To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR.
I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded.
It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure.
Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and extract more common patterns.
And once you reach the limit of the context window you're essentially suck, as the LLM can no longer keep track of its patches.
English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do, and more importantly, a lot of time and experience precedes code that a senior developer writes.
If you want to have this senior developer 'vibe' code, then you'll need to have a way to be more precise in your prompts, and be able to articulate all learnings from your past mistakes and experience.
And that is incredibly heavy. Remember, this is opposite from answering 'why did you write it like this'. This is an endless list of items that say 'don't do this, but this, in this highly specific context'.
Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern.
The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinking about long term architecture and craftsmanship. It’s a laziness enhancer.
I have the same observation. I've been able to improve things I just didn't have the energy to do for a while. But if you're gonna be lazy, it will multiply the bad.
The same thing as always: either a strong tech voice convinces them to invest the required time or corners are cut and we all cry later. But I don’t see how that is made better or worse by AI.
well, in all honesty, a lot of code that actually works in production, and delivers... goods, services, etc. is an over patched mess of code snippets. that sad part is that cpus are so powerful that it works.
You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs
The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly.
So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you.
Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to launder it.
Google had too much class (and comfortable market position) to launch the sleazy "AI" gold rush.
But plenty of upstarts currently see an irresistible opportunity to get rich, by leveraging automated mass copyright violation, while handwaving "AI".
I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".
I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code.
But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor).
For one reason, code is important, and valuable...
There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc.
A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working.
There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow.
Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI".
We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution.
In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important.
I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.
If that is the case, isn't the future more private code? The producers realize that public release is no longer in their favor and will keep it in their groups (until they leak or whatever)?
Google had too much class? They've been scraping sites content for years before all this LLM stuff - using it to answer questions directly in search results and sending no clicks
Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers?
What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely enough to keep the narrative alive.
I wonder about codebase maintainability over time.
I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality.
So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.
A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so.
AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools.
I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.
When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements.
Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.
I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
> I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
indeed. people generally hate foreign/alien code, or rather - love their style too much. it is not hard to recognize this pattern - ive seen it with colleagues, with my students, with some topnotch 10x-coders back in the day. so proofing is a skill one perhaps develops by teaching others do things right, but is not something most people entertain about.
on the other hand, people who lack time and patience to implement complex stuff may benefit from this process. particularly if they are good code-readers, and some seasoned devs become such people. i can see little chance they wont be using llms to spit code out.
but the two groups largely don't overlap and are different as astronomers and astronauts.
For me it dependa on scale. Asking AI for something small and specific is a joy. Asking it to make a big change is a nightmare I so far only try every time a new model comes out.
Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department.
Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job.
And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.
Of course it is true. The thing was 90% of Amazon engineers made far more money at their job while essentially doing typical enterprise software work. This money led them believe it is some creative work. And now those task management and time monitoring tools are catching up to Amazon IT workers so they are realizing it is similar to another low end IT job/ factory work.
Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.
For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.
Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.
This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that scales tremendously, in exchange for a comfortable upper middle-to-lower upper class life.
The means of production for a software engineer is a laptop. Many SEs own them. There are no raw materials or factories needed to produce software, at least not in the sense of traditional production.
You could say the same thing of hands. What really distinguishes capital from labor is not what counts as a tool, but market power. A large number of non-unionized workers are inherently at a disadvantage against a small number of employers with exorbitantly costly infra.
The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.)
American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.
This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.
Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of:
A) a worker at Walmart
B) Mark Zuckerberg?
> Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class.
That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound.
Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.
Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here.
When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.
If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.
Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
Caring is part of it. Having good measures is another. Older measures that worked might need updating to reflect the new, higher spaghetti risk. I expect Amazon to figure it out but I don't see why they necessarily already would have.
Management has different layers with different goals.
A middle manager and a director certainly care a lot about accomplishing short term goals and are ok with tech debt to meet the goals.
No. The actual competency of AI won't matter. Lots of corporate executives will prioritize short-term cost savings, with little concern for the degradation for essential systems. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining the systems that users and society rely on. That's part of the reason why the current hype is blown way out of proportion by these people. Because who has faced consequences for behaving this way?
> “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
> This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
> They also use A.I. to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding.
I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs.
Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly boring now. I'd rather do just about anything than write another iteration of a web form or connect some javascript widget to some other javascript widget in the framework flavor of the week. To some extent, then, working with LLMs has restored some of the fun of coding because it takes care of the tedious part, and I get to solve the interesting problems.
I'm with you. I love solving puzzles to make something go. In the past that involved writing code, but it's not the code writing that I love, it's the problem solving and building. And I get plenty of that now, in a post-LLM world.
Part of the fun is also figuring out the “best” way to achieve a thing. LLMs don’t often propose the best way and will happily propose convoluted ways. Clean approaches are still hard to come up with, but LLMs certainly help implementing them once thought up
I think for me, the fun comes from preventing bugs; being able to draw on my experience to foresee common classes of bugs, and being able to prevent them through smart code architecture, making it easier for future contributors/readers to avoid walking into those traps. I'm hoping I'll keep being able to do that.
I spend all day fixing bugs and that's why they pay me -- because for most people it's not an enjoyable task. I'm not denying your experience but I will tell you I think you're an outlier. For most people, fixing bugs they didn't create is the worst part of the job.
With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing. I am sure there will always be devs who are doing interesting work but I feel these opportunities will be less and less.
In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,
I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular.
But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff.
At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.
Ex-cobol guy here, the work was a blast! I was working on the Lawson erp for a non-profit, mostly customizing the software for their specific use case. I loved it because the tools were crazy, the language limited, and the system itself was high value to the org. Debugging took forever but the fixes were often really small changes. I often had to go into the database (oracle) and clean up the data by hand. Such fun!
I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!
Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead.
The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.)
The second is that AI is just about good enough and things muddle along in a not-great-not-terrible way. Dev status and salaries drop slowly, profits increase, reliability and quality are both down, but not enough to cause serious problems.
The third is that the shitpile singularity is avoided because AI gets much better at coding much more quickly, and rapidly becomes smarter than human devs. It gets good enough to create smart specs with a better-than-human understanding of edge cases, strategy, etc, and also good enough to implement clean code from those specs.
If this happens development as we know it would end, because the concept of a codebase would become obsolete. The entire Internet would become dynamic and adaptive, with code being generated in real time as requirements and condition evolve.
I'm sure this will happen eventually, but current LLMs are hilariously short of it.
So for now there's a gap between what CEOs believe is happening - option 3. And what is really happening - option 1.
I think a shitpile singularity is quite likely within a couple of years. But if there's any sane management left it may just about be possible to steer into option 2.
Another game is to distribute the gains from increased productivity more equally. E.g. in Europe as late as early 2000s working hours were reduced in response to technological development. But since then the response even from workers seems to be to demand increasingly shittier bullshit jobs to keep people busy.
> But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer
Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you.
But, you know, you can always hustle against your fellow SEs, and try to appease your masters. Where others work the bare minimum of 8 hours, why not work 12, and also on the weekend? It's also fine.
Generating shareholder value is very important for the well-being of society! /s
By all means “organize together to place demands on your employers”. I didn’t say don’t do that. But there are 24 hours in a day — maybe strive to be good at your job AND organize instead of doing just one or the other?
I'd argue we'll be better at our jobs if we took pride in our craft and were treated with dignity and respect rather than like replaceable cogs in a machine that have to compete with one another to stay "competitive".
Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was)
Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.
If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
I think there is a fundamental misconception of the benefit / performance-improvement of LLM-aided programming:
Without sacrificing code quality, it only makes coding more productive _if you already know_ what you're doing.
This means that while it has a big potential for experienced programmers (making them push out more good code), you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good software.
I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do think they're a bit slow, but I'm not looking for fast.
...wait till you find out how much my one friend spends on golf a year!!!!! Hobbies are expensive. This will take about 3 maybe 4 months, and I think i'll enjoy playing it with and so will all my friends and family, so it's worth it I think.
It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job.
AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.
> It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job.
Exactly, but I would go further, anyone who worked in big corps know that other non 'generating new code' part is usually pretty inefficient and I would argue AI is going to change that too. So there will be much less of that abstract yapping in endless meetings or there will be less people involved in that.
Yes, because from my observations these are the people who cannot write anymore code today - they really don't understand the newer paradigms or technologies. So Copilot enabled a lot of people to write POCs and ship them to production fast, without thinking too much about edge cases, HA, etc.
And these people have become advocates in their respective companies, so that everyone is actually following inaccurate claims about productivity improvements. These are the same people quoting Google's ceo who say that 30% of newly generated code at Google is written by AI, without possibility to deny or validate it. Just blindly quote a company that has a huge conflict of interests in this field and you'll look smarter than you are.
This is where we're at today. I understand these are great tools, but all I am seeing madness around. And who works with these tools on a daily basis knows it. Knows what it means, how they can be misleading, etc.
Agreed. I spend maybe 20% of my time writing code. The rest is gathering requirements, design, testing, scheduling. Maybe if that 20% now takes half as long, I might have time to actually write some tests and documentation
I'm wondering whether most other white collar jobs will turn like this as well. I see lots of articles that have been at least partially written by AI - so there goes most of your average journalist's job. Then there's stuff like marketing and communications, where your output is mostly text and media. Again, something AI can mostly handle based on initial requirements.
Personally I find babysitting AI quite boring. It's easy to just stop caring about the quality of the output when one just is wage slaving it, and the process itself is no longer satisfying.
Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
I keep meaning to experiment with vibe-coded VSTs. The shell and UI parts should be easy to automate, because they're basically boilerplate. But I doubt AI knows enough about DSP to design an incredible new reverb algorithm, or is an expert on bandwidth-limited oscillator design.
Or maybe it is? When I have some time, I'll find out.
I'm sure it could replicate any existing algorithm or riff on combinations, but a good plugin is made carefully by hand by an artisan who knows what they are looking to achieve, who knows what to listen for. I'm skeptical that a pure AI algorithm would be anything but plagiarism on existing designs.
> won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
No why would there be? Unless you are spiritual, there isn't any reason any of the physical processes that make up human thought can't be done artificially, probably much more efficiently. Society needs to confront the myth that automation is going to always open up more jobs that need human labor. It's comforting for people who hate the idea of UBI or other safety nets that people can keep "retraining". Eventually there's going to be nothing to retrain to (at least of nothing of economic value)
>This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
This feels like we are forcing people who rather look at code to start talking in plain language, which not every dev likes or is proficient in.
Devs won’t be replaced by AI. Devs will be replaced by people that can (and want to) speak to LLMs.
Fast, good, cheap; pick two. It's the single immutable law in software development and the one thing management has been trying to circumvent for decades. This is just their latest incantation.
I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term
What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced.
Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.
As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".
CS degree programs have never been about learning to code. They are learning about computers, data structures, machine structures, algorithms. The code was always done on your own time at least that's how my school did it. I never had a class in "Java" or "Python" or "C" or any other languge, that was always incidental to the particular course. I could have used ChatGPT (had it existed) or hired a friend to write the code but that wouldn't help me on the exams (written on paper, at that time). Dev bootcamps? Yeah they should probably be leaning hard into AI as that's just what junior devs are going to be asked to do from here on out.
You raise a good point. Ba k in the early 90s when i started with programming, my source of knowledge were magazines with code, a "programming with C/C++" book, and a lot of time.
Then the internet came, and it felt like 'cheating'.
Then forums came and it felt like cheating, Then SO, and so on and so forth.
Now AI is eating the [software] world, and to a lot of people, it feels like cheating. I am just amazed of what i can build.
In 10-15 years software will become a commodity, along with books/stories and maybe even music/art. I don't know how it looks like. But darn im excited to be here to experience it.
Sure, AI makes writing code easy, but code review remains a bottleneck. The individual coders are finding ways to use AI to improve their workflows, but as long as organizational culture remains stuck in the old ways of reviewing code, the overall throughput will not improve significantly. That's been my personal experience at Amazon. I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long. You need to have high degrees of trust within a team for this to work at scale, and that's very rarely the case in my group.
You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.)
The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that's written code knows that writing code is a lot more fun than reading code, but for some reason we're delegating to the AI the actual enjoyable task and turning ourselves into glorified code reviewers. Except we don't actually review the code, it seems, we just go on with bug ridden monstrosities.
I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code. I don't want my job to be reviewing LLM slop to find hallucinations and security vulnerabilities, only to try to tweak the 20,000 word salad prompt.
I think the key to understanding why people want this is that those people care about results more than the act of coding. The easy example for this is a corporation. If the software does what was said on the product pitch, it doesn’t matter if the developer had fun writing it. All that matters is that it was done in an efficient enough (either by money or time) manner.
A slightly less bleak example is data analysis. When I am analyzing some dataset for work or home, being able to skip over the “rote” parts of the work is invaluable. Examples off the top of my head being: when the data isn’t in quite the right structure, or I want to add a new element to a plot that’s not trivial. It still has to be done with discipline and in a way that you can be confident in the results. I’ll generally lock down each code generation to only doing small subproblems with clearly defined boundaries. That generally helps reduce hallucinations, makes it easier to write tests if applicable and makes it easier to audit the code myself.
All of that said, I want to make clear that I agree that your vision of software engineering Becoming LLM code review hell sounds like… well, hell. I’m in no way advocating that the software engineering industry should become that. Just wanted to throw in my two cents
> (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.)
I am not a professional programmer, and I tend to bounce between lots of different languages depending on the problem I'm trying to solve.
If I had all of the syntax for a given language memorized, I can imagine how an LLM might not save me that much time. (It would still be helpful for e.g. tracking down bugs, because I can describe a problem and e.g. ask the AI to take a first pass through the codebase and give me an idea of where to look.)
However, I don't have the syntax memorized! Give me some Python code and I can probably read it, but ask me to write some code from scratch, and LLMs I would have needed to dive into the language documentation or search Stack Overflow. LLMs, and Claude Code in particular, have probably 10x'd what I am capable of, because I can describe the function I want and have the machine figure out the minutia of syntax. Afterwards, I can read what the produced and either (A) ask it to change something specific or (B) edit the code by hand.
I also do find writing code to be less enjoyable than reading/editing code, for the reason described above.
No one have the language syntax memorized, unless you're working with the language daily. Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot (checkout the formal grammar for any programming language). For any C like language, they overlap a lot, the difference are mostly in syntax minutia (which we can refresh in an afternoon with a reference) and the higher abstractions (which you learn once, like OOP, pattern matching).
Generally you spend 80% of the time wrangling abstractions, especially in mature project. The coding part is often a quick mental break where you just doing translation. Checking the syntax is often a quick action that no one mind.
> Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot
That's kind of what I mean by "syntax". For example, "how do I find a value that matches X in this specific type of data structure?" AI is very good at this and it's a huge time saver for me. But I can imagine how it might be less helpful if I did this full time.
I mean, I'm not a mathematician but I don't expect that I should be able to write a proof.
You talk of memorizing syntax like its a challenge but excluding a small number of advanced languages no programmer thinks syntax is hard. But if you don't understand the basics how can you expect to be able to understand if the solution an LLM presents is decent and not rife with bugs (security and otherwise)
I guess my issue is people are confusing a shortcut with actually being able to do the thing. If you can't remember syntax I don't really want your code anywhere I care about
> I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code.
IME there's an inverse relationship between how excited the person is about AI coding and their seniority as an engineer.
Juniors (and non-coders) love it because now they can suddenly do things they didn't know how to do before.
Seniors don't love it because it gets in their way, causes coworkers to put up low-quality AI-generated code for peer review, and struggles with any level of complexity or nuance.
My fear is that AI code assistants will inadvertently stop people from progressing from Junior --> Senior since it's easier to put out work without really understanding what you're doing. Although I guess I could have said the same thing about Stack Overflow 10 years ago.
I know I'm making an improvement by features I've shipped to customers. Bugs prevent me from shipping more features until they're fixed. I do not enjoy bugs.
How is the impact of this assessed? How is system quality / performance changed? Is there an increase in high severity defects as more code gets pushed out more quickly?
I'm seeing the speed up and it's forcing out people with disabilities who are able to do the work at the previous slower speeds. I wonder if there are any solutions to this or if people like me are just expected to be walmart greeters.
I feel my job in the future will be more secure than ever. Tons and tons of AI generated garbage code (trained on more and more existing garbage code) that the „developer“ will at a certain point no longer be able to maintain or fix. Not even speaking about trusting the output. Feels similar to all the outsourced development to cheap suppliers that inevitably collapse or create horrible maintenance overhead.
Do you feel you would be able to “maintain and fix” LLM-generated 100-megabyte source code blobs? And if you could, do you think it would be a job you’d want to do?
Not so crappy if the pain is big enough for the customer. Once a certain threshold is reached they are often very open to changes and giving freedom to develop a proper solution.
This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees well.
(That said I'm all for more dystopian stories so we can get past this AI-replacing-coders fad)
Amazon pays really well. Amazon also has a number of interesting projects (e.g. a number of contributors to the rust compiler are employed by Amazon to work on rustc.) It also looks nice enough on a resume to give people a nice stepping stone towards even better opportunities.
I really like a lot about Amazon. Friendly and creative people, good projects with high ambiguity and autonomy. The bad parts are the penny-pinching, careless and unaccountable senior leaders who just wants to exploit everyone and everything. But really, aside from things like RTO, they aren’t too impactful on the day to day.
Feels like this could be part of a broader shift towards dis-empowering knowledge workers.
The cog in machine effect has always been there in the corporate world, but somehow it feels like the technique has been refined in the last couple of years.
20 years ago, when I first started working, Wipro and HCL Tech had been talking about making the outsourcing model into "factory-like assembly lines." This fizzled out very quickly back then, but I guess it is now coming to fruition :-|
Amazon is going down. 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now they are violating EU laws and cheat the gmp developers out of a CPU replacement:
> 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now
... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)
At least for stuff like electronics, random plastic household items etc EU Amazon isn't particularly cheap. Branded stuff costs about the same in many smaller stores, and random Chinese no-name brands can be bought from Aliexpress cheaper.
They aren’t cheaper anymore. The “real” branded stuff is usually more expensive on amazon than straight from the manufacturers website. The “cheap” fake aliexpress stuff is just that charged at a premium. You can find the same exact product images even on the same products on ebay from probably the same merchants listing on both marketplaces.
It has changed dramatically over the past 5 or so years into this.
From the business side of the house, I only ever look at it as what can do the right job for the right money to very quickly deliver continuous value to customers. In an employee base: Experience around is always good for growing and improving my people, but it isn't necessarily tied directly to the work to be done. The shift I feel is happening is how I place the value here. Where I can imagine I would land if I was actively running a startup right now is making sure I have amazing production teams (whatever that looks like, age, location, LLM powered or otherwise) book ended by great people growers as all cogs start to squeak if they're not oiled, and experience is the best lubricant on teams, you need both.
> Companies seem to be persuaded that, like assembly lines of old, A.I. can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent.
> The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines.
There are two issues this article brings to mind:
1. Feels like we are back when lines of code was a measure of productivity.
2. We’ve heard this tune before, and the problem we have now is that you don’t understand what you didn’t write. Software development is in large part about understanding the system from the highest level to its smallest details, and this takes away a key part of how our world works, in favor of a “cattle not pets” view of code.
Now, if you don’t expect your programmers to have an understanding of the system they built, and you treat code as disposable, then you’ll center around a world where folks aren’t trained to learn a system, and I don’t see that as a world that is compatible with increased reliance on A.I.
What even are most programmers at Amazon doing? It seems like all the interesting bits (the MVP of Amazon's major products) was developed long ago. All the low-hanging fruit is gone so the task is now focused on squeezing the few remaining drops of efficiency out of the stone.
That’s most major tech companies at this point. The fun was building closer to the mvp of the core product. Once that’s done, it’s just corporate druggery with computers.
Until you join a FAANG you simply cannot imagine the complexity of the systems and how much has not been automated and how much there is to build.
I've been in Amazon for close to a decade, and I constantly think "I can't believe X hasn't been automated in the 30 years that Amazon has existed and is still done on Excel".
Most engineers will work on new features for at least half of the year, and I personally work on brand new projects or at least features constantly.
Why would any company want to pay a software engineer to do repetitive / factory like work? It would be better to automate that and not have any engineers from the company's perspective.
The Amazon site search and at least some product pages seem to be down right now, although I'm hesitant to say that because I don't remember Amazon ever breaking.
I'm getting 503s ("Sorry! Something went wrong on our end") on searches and "We're sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again" on product pages.
“OK Andrew, we’re looking for someone for this senior developer and they’ve got to be really really great at copying and pasting between Claude and an IDE.
Now we’re going to set up a whiteboard test here and you can demonstrate to us your best copying and pasting.”
“errrr, do I do any actual coding in the job?”
“Well, yes, inasmuch as anyone does these days. It’s mostly copying and pasting though, but hey that’s what coding IS now, right?”
“OK are you ready for your coding test, here it is: what key is COPY? And what key is PASTE?”
But for about ten years, at least, the majority of Google swe rules have been talked about as "just moving protobufs", which is effectively the same. If your job is just plumbing other people's designs for existing products, how fun can it be?
It's a running joke internally. But not always far from the truth. Translating business level protobufs into solution level protobufs is indeed the job of entire teams sometimes.
> One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
I am sick of these verbose articles that boil down to nothing basically. What the f does it mean to "produce code"? Like are we just churning out LoCs daily just for the sake of doing so?
About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say.
I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity and autonomy. Coding was always solving problems, and never felt like some sort of assembly line. But in a lot of companies, this is how it was constructed, with PMs setting up sprints and points, etc.
Similarly, I spoke to a doctor about how much they loved being able to work remotely at their role - with 2-3 days a week where they just responded to email and saw patients over telehealth. It felt very "ticket" focused and not at all the high status doctor role I imagined.
I suspect that both those roles will be lost to AI. If your role is taking a ticket that says "the box should be green, not red", and nothing more, that's the sort of thing that AI is very capable of.
> They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day.
Based on my experience with sprint teams, breaking things down into just a couple hours of work per ticket implies that someone else is doing an enormous amount of prep work to create a dozen tickets per feature. I agree that your friend is performing the work of a development system. I've heard this called "programming in Developer" as opposed to whatever language the developer is using.
I've had plenty of colleagues who expect the job to be that. Just working on a small ticket and moving it to "to test" when done.
It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.
This article features a study claiming 25% productivity gains form co-pilot. I wonder what a similar study would say about developers with and without access to internet search. In the study, it seems, as I expected, less experienced people found more value from it. My experience has been AI tools are more helpful when I don't know the domain, and then their benefit declines as I familiarize.
I also looked at the study and noticed a few aspects that were surprising:
(a) some of the 95% CIs crossed zero, meaning no benefit is a possible interpretation in figures 6 and 7
(b) did anyone account for what happens when two workers are in different experimental groups and sit next to each other? I imagine it was likely common people in the experimental group to use co-pilot queries for their friends.
(c) for experienced workers, the mean value is actually negative (lol) in the unweighted data in Figure 7
There are a lot of other subtleties in the interpretation of this paper.
"...developers who were less productive before the
experiment are significantly more likely to accept any given suggestion...."
I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.
Software development is the most automated career in the history of all time.
Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development.
LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used. The same applies to other forms of automation too - but LLMs are really hyped up right now. Probably it will go through the normal hype cycle where there'll be a crash, and then a plateau where LLMs are used to drive productivity but expectations of their capability are more aligned to reality.
In french the two fields that are Computer Science and Information Technology are under the same moniker: "informatique", a portmanteau of information and automatic.
The whole field is about automating yourself out of a job, and it's right in the name.
> Il faut attendre 1962 pour réentendre parler d’informatique dans les médias. « Informatique » est en effet le terme utilisé pour la première fois par un scientifique français pour désigner le traitement automatique des données. Il s’agit de Philippe Dreyfus, fondateur de la société SIA, acronyme pour « Société d’Informatique Appliquée ».
And then enters the dictionary in 1966.
In 1957 in Germany, Karl Steinbuch describes Informatik as Automatische Informationsverarbeitung.
Gloating about hardships was and is a great way to ensure things will get worse for workers as efficiency and automation increases.
Another option would be to join forces to collectively demand more equitable distribution of the fruits of technological development. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular.
Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it.
Certainly back when I worked in IT, the people I worked with were mostly very much anti-union. I didn't hear much anti immigrant talk back then but I've been retired for a while.
I don't really believe in unions either. But I do believe in a good balance between capitalism and socialism (and welfare systems, employee rights etc). I don't believe in the market solving everything.
The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we wouldn't have to fight for our rights because we'd already have them anyway.
I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights. I find it a bit 'off' that each class of labour has to fight for their own rights separately. That shouldn't be needed (and really isn't, where I live). It also causes a lot of uproar, see France for example where a strike is just tuesday. Employee rights are strong, but the public is heavily impacted all the time. Better to just handle this on the government side. This is why I was a member of the socialist party but not of the union in my workplace (I'm no longer a member because I moved countries and can't vote where I live).
Note: I'm not living in the US obviously :)
I do say a balance because of course we're not living in a communist state. So even with a socialist government there is still capitalism. Just not unrestrictedly so as it is in the US.
I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave). All our basic rights are already sorted. We can't work too many hours, we have unlimited sick leave (though of course validated by a doctor for long absences), we're entitled to a lot of money when fired etc. But this is all national law level stuff. Not industry level.
> I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights.
Having strong and independent unions is how you keep a good socialist government. Almost anytime you hear “With a good government, you don’t need <whatever>”, you are hearing a recipe for guaranteeing that good government is an exceptional, transitory state. If your society isn't prepared for bad government, it will have one sooner than you’d like, and it will be difficult to dislodge it.
This comment reeks of liberalism and illustrates why liberalism doesn’t work.
You claim you’re trying to balance individualism and collectivism but don’t actually support things that make collectivism work so you end up de facto supporting individualism.
Its a way to support individualism while allowing people to feel extra good about themselves for supporting collectivist ideas, on paper.
I'm very socialist, and anti-liberal (at least, in the economic sense of liberalism).
But where I live we just have strong labour rights from the government so individual unions fighting for each type of labour's rights are not needed as much. Sometimes they are, when there are specific risks like chemicals that they work with. But for overall "not get taken advantage of" stuff, it's just not needed so much.
I’m glad the people in your country allow good things to happen. That’s definitely not the case in all countries and you need collective power to get nice things for workers.
Savoring suffering is uniquely hideous, and one of the grand hallmarks of almost every facet of the decline of the US. It's a clear, bright sign of the death of one's humanity, and the foundation of all evil.
Is that dramatic? No.
More specifically: Things can be inevitable and also horrible. It is not some kind of cognitive dissonance to care about people losing their livelihoods and also agree that it had to happen. We can structure society to help people, but instead we hate the imaginary stereotypes we've generalized every conceivable grouping of real people into, politics being the most obvious example, but we do it with everything, as you have.
The electrician doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by electricity. The engineer doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by engineering. A person isn't an asshole who deserves his family to suffer because he committed his life to learning to write application servers, or whatever.
If in the process of automating away people's livelihoods, you do not simultaneously advocate for the destruction of the capitalist system that ties the well-being of people and their families intrinsically to those jobs, then you do in fact deserve what's coming to you. History shows that retribution against class traitors is not limited to financial hardship, either.
I have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less.
It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.
The goal of all American business is exactly the same: maximize the return of profits to the shareholders at large. It is in fact, the law. Do more with less is a natural consequence of this.
The problem I see is less that of losing jobs, but the fact that the jobs get less enjoyable, less deep work, more mindlessness and less reflection, and possibly also the quality of the produced software decreasing.
Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for detailed specification — which creates a conflict that didn’t previously exist in software technology.
To be fair, all of corporate has grated against deep work and well written software way before the dawn of LLMs. Tech debt is one of the things that modern software engineering produces in spades.
I may be wrong, but I think every job creates wealth overall (or it would not exist), and that software engineering has been making some jobs more efficient and others not necessary, and then the wealth which formerly had to be employed where those jobs were inefficient, or had to exist at all, is then employed elsewhere.
If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside.
Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
When an economy is growing, there is in general demand for workers, and so pay and conditions are encouraged; when an economy is shrinking, there is less demand than supply, and pay and conditions are discouraged.
> Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.
Ok, but so is everyone involved with building the fulfillment centre, the sorting machines, the roads for delivery, the trucks, the railways...
If it sounds like I'm including a lot of jobs, it's because every non-service job in the history of the post-industrial revolution economy has revolved around making things more efficient. Software development is not some uniquely evil domain.
Same goes for a truck driver, road builder, railway worker, etc.
FWIW, I spent many years as a cashier. It's not something I find inherently more valuable to the world. If we could trust people not to steal, we wouldn't need them.
Nothing in my comment was a personal attack, only a reflection of GP's own behaviour. Go ahead and ban the account if calling out these comments as written is unwelcome. But beware the behaviour you welcome by leading it unchallenged.
I don't want to ban you! I hope to persuade you to stop using personally pejorative language in your HN comments, which you've unfortunately been doing a lot of.
If you don't like the phrase "personal attack" we can call it something else, but the point is you can't treat other commenters this way on HN, regardless of how wrong anyone is or you feel they are.
Hmm on the other hand, there isn't much resistance against genAI in software development (unlike other creative industries) because ours is founded in collaboration and continuing others' work. It's where open source came from, and the use of libraries. Using stackoverflow was never frowned on. AI is just the same but more efficient. Nobody invents the wheel from scratch.
It will change the job yes but it also can mean the job can go in new directions because we can do more with less.
There isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete.
This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
These things are waves. First they will fire a bunch of people, but no company can grow through constant downsizing. Then they'll start to imagine to do new things they can do with the new skills and invest in that.
It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now.
And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people.
But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped)
I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much.
In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.
This is the message between the lines of much of the anti-dev schadenfreude, but actually spelling it out makes it obvious: it's not true.
Only a minority of dev jobs are automating people out of work. There are entirely new industries like game dev that can't exist without it.
Software development has gained such a political whipping-boy status, you'd be forgiven for forgetting it's been the route to the middle classes for a lot of people who would otherwise be too common, weird or foreign.
I think a lot of genAI coding efficiency will have the same property: costs will go down to the point where things that couldn’t be done affordably in software in 2020 will be affordable in 2030. That could well result in a net increase in tech employment.
Agreed, although it's slightly beside the point. The goal of building tools and robots has always been to alleviate work. And this is fine. There's still plenty of stuff to do if machines work for us to give us basic housing and food.
Now what needs to be done is to give back the profits to everyone, inclusively, as a kind of "universal basic income", so that we all enjoy it together, and not just the billionaires
Well if the majority of developers are mostly using web-based technologies such as JS, TS, HTML and CSS, and all you're doing is modifying the site and shuffling around elements + a11y addition, etc that is something an AI can do in seconds.
Seems indeed to be like Warehouse work, which is why Web developers will be the first to be affected by AI.
Doesn't matter if you are "senior" or "staff" in Web development. AI is already senior staff level in that.
Ruby/Dawson in SLU even looks like a warehouse on the inside, complete with chain link fence decor, exposed concrete floors with a splash of paint, exposed ceiling infrastructure, and spartan decorations. And it was built over a decade ago.
Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?
I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.
Joke's on us; this is going to rapidly drain what little creativity there is in places like Amazon as they rely increasingly more on a tool that at best intelligently regurgitates what it learned/gleaned/stole from the internet. As the AI models are further trained on their own slop, the signal to noise ratio will only get worse; this has already been noted in studies.
> Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?
Yes. We don't need to pay $$$ for simply changing elements on a page or adopting the next web framework to replace another. The hype in many web technologies that lots of developers that have fell for also contributed to the low quality of the software that you use right now.
All of this work to pay developers to over-engineer inefficient solutions and to give a false sense of meaningful work contributed to the "psyop" of how highly inflated their salaries were to do their jobs in the ZIRP era.
And AI has shown which developer jobs it is really good at, and it is consistently good at web developer roles.
So I'd expect those roles to be significantly less valuable.
I'm a software engineer at Amazon and I'm directly and indirectly involved a lot in programs related to GenAI tooling.
I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere, and everyone is free to completely ignore them.
That said, is there an increase in expectations? Yes. But that's just normal Amazon in an employer's market, and has nothing to do with LLMs and GenAI.
The comparison to Microsoft where we can witness in public the .Net maintainers fighting with the shit code generated by Copilot on their repos is ridiculous. Amazon is probably one of the companies pushing the least and being the most prudent about GenAI adoption.
If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening.
Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many teams are being told they must use AI every single day (some VPs have sent out org-wide emails saying that AI must be used), and engineers have to tell their managers how they are making use of it day-to-day. In my org, OP1 docs must include at least one section about how the team will increase use of AI. Hackathons aren’t allowed to happen anymore unless they are AI-themed. I could keep going. Amazon is absolutely forcing AI usage, and the article undersells how egregious it is.
Your comment stated “nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools”, which is entirely false - I’m looking at an email in my inbox from my VP right now saying everyone must use AI every day.
You said “None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere” - this is also false. I’m looking at an installed by default (and uninstallable) AI browser addon on my work laptop right now.
It’s not hearsay, you’re either commenting in bad faith or you’re just clueless about what’s going on at your own company.
https://archive.ph/HVZRL
To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR.
I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded.
It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure.
Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and extract more common patterns.
And once you reach the limit of the context window you're essentially suck, as the LLM can no longer keep track of its patches.
English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do, and more importantly, a lot of time and experience precedes code that a senior developer writes.
If you want to have this senior developer 'vibe' code, then you'll need to have a way to be more precise in your prompts, and be able to articulate all learnings from your past mistakes and experience.
And that is incredibly heavy. Remember, this is opposite from answering 'why did you write it like this'. This is an endless list of items that say 'don't do this, but this, in this highly specific context'.
I feel you and would personally pay a bit more for LLMs trained on 'senior code'.
Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern.
The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinking about long term architecture and craftsmanship. It’s a laziness enhancer.
And once AI is not there anymore, you're back on square one.
It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation.
It's the wrong tool for the job, that's what it is.
I have the same observation. I've been able to improve things I just didn't have the energy to do for a while. But if you're gonna be lazy, it will multiply the bad.
100% this. I did this many times too. Often I wouldn’t bother with cleanup or refactor before, but now it’s way easier, faster and cheaper to do it.
And it’s better in the long run.
What do you think is going to happen when management is pushing on deadlines?
The same thing as always: either a strong tech voice convinces them to invest the required time or corners are cut and we all cry later. But I don’t see how that is made better or worse by AI.
You're more likely to meet the deadline and refactoring it later is easier, obviously depending on various factors...
well, in all honesty, a lot of code that actually works in production, and delivers... goods, services, etc. is an over patched mess of code snippets. that sad part is that cpus are so powerful that it works.
Yeah, this isn't new, but it certainly seems worse now
You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs
The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly.
So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you.
Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to launder it.
Google had too much class (and comfortable market position) to launch the sleazy "AI" gold rush.
But plenty of upstarts currently see an irresistible opportunity to get rich, by leveraging automated mass copyright violation, while handwaving "AI".
I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".
I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code.
But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor).
For one reason, code is important, and valuable...
There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc.
A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working.
There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow.
Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI".
We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution.
In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important.
I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.
Yep.
ChatGPT was hugely irresponsible in many ways and rests solely on the shoulders of Sam Altman, someone allegedly implicated in various schemes.
If that is the case, isn't the future more private code? The producers realize that public release is no longer in their favor and will keep it in their groups (until they leak or whatever)?
Google had too much class? They've been scraping sites content for years before all this LLM stuff - using it to answer questions directly in search results and sending no clicks
No, I think Google was just slow this time
Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely enough to keep the narrative alive.
I wonder about codebase maintainability over time.
I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality.
So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.
I’m concerned that it might not be easy to vibecode a security fix for a complex codebase, especially when the flaw was introduced by vibecoding.
A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.
When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements.
Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.
I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
> I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
indeed. people generally hate foreign/alien code, or rather - love their style too much. it is not hard to recognize this pattern - ive seen it with colleagues, with my students, with some topnotch 10x-coders back in the day. so proofing is a skill one perhaps develops by teaching others do things right, but is not something most people entertain about.
on the other hand, people who lack time and patience to implement complex stuff may benefit from this process. particularly if they are good code-readers, and some seasoned devs become such people. i can see little chance they wont be using llms to spit code out.
but the two groups largely don't overlap and are different as astronomers and astronauts.
I worry a bit about people who like writing code but don’t like reading and debugging it. There are enough “throw it over the wall” coders.
Yeah, AI will kill all mundane brick layering jobs.
The real software engineering role, with architecture, customer management, discovery phase, risk analysis and all the other kind of stuff, not yet.
I don't mind reading and debugging my own code, or any other code written with a plan by someone with a clue.
Reading and debugging slop code is not the same thing, not even close.
For me it dependa on scale. Asking AI for something small and specific is a joy. Asking it to make a big change is a nightmare I so far only try every time a new model comes out.
It has been a factory job for decades.
Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department.
Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job.
And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.
Of course it is true. The thing was 90% of Amazon engineers made far more money at their job while essentially doing typical enterprise software work. This money led them believe it is some creative work. And now those task management and time monitoring tools are catching up to Amazon IT workers so they are realizing it is similar to another low end IT job/ factory work.
What you're describing doesn't sound like something that requires a lot of foreign laborers.
It's been like this for decades.
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Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.
Yes and (adjacently):
Seeing Like a State by James Scott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
Explains a lot of the confusing stuff I've experienced, in that eureka sort of way.
For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
Why are you using the word "demoting"?
The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.
Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.
Working class is not defined by income level.
The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears.
That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.
This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that scales tremendously, in exchange for a comfortable upper middle-to-lower upper class life.
The means of production for a software engineer is a laptop. Many SEs own them. There are no raw materials or factories needed to produce software, at least not in the sense of traditional production.
You could say the same thing of hands. What really distinguishes capital from labor is not what counts as a tool, but market power. A large number of non-unionized workers are inherently at a disadvantage against a small number of employers with exorbitantly costly infra.
But for the software developer, the tool is also the factory.
The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.
The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
This also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"
That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.)
American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.
This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.
>Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century
I agree. What a disaster that was! Let's hope it will have much less impact on the 21th century.
Yeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people
Is the wealth of the average software developer ($122 000/y) in the US closer to the wealth of:
A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary
B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000
Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
- https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO...
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956....
Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of:
A) a worker at Walmart
B) Mark Zuckerberg?
> Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class.
That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.
Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
On the contrary, the definition of "working class" has basically included everyone of up (and potentially including) the petit bourgeois.
Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here.
When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.
If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.
Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
Caring is part of it. Having good measures is another. Older measures that worked might need updating to reflect the new, higher spaghetti risk. I expect Amazon to figure it out but I don't see why they necessarily already would have.
Management has different layers with different goals. A middle manager and a director certainly care a lot about accomplishing short term goals and are ok with tech debt to meet the goals.
So it does make sense?
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> shitty code monkeys
Please don't put others down like that on HN. It's mean and degrades the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I see it more as replacing shitty code monkeys because it leaves the hard parts behind.
But you of course with your superior skills are above that risk?
No. The actual competency of AI won't matter. Lots of corporate executives will prioritize short-term cost savings, with little concern for the degradation for essential systems. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining the systems that users and society rely on. That's part of the reason why the current hype is blown way out of proportion by these people. Because who has faced consequences for behaving this way?
Hey, it's not my fault that you didn't have the patience to learn coding without crutches.
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This is interesting:
> “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
> This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
> They also use A.I. to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding.
I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs.
Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly boring now. I'd rather do just about anything than write another iteration of a web form or connect some javascript widget to some other javascript widget in the framework flavor of the week. To some extent, then, working with LLMs has restored some of the fun of coding because it takes care of the tedious part, and I get to solve the interesting problems.
I'm with you. I love solving puzzles to make something go. In the past that involved writing code, but it's not the code writing that I love, it's the problem solving and building. And I get plenty of that now, in a post-LLM world.
Part of the fun is also figuring out the “best” way to achieve a thing. LLMs don’t often propose the best way and will happily propose convoluted ways. Clean approaches are still hard to come up with, but LLMs certainly help implementing them once thought up
I think for me, the fun comes from preventing bugs; being able to draw on my experience to foresee common classes of bugs, and being able to prevent them through smart code architecture, making it easier for future contributors/readers to avoid walking into those traps. I'm hoping I'll keep being able to do that.
I spend all day fixing bugs and that's why they pay me -- because for most people it's not an enjoyable task. I'm not denying your experience but I will tell you I think you're an outlier. For most people, fixing bugs they didn't create is the worst part of the job.
Fixing bugs in my own code is fine. In other's code its less fun.
Why?
That’s the wrong mentality. You and your team own all the code. A bugs peer is your bug too.
Bugs are awesome. I picked my current job at Google because it involved lots of bug fixing and crash investigation.
Code reviews are fun when you can trust the competence of the coder.
With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing. I am sure there will always be devs who are doing interesting work but I feel these opportunities will be less and less.
In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,
I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular.
But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff.
At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.
Another datapoint is working earlier eras sound bad to me: punchcards, assembly, COBOL, FORTRAN. Yes I suspect those people had a blast.
Ex-cobol guy here, the work was a blast! I was working on the Lawson erp for a non-profit, mostly customizing the software for their specific use case. I loved it because the tools were crazy, the language limited, and the system itself was high value to the org. Debugging took forever but the fixes were often really small changes. I often had to go into the database (oracle) and clean up the data by hand. Such fun!
I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!
Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead.
The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
This can only go three ways.
The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.)
The second is that AI is just about good enough and things muddle along in a not-great-not-terrible way. Dev status and salaries drop slowly, profits increase, reliability and quality are both down, but not enough to cause serious problems.
The third is that the shitpile singularity is avoided because AI gets much better at coding much more quickly, and rapidly becomes smarter than human devs. It gets good enough to create smart specs with a better-than-human understanding of edge cases, strategy, etc, and also good enough to implement clean code from those specs.
If this happens development as we know it would end, because the concept of a codebase would become obsolete. The entire Internet would become dynamic and adaptive, with code being generated in real time as requirements and condition evolve.
I'm sure this will happen eventually, but current LLMs are hilariously short of it.
So for now there's a gap between what CEOs believe is happening - option 3. And what is really happening - option 1.
I think a shitpile singularity is quite likely within a couple of years. But if there's any sane management left it may just about be possible to steer into option 2.
Another game is to distribute the gains from increased productivity more equally. E.g. in Europe as late as early 2000s working hours were reduced in response to technological development. But since then the response even from workers seems to be to demand increasingly shittier bullshit jobs to keep people busy.
> But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer
Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you.
- That's how you got the weekend: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phe...
- And that's how you got the 8-hour working week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement
- And that's how you got children off the factories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour
But, you know, you can always hustle against your fellow SEs, and try to appease your masters. Where others work the bare minimum of 8 hours, why not work 12, and also on the weekend? It's also fine.
Generating shareholder value is very important for the well-being of society! /s
By all means “organize together to place demands on your employers”. I didn’t say don’t do that. But there are 24 hours in a day — maybe strive to be good at your job AND organize instead of doing just one or the other?
I'd argue we'll be better at our jobs if we took pride in our craft and were treated with dignity and respect rather than like replaceable cogs in a machine that have to compete with one another to stay "competitive".
Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
“I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.” Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed?
> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was)
Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.
If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
With or without LLMs, the culture of Amazon would eventually lead to all of their positions feeling like warehouse work.
Source: I worked there.
I think there is a fundamental misconception of the benefit / performance-improvement of LLM-aided programming:
Without sacrificing code quality, it only makes coding more productive _if you already know_ what you're doing.
This means that while it has a big potential for experienced programmers (making them push out more good code), you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good software.
I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do think they're a bit slow, but I'm not looking for fast.
You're paying $1000 a month to build a web app for fun?
This seems like a crazy solution to a situation.
...wait till you find out how much my one friend spends on golf a year!!!!! Hobbies are expensive. This will take about 3 maybe 4 months, and I think i'll enjoy playing it with and so will all my friends and family, so it's worth it I think.
It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job.
AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.
> It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job.
Exactly, but I would go further, anyone who worked in big corps know that other non 'generating new code' part is usually pretty inefficient and I would argue AI is going to change that too. So there will be much less of that abstract yapping in endless meetings or there will be less people involved in that.
Yes, because from my observations these are the people who cannot write anymore code today - they really don't understand the newer paradigms or technologies. So Copilot enabled a lot of people to write POCs and ship them to production fast, without thinking too much about edge cases, HA, etc.
And these people have become advocates in their respective companies, so that everyone is actually following inaccurate claims about productivity improvements. These are the same people quoting Google's ceo who say that 30% of newly generated code at Google is written by AI, without possibility to deny or validate it. Just blindly quote a company that has a huge conflict of interests in this field and you'll look smarter than you are.
This is where we're at today. I understand these are great tools, but all I am seeing madness around. And who works with these tools on a daily basis knows it. Knows what it means, how they can be misleading, etc.
But hey, everyone says we must use them ...
Agreed. I spend maybe 20% of my time writing code. The rest is gathering requirements, design, testing, scheduling. Maybe if that 20% now takes half as long, I might have time to actually write some tests and documentation
I'm wondering whether most other white collar jobs will turn like this as well. I see lots of articles that have been at least partially written by AI - so there goes most of your average journalist's job. Then there's stuff like marketing and communications, where your output is mostly text and media. Again, something AI can mostly handle based on initial requirements.
Personally I find babysitting AI quite boring. It's easy to just stop caring about the quality of the output when one just is wage slaving it, and the process itself is no longer satisfying.
Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
I keep meaning to experiment with vibe-coded VSTs. The shell and UI parts should be easy to automate, because they're basically boilerplate. But I doubt AI knows enough about DSP to design an incredible new reverb algorithm, or is an expert on bandwidth-limited oscillator design.
Or maybe it is? When I have some time, I'll find out.
I'm sure it could replicate any existing algorithm or riff on combinations, but a good plugin is made carefully by hand by an artisan who knows what they are looking to achieve, who knows what to listen for. I'm skeptical that a pure AI algorithm would be anything but plagiarism on existing designs.
> won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
No why would there be? Unless you are spiritual, there isn't any reason any of the physical processes that make up human thought can't be done artificially, probably much more efficiently. Society needs to confront the myth that automation is going to always open up more jobs that need human labor. It's comforting for people who hate the idea of UBI or other safety nets that people can keep "retraining". Eventually there's going to be nothing to retrain to (at least of nothing of economic value)
>This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
This feels like we are forcing people who rather look at code to start talking in plain language, which not every dev likes or is proficient in.
Devs won’t be replaced by AI. Devs will be replaced by people that can (and want to) speak to LLMs.
Fast, good, cheap; pick two. It's the single immutable law in software development and the one thing management has been trying to circumvent for decades. This is just their latest incantation.
I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term
What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced.
Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.
What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI.
No they don't. They need to actually learn how to use their brains first.
As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".
CS degree programs have never been about learning to code. They are learning about computers, data structures, machine structures, algorithms. The code was always done on your own time at least that's how my school did it. I never had a class in "Java" or "Python" or "C" or any other languge, that was always incidental to the particular course. I could have used ChatGPT (had it existed) or hired a friend to write the code but that wouldn't help me on the exams (written on paper, at that time). Dev bootcamps? Yeah they should probably be leaning hard into AI as that's just what junior devs are going to be asked to do from here on out.
You raise a good point. Ba k in the early 90s when i started with programming, my source of knowledge were magazines with code, a "programming with C/C++" book, and a lot of time.
Then the internet came, and it felt like 'cheating'.
Then forums came and it felt like cheating, Then SO, and so on and so forth.
Now AI is eating the [software] world, and to a lot of people, it feels like cheating. I am just amazed of what i can build.
In 10-15 years software will become a commodity, along with books/stories and maybe even music/art. I don't know how it looks like. But darn im excited to be here to experience it.
Sure, AI makes writing code easy, but code review remains a bottleneck. The individual coders are finding ways to use AI to improve their workflows, but as long as organizational culture remains stuck in the old ways of reviewing code, the overall throughput will not improve significantly. That's been my personal experience at Amazon. I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long. You need to have high degrees of trust within a team for this to work at scale, and that's very rarely the case in my group.
> I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long.
Hum yeah, because it's insanely hard to properly review a CR that's more than a few pages long?
You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.)
The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that's written code knows that writing code is a lot more fun than reading code, but for some reason we're delegating to the AI the actual enjoyable task and turning ourselves into glorified code reviewers. Except we don't actually review the code, it seems, we just go on with bug ridden monstrosities.
I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code. I don't want my job to be reviewing LLM slop to find hallucinations and security vulnerabilities, only to try to tweak the 20,000 word salad prompt.
I think the key to understanding why people want this is that those people care about results more than the act of coding. The easy example for this is a corporation. If the software does what was said on the product pitch, it doesn’t matter if the developer had fun writing it. All that matters is that it was done in an efficient enough (either by money or time) manner.
A slightly less bleak example is data analysis. When I am analyzing some dataset for work or home, being able to skip over the “rote” parts of the work is invaluable. Examples off the top of my head being: when the data isn’t in quite the right structure, or I want to add a new element to a plot that’s not trivial. It still has to be done with discipline and in a way that you can be confident in the results. I’ll generally lock down each code generation to only doing small subproblems with clearly defined boundaries. That generally helps reduce hallucinations, makes it easier to write tests if applicable and makes it easier to audit the code myself.
All of that said, I want to make clear that I agree that your vision of software engineering Becoming LLM code review hell sounds like… well, hell. I’m in no way advocating that the software engineering industry should become that. Just wanted to throw in my two cents
> (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.)
I am not a professional programmer, and I tend to bounce between lots of different languages depending on the problem I'm trying to solve.
If I had all of the syntax for a given language memorized, I can imagine how an LLM might not save me that much time. (It would still be helpful for e.g. tracking down bugs, because I can describe a problem and e.g. ask the AI to take a first pass through the codebase and give me an idea of where to look.)
However, I don't have the syntax memorized! Give me some Python code and I can probably read it, but ask me to write some code from scratch, and LLMs I would have needed to dive into the language documentation or search Stack Overflow. LLMs, and Claude Code in particular, have probably 10x'd what I am capable of, because I can describe the function I want and have the machine figure out the minutia of syntax. Afterwards, I can read what the produced and either (A) ask it to change something specific or (B) edit the code by hand.
I also do find writing code to be less enjoyable than reading/editing code, for the reason described above.
No one have the language syntax memorized, unless you're working with the language daily. Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot (checkout the formal grammar for any programming language). For any C like language, they overlap a lot, the difference are mostly in syntax minutia (which we can refresh in an afternoon with a reference) and the higher abstractions (which you learn once, like OOP, pattern matching).
Generally you spend 80% of the time wrangling abstractions, especially in mature project. The coding part is often a quick mental break where you just doing translation. Checking the syntax is often a quick action that no one mind.
> Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot
That's kind of what I mean by "syntax". For example, "how do I find a value that matches X in this specific type of data structure?" AI is very good at this and it's a huge time saver for me. But I can imagine how it might be less helpful if I did this full time.
I mean, I'm not a mathematician but I don't expect that I should be able to write a proof.
You talk of memorizing syntax like its a challenge but excluding a small number of advanced languages no programmer thinks syntax is hard. But if you don't understand the basics how can you expect to be able to understand if the solution an LLM presents is decent and not rife with bugs (security and otherwise)
I guess my issue is people are confusing a shortcut with actually being able to do the thing. If you can't remember syntax I don't really want your code anywhere I care about
> I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code.
IME there's an inverse relationship between how excited the person is about AI coding and their seniority as an engineer.
Juniors (and non-coders) love it because now they can suddenly do things they didn't know how to do before.
Seniors don't love it because it gets in their way, causes coworkers to put up low-quality AI-generated code for peer review, and struggles with any level of complexity or nuance.
My fear is that AI code assistants will inadvertently stop people from progressing from Junior --> Senior since it's easier to put out work without really understanding what you're doing. Although I guess I could have said the same thing about Stack Overflow 10 years ago.
I personally find debugging and fixing code to be the most rewarding.
That way you know you're (usually) strictly making an improvement.
I know I'm making an improvement by features I've shipped to customers. Bugs prevent me from shipping more features until they're fixed. I do not enjoy bugs.
How is the impact of this assessed? How is system quality / performance changed? Is there an increase in high severity defects as more code gets pushed out more quickly?
I'm seeing the speed up and it's forcing out people with disabilities who are able to do the work at the previous slower speeds. I wonder if there are any solutions to this or if people like me are just expected to be walmart greeters.
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I feel my job in the future will be more secure than ever. Tons and tons of AI generated garbage code (trained on more and more existing garbage code) that the „developer“ will at a certain point no longer be able to maintain or fix. Not even speaking about trusting the output. Feels similar to all the outsourced development to cheap suppliers that inevitably collapse or create horrible maintenance overhead.
Do you feel you would be able to “maintain and fix” LLM-generated 100-megabyte source code blobs? And if you could, do you think it would be a job you’d want to do?
No, writing a replacement. Either part by part or a whole new software system.
Secure, sure. But this sounds like a crappy job.
Not so crappy if the pain is big enough for the customer. Once a certain threshold is reached they are often very open to changes and giving freedom to develop a proper solution.
This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees well.
(That said I'm all for more dystopian stories so we can get past this AI-replacing-coders fad)
Amazon pays really well. Amazon also has a number of interesting projects (e.g. a number of contributors to the rust compiler are employed by Amazon to work on rustc.) It also looks nice enough on a resume to give people a nice stepping stone towards even better opportunities.
> Amazon pays really well
maybe 10 years ago. HR is like a rabid dog, fighting for every dollar.
I really like a lot about Amazon. Friendly and creative people, good projects with high ambiguity and autonomy. The bad parts are the penny-pinching, careless and unaccountable senior leaders who just wants to exploit everyone and everything. But really, aside from things like RTO, they aren’t too impactful on the day to day.
Feels like this could be part of a broader shift towards dis-empowering knowledge workers.
The cog in machine effect has always been there in the corporate world, but somehow it feels like the technique has been refined in the last couple of years.
The solution is a no-commercial use enhanced GPL license. Corporations are actively using our open source against us, so we have to fight back.
All these narratives about user freedom, for any purpose etc. are just propaganda these days.
> Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year.
Three?
20 years ago, when I first started working, Wipro and HCL Tech had been talking about making the outsourcing model into "factory-like assembly lines." This fizzled out very quickly back then, but I guess it is now coming to fruition :-|
Amazon is going down. 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now they are violating EU laws and cheat the gmp developers out of a CPU replacement:
https://gmplib.org/
Granlund's gcc optimizations probably save Amazon millions in electricity each year. But evidently they don't care about real programmers.
> 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now
... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)
At least for stuff like electronics, random plastic household items etc EU Amazon isn't particularly cheap. Branded stuff costs about the same in many smaller stores, and random Chinese no-name brands can be bought from Aliexpress cheaper.
They aren’t cheaper anymore. The “real” branded stuff is usually more expensive on amazon than straight from the manufacturers website. The “cheap” fake aliexpress stuff is just that charged at a premium. You can find the same exact product images even on the same products on ebay from probably the same merchants listing on both marketplaces.
It has changed dramatically over the past 5 or so years into this.
For the EU, use this search engine:
https://geizhals.eu/
Amazon is not nearly the cheapest or most reliable one for hardware.
I am sorry but this is insane cope, Amazon is still on-top everywhere, also in Europe.
In Poland and neighboring countries, Amazon has some serious competition from Allegro.
Nonsense. Literally the first random example I chose:
https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-h13ssl-n-bulk-mbd-h13ssl-n-b-...
The vendors with the cheapest price have good customer reviews as well, unlike Amazon, which has terrible ones.From the business side of the house, I only ever look at it as what can do the right job for the right money to very quickly deliver continuous value to customers. In an employee base: Experience around is always good for growing and improving my people, but it isn't necessarily tied directly to the work to be done. The shift I feel is happening is how I place the value here. Where I can imagine I would land if I was actively running a startup right now is making sure I have amazing production teams (whatever that looks like, age, location, LLM powered or otherwise) book ended by great people growers as all cogs start to squeak if they're not oiled, and experience is the best lubricant on teams, you need both.
> Companies seem to be persuaded that, like assembly lines of old, A.I. can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent.
> The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines.
There are two issues this article brings to mind:
1. Feels like we are back when lines of code was a measure of productivity.
2. We’ve heard this tune before, and the problem we have now is that you don’t understand what you didn’t write. Software development is in large part about understanding the system from the highest level to its smallest details, and this takes away a key part of how our world works, in favor of a “cattle not pets” view of code.
Now, if you don’t expect your programmers to have an understanding of the system they built, and you treat code as disposable, then you’ll center around a world where folks aren’t trained to learn a system, and I don’t see that as a world that is compatible with increased reliance on A.I.
What even are most programmers at Amazon doing? It seems like all the interesting bits (the MVP of Amazon's major products) was developed long ago. All the low-hanging fruit is gone so the task is now focused on squeezing the few remaining drops of efficiency out of the stone.
That’s most major tech companies at this point. The fun was building closer to the mvp of the core product. Once that’s done, it’s just corporate druggery with computers.
Yeah, most of the things in IT are just in maintenance mode now.
You need way way less people for that.
Until you join a FAANG you simply cannot imagine the complexity of the systems and how much has not been automated and how much there is to build.
I've been in Amazon for close to a decade, and I constantly think "I can't believe X hasn't been automated in the 30 years that Amazon has existed and is still done on Excel".
Most engineers will work on new features for at least half of the year, and I personally work on brand new projects or at least features constantly.
Last few drops of efficiency out of the aws stone scales to millions of dollars of savings potentially.
AI coding assistants are a force multiplier. It can multiply good things and bad things equally and without discrimination.
Amazon’s entry level SDEs are hired to answer pages and grind sev2s at 3am. AI seems set to make that worse, not better.
Why would any company want to pay a software engineer to do repetitive / factory like work? It would be better to automate that and not have any engineers from the company's perspective.
Because engineers train the AI that'll replace them.
The Amazon site search and at least some product pages seem to be down right now, although I'm hesitant to say that because I don't remember Amazon ever breaking.
I'm getting 503s ("Sorry! Something went wrong on our end") on searches and "We're sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again" on product pages.
The AIs should probably fix that.
I note less hostility to AI/LLM etc in the comments on this post than in previous months. Is the needle shifting?
There were many more throwaway accounts before (I think) the new moderation efforts. Many people cannot speak freely on this topic.
Hasn't that always been the case at Amazon?
“OK Andrew, we’re looking for someone for this senior developer and they’ve got to be really really great at copying and pasting between Claude and an IDE.
Now we’re going to set up a whiteboard test here and you can demonstrate to us your best copying and pasting.”
“errrr, do I do any actual coding in the job?”
“Well, yes, inasmuch as anyone does these days. It’s mostly copying and pasting though, but hey that’s what coding IS now, right?”
“OK are you ready for your coding test, here it is: what key is COPY? And what key is PASTE?”
But for about ten years, at least, the majority of Google swe rules have been talked about as "just moving protobufs", which is effectively the same. If your job is just plumbing other people's designs for existing products, how fun can it be?
I think you do not understand what A Google SWE actually does
It's a running joke internally. But not always far from the truth. Translating business level protobufs into solution level protobufs is indeed the job of entire teams sometimes.
> One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
I am sick of these verbose articles that boil down to nothing basically. What the f does it mean to "produce code"? Like are we just churning out LoCs daily just for the sake of doing so?
About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say.
I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity and autonomy. Coding was always solving problems, and never felt like some sort of assembly line. But in a lot of companies, this is how it was constructed, with PMs setting up sprints and points, etc.
Similarly, I spoke to a doctor about how much they loved being able to work remotely at their role - with 2-3 days a week where they just responded to email and saw patients over telehealth. It felt very "ticket" focused and not at all the high status doctor role I imagined.
I suspect that both those roles will be lost to AI. If your role is taking a ticket that says "the box should be green, not red", and nothing more, that's the sort of thing that AI is very capable of.
> They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day.
Based on my experience with sprint teams, breaking things down into just a couple hours of work per ticket implies that someone else is doing an enormous amount of prep work to create a dozen tickets per feature. I agree that your friend is performing the work of a development system. I've heard this called "programming in Developer" as opposed to whatever language the developer is using.
I've had plenty of colleagues who expect the job to be that. Just working on a small ticket and moving it to "to test" when done.
It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.
This article features a study claiming 25% productivity gains form co-pilot. I wonder what a similar study would say about developers with and without access to internet search. In the study, it seems, as I expected, less experienced people found more value from it. My experience has been AI tools are more helpful when I don't know the domain, and then their benefit declines as I familiarize.
I also looked at the study and noticed a few aspects that were surprising:
(a) some of the 95% CIs crossed zero, meaning no benefit is a possible interpretation in figures 6 and 7
(b) did anyone account for what happens when two workers are in different experimental groups and sit next to each other? I imagine it was likely common people in the experimental group to use co-pilot queries for their friends.
(c) for experienced workers, the mean value is actually negative (lol) in the unweighted data in Figure 7
There are a lot of other subtleties in the interpretation of this paper.
"...developers who were less productive before the experiment are significantly more likely to accept any given suggestion...."
...curious lol
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566
I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.
Software development is the most automated career in the history of all time.
Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development.
LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used. The same applies to other forms of automation too - but LLMs are really hyped up right now. Probably it will go through the normal hype cycle where there'll be a crash, and then a plateau where LLMs are used to drive productivity but expectations of their capability are more aligned to reality.
In french the two fields that are Computer Science and Information Technology are under the same moniker: "informatique", a portmanteau of information and automatic.
The whole field is about automating yourself out of a job, and it's right in the name.
Contraction of "information" and "electronics" according to this site:
https://grodiko.fr/informatique?lang=en
German site claims that "Informatik", which is practically the same, is a contraction of "Information" and "Mathematik":
https://www.pctipp.ch/praxis/gewusst/kam-begriff-informatik-...
Larousse dictionary disagrees:
https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/informatique/...
This cites the same person (Philippe Dreyfus) but with "automatic":
https://www.caminteresse.fr/societe/quelle-est-lorigine-du-m...
> Il faut attendre 1962 pour réentendre parler d’informatique dans les médias. « Informatique » est en effet le terme utilisé pour la première fois par un scientifique français pour désigner le traitement automatique des données. Il s’agit de Philippe Dreyfus, fondateur de la société SIA, acronyme pour « Société d’Informatique Appliquée ».
And then enters the dictionary in 1966.
In 1957 in Germany, Karl Steinbuch describes Informatik as Automatische Informationsverarbeitung.
Gloating about hardships was and is a great way to ensure things will get worse for workers as efficiency and automation increases.
Another option would be to join forces to collectively demand more equitable distribution of the fruits of technological development. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular.
> Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular
Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it.
https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...
Certainly back when I worked in IT, the people I worked with were mostly very much anti-union. I didn't hear much anti immigrant talk back then but I've been retired for a while.
There has been a lot of anti-H1B talk for a long time. And complaining about work being outsourced to India or where ever.
I don't really believe in unions either. But I do believe in a good balance between capitalism and socialism (and welfare systems, employee rights etc). I don't believe in the market solving everything.
The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we wouldn't have to fight for our rights because we'd already have them anyway.
Too unreasonable and yet now the issues warned against by labour movements for decades are coming to pass.
You have fallen for capitalist propaganda. Time to re-evaluate.
I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights. I find it a bit 'off' that each class of labour has to fight for their own rights separately. That shouldn't be needed (and really isn't, where I live). It also causes a lot of uproar, see France for example where a strike is just tuesday. Employee rights are strong, but the public is heavily impacted all the time. Better to just handle this on the government side. This is why I was a member of the socialist party but not of the union in my workplace (I'm no longer a member because I moved countries and can't vote where I live).
Note: I'm not living in the US obviously :)
I do say a balance because of course we're not living in a communist state. So even with a socialist government there is still capitalism. Just not unrestrictedly so as it is in the US.
I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave). All our basic rights are already sorted. We can't work too many hours, we have unlimited sick leave (though of course validated by a doctor for long absences), we're entitled to a lot of money when fired etc. But this is all national law level stuff. Not industry level.
> I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights.
Having strong and independent unions is how you keep a good socialist government. Almost anytime you hear “With a good government, you don’t need <whatever>”, you are hearing a recipe for guaranteeing that good government is an exceptional, transitory state. If your society isn't prepared for bad government, it will have one sooner than you’d like, and it will be difficult to dislodge it.
This comment reeks of liberalism and illustrates why liberalism doesn’t work.
You claim you’re trying to balance individualism and collectivism but don’t actually support things that make collectivism work so you end up de facto supporting individualism.
Its a way to support individualism while allowing people to feel extra good about themselves for supporting collectivist ideas, on paper.
I'm very socialist, and anti-liberal (at least, in the economic sense of liberalism).
But where I live we just have strong labour rights from the government so individual unions fighting for each type of labour's rights are not needed as much. Sometimes they are, when there are specific risks like chemicals that they work with. But for overall "not get taken advantage of" stuff, it's just not needed so much.
I’m glad the people in your country allow good things to happen. That’s definitely not the case in all countries and you need collective power to get nice things for workers.
Join tech workers coalition
Savoring suffering is uniquely hideous, and one of the grand hallmarks of almost every facet of the decline of the US. It's a clear, bright sign of the death of one's humanity, and the foundation of all evil.
Is that dramatic? No.
More specifically: Things can be inevitable and also horrible. It is not some kind of cognitive dissonance to care about people losing their livelihoods and also agree that it had to happen. We can structure society to help people, but instead we hate the imaginary stereotypes we've generalized every conceivable grouping of real people into, politics being the most obvious example, but we do it with everything, as you have.
The electrician doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by electricity. The engineer doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by engineering. A person isn't an asshole who deserves his family to suffer because he committed his life to learning to write application servers, or whatever.
If in the process of automating away people's livelihoods, you do not simultaneously advocate for the destruction of the capitalist system that ties the well-being of people and their families intrinsically to those jobs, then you do in fact deserve what's coming to you. History shows that retribution against class traitors is not limited to financial hardship, either.
I have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less.
It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.
not necessarily. the economies of scale might be increasing as dev productivity increases. the goal of many businesses being to do more with less.
The goal of all American business is exactly the same: maximize the return of profits to the shareholders at large. It is in fact, the law. Do more with less is a natural consequence of this.
> is in fact, the law
It is not in fact law in the US.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what...
If directors consistently chose "do less with more" - they'd certainly lose under virtually any legal standard?
Edit: I guess it's technically Michigan law, but as far as I'm aware is de facto? Even Aronson v. Lewis wouldn't allow that. (IANAL)
The problem I see is less that of losing jobs, but the fact that the jobs get less enjoyable, less deep work, more mindlessness and less reflection, and possibly also the quality of the produced software decreasing.
Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for detailed specification — which creates a conflict that didn’t previously exist in software technology.
To be fair, all of corporate has grated against deep work and well written software way before the dawn of LLMs. Tech debt is one of the things that modern software engineering produces in spades.
LLMs can't do creative or unique work. They're really only useful for boilerplate, which is the tedious part.
I may be wrong, but I think every job creates wealth overall (or it would not exist), and that software engineering has been making some jobs more efficient and others not necessary, and then the wealth which formerly had to be employed where those jobs were inefficient, or had to exist at all, is then employed elsewhere.
If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside.
Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
When an economy is growing, there is in general demand for workers, and so pay and conditions are encouraged; when an economy is shrinking, there is less demand than supply, and pay and conditions are discouraged.
> Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.
> This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.
If everyone is becoming better off, but at different rates such that there is increase in inequality, then everyone experiences economic growth.
Thought experiment.
We have two people, one with 1000 wealth one with 100.
We have 10% growth per year.
So we see;
1000 -> 1100 -> 1210 -> 1331 100 -> 110 -> 121 -> 133.1
Difference in wealth;
900 -> 990 -> 1089 -> 1198
The ratio of wealth remains 10:1, but the absolute difference becomes larger and larger.
I do not know, and I would like to know, how numbers for wealth inequality are being computed.
The person the headline refers to is a webdev. What job is that getting rid of?
Web dev doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Web dev for e-commmerce displaced brick and mortar retail. Web dev for streaming displaced video rentals and audio sales.
Web devs are a tiny proportion of the employees needed for e-commerce.
Without them (and mobile devs, though there’s increasing cross-over), e-commerce doesn’t get done.
Ergo, web devs are directly contributing to the outcomes that e-commerce enables.
Ok, but so is everyone involved with building the fulfillment centre, the sorting machines, the roads for delivery, the trucks, the railways...
If it sounds like I'm including a lot of jobs, it's because every non-service job in the history of the post-industrial revolution economy has revolved around making things more efficient. Software development is not some uniquely evil domain.
I agree. I was just answering the upthread question, which seemed to imply that web devs have no part in it.
Cashiers, some officials, a lot of the “personal contact with a customer” gets transferred to web. I am not complaining, just answering the question.
Same goes for a truck driver, road builder, railway worker, etc.
FWIW, I spent many years as a cashier. It's not something I find inherently more valuable to the world. If we could trust people not to steal, we wouldn't need them.
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Could you please stop crossing into personal attack? Your account has unfortunately been doing this a lot and we ban accounts that do that.
I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Nothing in my comment was a personal attack, only a reflection of GP's own behaviour. Go ahead and ban the account if calling out these comments as written is unwelcome. But beware the behaviour you welcome by leading it unchallenged.
I don't want to ban you! I hope to persuade you to stop using personally pejorative language in your HN comments, which you've unfortunately been doing a lot of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089951
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089808
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088236
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088105
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040448
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040666
If you don't like the phrase "personal attack" we can call it something else, but the point is you can't treat other commenters this way on HN, regardless of how wrong anyone is or you feel they are.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Hmm on the other hand, there isn't much resistance against genAI in software development (unlike other creative industries) because ours is founded in collaboration and continuing others' work. It's where open source came from, and the use of libraries. Using stackoverflow was never frowned on. AI is just the same but more efficient. Nobody invents the wheel from scratch.
It will change the job yes but it also can mean the job can go in new directions because we can do more with less.
There isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete.
This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
These things are waves. First they will fire a bunch of people, but no company can grow through constant downsizing. Then they'll start to imagine to do new things they can do with the new skills and invest in that.
It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now.
And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people.
But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped)
I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much.
In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.
How is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation?
> How is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation?
Yes? I know I did, still do, and will continue to at least.
Email made the corporate mailroom obsolete and the letter carrier.
So would it be poetic justice when an electrician gets laid off?
More like if the motor maker gets replaced by a motorised machine. And yeah, that’s poetic.
The electrician is more like the person laying fibre optic cable.
You were writing all the code for automation.
This is the message between the lines of much of the anti-dev schadenfreude, but actually spelling it out makes it obvious: it's not true.
Only a minority of dev jobs are automating people out of work. There are entirely new industries like game dev that can't exist without it.
Software development has gained such a political whipping-boy status, you'd be forgiven for forgetting it's been the route to the middle classes for a lot of people who would otherwise be too common, weird or foreign.
The kind of automation I write is stuff that wouldn't get done if person had to do it. But with automation, it becomes possible and profitable.
I think a lot of genAI coding efficiency will have the same property: costs will go down to the point where things that couldn’t be done affordably in software in 2020 will be affordable in 2030. That could well result in a net increase in tech employment.
I'm surprised people aren't using it to churn out javascript framework after framework - is that not the done thing anymore?
Agreed, although it's slightly beside the point. The goal of building tools and robots has always been to alleviate work. And this is fine. There's still plenty of stuff to do if machines work for us to give us basic housing and food.
Now what needs to be done is to give back the profits to everyone, inclusively, as a kind of "universal basic income", so that we all enjoy it together, and not just the billionaires
Well if the majority of developers are mostly using web-based technologies such as JS, TS, HTML and CSS, and all you're doing is modifying the site and shuffling around elements + a11y addition, etc that is something an AI can do in seconds.
Seems indeed to be like Warehouse work, which is why Web developers will be the first to be affected by AI.
Doesn't matter if you are "senior" or "staff" in Web development. AI is already senior staff level in that.
The place known for:
- High degree of warehouse injuries (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/business/economy/amazon-w...)
- Making its delivery drivers piss in bottles (https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...)
- Illegally busting unions (https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/amazon-union-bust...)
- Forcing people back into their offices on five day RTO (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-5-day-rto-mandate-pol...)
Is now making its white-collar employees' life resemble ...warehouse work? Unthinkable!
Ruby/Dawson in SLU even looks like a warehouse on the inside, complete with chain link fence decor, exposed concrete floors with a splash of paint, exposed ceiling infrastructure, and spartan decorations. And it was built over a decade ago.
Welcome to the club.
Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?
I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.
This begins the golden age of creative generalists (until that's also in the chopping block).
Joke's on us; this is going to rapidly drain what little creativity there is in places like Amazon as they rely increasingly more on a tool that at best intelligently regurgitates what it learned/gleaned/stole from the internet. As the AI models are further trained on their own slop, the signal to noise ratio will only get worse; this has already been noted in studies.
Is it? We’re more specialized than ever imo.
> Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?
Yes. We don't need to pay $$$ for simply changing elements on a page or adopting the next web framework to replace another. The hype in many web technologies that lots of developers that have fell for also contributed to the low quality of the software that you use right now.
All of this work to pay developers to over-engineer inefficient solutions and to give a false sense of meaningful work contributed to the "psyop" of how highly inflated their salaries were to do their jobs in the ZIRP era.
And AI has shown which developer jobs it is really good at, and it is consistently good at web developer roles.
So I'd expect those roles to be significantly less valuable.
AI is good at web developer roles because that’s what has been most prevalent in the training material.
Software development is a lot more than web development.
I'm a software engineer at Amazon and I'm directly and indirectly involved a lot in programs related to GenAI tooling.
I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere, and everyone is free to completely ignore them.
That said, is there an increase in expectations? Yes. But that's just normal Amazon in an employer's market, and has nothing to do with LLMs and GenAI.
The comparison to Microsoft where we can witness in public the .Net maintainers fighting with the shit code generated by Copilot on their repos is ridiculous. Amazon is probably one of the companies pushing the least and being the most prudent about GenAI adoption.
If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening.
Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many teams are being told they must use AI every single day (some VPs have sent out org-wide emails saying that AI must be used), and engineers have to tell their managers how they are making use of it day-to-day. In my org, OP1 docs must include at least one section about how the team will increase use of AI. Hackathons aren’t allowed to happen anymore unless they are AI-themed. I could keep going. Amazon is absolutely forcing AI usage, and the article undersells how egregious it is.
Somehow you're dismissing my post saying it's based on my own anecdotical experience while providing your own anecdotical experience and just hearsay.
There is absolutely no company-wide mandate to use GenAI. If some SDM is pushing it on his SDEs, that's an outlier and on that person alone.
Your comment stated “nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools”, which is entirely false - I’m looking at an email in my inbox from my VP right now saying everyone must use AI every day.
You said “None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere” - this is also false. I’m looking at an installed by default (and uninstallable) AI browser addon on my work laptop right now.
It’s not hearsay, you’re either commenting in bad faith or you’re just clueless about what’s going on at your own company.
> There is absolutely no company-wide mandate
And now you’re just moving the goalposts.
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