Big llm smells: 'Not "AI helps you autocomplete a function." Not "AI explains a stack trace." I mean the full-on narrative:'
'Sure, it's a weird language. It looks archaic. Sometimes it's hostile. Sometimes it's beautiful.
But still—if you know what you're doing—you can sit down with a keyboard and turn words into:
a product a workflow an automated business process a system that makes money while you sleep a tool that saves a team thousands of hours That's real power. It's leverage.'
'Not because we're lazy. Not because we're gatekeeping. Because building real systems is hard, and the number of people who can reliably do it is limited.'
Sometimes I think we get too caught up on what chatgpt will do to the economy, software, and businesses, and forget the most insidious aspect of this type of technology - we will no longer know how to write and all human text communication will confirm to a specific pattern.
There are literally people running bots creating such shortform videos as we speak.
And there are millions of kids (and adults) scrolling those same videos as you reading this.
Let that sink in.
What are the good reasons to write a blog, minus those that involve you actually writing it?
It's basic market dynamics + some high school social calculus.
"My manager wants to get rid of me because I'm too good with computers and he is jealous."
No, he wants to get rid of you because you are an operating expense for the company. If they can achieve the same outcome without paying your salary then why wouldn’t they fire you?
It would take a huge leap forward, if not actual AGI, to fully replace Software Developers. If that's the case, they could replace any human job at any level, not just developers.
It's a misunderstanding that AI makes SW engineers less valuable, when the code making is cheaper. This assumes there is some fixed amount of code that the society needs to produce. I think the companies will face a different reality - the code they own ("intellectual property") will become less valuable, but the programmers (who are now effectively promoted to kind of product managers) will become more valuable, as they can now do more (and cause more damage, too).
The innovations of the past, such as compilers and open source, which made programmers more productive, didn't make them obsolete.
That being said, it will take companies (and their owners) some time to accept the new reality - programmers have more power now and it's harder to gatekeep what they work on. So the management of these companies will try to twist it, which will ultimately be counterproductive. The programmers should recognize it and look into some form of social organization - be it unions, professional organization or worker cooperatives. (Distinction of labor vs capital is not a natural law, just like the distinction between lords and peasants isn't god-given.)
"thank god programming is solved, I hated writing code...
anyway, off to issue statements to a computer in a way it can interpret"
Flagged why?
I think it was a pretty good article.
I don't how this could offend anyone.
Since the development of computers, companies have wanted to save money and that's meant a push to find a magic bullet that can replace many, if not most or all, programmers. Natural language programming, RAD tools, much of the work on fifth-generation languages, was oriented around that objective (removing or reducing the dependence on programmers as a category of professionals, versus domain experts who happen to also program).
:-/
The same argument could be made about people writing articles and influencing actions in other humans. Something, it seems, people want to use AI for. Have AI write articles for them.
We’re software engineers. Like half of the work we do is try and automate jobs.
Are we really confused about why “they” might want to automate our jobs?
We manage complexity.
It's not jealousy though. It's seeing an operational bottleneck as inefficiency. If you know what you want and you have to go through someone else to get it, that's frustrating, so you look for ways around it. AI is a way around software engineers.
The key to remaining usefully employed is not to be the bottleneck. If it's faster for someone to get to a solution with a software engineer than without a software engineer then you will remain employed. This is largely irrespective of cost - generally speaking spending money on a salaries to go faster is always better so long as you're actually going faster.
There are a lot of senior developers who discuss how they use LLMs and why, for example, and it exposes that even with a decade or so of experience, people can have extremely thin and weak understandings of what they're doing, and why. That isn't to cast shade at all, and I've been (and will be) the experienced yet clueless person at times. I could be right now.
A reductive description is that it's turning a lot of people in expert beginners, and the coworker they collaborate most now has no way of compensating for it. LLMs are useful and powerful tools, but they can't make up for these kinds of deficiencies yet. It doesn't seem like they will very soon, either. As they get better at generating code, they seem to simultaneously widen gaps in their ability to identify or anticipate bugs or poorly fit solutions.
I can't imagine the messes people are creating with LLMs when they have no experience at all, though. They might feel empowered (and to a degree they certainly are) but when it comes to complex, large, mission-critical, and/or distributed systems... These tools are nowhere near where they need to be.
Otherwise, I've also found that important software can now become more ambitious. We seem to model the career risk developers face based on the software of today, but what I'm seeing is that I'm able to build and maintain more ambitious projects than ever. I'll be pushing the limits of what's possible for myself for a while yet, and I suspect it will continue to produce value for the people I work with. I could have these tools do the work I used to do (or help me do it faster) and leave it at that, but the reality is that I don't just stop there. I keep going, I continue refining, I discover more ways to make it more valuable, I iterate faster and maintain a tighter feedback loop with the people who use the things I create.
So, why would I be eliminated from that process? Do people really believe that my position in that loop will be eliminated by AI? This seems to disregard a myriad of qualities that allow software developers to be effective and valuable team members.
If that happens, frankly, I believe far more roles than software development would be eliminated at that point. The implications would go far beyond software.
It's not rocket science.
Digital computers were cheaper than the legions of human "calculators" that they replaced, but once those savings were realized, the next step was to attack the smaller number but still expensive per head staff of programmers you needed to get the most value out of a computer.
1) Cost
2) Flexibility. If you can hire random laborers to do most of your tasks, you can quickly scale up whereas if you depend on highly skilled and trained workers, starting a new operation elsewhere is hard. Similar, you can shift activity around, are less impeded by the opinions of workers, etc. Significantly, this may allow you to "franchise" your operations in various ways.
I've seen both ways, and don't share the "capital owners BAD" sentiment. The first thing to join a company is to see whether they assign Eng department to Costs or to Assets mentally.
The same is true for other knowledge workers, not just programmers. That doesn't mean that if corporate owners and managers had a magic wand that could replicate the worker on demand they wouldn't use it and toss the knowledge worker aside. They would do so happily, especially if it saved them money.
The reason that programmers (few are actually engineers, no reason to bullshit we're among friends and can be honest) have been treated so well is that they were hard to replace. If that barrier gets lifted, or is perceived to have been lifted, they'll get rid of the programmers in a heartbeat.
You could say LLMs can't "keep intellectual property in their heads", but even today they don't need to. They just need to capture everything in a bunch of artifacts -- code, docs, spreadsheets, etc. -- which is already possible. The same things we do but to a limited extent because we're human. LLMs, being tireless, can do so with much more meticulous detail. Whatever an LLM cannot do can be done by a fraction of the workforce.
Yes, enlightened companies used to value their engineers, but the calculus has shifted. Look around -- layoffs, RTO mandates, AI mandates, offshoring, under-leveling, record levels of burnout -- even before AI has been widely adopted! The tech industry overall is been telling us what their stance is with their actions louder than any amount of perks or "we are all family" ever could.
It's not "because capital owners BAD", it's just "because Capitalism."
Our primary edge at this point is creativity and innovation that creates new intellectual property. I think that will be safe for a while, but that requires a pretty high level of skill and experience, which excludes a majority of the workforce. This is where I suspect a lot of pain will be felt.
Workers are costs. Always have been. If you don't own them, they're not assets.
"SWEs are assets" is HR propaganda so you think you're valued.
And software engineers and IT staff are notoriously expensive, so hearing about a way to get rid of them would excite any investor.
> It's not rocket science.
It's far above the heads of many supposedly "smart" software engineers, who looked at their high salaries and 401ks, forgot they were disposable laborers, and confused themselves for capitalist tycoons.
Drop the libertarianism and form a labor union before it's too late. You're not smart if you're parroting your boss's talking points like an idiot.
I agree with this, but it isn't just limited to software engineers. Most of the supposed "middle class" in the US fits this description.
We currently have the highest level of wealth inequality in history which is still growing at runaway rates and plenty of laborers who view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" willing to prop up the system, seemingly unaware that those at the top will gladly wipe them off their boot when given the chance.
Narcissism
This feels like cope here.
They want to get rid of SWE because they are highly paid (in the US especially) and they want them for cheap (e.g. Bangalore, London)
AI just makes it a no brainer.
Also I don't think there is anything wrong with everyone being a software engineer, more accessibility to the SWE field for all is great.
Current SWE's will just need to now adapt quicker to remain relevant, and those that can't will just then leave the field.
Perhaps those that don't adapt were probably not good engineers anyway.
