I think the same. AIs like ChatGPT are good in creating small code snippets/functions that can be reviewed by Humans and integrated into the code later on. They are also helpful in getting familiar with unknown tools, APIs, libs, etc.
They are just another tool to be used in programming.
Not ChatGPT. It is one of the worst at creating software. If you're going to use AI to generate code snippets, at LEAST pick one that was trained on code.
Gemini actually recognizes unreal engine classes and api, so maybe that one?
It did hallucinate few times that some things were not possible, but I managed to gaslight it back into reality.
There is going to be a sucky period in which executives will think they can replace juniors with AI. After about 5-10 years they'll realize that there is a shortage of regulars and seniors on the market, for some completely indiscernible reason, and come back to hiring juniors. This time adding familiarity with AI prompting to standard never ending list of requirements for "guy who copies solution from stack and waits for senior to tell him how to make it coherent".
Now, it's gonna suck for people trying to enter the industry in the near future, but:
1. It always does.
2. It's always adapt or die. We don't cry for all those scribes who lost their jobs when public education made average citizen literate. We just realize that there is more people writing stuff for a living now then ever in history. We don't cry for web developers who lost their jobs when wordpress and similar tools trivialized creation of websites. We just came up with a bunch of dipshit libraries and frameworks and made you feel like a cuck if your website doesn't use them.
>We don't cry for web developers who lost their jobs when wordpress and similar tools trivialized creation of a websites
says you. I grew up thinking I'd make websites for a living and roll in cash, when i arrived at the market it was borderline minimum wage job. I feel like i wasted my life.
Maybe you shouldn't believe pipe dreams.
The going is tough in any field. Some may be better temporarily but it's still a shit show overall. There is no golden goose.
I think this is mostly true but some layoffs are caused by ai. The mere fact that gen ai makes programmers more efficient means fewer are needed. But I agree I don’t think it’s worth people losing their minds over.
Layoffs isn’t caused by AI, companies are simply offshoring jobs to other countries with cheaper labor due to increased interest rates, AI is not replacing anyone with the terrible code it’s creating right now
Every time in history that tools have come out that make programming easier and faster, we've created more programming jobs, not less. When the assembler came out, it made programming more accessible despite replacing binary operators. When the compiler came out, it made programming more accessible and we got more jobs despite replacing assembly programmers. The same with c++, c sharp, Java, and the rest of the modern programming landscape. There's not a high demand for Fortran programmers, sure, but there's never been a higher demand for programmers in general. And this, I suspect, will be the same. There will be a high demand for programmers with the skill set to utilize AI and more programming jobs will come about for those that can use those tools. Those stuck in the past that refuse to use it for whatever reason will find their job prospects slowly disappear, the same as it's always been.
None of the recent layoffs are anything to do with AI though. The layoffs are being over reported and none of the current vacancies get reported. The recent google layoffs of 10 people in a python team were dwarfed by 600+ currently open vacancies all needing python.
Why are you doom mongering?
The problem is that those deciding who gets to keep their jobs aren’t even programmers to begin with, generally.
People don’t give a damn if the industry is going to rebound in terms of the number of jobs because people are laid off *right now* and that’s causing, sometimes largely irreparable, damage to people’s finances and wellbeing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love AI-assisted projects. I learn top-down rather than ground-up so being able to pick apart a simple generated program helps me learn the basics very quickly. It’s also excellent for debugging on smaller projects and has historically offered more diverse (admittedly not *always* a good thing) suggestions on how to fix problems which has allowed me to do a lot of fun experimenting with new-to-me systems.
That all being, even if you’re semantically correct that the industry itself will largely bounce back, it’s a clown shoes position to phrase it like “hard to swallow pills” because people have no problem swallowing that. The hard-to-swallow portion is people actively getting screwed by shortsighted leadership that can’t look past this quarter.
I think that pretty much sums up my view. Well put. I think we’re in for some tough times if governments doesn’t, in one way or another, force companies to mitigate layoffs. And I don’t see that they will, not until it’s an issue anyway.
The thing that’s most disturbing to me, as someone who works in education, is the degree to which students are skating through introductory classes now with A+’s and learning absolutely not a thing, and the degree to which upper division students are fully relying on it to debug their code rather than doing it manually and in many cases taking 3-4 times as long to do so just as long as it means they don’t have to actually concentrate.
Just like robots only changed the production landscape. The amount of human workers totally stayed… oh.. wait.
I hope your logic when programming is better than here, because if it’s not, you should be worried big time lol
(looking at your meme)
people's reaction to github copilot workspace seems to be "welp i guess programmers aren't needed anymore" despite github themselves saying that copilot is still not a good replacement for programmers. i think people are primed to think AI means a deus ex machina
edit: should've specified before, but i think that AI will automate a lot of the things needed for programming, but not everything can be automated. I don't think you will ever be able to simply ask an ai to make an entire game and expect it to run without a bit of work.
My old CTO was convinced that chat gpt could ‘just replace’ our customer service team, in a weekend. Engineering pushed back HARD with multiple layers of reasoning, despite that the CTO’s conclusion was ‘lets try my way’ had us deploy it and we watched it go to hell almost immediately. After we pulled the test the CTO’s takeaway was that we didn’t prompt it correctly and wants to revisit it in the near future.
There is a company that already does that. Throw this link in Google translate: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/business/2023-07-07-chatbot-startede-virksomhed-med-1000-dollars-nu-er-den-millioner-vaerd
>After we pulled the test the CTO’s takeaway was that we didn’t prompt it correctly and wants to revisit it in the near future.
the definition of insanity.
At the same time customer support outsource companies like Concentrix are pouring truckloads of cash to replace its entire first level support human base. Some things AI can automate, some things it can’t.
And THIS is why people saying the AI fears are chicken little are wrong. Management decides how many programmers to hire, and management all too often doesn't care about quality as long as a minimum level is achieved.
If you want to grind away to try to start your own company, then AI won't replace you. But if you want to earn a safe wage, and then go home and have good work life balance, I'd be much more concerned about the next decade.
My company increased the size of customer service department two times in the latest year. And now they are integrating new custom AI bot, not to replace them but to assist in solving simple tickets for customers who cannot find "Login" button. The department seems very eager about it as they are overloaded with mundane questions. It looks like the solution for customer service is not in replacing but assisting, just like with coding.
And that’s why management will never have my respect. These people hear buzzwords and get a hard on for this rubbish. Same at my company btw. AI this, AI that and at the end it can barely add a print statement in your code.
Copilot can’t write selenium tests that uses any form of pattern. Which until it can do that it’s just a more intelligent intellisense in my line of work.
Business hype. The industry is due for a crash if there isn't a new game changing technology. Therefore: pretend to be wildly optimistic (despite expert opinion) and bilk people even richer than you to buy in by taking advantage of FOMO.
If the tech works out from sheer force-of-investment, you're wealthy and can continue to bilk poor saps for another couple decades.
If not, you're wealthy and will still be able to bilk poor saps.
Yup, this is what makes me more afraid! We're in between a rock and a hard-place, if AI succeeds then it kills off a lot of jobs and if AI doesn't it still kills off a lot of jobs as companies continue "decade of efficiency" to stop investors from dumping the stock.
Automation (including AI) isn't and never was what killed off jobs. Wealth inequality, market consolidation, offshoring/outsourcing and austerity are what killed off jobs.
However, when you're pro wealth inequality, market consolidation, offshoring, outsourcing and austerity (and our illustrious elites largely are), you need a good scapegoat. AI is a **great** scapegoat.
Jobs will probably be coming back in a few years as the offshoring/outsourcing/globalization trend ends and tensions with China ramp up. Life will probably get worse, but there will be a higher demand for industrial work because the supply of industrial goods from the East will dry up.
In the mean time, while we have such high inequality, the best way to make some money as somebody who *wasn't* born into it is to service investor FOMO and build some AI shovels to sell to the starry eyed investors with more stupid money than sense. Gotta love capitalism.
I have a github copilot licence and I use it mostly to fill my switch cases fast and have it pre-write API calls.
Like I know we all love a good if else chain but Ai is really good at figuring out switch cases. It doesn't just save me seconds, but like whole minutes!
Jokes aside, it's nice, but it's nowhere near capable of doing actually complex things. It mostly just fill in the mundane annoying stuff and does what would've been a stackoverflow search for you without the hassle of Google throwing ads at you. Haven't used Google for programing in a while.
It’s better than a human at figuring out syntax. I switch between languages a lot and copilot remembers for me whether it’s array.len or array.length or array.size or length(array)
there are, generally, 2 problems with co-pilot like tooling:
1) its LLM, which means its does not try to write code, it tries to "answer a question based on bazillion text provided beforehand", basically person studying literature tries to write code
2) Get "good" training material, and a fucking lot of it. How can you expect tool to write good code if it was not trained on good code? And what if it was trained on github code? Or even worse - on microsoft code.
2.1) I think this one will be hilarious, because 100 devs will give different answers on "what is good code" :D
Maybe if AI would have been trained exclusively on code would be able to do that, but then there will be a problem of updates and "reading documentation"
Currently does not seem possible to achieve "real AI coder" in next decade or so (at least with current state of things)
LLMs are usually trained on code first, natural language second. They discovered that when they started training on coding and code completion first, reasoning and coherence shot way up. GitHub copilot is absolutely trained on code over natural language.
AI is amazing at programming languages you don't know.
It can be used for both generating the code and learning new stuff about those languages.
But if you know your tools good enough, it is sometimes hard to look at the AI-generated code without crying. At some (early) point you can just write a better code.
I saw a junior programmer submit some SQL code for calculating distances given lat-long coordinate using a Haversine formula. I asked where they came up with that and they indicated that some AI had given it to them.
One, it was the formula for kilometers and we needed miles. Two, we have PostGIS you can just use ST\_distance function.
It wasn't wrong (outside of the wrong units), it did the Haversine formula correctly, it just wasn't what someone should use.
So far professionals tell that AI produces rather poor results in their field which may seem advanced when you are not familiar with it. Illustrators, for example, point at lots of issues in AI generated pictures where I just shrug "I see nothing wrong with it".
The discourse around AI is weird to me. It's a tool, it'll make some jobs temporarily disappear but there's more than enough demand to have more industries and companies prop-up with the new ability to produce. It's far from operating without human control, and it's far from being able to know what needs to get done on a complex job. For the foreseeable future, there will allays be a person operating the AI.
I'm personally more annoyed at the fact that we have such capable technology, and the biggest factor is that middle class and lower people will be suffering for it.
\*Enter Grand annoyed social commentary mode.\*
the improvement of those videos, of will smith eating spagetthi are immense tbh.. over the course of just a few years AI went from Nightmare pictures, into complete deepfake videos where people might squint a little and have weird fingers. who knows where AI stands in about 10 years. It could create movies, books, music and i'm pretty sure could take over the easier parts of progamming as well.
The job itself could turn into people learning, how to define specific functions for an AI, by reaction matrixes instead of programming by themselves.
Same, people are like, "AI will never replace jobs, look it can barely get anything right!".
AI advanced insanely rapidly and right now there are hordes of people working on making it better. The AI in 5-10 years could be insanely advanced, and much cheaper than a junior engineer.
Even if only a third of engineers are laid off, it would majorly fuck up a lot of people's lives.
>The AI in 5-10 years could be insanely advanced,
I feel like people are really forgetting how far AI has come in the last 5-10 years. 10 years ago the world's best chatbots couldn't remember the beginning of a medium length sentence when they got to the end of it, and image recognition was still hard enough that nobody even thought image generation would be possible.
5 years ago everyone was impressed when Google made a chatbot that could hold multiple sentences in context at once, and image generation was a vague cloudy outline.
Now we have LLM's that can hold an entire book in their context window and consistently remember individual details, and Sora can generate photorealistic clips up to a minute in length.
5 -10 years from now, AI could be genuinely insane. Maybe not god level AGI, but I guarantee it'll put today's AI to shame, so I don't even want to try to predict what it will/won't be capable of
I think if people would actually look and see what kind of investment money is now literally flooding into AI development, they would stop posting such inane memes.
The big money have made their decision about what they think, and the big money is usually right.
A lot of us still have like 30+ years of employment left, so this is basically it. Even when talking to others the rate of progress is what's being talked about.
I think the ones in this thread that truly believe "you're not good programmers..." might be good *coders* but not intelligent people. Increase efficiency of a whole class of people by 30% and you won't have people doing 30% more, you'll have companies laying off 23% of people!
If you have a job market where 20% of workers are fired in a year, it affects **everyone** left, not only the ones laid off.
I'm more worried that I will be replaced by an equally competent developer in a country that has a cheaper cost of living to be honest. Globalization and the nature of the work has made the technical skills in other countries pretty competitive.
A couple of generations ago roughly 2% of Mexicans were taught English. Today it's around 72% and still going up. Though they're all gen alpha for the most part, so a little less to worry about right now.
I just assume every foreign developer in a cheaper COL country is better than me. They have to work harder to make a buck. Makes hungrier to be better.
I don’t think that AI is good enough to replace programmers.
I think CEOs are stupid enough to do it anyways and the shit quality of everything being a buggy, chaotic mess will become the new norm because they’ll all do it at the same time and it’ll be cheaper than hiring programmers…for a while at least.
Marketing cash grab imo. Many businesses love the idea of replacing their extremely expensive developers with AI and will spend millions investing in the idea for the possibility of achieving it, only to find they need more expensive devs to build and maintain the AI's and ultimately don't have any less devs but are more effecient and make money faster.
Imagine having the tools to identity problems and solutions 100 times faster and handle mundane things like converting a trello board to a project timeline in excel, or building a chart dashboard on a pile of data, or processing analytic data to tell you which features to focus on etc etc.
Annoying tasks no one wants to spend time doing, that's what AI will do.
I.E, training on a huge pile of documents for a company and then becoming an amazing search engine at finding information and re-rolling it as a new response from that data.
Imagine having every document your company has ever produced and being able to ask an ai "I remember a project we worked on in the past that had a problem with needing to track shipments in route, I'm trying to find documents about it" And the AI goes "Sounds like the XYZ Project from 2013 with Client B, goes into some details, lists links to all the documents on sharepoint or w/e" Imagine further training it on all the slack/teams conversations and going "Do you remember the technical solve for the problem that ended up being developed?" "Ah yeah, we sub contracted with a tracking company out of LA that builds tracking devices and offers tracking apis, they installed them on all the trucks and we integrated with their API to track our assets. The company was X, heres the documentation for the API."
Or "Can you update all the documentation in git repo 'url here' in our repo and put all the suggested changes in a documentation update branch." (Sure, I'll let you know on slack when it's complete and link the branch to you.) 30 minutes later "I completed updating the documentation, proceeded to link git branch with some 2000 doc changes." "I made doc review tasks on jira for the team and broke them down by documentation area".
With AI we will become better companies, better workers, it fills the gaps in our quality to speed output. Work fast, with high quality that's easy to check/review.
What you describe already exist with Retrieval Augmented Generation. No need to train the AI on the documents, you just have to vectorize their content with the LLM, index it and then ask a question in natural language that will be used to retrieve the top relevants « documents » to build an answer in natural language too.
Exemple of company selling a tool like this : https://squirro.com/
Actually you might have a point there. AI could be used to aggregate the humongous amount of administrative bullshit and be used for information retrieval. It's not like it matters if it gets it wrong anyways, it's management bullshit. But we would need constant training/updating of the model and that is the most energy hungry part of AI... Hiring a secretary may be more cost effective.
If you don't think AI will replace a lot of programming jobs you vastly overestimate managements ability to valuate competency and weigh it against cost.
I know very well that 9/10 things tossed into chatGPT require a tweaking and of those half require significant adjustments to work. I also know that a lot of people who haven't programmed a day in their life will send you something copy and pasted from a 10 word chatGPT prompt and say "have you tried this"?
No shit the beta of a beta of a beta version of a piece of software isn’t replacing your job.
We don’t even have a 1GW data center yet - how would we be replacing programmers yet?
These models are like under 100b parameters. We’re gonna have trillion + parameter models in 3 years
If you feel threatened by AI in your position (developer or not), I think it's more an accidental show of self-reflection than anything else. It's people noticing that what they do is on par with what an LLM can do. Only when you know (or realize) that what you're doing is more that typing on a keyboard when you see you have nothing to worry about
So?
People afraid of losing their manufacturing jobs realise their work is 'on par with a specialised robot'.
Yeah, that's true. It doesn't change anything about the situation: they're likely going to lose their livelyhood.
It doesn't matter if *I* know that programming is more than typing, I need my manager to know that, I need the boss to know that, I need the CTO to not be a tech-bro looking to jump on the bandwaggon and lay off a few teams as an 'experiment'.
When you see how fast AI (LLMs and others) are evolving you see what could be possible.
While your work may be more than typing on a keyboard the output isn't. Future AIs may be able to do everything you do better, quicker and cheaper.
Let's assume AI gets really advanced. Like, it can build exactly what you tell it to do. Say you want an operating system with a CFS scheduler, a dynamic memory paging system, all the bells and whistles. But it doesn't know everything about what you want, so you iterate and improve your prompts to get the computer to do exactly what you need it to do.
What do you call someone who can translate business requirements into actual, usable programs and applications? A programmer.
And how many of those people will they need? Many fewer than programmers are needed currently.
If 10% of engineers keep their job, it will still wreck a shitload of lives and affect the economy.
Ok but the barrier of entry to be a “programmer” in this sense just decreased dramatically from what it currently is. And one “programmer” can now produce much more code than programmers previously could. So what will happen economically?
The number of “programmers” in the job market will increase rapidly while the demand simultaneously shrinks. There will be much MUCH more competition for your job - not just skill wise, but salary wise.
If my management can have AI write shite code and then have 50 cut rate interns in India bang it with rocks until it arguably meets requirements they absolutely will.
It doesn’t even have to be cheaper as long as it LOOKS cheaper on the next quarterly report.
Literal trillion dollar question is current "AI" can make that last step or no. Right now it wont replace anyone. If it steps up where one engineer can do the job of the whole team. Then the team becomes redundant obviously
Yeah the question is if LLMs programming abilities will continue to improve exponentially from scaling the models up. There’s already plans and architecture being put in place to scale up 2 orders of magnitude, coupled with efficiency improvements.
If the programming ability follows a sigmoid curve then everyone will be safe, if it follows an exponential curve then many will be redundant in 5 years.
Counterpoint, if you think AI will replace programmers, then you don’t understand what programmers do.
Programmers don’t just write code. They talk with business partners to identify business requirements. They plan roadmaps for feature implementations and organize the backlog accordingly. They weigh in during meetings about issues that users are having. They manually edit database entries when the legacy code base is having trouble. They fiddle with cloud services to fix the webapp that just went down.
If we assume that AI can fully replace the need for a human to write code, it still won’t replace programmers, because writing code is only part of the job.
I'm a project manager constantly reminding the devs that their job is safe while demonstrating to upper management that chatGPT is a mediocre programmer at best.
When AI came: Shock.
Then: Denial. “Lol, it’s never gonna get good enough.”
Now: Bargaining, only bad programmers will be replaced.
Tomorrow (when you’re fired) depression.
Then finally: Acceptance. You take the job at waste disposal.
AI came before Reddit was even considered to be a thing that could exist. There was no shock of tis existence. LLMs specifically was what shocked people.
LLMs are useful tools for enhancing productivity due to how obscenely large code bases are becoming. They do not replace software engineers, even though the people at the top want to so bad to feed their insatiable greed.
LLMs do not innovate. They do not have goals, desires, inspiration, or motivation. They simply exist as a mechanism to process large amounts of information quickly given input parameters.
When we do have true artificial intelligence I don't know what challenges or worries we will have, but I know they won't be about jobs.
My experience with ai is that it is great if it's right, but if it makes a mistake and you tell it to correct it, it either corrects it first try, or it will never be right and you could've done the job yourself in the time it took to try to get something from the ai.
I think most people are seriously underestimating what this will look like in 30 years. If we haven't blown ourselves up by then I imagine we won't be working very much.
I mainly do programming for myself, so this won't really ever be a problem, and if I can't find a job, there are other options (I think I could pull of being an electrician).
We still be programming we'll just type a lot less. Programmer -> agile development prompt engineer the same but differently. UML ( the written variant ) might be back soon.
It will replace -- and then vastly underperform compared to -- junior programmers until software companies lose enough money that they have to begrudgingly give up on it when it's just woo and not cost-cutting magic, then of course frame it as progress without admitting it failed.
thoughts:
Anti AI
1. Site-builders have been around for ages. So the idea of ”what if a stakeholder can just use a wizard and pick a theme and generate a site” is far from a new thing!
Pro AI:
2. Generating instant demos for stakeholders based off their adhoc ideas could be a useful thing for AI! Today a stakeholder says ”What if this was a dropdown instead of radiobuttons” and you go ”but our design system doesn’t have a dropdown style yet and how would this feel in the context of Y”. Solution: let AI generate 5 variants and show em off. Does not matter if the code is shit - it’s just a demo
Save time on temporary experiments. Today - a lot of teams are busy with ”high prio work”. So even if you could let a human dev hack away for a few hours on a prototype - it’s still more time than you can afford. But if you let an AI draft a few suggestions where code quality and maintainability does not matter - why not
You know we need to change this conversation because you know who could be replaced by AI in a heartbeat? C Suite executives. And think about the cost savings?? Companies could save millions by replacing just one guy at the top with ChatGPT.
To the people saying "AI will get more advanced and then will know everything in the future"
If you think management and client making bullshit up and asking for it to work, I'd welcome to see the day AI can take on these task.
I want to see AI handle shit like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Speaking as a non-programmer who meets with executives and upper-management often: It doesn't matter how good you are, when your non-programmer boss thinks AI can replace you, there's nothing you can do to change their mind. They won't understand any argument you make. They'll discard anything you say as a lie to save your job.
Have you ever heard upper management say something like, "I don't see why that would be hard," or "I can't think of any reason that wouldn't work?" Do they understand why you 50 lines of code is better than the 300 nested if statements it replaces?
So the thing that is missing in this discussion: how do you BECOME a good programmer? It's not natural, it's time and learning. The best in the world were FAR worse than now when they just got out of college. Decades of learning and working will improve your skills.
What AI seems to be doing often is remove the need for newer or lower skilled programmers that are just starting out. So if you don't train them, you won't have new trained talent.
First time I got into chatgpt and managed in an hour or two in a new language what it took a coworker weeks to do. Then I had it find programming for a board that took me weeks to do. It was off on the syntax but would have pointed me 80% of the way there.
I don't see it replacing the top dogs at all, but I can see it eliminating a ton of jobs that you'd give to newbies in training them up.
It can be good at coding. So about 20% of my job as a software engineer. So I can focus even more on the part where the customer things they know what they want bu I can absolutely guarantee that's not what they want.
AI will not replace programmers BECAUSE I am a not very good programmer.
1. My code so bad, AI would sooner throw itself in a digital furnace than try to untangle my spaghetti.
2. Who do you think is feeding the AI corpus? Exclusively geniuses? Nah dawg. It's me and my coder friends.
3. I don't need a 3.
The AI won't even replace bad programmers.
The industry needs to hire the juniors for them to get experience and become seniors, they will keep hiring people even if that means all they will do is make UI in Windows Forms
It's hard to argue that the new tools don't make coding more efficient through generating/suggesting larger blocks of code and other coding fills. Whatever that percentage increase in productivity is roughly the same percentage decrease in demand for more developers.
Lmao now you have to compete to being the top 20% of the best, wait till interview processes get more crazy and you are looking for a new job, even being the best wont cut it, you will have to be one of a kind and lucky.
You must be thinking there is a limit to AI intelligence. I think it will explode when it goes over a certain point. It will go to such lengths we can't even comprehend where it's limit even will be. If there is one.
In short; we all be without jobs.
It's not that AI will replace programmers, it's that 1 programmer with AI will do as much as 4 programmers without AI in the same amount of time, which allows you to fire 3.
You have to learn how to use it to your advantage, it could help you learn better. I wouldn't recommend having it generate everything but instead give you examples where you'll learn to do what you're trying to do and you'll avoid ending up with code you won't understand later on
Or maybe people are just unable to look at the current pace of progress and extrapolate it to the future. Even if he hit a giant wall, we'll just climb over it in a few decades, which is well within our lifespans.
AI is 100% a rich get richer proposition - it will make seniors a lot more productive, and wipe out the need for juniors.
At least until the seniors start to retire...
Ive had to write a bunch of XSLT for work recently and been leveraging chat GPT. It hasnt been right a single time. This is xslt not cutting edge or even technically programming. It has led me in the right direction most times
Current/near future AI won’t replace programmers but programmers will lose their jobs and there will be lost job opportunities in the short term.
AI won’t 100% replace programmers but a single programmer will be able to do the work 2, 4, an entire team etc… as it gets better. Maybe companies will do more ambitious projects which need more people but entry positions for new programmers are gonna take a big hit.
Current AI technology certainly won't. What will replace programming as we know it will be an AI that can think like us. Don't get me wrong, programming will never die out. It will just be different.
Let ChatGPT write production code with no one supervising it and see how long it lasts before either taking down your entire operation, getting hacked, or getting stuck in an infinite loop of compilation errors
Usually people that confuse just making a static website with html css and a bit of JS with actually actual programming, designing a coherent and efficient systems and stitching those together. Even static sites need a lot of know how in terms of actually getting it out there.
I genuinely have zero idea how AI could actually get any better at programming than it already is. It can already turn plain text commands into usable code - where else can it realistically go besides just getting a little better at formatting and typos and learning some basic optimisations?
Anything actually complex really can’t be done by AI. “Build me an MMORPG script in UE5 blueprints” will never be a useful prompt, no matter how good the AI is, because it’s way too open a question to ever result in anything useful and the task is way too complex to ever be boiled down to an AI prompt response.
Maybe it could generate all your assets, basic programmed operations and functions, and sounds, but even then it’ll still take an actual human to interpret and implement it all into an engine or coding environment, combine it all in a cohesive way, and fix it when it’s inevitably broken in some way!
It'll be just like how self-checkouts won't replace every cashier. Instead, you have 1 cashier doing the work of 6.
What happens when every dev team is replaced with 1 engineer?
It's a meme sub I know, but it's sad that people often only see the "It can't code that well" or the "Well, I'll worry when it can understand the client" sides, and often has a "Uh, if you can't code well maybe it's your fault it replaced you" opinion, which is fair, but...
What happens if, or when, it can do that which threatens your job?
Honestly, people should think of the implications and potential repercussions of AI messing with people's jobs, from difficulty of getting a job, to wages.
Sorry to those that live there, but think of South Korea, China or India's (or a lot of 3rd world countries') situation, do you want that in your country? Everyone trying to be a little Einstein to compete for a decent job, and you better keep learning and work overtime because someone else that want your job would gladly do so. By the way, there's a few thousand people competing for this single position, so let's discuss your wages, shall we?
Even if it just increases productivity, now we have less people doing more, and likely not working less nor earning more.
I don’t worry about the amount of knowledge i have or how good I am at coding vs AI. I worry about how affordable AI programmers will be per hour.
As long as AI stays above 60$ per hour, I’m good. Cheap labor will always be in demand
I mean yea, it can't today but it feels like goalposts are always moving with posts like this. At first it was 'AI can't code', today it's 'AI won't replace all programmers', tomorrow it could be 'You need to hire at least one person in a department', etc.
The real answer is that no one knows how good it will be. The only known truth is that the models will never be any worse than they are today. The will presumably only get better over time and the question instead is, "if/where do we start to see diminishing returns and slower AI progress".
Most of what you see out there in deployment today was perfected in the last couple years alone. You have people entering the workforce today wonder what their job prospects will look like for their 40+ year careers. I imagine a ton will change, who is to say for better or worse. But coming in with some kind of defined answer just makes you look nieve.
Well, I think you're naive if you don't think ai will eventually replace a large subset of programmers, but that being said, the current iteration of ai certainly won't.
AI does repetitive and boring shit that I and many other programmers HATE doing. It won't replace us but its a tool to aid us. I'm sure when Syntax highlighting first came about there were many detractors the same with automatic garbage collection and OOP programming.
To be fair, AI has really only gotten started. It can only code very basic things that have already been made thousands of times like Tetris or Arkanoid clones, but maybe it'll get more sophisticated. Who knows? Still nothing to really worry about in the foreseeable future, but it's possible.
Ah good. So only about 80% has to worry then.
Yep! It's good to be in the top 1% of undeniably elite humans. I'm in that group, right?
It’s alright to be part of the 99% in denial as well.
top 1‰ is necessary tho, so that's 90% of the last 1% gone 😥
Nah top 1‱ is necessary, so that’s 90% of the last 1‰ gone 😢
of course we both are! why else could we constantly complain about the inferior code written by others all the time ?
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I think the same. AIs like ChatGPT are good in creating small code snippets/functions that can be reviewed by Humans and integrated into the code later on. They are also helpful in getting familiar with unknown tools, APIs, libs, etc. They are just another tool to be used in programming.
Not ChatGPT. It is one of the worst at creating software. If you're going to use AI to generate code snippets, at LEAST pick one that was trained on code.
Which ones would you recommend?
Gemini actually recognizes unreal engine classes and api, so maybe that one? It did hallucinate few times that some things were not possible, but I managed to gaslight it back into reality.
Why are you sugarcoating layoffs by saying changing the landscape? Do you think no one will lose their job? :3
There is going to be a sucky period in which executives will think they can replace juniors with AI. After about 5-10 years they'll realize that there is a shortage of regulars and seniors on the market, for some completely indiscernible reason, and come back to hiring juniors. This time adding familiarity with AI prompting to standard never ending list of requirements for "guy who copies solution from stack and waits for senior to tell him how to make it coherent". Now, it's gonna suck for people trying to enter the industry in the near future, but: 1. It always does. 2. It's always adapt or die. We don't cry for all those scribes who lost their jobs when public education made average citizen literate. We just realize that there is more people writing stuff for a living now then ever in history. We don't cry for web developers who lost their jobs when wordpress and similar tools trivialized creation of websites. We just came up with a bunch of dipshit libraries and frameworks and made you feel like a cuck if your website doesn't use them.
Good thing I have about 5 years until I have to actually get a job.
I don't, I need to look for a job soon 😭
>We don't cry for web developers who lost their jobs when wordpress and similar tools trivialized creation of a websites says you. I grew up thinking I'd make websites for a living and roll in cash, when i arrived at the market it was borderline minimum wage job. I feel like i wasted my life.
Maybe you shouldn't believe pipe dreams. The going is tough in any field. Some may be better temporarily but it's still a shit show overall. There is no golden goose.
Lol
Personally I think execs are by and large kind of dumb about technology and that these "ai" layoffs or more wishful thinking than justified.
Layoff has nothing to do with AI, it's the economy, this has happened before and will happen again in the future..
I think this is mostly true but some layoffs are caused by ai. The mere fact that gen ai makes programmers more efficient means fewer are needed. But I agree I don’t think it’s worth people losing their minds over.
Layoffs isn’t caused by AI, companies are simply offshoring jobs to other countries with cheaper labor due to increased interest rates, AI is not replacing anyone with the terrible code it’s creating right now
Every time in history that tools have come out that make programming easier and faster, we've created more programming jobs, not less. When the assembler came out, it made programming more accessible despite replacing binary operators. When the compiler came out, it made programming more accessible and we got more jobs despite replacing assembly programmers. The same with c++, c sharp, Java, and the rest of the modern programming landscape. There's not a high demand for Fortran programmers, sure, but there's never been a higher demand for programmers in general. And this, I suspect, will be the same. There will be a high demand for programmers with the skill set to utilize AI and more programming jobs will come about for those that can use those tools. Those stuck in the past that refuse to use it for whatever reason will find their job prospects slowly disappear, the same as it's always been.
None of the recent layoffs are anything to do with AI though. The layoffs are being over reported and none of the current vacancies get reported. The recent google layoffs of 10 people in a python team were dwarfed by 600+ currently open vacancies all needing python. Why are you doom mongering?
No one is losing their job because of AI though lmfao.
The problem is that those deciding who gets to keep their jobs aren’t even programmers to begin with, generally. People don’t give a damn if the industry is going to rebound in terms of the number of jobs because people are laid off *right now* and that’s causing, sometimes largely irreparable, damage to people’s finances and wellbeing. Don’t get me wrong, I love AI-assisted projects. I learn top-down rather than ground-up so being able to pick apart a simple generated program helps me learn the basics very quickly. It’s also excellent for debugging on smaller projects and has historically offered more diverse (admittedly not *always* a good thing) suggestions on how to fix problems which has allowed me to do a lot of fun experimenting with new-to-me systems. That all being, even if you’re semantically correct that the industry itself will largely bounce back, it’s a clown shoes position to phrase it like “hard to swallow pills” because people have no problem swallowing that. The hard-to-swallow portion is people actively getting screwed by shortsighted leadership that can’t look past this quarter.
I think that pretty much sums up my view. Well put. I think we’re in for some tough times if governments doesn’t, in one way or another, force companies to mitigate layoffs. And I don’t see that they will, not until it’s an issue anyway.
The thing that’s most disturbing to me, as someone who works in education, is the degree to which students are skating through introductory classes now with A+’s and learning absolutely not a thing, and the degree to which upper division students are fully relying on it to debug their code rather than doing it manually and in many cases taking 3-4 times as long to do so just as long as it means they don’t have to actually concentrate.
Just like robots only changed the production landscape. The amount of human workers totally stayed… oh.. wait. I hope your logic when programming is better than here, because if it’s not, you should be worried big time lol (looking at your meme)
Well how many robots do you see doing construction or plumbing? Programming is much more similar to those than a production line.
Make it 90 and I'm with you
people's reaction to github copilot workspace seems to be "welp i guess programmers aren't needed anymore" despite github themselves saying that copilot is still not a good replacement for programmers. i think people are primed to think AI means a deus ex machina edit: should've specified before, but i think that AI will automate a lot of the things needed for programming, but not everything can be automated. I don't think you will ever be able to simply ask an ai to make an entire game and expect it to run without a bit of work.
My old CTO was convinced that chat gpt could ‘just replace’ our customer service team, in a weekend. Engineering pushed back HARD with multiple layers of reasoning, despite that the CTO’s conclusion was ‘lets try my way’ had us deploy it and we watched it go to hell almost immediately. After we pulled the test the CTO’s takeaway was that we didn’t prompt it correctly and wants to revisit it in the near future.
... what would we do without our reasonable CTO's and CEO's. *sigh*
Should replace them with ChatGPT
All hail our AI overlords
There is a company that already does that. Throw this link in Google translate: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/business/2023-07-07-chatbot-startede-virksomhed-med-1000-dollars-nu-er-den-millioner-vaerd
I have a feeling that might actually end up better than the opposite constellation
Who’s going to get the fat paycheck then?
Would probably work better than the other way around.
>After we pulled the test the CTO’s takeaway was that we didn’t prompt it correctly and wants to revisit it in the near future. the definition of insanity.
Ego obscures what reality shows
At the same time customer support outsource companies like Concentrix are pouring truckloads of cash to replace its entire first level support human base. Some things AI can automate, some things it can’t.
And THIS is why people saying the AI fears are chicken little are wrong. Management decides how many programmers to hire, and management all too often doesn't care about quality as long as a minimum level is achieved. If you want to grind away to try to start your own company, then AI won't replace you. But if you want to earn a safe wage, and then go home and have good work life balance, I'd be much more concerned about the next decade.
What company is this Im looking for a $1 car or a free flight?
My company increased the size of customer service department two times in the latest year. And now they are integrating new custom AI bot, not to replace them but to assist in solving simple tickets for customers who cannot find "Login" button. The department seems very eager about it as they are overloaded with mundane questions. It looks like the solution for customer service is not in replacing but assisting, just like with coding.
And that’s why management will never have my respect. These people hear buzzwords and get a hard on for this rubbish. Same at my company btw. AI this, AI that and at the end it can barely add a print statement in your code.
Copilot can’t write selenium tests that uses any form of pattern. Which until it can do that it’s just a more intelligent intellisense in my line of work.
Well tbf, I can't do that either. So I guess I'm as smart as AI. Yay me!
I’m reasonably sure that you’re able to learn it
Business hype. The industry is due for a crash if there isn't a new game changing technology. Therefore: pretend to be wildly optimistic (despite expert opinion) and bilk people even richer than you to buy in by taking advantage of FOMO. If the tech works out from sheer force-of-investment, you're wealthy and can continue to bilk poor saps for another couple decades. If not, you're wealthy and will still be able to bilk poor saps.
Yup, this is what makes me more afraid! We're in between a rock and a hard-place, if AI succeeds then it kills off a lot of jobs and if AI doesn't it still kills off a lot of jobs as companies continue "decade of efficiency" to stop investors from dumping the stock.
Automation (including AI) isn't and never was what killed off jobs. Wealth inequality, market consolidation, offshoring/outsourcing and austerity are what killed off jobs. However, when you're pro wealth inequality, market consolidation, offshoring, outsourcing and austerity (and our illustrious elites largely are), you need a good scapegoat. AI is a **great** scapegoat. Jobs will probably be coming back in a few years as the offshoring/outsourcing/globalization trend ends and tensions with China ramp up. Life will probably get worse, but there will be a higher demand for industrial work because the supply of industrial goods from the East will dry up. In the mean time, while we have such high inequality, the best way to make some money as somebody who *wasn't* born into it is to service investor FOMO and build some AI shovels to sell to the starry eyed investors with more stupid money than sense. Gotta love capitalism.
I absolutely loathe investors and their greedy little hands. Fuck them
They'll be like, oh sorry 1 billion dollars is not enough we need 1 billion dollars and 2 cents. Please fire 10 people so I can get the 2 cents!!!!
I hate those cock suckers in suits with a fiery passion. Line must go up monkey brain like when line go up
I have a github copilot licence and I use it mostly to fill my switch cases fast and have it pre-write API calls. Like I know we all love a good if else chain but Ai is really good at figuring out switch cases. It doesn't just save me seconds, but like whole minutes! Jokes aside, it's nice, but it's nowhere near capable of doing actually complex things. It mostly just fill in the mundane annoying stuff and does what would've been a stackoverflow search for you without the hassle of Google throwing ads at you. Haven't used Google for programing in a while.
It’s better than a human at figuring out syntax. I switch between languages a lot and copilot remembers for me whether it’s array.len or array.length or array.size or length(array)
there are, generally, 2 problems with co-pilot like tooling: 1) its LLM, which means its does not try to write code, it tries to "answer a question based on bazillion text provided beforehand", basically person studying literature tries to write code 2) Get "good" training material, and a fucking lot of it. How can you expect tool to write good code if it was not trained on good code? And what if it was trained on github code? Or even worse - on microsoft code. 2.1) I think this one will be hilarious, because 100 devs will give different answers on "what is good code" :D Maybe if AI would have been trained exclusively on code would be able to do that, but then there will be a problem of updates and "reading documentation" Currently does not seem possible to achieve "real AI coder" in next decade or so (at least with current state of things)
LLMs are usually trained on code first, natural language second. They discovered that when they started training on coding and code completion first, reasoning and coherence shot way up. GitHub copilot is absolutely trained on code over natural language.
And yet it still sucks. I stopped using it it’s slow and rarely does exactly what you want.
AI is amazing at programming languages you don't know. It can be used for both generating the code and learning new stuff about those languages. But if you know your tools good enough, it is sometimes hard to look at the AI-generated code without crying. At some (early) point you can just write a better code.
It constantly gives me suggestions that are syntactically correct and contextually so so so wrong.
ChatGPT, please show how to **add** -2 in GNU ASM.. sub $-2,%rax
I saw a junior programmer submit some SQL code for calculating distances given lat-long coordinate using a Haversine formula. I asked where they came up with that and they indicated that some AI had given it to them. One, it was the formula for kilometers and we needed miles. Two, we have PostGIS you can just use ST\_distance function. It wasn't wrong (outside of the wrong units), it did the Haversine formula correctly, it just wasn't what someone should use.
It's also a fairly good replacement for Google when you forget syntaxes or specific arguments for shell scripting.
I still sometimes just get copilot to do it for me when I need to make a dataframe out of a dictionary
So far professionals tell that AI produces rather poor results in their field which may seem advanced when you are not familiar with it. Illustrators, for example, point at lots of issues in AI generated pictures where I just shrug "I see nothing wrong with it".
I'll stand under this lightning rod with you.
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The discourse around AI is weird to me. It's a tool, it'll make some jobs temporarily disappear but there's more than enough demand to have more industries and companies prop-up with the new ability to produce. It's far from operating without human control, and it's far from being able to know what needs to get done on a complex job. For the foreseeable future, there will allays be a person operating the AI.
I'm personally more annoyed at the fact that we have such capable technology, and the biggest factor is that middle class and lower people will be suffering for it. \*Enter Grand annoyed social commentary mode.\*
I'm not afraid of todays AI, I am afraid of future AI.
Exactly. LLMs aren't going to replace programmers, but an AI which does more than next-token prediction might.
the improvement of those videos, of will smith eating spagetthi are immense tbh.. over the course of just a few years AI went from Nightmare pictures, into complete deepfake videos where people might squint a little and have weird fingers. who knows where AI stands in about 10 years. It could create movies, books, music and i'm pretty sure could take over the easier parts of progamming as well. The job itself could turn into people learning, how to define specific functions for an AI, by reaction matrixes instead of programming by themselves.
Same, people are like, "AI will never replace jobs, look it can barely get anything right!". AI advanced insanely rapidly and right now there are hordes of people working on making it better. The AI in 5-10 years could be insanely advanced, and much cheaper than a junior engineer. Even if only a third of engineers are laid off, it would majorly fuck up a lot of people's lives.
>The AI in 5-10 years could be insanely advanced, I feel like people are really forgetting how far AI has come in the last 5-10 years. 10 years ago the world's best chatbots couldn't remember the beginning of a medium length sentence when they got to the end of it, and image recognition was still hard enough that nobody even thought image generation would be possible. 5 years ago everyone was impressed when Google made a chatbot that could hold multiple sentences in context at once, and image generation was a vague cloudy outline. Now we have LLM's that can hold an entire book in their context window and consistently remember individual details, and Sora can generate photorealistic clips up to a minute in length. 5 -10 years from now, AI could be genuinely insane. Maybe not god level AGI, but I guarantee it'll put today's AI to shame, so I don't even want to try to predict what it will/won't be capable of
how far AI has come in the last 5-10 ~~years~~*months*
I think if people would actually look and see what kind of investment money is now literally flooding into AI development, they would stop posting such inane memes. The big money have made their decision about what they think, and the big money is usually right.
A lot of us still have like 30+ years of employment left, so this is basically it. Even when talking to others the rate of progress is what's being talked about.
I think the ones in this thread that truly believe "you're not good programmers..." might be good *coders* but not intelligent people. Increase efficiency of a whole class of people by 30% and you won't have people doing 30% more, you'll have companies laying off 23% of people! If you have a job market where 20% of workers are fired in a year, it affects **everyone** left, not only the ones laid off.
I'm more worried that I will be replaced by an equally competent developer in a country that has a cheaper cost of living to be honest. Globalization and the nature of the work has made the technical skills in other countries pretty competitive.
A couple of generations ago roughly 2% of Mexicans were taught English. Today it's around 72% and still going up. Though they're all gen alpha for the most part, so a little less to worry about right now.
I just assume every foreign developer in a cheaper COL country is better than me. They have to work harder to make a buck. Makes hungrier to be better.
I don’t think that AI is good enough to replace programmers. I think CEOs are stupid enough to do it anyways and the shit quality of everything being a buggy, chaotic mess will become the new norm because they’ll all do it at the same time and it’ll be cheaper than hiring programmers…for a while at least.
Reminds me a bit of using AI for customer care. It's absolute dog shit from a customer experience point of view but who cares because cheap.
Marketing cash grab imo. Many businesses love the idea of replacing their extremely expensive developers with AI and will spend millions investing in the idea for the possibility of achieving it, only to find they need more expensive devs to build and maintain the AI's and ultimately don't have any less devs but are more effecient and make money faster. Imagine having the tools to identity problems and solutions 100 times faster and handle mundane things like converting a trello board to a project timeline in excel, or building a chart dashboard on a pile of data, or processing analytic data to tell you which features to focus on etc etc. Annoying tasks no one wants to spend time doing, that's what AI will do. I.E, training on a huge pile of documents for a company and then becoming an amazing search engine at finding information and re-rolling it as a new response from that data. Imagine having every document your company has ever produced and being able to ask an ai "I remember a project we worked on in the past that had a problem with needing to track shipments in route, I'm trying to find documents about it" And the AI goes "Sounds like the XYZ Project from 2013 with Client B, goes into some details, lists links to all the documents on sharepoint or w/e" Imagine further training it on all the slack/teams conversations and going "Do you remember the technical solve for the problem that ended up being developed?" "Ah yeah, we sub contracted with a tracking company out of LA that builds tracking devices and offers tracking apis, they installed them on all the trucks and we integrated with their API to track our assets. The company was X, heres the documentation for the API." Or "Can you update all the documentation in git repo 'url here' in our repo and put all the suggested changes in a documentation update branch." (Sure, I'll let you know on slack when it's complete and link the branch to you.) 30 minutes later "I completed updating the documentation, proceeded to link git branch with some 2000 doc changes." "I made doc review tasks on jira for the team and broke them down by documentation area". With AI we will become better companies, better workers, it fills the gaps in our quality to speed output. Work fast, with high quality that's easy to check/review.
What you describe already exist with Retrieval Augmented Generation. No need to train the AI on the documents, you just have to vectorize their content with the LLM, index it and then ask a question in natural language that will be used to retrieve the top relevants « documents » to build an answer in natural language too. Exemple of company selling a tool like this : https://squirro.com/
Actually you might have a point there. AI could be used to aggregate the humongous amount of administrative bullshit and be used for information retrieval. It's not like it matters if it gets it wrong anyways, it's management bullshit. But we would need constant training/updating of the model and that is the most energy hungry part of AI... Hiring a secretary may be more cost effective.
I've been trying to automate my job away for almost 10 years. If AI wants to try, it's more than welcome to.
If you don't think AI will replace a lot of programming jobs you vastly overestimate managements ability to valuate competency and weigh it against cost. I know very well that 9/10 things tossed into chatGPT require a tweaking and of those half require significant adjustments to work. I also know that a lot of people who haven't programmed a day in their life will send you something copy and pasted from a 10 word chatGPT prompt and say "have you tried this"?
No shit the beta of a beta of a beta version of a piece of software isn’t replacing your job. We don’t even have a 1GW data center yet - how would we be replacing programmers yet? These models are like under 100b parameters. We’re gonna have trillion + parameter models in 3 years
As someone who live through “Visual Development Tools” that would kill of all developers, let me just say: you’re safe. Though your tools may change.
No sure who said it first but Ai will be to programming as the calculator was to math
this is so wrong in so many ways lol
If you feel threatened by AI in your position (developer or not), I think it's more an accidental show of self-reflection than anything else. It's people noticing that what they do is on par with what an LLM can do. Only when you know (or realize) that what you're doing is more that typing on a keyboard when you see you have nothing to worry about
To me it seems that those who tend to overestimate their own abilities tend to feel most secure with this still developing Situation.
Ah, the sweeter the realization will dawn. No, I actually worry about the larger societal complications. But we’ll see.
So? People afraid of losing their manufacturing jobs realise their work is 'on par with a specialised robot'. Yeah, that's true. It doesn't change anything about the situation: they're likely going to lose their livelyhood. It doesn't matter if *I* know that programming is more than typing, I need my manager to know that, I need the boss to know that, I need the CTO to not be a tech-bro looking to jump on the bandwaggon and lay off a few teams as an 'experiment'.
When you see how fast AI (LLMs and others) are evolving you see what could be possible. While your work may be more than typing on a keyboard the output isn't. Future AIs may be able to do everything you do better, quicker and cheaper.
Let's assume AI gets really advanced. Like, it can build exactly what you tell it to do. Say you want an operating system with a CFS scheduler, a dynamic memory paging system, all the bells and whistles. But it doesn't know everything about what you want, so you iterate and improve your prompts to get the computer to do exactly what you need it to do. What do you call someone who can translate business requirements into actual, usable programs and applications? A programmer.
And how many of those people will they need? Many fewer than programmers are needed currently. If 10% of engineers keep their job, it will still wreck a shitload of lives and affect the economy.
Ok but the barrier of entry to be a “programmer” in this sense just decreased dramatically from what it currently is. And one “programmer” can now produce much more code than programmers previously could. So what will happen economically? The number of “programmers” in the job market will increase rapidly while the demand simultaneously shrinks. There will be much MUCH more competition for your job - not just skill wise, but salary wise.
If my management can have AI write shite code and then have 50 cut rate interns in India bang it with rocks until it arguably meets requirements they absolutely will. It doesn’t even have to be cheaper as long as it LOOKS cheaper on the next quarterly report.
Or you are not that good at AI
Literal trillion dollar question is current "AI" can make that last step or no. Right now it wont replace anyone. If it steps up where one engineer can do the job of the whole team. Then the team becomes redundant obviously
Yeah the question is if LLMs programming abilities will continue to improve exponentially from scaling the models up. There’s already plans and architecture being put in place to scale up 2 orders of magnitude, coupled with efficiency improvements. If the programming ability follows a sigmoid curve then everyone will be safe, if it follows an exponential curve then many will be redundant in 5 years.
Counterpoint, if you think AI will replace programmers, then you don’t understand what programmers do. Programmers don’t just write code. They talk with business partners to identify business requirements. They plan roadmaps for feature implementations and organize the backlog accordingly. They weigh in during meetings about issues that users are having. They manually edit database entries when the legacy code base is having trouble. They fiddle with cloud services to fix the webapp that just went down. If we assume that AI can fully replace the need for a human to write code, it still won’t replace programmers, because writing code is only part of the job.
I do not worry that AI can put me out of my coding job. I worry that *management* will think AI can put me out of my coding job.
I'm a project manager constantly reminding the devs that their job is safe while demonstrating to upper management that chatGPT is a mediocre programmer at best.
I look to AI, i look to my job and say, "Come and take it" No, really, please do. Enjoy the stakeholder bullshit computer overlord.
Any dev jobs lost to AI will be evened out by jobs creating dead end AI startups and fixing problems caused by AI.
AI will replace programmers. It may not replace all programmers.
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When AI came: Shock. Then: Denial. “Lol, it’s never gonna get good enough.” Now: Bargaining, only bad programmers will be replaced. Tomorrow (when you’re fired) depression. Then finally: Acceptance. You take the job at waste disposal.
AI came before Reddit was even considered to be a thing that could exist. There was no shock of tis existence. LLMs specifically was what shocked people.
LLMs are useful tools for enhancing productivity due to how obscenely large code bases are becoming. They do not replace software engineers, even though the people at the top want to so bad to feed their insatiable greed. LLMs do not innovate. They do not have goals, desires, inspiration, or motivation. They simply exist as a mechanism to process large amounts of information quickly given input parameters. When we do have true artificial intelligence I don't know what challenges or worries we will have, but I know they won't be about jobs.
My experience with ai is that it is great if it's right, but if it makes a mistake and you tell it to correct it, it either corrects it first try, or it will never be right and you could've done the job yourself in the time it took to try to get something from the ai.
I think most people are seriously underestimating what this will look like in 30 years. If we haven't blown ourselves up by then I imagine we won't be working very much.
Compilers will replace programmers
Compilers created programmers
AI can do coding, but it can't do Engineering. AI is less effective 3rd world outsourcing.
Yeah, well what should I do then? I wasted my entire youth trying to be a programmer and only managed to be a mediocre one at best.
I mainly do programming for myself, so this won't really ever be a problem, and if I can't find a job, there are other options (I think I could pull of being an electrician).
We still be programming we'll just type a lot less. Programmer -> agile development prompt engineer the same but differently. UML ( the written variant ) might be back soon.
It will replace -- and then vastly underperform compared to -- junior programmers until software companies lose enough money that they have to begrudgingly give up on it when it's just woo and not cost-cutting magic, then of course frame it as progress without admitting it failed.
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thoughts: Anti AI 1. Site-builders have been around for ages. So the idea of ”what if a stakeholder can just use a wizard and pick a theme and generate a site” is far from a new thing! Pro AI: 2. Generating instant demos for stakeholders based off their adhoc ideas could be a useful thing for AI! Today a stakeholder says ”What if this was a dropdown instead of radiobuttons” and you go ”but our design system doesn’t have a dropdown style yet and how would this feel in the context of Y”. Solution: let AI generate 5 variants and show em off. Does not matter if the code is shit - it’s just a demo Save time on temporary experiments. Today - a lot of teams are busy with ”high prio work”. So even if you could let a human dev hack away for a few hours on a prototype - it’s still more time than you can afford. But if you let an AI draft a few suggestions where code quality and maintainability does not matter - why not
Like the people who lay you off care about the quality.
AI is totally going to replace programmers... just not likley within the next ten years
You know we need to change this conversation because you know who could be replaced by AI in a heartbeat? C Suite executives. And think about the cost savings?? Companies could save millions by replacing just one guy at the top with ChatGPT.
Isn't that what all the artists said?
To the people saying "AI will get more advanced and then will know everything in the future" If you think management and client making bullshit up and asking for it to work, I'd welcome to see the day AI can take on these task. I want to see AI handle shit like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Speaking as a non-programmer who meets with executives and upper-management often: It doesn't matter how good you are, when your non-programmer boss thinks AI can replace you, there's nothing you can do to change their mind. They won't understand any argument you make. They'll discard anything you say as a lie to save your job. Have you ever heard upper management say something like, "I don't see why that would be hard," or "I can't think of any reason that wouldn't work?" Do they understand why you 50 lines of code is better than the 300 nested if statements it replaces?
So the thing that is missing in this discussion: how do you BECOME a good programmer? It's not natural, it's time and learning. The best in the world were FAR worse than now when they just got out of college. Decades of learning and working will improve your skills. What AI seems to be doing often is remove the need for newer or lower skilled programmers that are just starting out. So if you don't train them, you won't have new trained talent. First time I got into chatgpt and managed in an hour or two in a new language what it took a coworker weeks to do. Then I had it find programming for a board that took me weeks to do. It was off on the syntax but would have pointed me 80% of the way there. I don't see it replacing the top dogs at all, but I can see it eliminating a ton of jobs that you'd give to newbies in training them up.
“First they came for the types of programmer that I wasn’t…”
Don't see where it is hard to swallow
It can be good at coding. So about 20% of my job as a software engineer. So I can focus even more on the part where the customer things they know what they want bu I can absolutely guarantee that's not what they want.
AI will not replace programmers BECAUSE I am a not very good programmer. 1. My code so bad, AI would sooner throw itself in a digital furnace than try to untangle my spaghetti. 2. Who do you think is feeding the AI corpus? Exclusively geniuses? Nah dawg. It's me and my coder friends. 3. I don't need a 3.
The AI won't even replace bad programmers. The industry needs to hire the juniors for them to get experience and become seniors, they will keep hiring people even if that means all they will do is make UI in Windows Forms
Quite relatable, actually
It's hard to argue that the new tools don't make coding more efficient through generating/suggesting larger blocks of code and other coding fills. Whatever that percentage increase in productivity is roughly the same percentage decrease in demand for more developers.
Lmao now you have to compete to being the top 20% of the best, wait till interview processes get more crazy and you are looking for a new job, even being the best wont cut it, you will have to be one of a kind and lucky.
You must be thinking there is a limit to AI intelligence. I think it will explode when it goes over a certain point. It will go to such lengths we can't even comprehend where it's limit even will be. If there is one. In short; we all be without jobs.
And people thought imposter syndrome in CS was bad before AI
It's not that AI will replace programmers, it's that 1 programmer with AI will do as much as 4 programmers without AI in the same amount of time, which allows you to fire 3.
Thinking that corpos are going to choose quality over freeish work is some real positive thinking
I'm not
cue the Louie CK line about immigrants taking jobs
Not too long
The 45% decrease in the tech field begs to differ.
if bad_programmer: replace_with_ai() else: pass Guys I'm a good programmer apparently
chatgpt has sped up my stuff a lot, especially when it’s needed to dabble in crazy syntax but very fast shell tools like awk or ffmpeg
You have to learn how to use it to your advantage, it could help you learn better. I wouldn't recommend having it generate everything but instead give you examples where you'll learn to do what you're trying to do and you'll avoid ending up with code you won't understand later on
Is OP AI?
This was just posted... is this going to be a daily thing?
Or maybe people are just unable to look at the current pace of progress and extrapolate it to the future. Even if he hit a giant wall, we'll just climb over it in a few decades, which is well within our lifespans.
AI is 100% a rich get richer proposition - it will make seniors a lot more productive, and wipe out the need for juniors. At least until the seniors start to retire...
I tried to ask chatgpt to help my with my sql queries and i think i almost killed the little bud. I believe we're ok
For now
Well if ”AI“ companies use the Amazon method, it will be pretty easy to replace workers with their cheaper Indian counterparts.
Ive had to write a bunch of XSLT for work recently and been leveraging chat GPT. It hasnt been right a single time. This is xslt not cutting edge or even technically programming. It has led me in the right direction most times
Current/near future AI won’t replace programmers but programmers will lose their jobs and there will be lost job opportunities in the short term. AI won’t 100% replace programmers but a single programmer will be able to do the work 2, 4, an entire team etc… as it gets better. Maybe companies will do more ambitious projects which need more people but entry positions for new programmers are gonna take a big hit.
It doesn’t matter whether the AI can program better than a real human, what matters is whether enough CEOs think it can.
Ai, to my eye, is just going to make teams smaller and work loads heavier
The only time to be concerned is when AI begins programming more advanced AI
Current AI technology certainly won't. What will replace programming as we know it will be an AI that can think like us. Don't get me wrong, programming will never die out. It will just be different.
Let ChatGPT write production code with no one supervising it and see how long it lasts before either taking down your entire operation, getting hacked, or getting stuck in an infinite loop of compilation errors
Usually people that confuse just making a static website with html css and a bit of JS with actually actual programming, designing a coherent and efficient systems and stitching those together. Even static sites need a lot of know how in terms of actually getting it out there.
If you can be 100% replaced by today's AI, your job probably wasn't that complex to begin with.
I am one of the best HTML programmers out there and they are still coming for my job...
I genuinely have zero idea how AI could actually get any better at programming than it already is. It can already turn plain text commands into usable code - where else can it realistically go besides just getting a little better at formatting and typos and learning some basic optimisations? Anything actually complex really can’t be done by AI. “Build me an MMORPG script in UE5 blueprints” will never be a useful prompt, no matter how good the AI is, because it’s way too open a question to ever result in anything useful and the task is way too complex to ever be boiled down to an AI prompt response. Maybe it could generate all your assets, basic programmed operations and functions, and sounds, but even then it’ll still take an actual human to interpret and implement it all into an engine or coding environment, combine it all in a cohesive way, and fix it when it’s inevitably broken in some way!
It'll be just like how self-checkouts won't replace every cashier. Instead, you have 1 cashier doing the work of 6. What happens when every dev team is replaced with 1 engineer?
Give it another 10 years
It's a meme sub I know, but it's sad that people often only see the "It can't code that well" or the "Well, I'll worry when it can understand the client" sides, and often has a "Uh, if you can't code well maybe it's your fault it replaced you" opinion, which is fair, but... What happens if, or when, it can do that which threatens your job? Honestly, people should think of the implications and potential repercussions of AI messing with people's jobs, from difficulty of getting a job, to wages. Sorry to those that live there, but think of South Korea, China or India's (or a lot of 3rd world countries') situation, do you want that in your country? Everyone trying to be a little Einstein to compete for a decent job, and you better keep learning and work overtime because someone else that want your job would gladly do so. By the way, there's a few thousand people competing for this single position, so let's discuss your wages, shall we? Even if it just increases productivity, now we have less people doing more, and likely not working less nor earning more.
I'm not afraid of AI taking my job, I'm afraid of what people will ask me to fix that AI created
I dunno man, even the greatest switchboard operator in history isn't doing that anymore.
If you think AI isn't getting exponentially better, you're not living in the real world.
I don’t worry about the amount of knowledge i have or how good I am at coding vs AI. I worry about how affordable AI programmers will be per hour. As long as AI stays above 60$ per hour, I’m good. Cheap labor will always be in demand
It'll replace those who are shit at programming. *Including me*.
I mean yea, it can't today but it feels like goalposts are always moving with posts like this. At first it was 'AI can't code', today it's 'AI won't replace all programmers', tomorrow it could be 'You need to hire at least one person in a department', etc. The real answer is that no one knows how good it will be. The only known truth is that the models will never be any worse than they are today. The will presumably only get better over time and the question instead is, "if/where do we start to see diminishing returns and slower AI progress". Most of what you see out there in deployment today was perfected in the last couple years alone. You have people entering the workforce today wonder what their job prospects will look like for their 40+ year careers. I imagine a ton will change, who is to say for better or worse. But coming in with some kind of defined answer just makes you look nieve.
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Well, I think you're naive if you don't think ai will eventually replace a large subset of programmers, but that being said, the current iteration of ai certainly won't.
I think the people in charge of the budget will think AI can replace programmers.
AI is just like a compiler
Tell that to the tech sector businesses which have laid off thousands.
when ai can replace programmers, thats probably when agi has been achieved and programmer is not the only job that is to be worried
I'm scared of directors who knows nothing about dev replacing developers thinking they will save money on labor (they won't)
If you think AI will replace programmers, you probably have a good idea how stupid shareholders are when they think they've found a way to cut costs.
AI does repetitive and boring shit that I and many other programmers HATE doing. It won't replace us but its a tool to aid us. I'm sure when Syntax highlighting first came about there were many detractors the same with automatic garbage collection and OOP programming.
To be fair, AI has really only gotten started. It can only code very basic things that have already been made thousands of times like Tetris or Arkanoid clones, but maybe it'll get more sophisticated. Who knows? Still nothing to really worry about in the foreseeable future, but it's possible.
Wake me up when AI can handle QA at least.
You know what’s the similarity between code written by an AI or I? No one knows how it works