Technology

That is what happens when you mix a fucking CEO with tech "How many workers can I fire to make more money and boast about my achievements in the annual conference of mega yacht owners" where as the correct question should obviously have always been (unless you are a psychopath) "how can I use this tech to boost productivity of my workers so they can produce the same amount of work in less amount of time and have more personal time for themselves"

Also these idiots always forget the "problem solving" part of most programming tasks which is still beyond the capability of LLMs. Sure have LLMs do the mundane stuff so that programmers can spend time on stuff that is more rewarding? No instead lets try to fire everyone.

Just the other day, the Mixtral chatbot insisted that PostgreSQL v16 doesn't exist.

A few weeks ago, Chat GPT gave me a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table that used several DAX functions in ways that they could not be used.

The funny thing was, it knew and could explain why those functions couldn't be used when I corrected it. But it wasn't able to correlate and use that information to generate a proper function. In fact, I had to correct it for the same mistakes multiple times and it never did get it quite right.

Generative AI is very good at confidently spitting out inaccurate information in ways that make it sound like it knows what it's talking about to the average person.

Basically, AI is currently functioning at the same level as the average tech CEO.

I worked at a different MAANG company and saw internal slides showing that they planned on being able to replace junior devs with AI by 2025. I don't think it's going according to plan.

At the end of the day, one thing people forget about with these things is that even once you hit a point where an AI is capable of writing a full piece of software, a lot of businesses will still pay money to have a human read through, validate it, and take ownership of it if something goes wrong. A lot of engineering is not just building something for a customer, but taking ownership of it and providing something they can trust.

I don't doubt that eventually AI will do almost all software writing, but the field of software companies isn't about to be replaced by non software people just blindly trusting an AI to do it right (and in legally compliant ways), anytime soon.

Spoken like someone who manages programmers instead of working as one.

Its not like jobs will disappear in a single day. Incremental improvements will render lower level tasks obsolete, it already has to a degree.

Someone will still need to translate the business objectives into logical structure, via code, language, or whatever medium. Whether you call that a "coder" or not, is kind of irrelevant. The nerdy introverts will need to translate sales-douche into computer one way or another. Sales-douches are not going to be building enterprise apps from their techbro-hypespeak.

I taught myself Python in part by using ChatGPT. Which is to say, I coaxed it through the process of building my first app, while studying from various resources, and using the process of correcting its many mistakes as a way of guiding my studies. And I was only able to do this because I already had a decent grasp of many of the basics of coding. It was honestly an interesting learning approach; looking at bad code and figuring out why it's bad really helps you to get those little "Aha" moments that make programming fun. But at the end of the day it only serves as a learning tool because it's an engine for generating incompetent results.

ChatGPT, as a tool for creating software, absolutely sucks. It produces garbage code, and when it fails to produce something usable you need a strong understanding of what it's doing to figure out where it went wrong. An experienced Python dev could have built in a day what took me and ChatGPT a couple of weeks. My excuse is that I was learning Python from scratch, and had never used an object oriented language before. It has no excuse.

Well, that would be the 3rd or 4th thing during my career that was supposed to make my job a thing of the past or at least severely reduce the need for it.

(If I remember it correctly, OO design were supposed to reduce the need for programmers, as were various languages, then there was Outsourcing, visual programming and on the server-side I vaguely remember various frameworks being hailed as reducing the need for programmers because people would just be able to wire modules together with config or some shit like that. Additionally many libraries and frameworks out there aim to reduce the need for coding)

All of them, even outsourcing, have made my skills be even more in demand - even when they did reduce the amount of programming needed without actually increasing it elsewhere (a requirement were already most failed) the market for software responded to that by expecting the software to do more things in more fancy ways and with data from more places, effectively wiping out the coding time savings and then some.

Granted, junior developers sometimes did suffer because of those things, but anything more complicated than monkey-coder tasks has never been successfully replaced, fully outsourced or the need for it removed, at least not without either the needs popping up somewhere else or the expected feature set of software increasing to take up the slack.

In fact I expect AI, like Outsourcing before it, in a decade or so is going to really have screwed the Market for Senior Software Engineers from the point of view of Employers (but a golden age for Employees with those skills) by removing the first part of the career pathway to get to that level of experience, and this time around they won't even be able to import the guys and galls in India who got to learn the job because the Junior positions were outsourced there.

Don't worry guys. As long as project managers think "do the thing ... like the thing ... (waves hands around) ... you know ... (waves hands around some more) ... like the other thing ... but, um, ..., different" constitutes a detailed spec, we're safe.

And anyone who believes that should be fired, because they don't understand the technology at all or what is involved in programming for that matter. At the very least it should make everyone question the company if its leadership doesn't understand their own product.

The first thing AI gonna replace is CEO, dumb ass job, Mac Donald employer require more expertise

Lol, as a programmer who uses generative AI myself, I would genuinely love to see them try.

Meanwhile, llms are less useful at helping me write code than intellij was a decade ago

Yeah nah. We already have copilot and it introduces so many subtle bugs.

To predict what jobs AI will replace, you need to know both of the following:

1. What's special about the human mind that makes people necessary for completing certain tasks
2. What AI can do to replicate or replace those special features

This guy has an MA in industrial engineering and an MBA, and has been in business his whole career. He has no knowledge of psychology and whatever knowledge of AI that he's picked up on the side as part of his work.

He's not the guy to ask. And yet, I feel like this is the only kind of guy anyone asks.

20 years ago at a trade show, a new module based visual coding tool was introduced in my field which claimed "You'll never need another programmer".

Oddly enough, I still have a job.

The tools have gotten better, but I still write code every day because procedural programming is still the best way to do things.

It is just now reaching the point that we can do some small to medium scale projects with plug and play systems, but only with very specific equipment and configurations.

'Soon' is a questionable claim from a CEO who sells AI services and GPU instances. A single faulty update caused worldwide down time recently. Now, imagine all infrastructure is written with today's LLMs - which are sometimes hallucinate so bad, they claim 'C' in CRC-32C stands for 'Cool'.

I wish we could also add a "Do not hallucinate" prompt to some CEOs.

The sentiment on AI in the span of 10 years went from "it's inevitable it will replace your job" to "nope not gonna happen". The difference back then the jobs it was going to replace were not tech jobs. Just saying.

I'd believe AI will replace human programmers when I can tell it to produce the code for a whole entire video game in a single prompt that is able to stand up to the likes of New Vegas, has zero bugs, and is roughly hundreds of hours of content upon first play due to vast exploration.

In other words, I doubt we'll see human programmers going anywhere any time soon.

Edit:

Reading other replies made me remember how I once, for fun, tried using a jailbroken copilot program to do python stuff slightly above my already basic coding skill and it gave me code that tried importing something that absolutely doesn't exist. I don't remember what it was called ince I deleted the file while cleaning up my laptop the other day, but I sure as hell looked it up before deleting it and found nothing.

yup

and humans soon won't be the target audience for anything

Honestly I feel even an AI could write better code then what some big tech software uses lol

They could churn out garbage and scams for the idiots on Facebook, sure.