Even if ai took over 90% of all coding work, that still wouldn't affect more than maybe two hours a day.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Yes, but your bosses don't know/understand that, why pay you when they can have 3 interns & AI for freeeeeeeeeeee???
The bosses will figure it out when they never receive a working product.
Our team lead recently sent out two fresh juniors to tackle a task, with no senior informed. And of course, they were supposed to build it in Python, even though they had no experience with it, because Python is just so easy. Apparently, those juniors had managed to build something that was working ...on one machine, at some point.
On the day when our team lead wanted to show it to the customer, the two juniors were out of house (luckily for them) and no one knew where a distribution of that working state was. The code in the repo wouldn't compile and seemed to be missing some commits.
So, a senior got pulled in to try to salvage it, but the juniors hadn't set up proper dependency management, unit tests, logging, distribution bundling, nor documentation. And the code was spaghetti, too. Honestly, could have just started over fresh.
Our team lead was fuming, but they've been made to understand that this was not the fault of the juniors. So, yeah, I do think on that day, they found some new appreciation for seniors.
Heck, even I found new appreciation for what we do. All of that stuff is just the baseline from where we start a project and you easily forget that it's there, until it's not.
- Bosses
- Figuring out why a project failed
Name a less iconic duo.
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Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn't become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
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We do this every 15 years. For anyone less than 15 years into their career, welcome to the party.
Let's see if I can save you some energy:
- Yes, it made my job massively easier.
- No, it didn't replace me.
- Yes, it allowed a bunch of new people to also do the job I do. Welcome newbies!
- No, my salary didn't go down, relative to inflation.
It turns out that the last mile to a successful product delivery is still really fucking hard, and this magic bullet tool also didn't solve that.
Now... Am I talking about...?
- AI?
- Web frameworks?
- English like programming language syntax?
- A compiler with built-in type checking?
- All of the above.
Edit: Formatting for readability.
I mean honestly for things like tech, the jobs are going away due to these innovations, just piecemeal. Each of these innovations have shaved hours off of projects. Now someone's salary might be the same and they might still have to go into the office 40hrs a week (or be just as productive working from home, go figure) but the actual work they're doing is that much easier than it used to be, they might only have to work 4 hours a day now to accomplish what might have taken 2 days in the past.
Sure, certain companies put more demand on employees than others, and as you mentioned there are still human components to the system that remain untouched by technology, but if the tech world was honest with itself tech employees do far less work now than they did 10-20 years ago, disregarding the general expansion of the tech industry. I'm just talking about individual jobs.
Of course I don't think those employees should be making less. I think if we innovate so much that a person's job disappears we should be able to recognize that that person still deserves to be clothed and fed as if they still had that job.
Yes, except for the fact that the flip side of those is that software, almost by definition, is automating away jobs in other industries.
So when it gets easier / cheaper to write software, other industries will spend an increasing amount on it to replace their workers. That's one of the reasons the software industry has continued to grow, even though it's gotten easier to write.
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tech employees do far less work now than they did 10-20 years ago
Agreed!
Of course, if we had truly understood the situation 10-20 years ago, we could have admitted that they were primarily being paid to know how to get the thing* to work, and not actually for the hours they spent typing in new code. Hence the rise of "Infrastructure Engineer" and "DevOps Specialist" as titles.
*I omiitted the technical term, for brevity. But to be clear, by 'thing', I mean what professionas typically call the "damned fucking piece of shit webserver, and this fucking bullshit framework".
No, my salary didn't go down, relative to inflation.
I'm calling bullshit on that one.
Everybody's salary except executives has gone down relative to inflation going all the way back the the 80s.
Not mine. Every year if I don't get a "cost of living" increase that meets or exceeds inflation, I go complain about it to my boss who then negotiates with HR on my behalf and I get a bigger raise. I'm not gonna let inflation kill my salary, and my boss is not gonna risk me leaving for another company. I do wish they would just give it to me up front and stop making me ask each year. We all know what the outcome is gonna be.
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When AI is good enough to replace all of IT we all better hold onto our butts because we're all going to fucking die
- People vastly overestimate the abilities of AI.
- Developers vastly overestimate their own abilities.
- There are people on any level of seniority that would be perfectly replaced by a noise generator.
There are people on any level of seniority that would be perfectly replaced by a noise generator.
Im fairly certain that this is what happened I my CISO.
The company had avoided certain destruction, after having fired the previous CEO and putting a new one in it's place. The new CEO had managed to bring a newfound calm to the company and it's ranks, and brought an air of meditative discipline to board room meetings.
Some said it was crazy, but making the LectoFan EVO the new CEO was the best decision the company board had ever made.
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It literally cannot come up with novel solutions because it's goal is to regurgitate the most likely response to a question based on training data from the internet. Considering that the internet is often trash and getting trashier, I think LLMs will only get worse over time.
AI has poisoned the well it was fed from. The only solution to get a good AI moving forward is to train it using curated data. That is going to be a lot of work.
On the other hand, this might be a business opportunity. Selling curated data to companies that want to make AIs.
I could see large companies paying to train the LLM on their own IP even just to maintain some level of consistency, but it obviously wouldn't be as valuable as hiring the talent that sets the bar and generates patent-worthy inventions.
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I said this a while ago but you know how we have "pre-atomic" steel? We are going to have pre-LLM data sets.
Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel, is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Typically sourced from ships (either as part of regular scrapping or shipwrecks) and other steel artifacts of this era, it is often used for modern particle detectors because more modern steel is contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout.[1][2]
Very interesting, today I learned.
The reason why chat gpt 3.5 is still great for anything previous to it's cutoff date. It's not constantly being updated with new garbage
Also the more the internet is swept with AI generated content, the more future datasets will be trained on old AI output rather than on new human input.
Humans are also now incentivized to safeguard their intellectual property from AI to keep a competitive advantage.
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Who do they think will be using the AI?
AI threatens to harm a lot about programming, but not the existence/necessity of programmers.
Particularly, AI may starve the development of open source libraries. Which, ironically, will probably increase the need for employed programmers as companies accrue giant piles of shoddy in-house code that needs maintaining.
I can't wait for my future coworkers who will be coding with AI without actually understanding the fundamentals of the language they're coding in. It's gonna get scary.
I guarantee you have coworkers right now coding without understanding the fundamentals of the language they're coding in. Reusing code you don't understand doesn't change if you stole it from Stack Overflow, or you stole it from Chat-GPT9.
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I have no other skills that would pay anywhere close to what this career pays. I'd need to go back to school and become a surgeon or something. I don't think they let people become surgeons at 50 years old, and I don't have the energy for an internship and residency. I'm just hanging on and hoping that it doesn't all vanish in the next few years. I'm also spending time learning how to leverage AI, since I think that'll put me a step ahead. Good luck to all of us, we're going to need it!
Any gains from LLM now would barely offset the complexity bloat introduced in enterprise applications in the last decade alone. And that’s not even taking into account the sins of the past that are only hidden behind the topsoil lair of cargo cult architecture.
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Yea, I tried to use AI for my work, it seems to have zero clue about the software I asked about but it pretends it does. I think I'm safe.
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Didn't ChatGPT become very bad recently? It used to give really working code but now it gets things wrong and doesn't follow context. It gives code but when you ask it to improve by give more context, it ignores the previous answer and give wrong code.
It even sometimes answers by saying it does not have the answer for questions that it answered few months ago.
Last time I asked a niche api question it showed me how to formulate the question so I could post it on this GitHub issues..
Edit
How is that a niche api question? That's a public api that is scraped up.
It's also a terrible way to ask the question. It's how a clueless newb asks questions. Anyone hoping to help needs to at least know: What are you attempting to use the end point for and What results are you receiving vs expecting?
It is a perfect example of why you still need good programmers, that know what/how to ask.
Also also it told him to include the API key and used v3 in the URL.
That looks like advice on how NOT to ask for technical support on a public forum.
- Be generic and vague. Omit as many details as possible, this will only distract from the problem at hand.
- remember to include your private API key to share it with the world.
The latest update from openai calls this "laziness" and discusses a fix coming
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I'll start worrying about artificial intelligence when customers can generate requirements specific enough for actual intelligence to decipher.
Kinda hard to build a prompt when they don't even really know what they want until they've seen what they asked for.
Could AI repair a bicycle?
That would be awesome.
Or "digest" a hoard of used bicycle parts and secrete assembled bikes.
Wait, y'all have parents that understand and/or care what you do for a living?
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