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Is it just me or does every recent headline feels more like a campaign to scare off future devs? Instagram is full of it...
Honestly, I’m losing trust in companies pushing this narrative. Feels more like manipulation than progress.
Discussion
It's like cobol in the 90s programmers making bank
Hope we can make the same debugging AI Python code in a decade or two lol
The Python code out there is already awful, AI can't do much worse.
Don't forget the layoffs, too. Companies right now are betting hard that this will be It (c)(tm) for them to succeed and justify the massive investments in AI/ML, the hardware, etc.
Those in tech are basically hoping to will this into existence. Reality will probably bite hardest when the lawsuits (i.e. some major guffaw, issue, and/or death) are traced back to the use of AI, but time will tell.
Companies right now are betting hard that this will be It (c)(tm) for them to succeed and justify the massive investments in AI/ML
Nope. Mass layoffs have always been how tech companies prop up their stock prices at the end of a hype cycle. It's a classic manoeuvre to signal to investors that they are taking drastic measures to right the ship.
Those in tech are basically hoping to will this into existence.
The reality is that, except for VCs, they don't really care either way since, at the end of the day, every bet is a safe bet from their point of view so as long as the company's stock price stays up, and they have already worked out long before how to make that happen even when a major product gets them nowhere.
2023 was the largest round of concerted layoffs in a long time, if ever, for certain companies (i.e. Google 12k, Meta 11k, Amazon 27k). Last time we saw anything like this was the dot com burst. Small periodic layoffs dont usually cover 10+% of the workforce.
When you have tech companies sinking billions upon billions of dollars into a product no one wants, that's an enormous amount of value destroyed not just for the companies themselves but for the economy on the whole.
What those comparing this hype cycle to the dot-com bust tend to forget is the fact that entire bubble was caused by Wall Street money pouring into Silicon Valley startups with ideas that were either completely useless or simply commercially nonviable, and that wholesale destruction of value was what ultimately caused the market to collapse upon itself.
Also, let's not forget the fact that the current layoffs mostly concern non-technical staff, i.e. people that don't add value to products. This isn't the sort of action typical of any firm with a goose that can lay golden eggs. In the case of Microsoft, the intent as of now is ostensibly to replace conventional sales reps with "technically oriented" people, but, if you ask me, what that means is that they are desperate to find a way to salvage the giant pile of cash that they have already poured kerosene over and set on fire.
The tech companies are making massive profits, I'm not sure why anyone thinks they need to right the ship. They are printing money.
My friend keeps getting laid off by mismanaged startups. He’s making bank. And he keeps getting hired because he has 13 years or so of experience, so people naturally want him.
I never get laid off, I want that sweet severance 😔
People said the same type of things about the internet as well. Especially after the .com bust.
There is def some over investing going on, but "AI" is here to stay. What stays around will be determined by who survives the bubble pop.
I don't recall the internet ever being reported as the "doom for all [insert worker/job here]". It was certainly hyped as transformative to the job market, just not, well, replacing large chunks of it.
What we're seeing here is what appears to be a concerted effort by various tech leaders to drive down the cost of labor without much evidence to justify it (beyond "it will totally do these things; trust me bro!"). I know folks in companies right now making bold claims around how much % of the code is now being made by AI, and the reality of that % is rather small, sad, and not exactly 'transformative'. Take that anecdote as you will.
I'm not saying AI is going away. But it hasn't exactly found its "killer app" yet that justifies the massive investments being made, and I expect it to be naturally relegated to a few niches that actually provide a net revenue.
I don't recall the internet ever being reported as the "doom for all [insert worker/job here]". It was certainly hyped as transformative to the job market, just not, well, replacing large chunks of it.
I started in tech innthe mid 90s. I was hearing about the internet killing brick and morter retail back then. Especially before the .COM bubble popped.
What we're seeing here is what appears to be a concerted effort by various tech leaders to drive down the cost of labor without much evidence to justify it (beyond "it will totally do these things; trust me bro!"). I know folks in companies right now making bold claims around how much % of the code is now being made by AI, and the reality of that % is rather small, sad, and not exactly 'transformative'. Take that anecdote as you will.
I am working for a very large company as an SDET. They are forcing Amazon Q on us. It's meh at best for me. From what I can tell, they are expecting a 30% or more throughput improvement from us.
I have been through this before. I was a manual tester at one point. They are always wildly optimistic about productivity gains at first. We do eventually get there, though. I have built systems that could do about 600 hrs of manual testing in 4 hrs. It just took a lot longer to build than they wanted.
I'm not saying AI is going away. But it hasn't exactly found its "killer app" yet that justifies the massive investments being made, and I expect it to be naturally relegated to a few niches that actually provide a net revenue
The killer app is replacing humans with code. It is already happening. Phone support is being decimated right now. More will come.
I was hearing about the internet killing brick and morter retail back then.
TBF, it might not have killed it, but it took a large enough chunk out to put it on life support.
Yup. COVID took another big chunk as well.
I'm constantly facing issues in recent months on Amazon of all places. Forms where I can't scroll to the bottom on all browsers and platforms available to me. App crashing randomly. It all seems like the collapse is already happening.
They don't need headlines for this. The education system and iPad parents are doing it all for us. Also, not how this meme works.
My bad! Should the bottom be equal?
The text shouldn't change in the bottom panels since the idea is that in the movie the pages are being flipped as gru explains it, and then he read something excitedly just to realize that its not really good, idk the context of the scene though, watched it once years ago...
and then he read something excitedly just to realize that its not really good, idk the context of the scene though, watched it once years ago...
Wasn't part of his plan. Which was to do something evil but it wasn't evil, it was actually good.
Yes. Ideally you should have combined text from 3 + 4 and copied the text on both, but it’s a lot of words and it still works how you made it. This critic just has their panties in a wad
Yes also more lewd minions
You could've gotten rid of the first panel. Make the 2nd panel the first and make the last panel the bottom two panels.
I was on a training call last week learning some propriety C# that uses custom objects and methods that only exist in this software.
A PM in the call suggested we could just do this with OpenAI.
Good luck with that.
Edit: I wanted to say “AI could for sure do your job”
That's where a RAG could be useful, it would be able to read the documentation for those custom objects and methods. However you still need someone to write a good documentation with examples and guidelines. This is what we're working on in my company. We have a bunch of internal libraries and nobody bothers to read the documentation and either use them wrong, or don't use them at all and re-code something that's already been done a thousand times. So with the libraries authors we're working into feeding the documentation to a RAG that copilot can call using the MCP protocol.
From my experience, AI is still poor at reading and actual comprehension and reasoning. It works when it gets 20 examples that it can combine, but it doesn't work when it only has documentation to work from.
Companies NEED AI to be the next big thing cause… there’s really nothing else. All these tech companies have run out of growth. They’ve more or less optimized extracting max value from consumers on existing offerings.
That’s what’s driving the layoffs. But without AI there’s really nothing on the horizon. And the industry knows if you jam it down people’s throats have “thought leaders” run endless seminars on AI that that will get companies to buy, that consumers will eventually latch onto something. They’re trying to create a market for a product through sheer fucking hopium.
are y'all betting that computer science will just be even better for people?
because salaries are up but so is unemployment. I'm not sure if that will go down or not
I stayed out with last year's wave of layoffs. I did my part to raise y'alls salaries, you're welcome.
Give em a couple years and then they will figure out our skills were never coding, code was just the tool we use.
How many times have they tried to remove the developer and make "easier" coding ... it never succeeds, and all too often it then requires specialized developers to work on it, that usually cost more. Languages too that AI is going to struggle with as there will lack models to learn off.
The only people I see anytime soon is the Jr Developer, but that could risk then create a vacuum.
Developing for 20 years now I laugh at everyone telling me my Job will be obsolete in a few years because of AI… Yeah, I think I’m fine, thanks
Where are the salaries at an all-time high?? Things mostly seem to have plateaued around here, and I expect some more massive big tech layoffs in the next year
Still waiting for that "dev salaries hit all time high" part.
I have friends in industry for over 25 years and make under $150k.
Imagine $2k/year raise for 25 years. Doesn't even cover CoL adjustment.
My youtube algorithm absolutely loves these doom and gloom videos. Only after a sustained period of never watching one of them and only watching AI skepticism videos did it finally get the message. The default though for anyone watching programming content is a lot of “coding is dead. Here’s why I’ve given up and you should too” trash
Wait, is the 4th panel actually happening IRL?
The truth is… the game was rigged from the start
Devs are not smart enough to unionise and push for better working conditions, so they will have to clean up after AI while working more and be paid less.
I'm really hoping that this whole AI thing will actually make it easier for devs to get a job so long as you aren't dependent on AI doing basic things for you.
High skilled devs become more productive with ai and earns higher salary. Low skilled devs get unemployed.
I mean, i just graduated while retaining a skeptical view of AI and here's some takeaways from my last few years
- AI is actively generating developers that can't code without AI
- People feel totally safe saying they don't need to code unit tests because AI will do that for them.
- People are failing exams because they think they can code in the language, but in reality can't do shit when they're presented with a AI less written exam
So I think it's not only about AI replacing developers, but also a very real possibility of new graduates having a significantly reduced understanding of the code "they" write
You used the meme wrong
I wish I could code and have AI review my code for errors and bugs.
Not to have AI code and have me review the slop for errors and bugs while screaming to the cloud: why the fuck are you doing this shit?
More like seniors correcting vibe coders and management code/ideas get high income. Juniors meanwhile...
Lmao what all time high? My salary over doubled during COVID then halved post-AI-layoffs.
We are on the AI hype train, and no amount of personal knowledge is going to change other people's opinions. People don't know about Gartner Hype Cycle. It is very frustrating, so try to enjoy the ride the best you can!
I've heard that companies really aren't hiring entry level positions anymore. They want senior devs with copilot or similar over hiring new junior devs.
Damn, it's almost like supply and demand exists... maybe this is a double bluff to make dev salaries increase by convincing people that AI will reduce salaries.
Even when AI does get to the point where it's good enough to make usable code, you will still need people who understand the code to use it effectively. It's actually a tool to let you type faster.
One of the biggest problems in software development is that customers and clients don't even know how to describe what they want. They may have a perfect image in their head of what the software should look like, but that perfect image means nothing if they don't even have the ability to describe it.
Even if they manage to do so, there‘s always a ton of contradictions to sort out
I swear, devs who shit on AI without even admitting it can be helpful if you know what you're doing need to realise that they're just as bad at describing requirements and giving feedback as an average customer. Sure, AI will fuck up pretty frequently, but it doesn't take much polishing to get something useful out of it. If an AI is giving you garbage 100% of the time, it's because you're not bounding requirements clearly.
That, or their company only lets them use MS Copilot.
I don't know who you're arguing against here. No one was even talking about developers writing requirements or even just AI being bad.
That's the start of the thread.
The there was this.
Then this. I know I've literally just copied out the chain of comments for you, but... That seems like the set of relevant comments to reach what I was talking about.
Someone talking about AI needing people who understand code to use AI to make good code. Someone pointing out customers often struggle to describe what they want, someone else saying customers often introduce contradictions. Then I chimed in to point out devs also struggle to describe what they want accurately to AI.
There, that's how my comment was relevant. I wasn't arguing against anyone, just commenting something relevant to the combined chain of comments in the thread so far.
You only added another group of people who can't describe things accurately, would that not make AI even more useless?
But to be serious: it is more work to describe things accurately than to write code. Part of the reason why it is not as useful as some people claim.
And even beyond that, there are plenty of situations where the statement of “you think you do, but you don’t” truly is accurate.
Reminds me of someone mentioning a client asking for a web page with horizontal mouseover scrolling with no override (no bottom scroll bar or signifiers). Like babe it sounds great for you, but if you don’t have any way for the user to navigate your web page intuitively, and nobody wants to hover their cursor over the side of the screen for 5+ seconds to get to where they want to go.
Even the product managers can't describe it. What a world we live in.
And an understanding of edge cases and how to actually analyze issues that otherwise seem simple. Recently my work wanted to ship a notification system for updates and thought it would be easy.
It would be easy.... But without specific guards for about 30 edge cases in our system you'd be spamming tens of thousands useless notifications a day to users.
As a non programmer, what do you need to describe to help them understand?
What you actually want. The issue is, you rarely know what you actually want, not in any malicious way necessarily, you may have a very clear idea of "what you want" only to realize as it becomes reality that it ISN'T actually what you want, but you still don't know what you DO want, until you've gone through that process enough times to accidentally stumble on what you actually wanted but didn't know enough about tech to actually describe.
Well I got the the main intent from the first comment, what I was asking for is an example on how to be specific towards getting what you want. It varies under the circumstance but I don't see how it's a big problem when the programmer could politely reply to the client telling them it's out of their reach and compromise other ways under their advice, that's what they're paid to do right?
You underestimate the problem. Imagine describing a car. No way would somebody be able to put together a modern, working car based on what you say, especially since you don't want yet another Ford Escort, you want a new, unique thing. You will omit how ABS works, have no idea how an engine exactly works. You describe it to half a dozen people, that each build their own mental picture, but need to come up with what you expect. On the way you'll then realize that you did a ton of incorrect assumptions, some even contradict each other. Then you expect that a few hundred thousand lines of code do what you want, which you don't know yourself.
The term programmer is dead for two decades for this exact reason, programming is only one part of many. Software development is largely understanding and putting together a mostly correct thing that tries to fulfill most requirements while not going too much above budget and finish somewhen. It is a people business.
Now you also know why offshoring to india often doesn't work as well as the managers thought, as adding different cultural backgrounds to already complicated communication doesn't help at all
Sure, but they're trying to get rid of the programmer part of that equation. That's what we've been trying to explain. The programmer has more value than just the code they produce, and will not be so easily replaced with LLMs.
I'm sorry, I must be stupid for not understanding or I wasn't clear enough with my question. I was talking about in a ideal workspace, why wouldn't the client listen and give the expert's word as the correct judgement instead of tossing it aside?
It's kind of baffling in my head that this is considered a "big problem" as mentioned in the original comment, because this is a very common thing that happens in every industry, and the specialist always have to explain and add nuance to whatever they are working on.
As for LLMs, I never considered that avenue, I forgot they existed but I see your point. I've heard that they've taken many jobs, it's actually very tragic. Im not sure how they are today but they are still rampant in art communities. Clients would much prefer paying generative art because it's much cheaper and faster alternative. And to them its no different because they don't have the trained eye of a artist to see the mistakes AI can make. I assume it's the same problem with programming too like you mentioned.
Don't wanna get argumentative here but if you couldn't tell, I have absolutely zero understanding of how programmers work so I'm just thinking about ideal circumstances here.
A lot of people don't really consider the sheer number of scenarios that a given ask encompasses. Then when those scenarios happen, it leads to unexpected, or downright destructive behavior.
A lot of people don't think in terms of pure instruction/output. They're like "just make it work". But what does that mean? It's too subjective.
There was a great example of using BDD (Behavior Driven Design) to detail how an ATM might work and the process to go through to identify the Outcomes, Outputs, Process, Scenarios, and Inputs (OOPSI) that I like to refer to but I can't seem to find it. If I happen across it, I'll link it here.
EDIT: Link - https://jennyjmar.com/2016/04/16/bdd-discovery-and-oopsi/
I'll look for it too, I've been placed in this whole programming drama because of PirateSoftware situation and that has given me some interest to look into programming. It's been pretty interesting!
Oh yea, if you love to solve problems, and can handle logic, programming is great! I've been doing this for over 25 years and still get excited trying to solve a problem. I've just broadened my scope of "the problem" from "how to write the code" to "how to figure out what the hell they want" (which does end up helping downstream as well!)
Here it is: https://jennyjmar.com/2016/04/16/bdd-discovery-and-oopsi/
One of the most useful tips from that that I follow is this:
Pretend you're trying to do this in the 1920's, without computers, but with people doing the functions. What would you need? How would this work? It helps me visualize the details instead of just thinking in terms of "database", "cache", etc. (that can be handled after this process in the implementation/grooming phase)
I have to do most of the thinking for my product team whenever they go over picking development work. Have you considered A, B, and C? How will this affect it? Etc
In my experience they see a happy path and not much beyond that. Imagine them trying to describe this to AI and expecting a good result
So we should have developed better internal monologue reading devices instesd
They don't have a perfect image, they know jack shit about inner workings and UI/UX so what they imagined might be far from the constraints of reality
Spot on.
If it ever becomes powerful enough to destroy our jobs, we can just use it to program nefarious causes against ceos. Whose going to be better off a world run by AI, people that understand the tech or the idiots just typing baseless prompts?
This. It's a pretty good auto complete. Sometimes it gets into a groove and it knows what I'm gonna do next. Other times it's like "NO COPILOT STOP DOING THAT" which sucks in python where I'm hitting tab to indent it's like "yes you wanted this" then I have to delete a wack piece of code.
Letting AI generate not-quite boilerplate that previously wasn't really generate-able by an IDE is by far my favorite use of LLMs.
Back in the day I went to school and got my Airline Dispatch license. Doing a dispatch by hand might take two hours, but they have programs to do it basically instantly. They still employ plenty of dispatchers because they have 50% responsibility if anything happens to the flight.
Who has the other 50 %? Someone who can be held accountable.
The pilot does. Both have 50% responsibility for the flight, the dispatcher for creating the flight plan and validating weather, weight, and fuel, and the pilot for accepting these calculations. Not sure what you are trying to imply with this comment.
I usually compare it to the lathe for furniture manufacturing. They dramatically increased productivity (with some estimates coming it at 1000x productivity over the course of the 19th century) but you can't just plop some rando from off the street in front of a lathe and expect them to make you a chair. And if you did that, you'll be lucky if said rando keeps all their fingers.
With modern AI tools, you might be able to get more out of the same number of devs, or the same with slightly less devs. But we're a long way off from being able to plop some guy off the street in front of an AI assistant and them being able to make enterprise-grade software.
AI bros love it compare AI use with calculators, but completely miss the point.
It's as if a calculator would fix an idiot's issues with arithmetic. It's a tool, a powerful but sometimes wrong tool, which requires expertise to to fuck the project up, which requires years of "manual" experience to acquire.
I see AI as an opportunity to get more work. Right now I'm already rescuing many projects with shitty code from off-sourced teams. I'm salivating from all the work I can fix from shitty AI generated code.
I think people mix two very different concepts:
Writing code and engineering design.
The truth is, AI is better at writing code. But writing code is never the point. And AI is very shit at doing proper engineering. AI is going to work great for companies that have such god engineering that you can mount an MCP server and feed sweet docs to it as context. Then have a bug, and AI will easily solve it, because it’s great at following written instructions.
Now, when something new comes up that it’s outside the engineering frame of those docs, your AI will tell you “sure thing boss, I got this”. But oh no, it don’t.
What AI does is eloquence. That’s it. It’s extremely eloquent. But saying things the right way doesn’t mean what you’re saying has meaning, and it doesn’t mean that the next thing you say connects to the last one.
A good analogy is like that speech Billy Madison makes. Everyone thinks it’s amazing and cheers and claps. Then the one guy that knows shit is like “guy that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” That’s the engineers. The AI is Billy and the crowd is the hoard of hopium addicts from business and product that can’t wait for the day that they stop depending on us. But it is not that day!
AI is autocomplete on steroids
Well said
And u still need humans to develop the AI to get to write that much usable code
Yeah. But this leads to more efficient coders. Subsequently requiring less number of coders. Thus AI takes away jobs. It won't replace, but it'll eat a good chunk of coding jobs because one coder can do more work in same time.