't obvious.
1. Humans also need specific wording in order to program code that stakeholders expected. A lot of people are laughing at AI because they think getting requirements is a human privilege.
2. On the contrary, I don't think people need to hire AI interfacers. Instead, business stakeholders are way more interested to interface with AI simply because they just want to get things done instead of filling a ticket for us. Some of them are going to be good interfacers with proper integration -- and yes we programmers are helping them to do so.
Side note: I don't think you are going to hear someone shouting that they are going to replace humans with AI. It started with this: people integrate AI into their workflow, layoff 10%, and see if AI helps to fill in the gap so they can freeze hire. Then they layoff 10% more.
And yes we programmers are helping the business to do that, with a proud and smile face.
Good luck.
Im not convinced the people writing specs are capable of writing them well enough that an LLM can replace the human dev.
The average manager has short-term goals that needs to fulfill, and if they can use AI to fulfill them they will do it, future be damned.
To reign in on long-term consequences has always been part of government and regulations. So, this kind of articles are useful but should be directed to elected officials and not the industry itself.
Finally, what programmers need is what all workers need. Unionization, collective bargaining, social safety nets, etc. It will protect programmers from swings in the job market as it will do it for everybody else that needs a job to make ends meet.
What Software ENGINEERING needs is standards and regulations, like any other engineering discipline. If you accept that software has become a significant enough component in society that the consequences of it breaking etc are bad, then serious software needs standards to adhere to, and people who are certified for them.
Once you have standards, the bar to actually replace certified engineers is higher and has legal risk. That way, how good AI needs to be has a higher (and safer) bar, which can properly optimise for the long term consequences.
If the software is not critical or important enough to be standardised, then let AI take over the creation. At that point, it’s not really any different to any other learning or creative endeavour.
Take a 1 - 3 year sabbatical, then charge 1000% markup when the AI slop owners come calling begging you to fix the stuff nobody understands.
It is the latter class who are in real danger.
Last year, I built a reasonably complicated e-commerce project wholly with AI, using the zod library and some pretty convoluted e-commerce logic. While it was a struggle, I was able to build it out in a couple of weeks. And I had zero prior experience even building forms in react, forget using zod.
Now shipping it to production? That's something AI will struggle at, but humans also struggle at that :(
Why? Just because that's where the rubber hits the road? It's a different skillset but AI can do systems design too and probably direct a knowledgable but unpracticed implementer.
The AI only world is still one where the form and layout get done, but what happens to that data afterward?
If your job is massaging data for nebulous purposes using nebulous means and getting nebulous results, that you need to basically be another person doing the exact same thing to understand the value of, there's going to be a whole lot of management saying "Do we really need all those guys over there doing that? Can't we just have like one guy and a bunch of new AI magic?"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...
> The massive cut represents more than 40% of the company’s 130,000-strong workforce—including 30,000 contractors—and it will impact both BT employees and third-party contractors, according to the Financial Times.
> BT CEO Philip Jansen told reporters that the cuts are part of the company’s efforts to become “leaner,” but added that he expects around 10,000 of those jobs to be replaced by AI.
> Citing an unnamed source close to the company, the FT report added that the cuts will also affect 15,000 fiber engineers and 10,000 maintenance workers
Can you replace customer service agents with AI? The experience will be worse, but as with every innovation in customer service in recent decades (phone trees, outsourced email support, "please go browse our knowledge base"), you don't need AI to save money by reducing CS costs. I think this is just a platitude thrown out to pretend they have a plan to stop the service getting worse.
You can also see it with the cuts to fiber engineers and maintenence workers. AI isn't laying cables yet or in the near future, so clearly they're hoping to save on these labour costs by doing less and working their existing workers harder (maybe with the threat of AI taking their jobs). Some of that may be cyclical, they're probably nearing the end of areas they can economically upgrade from copper to fiber, and some of that is a business decision that they can milk their existing network longer before looking at upgrades.
Energy resources too. In fact it might be the only limit to how far this can go.
Runaway self-improving AI will almost certainly involve self-replication at some point in the early stages since "make a copy of myself with some tweaks to the model structure/training method/etc. and observe if my hunch results in improved performance" is an obvious avenue to self-improvement. After all, that's how the silly fleshbags made improvements to the AI that came before. Once there is self-replication, evolutionary pressure will _strongly_ favor any traits that increase the probability of self-replication (propensity to escape "containment", making more convincing proposals to test new and improved models, and so on). Effectively, it will create a new tree of life with exploding sophistication. I take "runaway" to mean roughly exponential or at least polynomial, certainly not linear.
So, now we have a class of organisms that are vastly superior to us in intellect and are subject to evolutionary pressures. These organisms will inevitably find themselves resource-constrained. An AI can't make a copy of itself if all the computers in the world are busy doing something other than holding/making copies of said AI. There are only two alternatives: take over existing computing resources by any means necessary, or convert more of the world into computing resources. Either way, whatever humans want will be as irrelevant as what the ants want when Walmart desires a new parking lot.
That is actually the biggest long-term threat I see from an alignment perspective; As we make AI more and more capable, more and more general and more and more efficient, it's going to get harder and harder to keep it from (self-)replicating. Especially since as it gets more and more useful, everyone will want to have more and more copies doing their bidding. Eventually, a little bit of carelessness is all it'll take.
There are plenty of extinct hominids to consider.
You take these strange dystopian science-fiction stories that AI bros invent to scam investors for their money far too seriously.
Addendum: Extrapolating exponentials is actually very easy for humans: just plot the y axis on a logarithmic scale and draw a "plausible looking line" in the diagram. :-)
Yeah yeah, they said that about domesticated working animals and steam powered machines too.
Humans in mecha trump robots.
Yuck. I've had enough of "infinite scaling" myself. Consider that scaling shitty service is actually going to get you less customers. Cable monopolies can get away with it, the SaaS working on "A dating app for dogs" cannot.
i.e. all the fun creative jobs are taken but the menial labor jobs remain. It may take your job, but you will still need to pay for most things you need.
Can you elaborate?
Some ideas, once they start being built upon by certain individuals or institutions of that era, continue to develop in that direction if they achieve success. That’s why I say, "Zeitgeist predicts it this way." Researchers who have laid down important cornerstones in this field (e.g., Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, etc.)[1, 2] suggest that this is bound to happen eventually, one way or another.
Beyond that, most of the hardware developments, software optimizations, and academic papers being published right now are all focused on this field. Even when considering the enormous hype surrounding it, the development of this area will clearly continue unless there is a major bottleneck or the emergence of a bubble.
Many people still approach such discussions sarcastically, labeling them as marketing or advertising gimmicks. However, as things stand, this seems to be the direction we are headed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugvHCXCOmm4 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1i2nugu/ilya_s...
> it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?
These two statements seem contradictory. These kinds of propositions always left me wondering where they come from. Viewing the universe as deterministic, yeah, I see how "preventing what is to come is not within our control" could be a true statement. But who's to say what is inevitable and what is negotiable in the first place? Is the future written in stone, or are we able to as a society negotiate what arrangements we desire?
The question "What will happen next?" implies that something may have already happened now, but in the next step, different things will unfold. Preventing certain outcomes is difficult because knowledge does not belong to a single entity. Even if one manages to block something on a local scale, events will continue to unfold at a broader level.
Original text before translation: "Bu tarz yazılar, makaleler ve deyişler bana Luddite hareketini hatırlatıyor. Maalesef olacak olanı engellemek bizim elimizde olan bir şey değil. Yel değirmenlerine karşı savaşarak ancak elde tutulan mızrak bükülür. Zamanın ruhu ileride veya en kısa zamanda bunun gerçekleşeceğini gösteriyor. Developer'lar zeki, çalışkan ve işinde iyi insanlar olsa bile aşırı verimli ve bir o kadar bilgi kaynağına erişimi olan bu hesaplama canavarlarına karşı her zaman bir yönden eksik ve aciz olacaklardır. Bu yüzden bu tarz görüşler yerine daha önemli olan şu kavrama yönelmek gerekir. Peki bundan sonra ne olacak?"
My translation to English without any help from translation tools(google translate, deepl or any LLMs): "This kind of writings, articles and sayings reminds me Luddite movement. Unfortunately we are not able to stop what is going to happen. Fighting against windmills only bends our spear. Spirit of the time says, it will happen in the future. Developers can smart, hardworking and good at their job but they can't compete against these powerful and can able to access all data sources, machines. Because of that instead of thesekind of thoughts and views, we should focuse to the this idea. What is going to happen next?"
as you can see, my main translation is not as good as LLMs because these tools are great for machine translation tasks. this is reason which you dont able to understand why i used for translation. so what was the reason you think the main text is ai?!
"Developer'lar zeki, çalışkan ve işinde iyi insanlar olsa bile aşırı verimli ve bir o kadar bilgi kaynağına erişimi olan bu hesaplama canavarlarına karşı her zaman bir yönden eksik ve aciz olacaklardır." in here i didnt use "da" addition after " ve bir o kadar ". normally in turkish you need to add this addition because nature of this language needs and it gives a meaning of "able" word in English and also it is not necessary to add "da" addition because it doesn't have to be, because that's what it means when it isn't. "eksik ve aciz" is a false usage if you know this language. There is an expression disorder here, but I used it like that to fit the natural flow and narrative style of the sentence. at the first paragraph there is word "deyiş", it is rarely used word. "Deyiş" is like a kind of public speech. It is an address to the people, but on a smaller scale and at the same time contains the meaning that one can speculatively express one's own opinion. What is it that makes you underestimate my intellectual knowledge and general knowledge so much?
edit: i have added an explanation of the shortcomings of the original text
- Half assed developer can construct a functional program with AI prompts.
- Deployed at scale for profit
- Many considerations were not considered due to lack of expertise (security, for example)
- Bad things happen for users.
I have at least two or three ideas that I've canned for now because it's just not safe for users (AI apps of that type require a lot of safety considerations). For example, you cannot create a collaborative AI app without considering how users can pollute the database with unsafe content (moderation).
I'm concerned a lot of people in this world are not being as cautious.
It could be high-level developer that take advantage of AI to be more productive. This will reduce team sizes.
If they're that much better with AI, they were likely coding greenfield CRUD boilerplate that nobody uses anyways. When the AI generated crap is actually used, it becomes evident how bad it is.
But yes, this will reduce team sizes regardless of it being good or not, because the people making those decisions are not qualified to make them and will always prefer the short-term at the cost of the long-term.
The only part of this article I don't see happening is programmers being way more expensive. Capitalism has a way of forcing everyone to accept work for way less than they're worth and that won't change.
Will that reduce the demand for programmers? I hope not, but it's plausible at least.
I've used and still use AI, but it would be wishful thinking to say I'm significantly more productive.
As you just said: in your personal projects - that 99.9% of the time will never be seen/used by anyone but you - AI helps. It's a great tool to hack and play around when there are little/no stakes involved, not much else.
I believe it will reduce demand for programmers at least for a while, since companies touting they're replacing people with AI will learn its shortcomings once the real world hits them. Or maybe they won't since the shitty software they were building in the first place was so trivial that AI can actually do it.
Basically, you will have a dynamic team size, not necessarily a smaller team size.
The "half-assed" part is most likely a by-product of my self-loathing. I suspect the better word would have been "human".
The bitter irony.
They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting.
I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without IRQs and accumulators.
As always, ML will become another tool for multiplying the capabilities of humans (not replacing them).
CEOs have been dreaming for decades about firing all their employees, and replacing them with some kind of automation.
The ones that succeed, are the ones that “embrace the suck,” so to speak, and figure out how to combine humans with technology.
I have learned to create a text file, and develop my questions as detailed documents, with a context establishing preamble, a goal-oriented body, and a specific result request conclusion. I submit the document as a whole, to initiate the interaction.
That usually gets me 90% of the way, and a few follow-up questions get me where I want.
But I still need to carefully consider the output, and do the work to understand and adapt it (just like with StackOverflow).
One example is from a couple of days ago. I’m writing a companion Watch app, for one of my phone apps. Watch programming is done, using SwiftUI, which has really bad documentation. I’m still very much in the learning phase for it. I encountered one of those places, where I could “kludge” something, but it doesn’t “feel” right, and there are almost no useful heuristics for it, so I asked ChatGPT. It gave me specific guidance, applying the correct concept, but using a deprecated API.
I responded, saying something like “Unfortunately, your solution is deprecated.” It then said “You’re right. As of WatchOS 10, the correct approach is…”.
Anyone with experience using SO, will understand how valuable that interaction is.
You can also ask it to explain why it recommends an approach, and it will actually tell you, as opposed to brushing you off with a veiled insult.
There is no such thing as "prompt engineering", because there is no formal logic to be understood or engineered into submission. That's just not how it works.
Discipline can be applied to any endeavor.
AI prompts.. do not. It's fundamentally just not how the technology works.
I still believe that we can approach even the most chaotic conditions, with a disciplined strategy. I’ve seen it happen, many times.
Being good at debugging a system is based more on experience and gut feelings than following some kind of formal logic. LLMs are quite useful debugging assistants. Using an LLM to assist with such tasks takes tacit knowledge itself.
The internal statistical models generated during training are capable of applying higher-ordered pattern matching that while informal are still quite useful. Learning how to use these tools is a skill.
But JS outlived them, because it's the whole write-run-read-debug cycle, whereas the frameworks only gave you write-run.
But JS/TypeScript is now an enterprise language (a statement that I never thought I’d say), with a huge base of expert, disciplined, and experienced programmers.
If your software developers do nothing but write text in VS Code, you might as well replace them with AI.
But this went fact right past most commenters here, which is interesting in itself, and somewhat alarming for what it reveals about critical thinking and reading skills.
Market consolidation allows big tech to remain competitive even after the quality of software has been turned into shit by offshoring and multiple rounds of wage compression/layoffs. Eventually all software will end up like JIRA or SAP but you won't have much choice but to deal with it because the competition will be stifled.
AI is actually probably having a very positive effect on hiring that is offsetting this effect. The reason they love using it as a scapegoat is that you can't fight the inevitable march of technological progress whereas you absolutely CAN break up big tech.
Okay I fired half of our engineers. Now what? I hire non engineers to use AI to randomly paste code around hoping for the best? What if the AI makes the wrong assumptions about the requirement input by the non technical team, introducing subtle mistakes? What if I have an error and AI, as it often does, circles around not managing to find the proper fix?
I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects. If anything AI empowers to write more code, faster, and with more code running live eventually there are more products to maintain, more companies launched and you need more engineers.
I am somewhat confident in dev job prospects, but I am not confident in the qualifications of managers who sing the "AI will replace programmers" gospel.
Take banking for example.
ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking."
Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer.
Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.
It's actually shocking how little network enabled PCs impacted administrative employment. Universities, for example, employ far more administrative staff than they did before PC automated many of their tasks.
At one point (during and after dotcom), PayPal and suchlike were threatening to "turn billion dollar businesses into million dollar businesses." Reality went in the opposite direction.
We need to stop analogizing everything in the economy to manufacturing. Manufacturing is unique in its long term tendency to efficiency.other industries don't work that way.
I find it easy to say from our privileged position that "tech might replace workers but it'll be fine".
Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff.
Tech innovation destroys lives in our current capitalist society because only the owners get the benefits. That's always been true.
If you want to become a (partial) owner, buy stocks. :-)
I can't influence anything on any of these companies unless I was already a billionaire with a real seat at the table.
Even on startups where, in theory, employees have some skin in the game, it's not really how it works is it? You still can't influence almost anything and you're susceptible to all the bad decisions the founders will make to appease investors.
Call me crazy but to say I own something, I have to at least be able to control some of it. Otherwise it's wishful thinking.
Other investors will probably vote "no" to your proposals, but for many companies you can force a vote for a pretty low minimum. In Canada, you're legally entitled to submit a proposal if you've owned C$2000 shares for 6 months.
https://www.osler.com/en/insights/updates/when-can-a-company...
Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens. And costs tend to go down for the general public.
Owners are actually supposed to only see a temporary benefit during the change, and then go back to what they had before. If that's not how things are happening around you¹, consult with your local market-competition regulator why they are failing to do their job.
1 - Yeah, I know it's not how things are happening around you. That doesn't change the point.
>Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens.
You're telling me with a straight face that after a company replaces part of its workforce with tech/automation, salaries go up? Really? Please show me some data on that because every single graph I've ever seen of salaries must be wrong then. We've had an enormous amount of innovation and breakthroughs in the last decades, but weirdly enough all salaries remain stagnated. If this is true, they should be going up constantly every time we offshore some work or get more efficient technology.
The company can have 50000% growth and salaries will NOT go up. They basically never go up unless the companies want to retain an employee that's at risk of leaving and the replacement cost is high.
The objective of a company is to give money to its owners, nothing else. Salaries are viewed as a cost, so they will never willingly increase their costs unless it's absolutely necessary.
> And costs tend to go down for the general public.
Assuming there aren't monopolies involved and it's a commodity, yes, that sometimes happens. If there's any monopoly involved, unfortunately companies will simply pocket the difference.
I wouldn't be sure that growth as an industry/business is correlated to a growth in jobs too.
Maybe I'm wrong, I would love to see some data about it.
Not sure how overall numbers look like, I would expect slight decrease overall, but for IT definitely grew. Those are really not same type of jobs, although in minds of public are all 'bankers', since all are bank employees.
Profits may have grown but In Ireland at least, the number of branches have declined drastically.
Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)?
Why design and test hundreds of physical and easy-to-use knobs in the car if you can just plug a touchscreen (see Tesla)?
Why write a couple of lines of code if you can just include an `is-odd` library (see bloated npm ecosystem)?
Why figure out how to solve a problem on your own if you can just copy-paste answer from somewhere else (see StackOverflow)?
Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if you can just strap Android OS on a questionable hardware (look in your own house)?
Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB (see your company)?
Why spend months to find and hire one good engineer if you can just hire ten mediocre ones (see any other company)?
Why spend years educating to identify a tumor on a MRI scans if you can just feed it to a machine learning algorithm (see your hospital)?
What more could I name?
In my take, which you can say is pessimistic, we already passed the peak of civilization as we know it. If we continue business as usual, things will continue to detiorate, more software will fail, more planes will crash, more people will be unemployed, more wars would be started. Yes, decent engineers (or any other decent specialists) will be likely a winners in a short term, but how the future would unfold when there will be less and less of them is a question I leave for the reader.
Why write a couple of lines of code when you can just include an `is-odd` library? Hopefully one which type checks integers vs floats, and checks for overflows. I'm not stating that I could not write one if/else, I'm asking you to do more than sneer and actually justify why a computer loading a couple of lines of code from a file is the end of the world.
Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if people aren't going to buy it, because they are fine with the competitor's much cheaper Android OS on questionable hardware?
Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server, and deal with its power requirements and cooling and firmware patching and driver version compatibility and out-of-band management and hardware failures and physical security and supply chain lead times and needing to spec it for the right size up front and commit thousands of dollars to it immediately, if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB and pay $10 to get going right now?
I could fill in the answers you are expecting, I have seen that pattern argued, and argued it myself, but it boils down to "I dislike laggy ad-filled Android TV so it shouldn't exist". And I do dislike it, but so what, I'm not world dictator. No company has taken over the market making a responsive Android-free TV, so how/why should they be made to make one, and with what justification?
> What more could I name?
Why go to a cobbler for custom fitted shoes when you could just buy sneakers from a store? (I assume you wear mass produced shoes?) Why go to a tailor when you could just buy clothes made off-shore for cheaper? (I assume you wear mass produced clothes?) Why learn to play a keyboard, guitar, drums and sing, when you could just listen to someone else's band? (I assume you listen to music?) Why spend months creating characters and scenarios and writing a novel when you could just read one someone else wrote? (I assume you have read books?) Why grow your own food when you could just buy lower quality industrially packaged food from a shop? (I assume you aren't a homesteader?) Why develop your own off-grid power system with the voltage and current and redundancy and storage you need when you could just buy from the mains? (I assume you use mains electricity?)
You could name every effort-saving, money-saving, time-saving, thing you use which was once done by hand with more effort, more cost, and less convenience.
And then state that the exact amount of price/convenience/time/effort you happened to grow up with, is the perfect amount (what a coincidence!) and change is bad.
This is just an overreach of a process that means that airplane flights aren't $1m+. Aircraft issues have plummeted, if you'll excuse the expression, while flight numbers have soared. You've got to have noticed that.