They're probably gonna laugh at the absurdity of the situation because some new popular language will come along and the AI will be back to pushing out broken code. That, or laugh because the code in well used languages will include a shit ton of vulnerabilities that wouldn't be present if real devs had to double check code before pushing it out to the public.
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
59 points (71.5% liked)
Technology
60459 readers
5945 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
back
When did it ever not push out broken code?
In this hypothetical situation?
In this hypothetical, why would we create new languages? What benefit does that have for AI-gen code?
So either we're going to improve AI-gen to the point where we rely on it, or human devs are still important in which case new languages matter. The main exception here are languages specifically designed for AI, in which case error-rate would go down.
So either AI pushes out broken code and human devs are still important, or AI doesn't push out broken code and new languages aren't valuable.
Someone still has to write the instructions. AI might not become a replacement for the engineer, but a more powerful compiler, that is still fed with code written by engineers.
Yeah, I agree that's the more likely scenario. People seem to worry way too much about AI, when it's really only going to replace junior devs, and only for short-sighted companies.
But I mean many people have already lost their job because AI automated it away.
True, and many people have lost jobs because something else automated it away, like toll booth workers, grocery clerks, and telephone switchers, and computers (i.e. people who would compute things by hand).
Jobs disappearing because technology advances is natural. It sucks for those impacted, but it's natural, and IMO it's only a problem of new jobs aren't created fast enough, or whole industries disappear. Fighting to keep jobs in spite of automation runs the risk of having an entire industry disappear, such as if dock workers win the fight to prevent automation on the docks, they'll just all lose their jobs at the same time once automation can replace them all at once.
The better plan is to adjust and adapt as technology changes. If you're entering CS or a recent grad, make sure you understand concepts and focus less on syntax. If you're a mid level, learn to incorporate AI into your workflow to improve productivity. If you're a senior, work toward becoming an architect and understand how to mitigate risks with poor quality code.
Fighting AI will at best delay things.
That is certainly true. It just sucks, that so many people are scrambling for jobs and rich people get richer. There has to be a better way.
I think both can happen at the same time. There's a lot of fkn nerds out there. (I'm a software developer myself)
Fixing broken software some robot pushed to prod
I'm not a programmer, but I don't think I'd pay for code that was 95% accurate. That sounds buggy af
I am a programmer, and I also wouldn't stand for that either. We also introduce bugs and are probably around that 95% rate, but at least we know the most important uses are correct and the person who introduced them can usually fix them quickly. With AI, there's no guarantee where the bugs will occur.
You don't have to pay for it. The billionaires do, and they will do it without hesitation
Coding is just a part of the overall "programming" problem. Most problematic areas are in translating what the customer wants into code (requirements analysis), modifying code to overcome specific constraints, integration, etc and etc
Don't forget testing the code to make sure what is delivered actually matches what the customer wants.
They're going to keep doing their job, good luck to some manager who thinks they can be verbose enough to get their idea across
Finally free from the Golden Handcuffs, I'd use my extra time to do something I've always wanted, like music production, which would also inevitably be taken over by AI.
Retire. All I ever wanted to be was a programmer. If I can’t do that anymore I’ll just retire. I’m saving/investing every penny I can just in case.
Same. If I can retire before my job is irrelevant, I'll work on my own projects on my own terms. If I don't, at least I have a nice pile of assets and can coast with another job.
That said, I don't think people like you and I will have problems, because we'll adapt. It's the "programming is just a job" crowd that would have a lot of issues.
Thats a whole lot of heavy assumptions, doing some really heavy lifting.
Ai-herder or Robot-farmer or Llama-raiser etc etc
devs still needed to ensure code is sane and not some insane hallucination.
You seem like someone who hasn't really worked in software development.
Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.
You'll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
That's still a lot of software engineers displaced in the hypothetical scenario. That means you only need the devops and qa engineers, and a solution architect or principal engineer or whatever your company calls that sort of role for the analysis and design part.
Writing code is last thing you want to do as senior SWE because every line of code is potential debt and maintenence problem.
The just write code bro, figure out things later attitude is good for R&D, MVP and POC that is like 10% of job.
Just like with art, writing code like drawing is just a skill. AI is trying to replace the obvious part (that is actually the reward from thinking and describing problem in your head) because it can't replace thinking. Removing rewards bring us to depression, depression bring us to death.
Ergo AI will kill economy with no people left to replace it so we will end up to being monkas.
That's why I'd say SWE will go to farm and wait untill people in cities will start starving to death because AI stopped working and there is nobody left to fix it.
It's funny how all trends extrapolated out lead to the plot of Idiocracy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
You have to understand what software can do, how to design it, and how it should interact with other systems in order to write software and not just code, and AI can’t do that. If you tell it to make you A, and what you really want is B, you’ll never get what you want.
Only about 10-20 percent of my job as a software engineer is writing code. AI can be really amazing at writing code, but unless it can do the other 80-90% of my job without me, I’ll be safe.
Now, whether middle and upper management will know this is an entirely different question. A lot of them think that lines of code written is a good measure of productivity, when in fact it’s often the opposite.
I foresee there being a big struggle for management to come to grips with the fact that AI is better suited at their job than ours.
If it is able to replace software devs, it's probably able to replace 95% of the jobs that require mainly using your brain.
Yeah it's being applied to software devs right now but it's already capable of replacing nearly every manager/supervisor in existence.
It can make schedules, direct tasks based on inventory, and balance a budget. Have a human backup available on call to fix hallucinations and you're golden.
They're just gonna sit around and wait a few months until they are begged to come back and can demand more compensation. The current generative AI, which is not general AI, will not be able to replace high functioning jobs. Eventually, a lot of those software engineers will be asked back and get much more for their services.
That will never happen, or at least with how ai currently works. It's basically a glorified autocorrect, it uses the same technology underneath.
But presuming it does, yes. We will have to go to another industry, like AI prompting. Coding is a tiny part of professional software development.
Yes, exactly this.
When compilers came along, some people honestly thought it would dumb down programming so much that anyone could do it.
When high level programming languages came along, they rejoiced again - now finally anyone can make software.
When Intellisense meat you no longer had to remember variable names, write your own imports and could guess how most libraries work, the bells rang out once again in celebration.
And now we have AI, it's cool but really just another step like all those steps before. For me, it's a replacement for the documentation I never read anyway. I can ask an AI a stupid question rather than bothering a human developer.
These days it's my job to manage a small team of developers - when I ask them why they wrote a stupid thing that makes no sense, 90% of the time, the answer is that an AI wrote it for them.
load more comments
(10 replies)
This thread is full of people comparing OPs hypothetical about 10 years from now with last year's capability.
Will AI progress that fast? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It probably won't get that good, but it doesn't matter. If it gets as good as your average junior that's going to mean something like 100% increase in productivity, which means 50% as many jobs and that's going to be a BIG FUCKING DEAL.
Especially when it's going to be replacing a lot of other types of office workers. What kind of job is your average software dev going to transition to? Tech support? Not anymore. UI Designer? LOL. Manager? And who are you going to be managing?
If the US doesn't hit 15-20% unemployment in the next 10 years I'll eat my hat. I'll be eating it either way because I'll be starving to death.
There is a hard limitation on LLM, it doesn't and by definition can not have a criteria for truth, and unless something completely new emerges, it will never replace a junior, really. Some managers can be convinced that it did, but that will be a lie and the company that believes it will suffer.
It can transform some junior jobs for sure, some people might need to relearn some practices, there will probably be some shift in some methods, but unless something fundamentally new will appear, there is no way LLM will meaningfully replace meaningful amount of people
Same thing the rest of us replaced by AI are gonna do: live on the dole or starve
Honestly people are getting distracted here. Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive thats a huge boost for smaller companies with only handful of developers.
Many companies are only thinking about reducing costs for themselves but at the same time they're freeing up a lot of talent for new and old competitors.
Here's some food for thought:
- Open source developers may use A.I to develop better software to close gap between paid alternatives. (Blender, Gimp, Krita, Linux distributions, mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed)
- Many LLM's can already be ran freely and locally. These will only get better as technology progresses. This can make selling/profiting from A.I services a lot harder
- A.I may be used to block ads or obfuscate (create bunch of fake data) user data that is sold to advertisers.
- Some media sites are already using A.I to write articles. Whats the point when users may just use chatbot to get all the information without ever engaging with the source.
These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.
There are a lot of dumb takes here in the comments
Developer displacement works the same way it does for any other technology
The problem is not that the job is eliminated but that fewer are needed per unit of output
My startup only has 4 engineers because we don't need 5
This trend will continue until the SV hiring bubble bursts
Even if we stipulate that, I’m not convinced it’s a big deal. The software field continues to grow like crazy and we can never find enough people to hire. If ai gets good enough to take the place of some of that hiring, fantastic!
They'll either move up the food chain to higher-touch work where AI can't compete, or they'll do other things.
Keep in mind that most devs aren't really all that good at their jobs, so it will probably be economically beneficial for them to do something else. I say this as a long-time hiring manager with many decades of experience in the field.
It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes
Only if you believe the hype. It can do that in best-case scenarios when the requirements are written as rigorously as code, or where it's replicating a common pattern.
Do they just become homeless?
During previous layoffs, a lot of them left the field, and some of the rest founded startups. It wasn't always the case that firms were founded by teenaged sociopaths with strong family connections to VC funding. There was a time when they were founded by people who knew how to do things.
load more comments
(3 replies)
The plan is to rehire them back temporarily to babysit the AI and fix all the AI generated crap. Then realize it was cheaper to actually just have the devs make code. Then hire them back at a reduced rate on a more permanent basis with the understanding that they believe the code will still be partially generated by AI and cleaned up by the same people and they aren't paying top tier for third hand AI slop.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Spend their days (and some nights) tweaking and refining AI prompts to get the stupid thing to generate the software that the dumbass product manager wants and the user does not.
You know....
Pretty much the same thing they do now.
Why would devs be displaced by an interactive search engine?
Well if it can replace senior software engineers... Wouldn't it also be able to do almost all of the other jobs? Or are you referring to some specific future where AI advances massively, but robotics does not and handymen are still safe?
I'd say if all humans are unemployed, society would change massively. We can't really tell how that'd work. But if machines / AI do all jobs, get food on the table... I don't really know what other people would be doing. I think I'd relax and pursue a few hobbies and interests. Or it'd be some dystopia where humankind is oppressed by the machines and I'd fight for the resistance.
But regardless... In a world like that, money wouldn't work the way it does now. Neither would salaries for labor mean anything.
I was going to learn how to give a really good handjob but the AI robots will probably take over that too.
view more: next ›