this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 122 points 2 months ago (27 children)

The only people who would say this are people that don’t know programming.

LLMs are not going to replace software devs.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wrong, this is also exactly what people selling LLMs to people who can't code would say.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago

It's this. When boards and non-tech savvy managers start making decisions based on a slick slide deck and a few visuals, enough will bite that people will be laid off. It's already happening.

There may be a reckoning after, but wall street likes it when you cut too deep and then bounce back to the "right" (lower) headcount. Even if you've broken the company and they just don't see the glide path.

It's gonna happen. I hope it's rare. I'd argue it's already happening, but I doubt enough people see it underpinning recent lay offs (yet).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (9 children)

AI as a general concept probably will at some point. But LLMs have all but reached the end of the line and they're not nearly smart enough.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 2 months ago

Guys that are putting billions of dollars into their AI companies making grand claims about AI replacing everyone in two years. Whoda thunk it

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 months ago (2 children)

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

--Lao Tzu...

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 months ago (2 children)

But coding never was the difficult part. It's understanding a concept, identify a problem and solve it with the possible methods. An AI just makes the coding part faster and gives me options to quicker identify a possible solution. Thankfully there's a never ending pile of projects, issues, todos and stackholder wants, that I don't see how we need less programmers. Maybe we need more to deal with AI, as now people can do a lot more in house instead of outsourcing, but as soon as that threshold is reached, companies will again contact large software companies. If people want to put AI into everything, you need people feeding the AI with company specific data and instruct people to use this AI.

All I see is middle management getting replaced, because instead of a boring meeting, I could just ask an AI.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I dread meetings and I can't wait for AIs to replace those managers. Or perhaps we'll have even more meetings because the management wants to know why we're so late despite the AI happily churning out meaningless codes that look so awesome like all that CSI VB GUI crap.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's been said before but the whiter your collar the more likely you are to be replaced by AI simply because the grunts tend to do more varied less pleibeon things.

Middle managers tend to write a lot of documents and emails which is something AI excels at. The programmers meanwhile have to come up with creative solutions to problems, and AI is less good at being creative, it basically just copy pastes known solutions from the web.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 months ago (1 children)

CEOs without a clue how things work think they know how things work.

I swear if we had no CEOs from today on the only impact would be that we wouldve less gibberish being spoken

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago

If AI could replace anyone... it's those dingbats. I mean, what would you say, in this given example, the CEO does... exactly? Make up random bullshit? AI does that. Write a speech? AI does that. I love how these overpaid people think they can replace the talent but they... they are absolutely required and couldn't possibly be replaced! Talent and AI can't buy and enjoy the extra big yacht, or private jets, or over priced cars, or a giant over sized mansion... no you need people for that.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 months ago (16 children)

If, 24 months from now, most people aren't coding, it'll be because people like him cut jobs to make a quicker buck. Or nickel.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

If that's true, how come there isn't a single serious project written exclusively or mostly by an LLM? There isn't a single library or remotely original application made with Claude or Gemini. Not one.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 months ago

Of course they won't be; somebody has to debug all the crap AI writes.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 months ago

Todays news: Rich assholes in suits are idiots and don’t know how their own companies are working. Make sure to share what they’re saying.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's not going to happen.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah writing the code isn't really the hard part. It's knowing what code to write and how to structure it to work with your existing code or potential future code. Knowing where things might break so you can add the correct tests or alerts. Giving time estimates on how long it will take to build the parts of the system and building in phases to meet your teams needs.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I know just enough about this to confirm that this statement is absolute horseshit

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Sounds like the no-ops of a decade ago and cloud will remove the need for infrastructure engineers. 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂😂😂🤣

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (4 children)

SHUT UP AND GO BACK TO OUR SHITTY YAML BASED INFRASTRUCTURE!

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It’ll replace brain dead CEOs before it replaces programmers.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm pretty sure I could write a bot right now that just regurgitates pop science bullshit and how it relates to Line Go Up business philosophy.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)
if lineGoUp {

    CollectUnearnedBonus()

} else {

   FireSomePeople()
   CollectUnearnedBonus()

}
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago

This will be used as an excuse to try to drive down wages while demanding more responsibilities from developers, even though this is absolute bullshit. However, if they actually follow through with their delusions and push to build platforms on AI-generated trash code, then soon after they'll have to hire people to fix such messes.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Good luck debugging AI-generated code...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They think it will be easier than having people write the code from scratch. I don't know shit about coding but I know that's definitely not right.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

AI is quite good at writing small sections of code. Usually because it's more or less just copying something off the internet that it's found, maybe changing a few bits around, but essentially just regurgitating something that's in its data set. I could of course just have done that but it saves time since the AI can find the relevant piece of code to copy and modify more or less instantly.

But it falls apart if you ask it to build entire applications. You can barely even get it to write pong without a lot of tinkering around after the fact which rather defeats the point really.

It also doesn't deal well if the thing you're trying to program for is not very well documented, which would include things like drivers, which presumably is their bread and butter.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A company I used to work for outsourced most of their coding to a company in India. I say most because when the code came back the internal teams anways had to put a bunch of work in to fix it and integrate it with existing systems. I imagine that, if anything, LLMs will just take the place of that overseas coding farm. The code they spit out will still need to be fixed and modified so it works with your existing systems and that work is going to require programmers.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

So instead of spending 1 day writing good code, we'll be spending a week debugging shitty code. Great.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

Everybody talks about AI killing programming jobs, but any developer who has had to use it knows it can’t do anything complex in programming. What it’s really going to replace is program managers, customer reps, makes most of HR obsolete, finance analysts, legal teams, and middle management. This people have very structured, rule based day to days. Getting an AI to write a very customized queuing system in Rust to suit your very specific business needs is nearly impossible. Getting AI to summarize Jira boards, analyze candidates experience, highlight key points of meetings (and obsolete most of them altogether), and gather data on outstanding patents is more in its wheelhouse.

I am starting to see a major uptick in recruiters reaching out to me because companies are starting to realize it was a mistake to stop hiring Software Engineers in the hopes that AI would replace them, but now my skills are going to come at a premium just like everyone else in Software Engineering with skills beyond “put a react app together”

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago (2 children)

While I highly doubt that becoming true for at least a decade, we can already replace CEOs by AI, you know? (:

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Most middle managers could be replaced by a simple script already.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago

I feel sorry for all those people in AWS that now have him as a leader...

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (8 children)

If generative AI hasn't replaced artists, it won't replaced programmers.

Generative AI is much better at art than coding.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Seriously how can these CEOs of a GPU company not talk to a developer. You have loads of them to interview

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sure, Microsoft is happy to let their AIs scan everyone else’s code., but is anyone aware of any software houses letting AIs scan their in-house code?

Any lawyer worth their salt won’t let AIs anywhere near their company’s proprietary code intil they are positive that AI isn’t going to be blabbing the code out to every one of their competitors.

But of course, IANAL.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

The LLMs they train on their code will only be accessible internally. They won’t leak their own intellectual property.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Let's assume this is true, just for discussion's sake. Who's going to be writing the prompts to get the code then? Surely someone who can understand the requirements, make sure the code functions, and then test it afterwards. That's a developer.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago

How many times does the public have to learn if the CEO says it, he probably doesn't know what he's talking about. If the devs say it, listen

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I'll take "things business people dont understand" for 100$.

No one hires software engineers to code. You're hired to solve problems. All of this AI bullshit has 0 capability to solve your problems, because it can only spit out what it's already ~~stolen from~~ seen somewhere else

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's the same claim when tools like Integromat, WayScript, PureData, vvvv and other VPLs (Visual Programming Languages) started to get some hype. I once worked for a company that strongly believed they'd "retire the need for coding", and my ex-boss was so confident and happy about that... Although VPLs were a practical thing, time is the ruler of truth, and for every dev-related job vacancy I see, they ask some programming language, the written ones (JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, Lua, and so on).

Because if you look closely, deep inside, voila, there's code in anything that is claimed to be no-code! Wow, could anyone imagine that? 🤯 /sarcasm

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I made this meme a while back and I think it's relevant

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Cloud tech seller sells cloud

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Translation: "We're going to make the suite for building, testing, and deploying so obnoxiously difficult to integrate with your work environment that in two years nobody in your DevOps team will be able to get anything to a release state."

Me, fiddling with a config file for a legacy Perl script that's been holding up the ass-end of the business since 1996: "Uh, yeah that's great."

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

All the manufacturers of mechanical keyboards just cried 🥺

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