Good luck debugging AI-generated code…
They think it will be easier than having people write the code from scratch. I don’t know shit about coding but I know that’s definitely not right.
AI is quite good at writing small sections of code. Usually because it’s more or less just copying something off the internet that it’s found, maybe changing a few bits around, but essentially just regurgitating something that’s in its data set. I could of course just have done that but it saves time since the AI can find the relevant piece of code to copy and modify more or less instantly.
But it falls apart if you ask it to build entire applications. You can barely even get it to write pong without a lot of tinkering around after the fact which rather defeats the point really.
It also doesn’t deal well if the thing you’re trying to program for is not very well documented, which would include things like drivers, which presumably is their bread and butter.
That might actually be a good test for managers who think coders can be replaced by this. Have them try to make a working version of Pong using AI prompts.
Really simple. Just ask it to point out the error. Also maybe tell it how the code is wrong. And then hope that the new code didn’t introduce new errors in formerly working sections. And that it understood what you meant. In a language that is inherently vague.
This will be used as an excuse to try to drive down wages while demanding more responsibilities from developers, even though this is absolute bullshit. However, if they actually follow through with their delusions and push to build platforms on AI-generated trash code, then soon after they’ll have to hire people to fix such messes.
Todays news: Rich assholes in suits are idiots and don’t know how their own companies are working. Make sure to share what they’re saying.
While I highly doubt that becoming true for at least a decade, we can already replace CEOs by AI, you know? (:
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html
Most middle managers could be replaced by a simple script already.
while(True): staffNumbers-=1 staffWorkload*=1.1 staffWages*=0.95 executiveWages*=1.2
If generative AI hasn’t replaced artists, it won’t replaced programmers.
Generative AI is much better at art than coding.
Generative AI is much better at art than coding.
Mostly because humans invented this convenient thing called abstract art - and since then tolerates pretty much everything that looks “strange” as art. Must have been a deep learning advocate with a time machine who came up with abstract art.
Don’t need to be abstract art, it manages to make many kinds of art.
The difference between art and coding is that if you pick a slightly different color or make a line with slightly the wrong angle, it doesn’t change much. In code, however, slight mistakes usually result in bugs.
I meant that thanks to abstract art we’re willing to forgive “image glitches” in art by deep learning models.
I don’t think that’s the case though. Obvious glitches like 6-fingered hands can be avoided by generating a bunch of samples and picking the best one, and less obvious glitches tend to be overlooked, not considered a “feature” due to an appreciation of abstract art.
AI art works best for pieces that need to fade into the background, like stock images and whatnot to accompany more important copy. If it’s taking center stage, it needs a lot more hand-holding that probably makes it about as costly as just having a human create it.
It will never replace artists anyway.
Art isn’t just about what it looks, like it’s also about an emotional connection. Inherently we think that you cannot have an emotional connection with something created by a computer. Humans will always prefer art created by humans, even if objectively there isn’t a lot of difference.
Also, it seems to only do digital art.
The problem is that not everyone looks for that human-to-human emotional connection in art. For some, it’s just a part of a much bigger whole.
For example, if you’re an indie game dev with a small budget and no artistic skills, you may not be that scrupulous about getting an AI to generate some sprites or 3D models for you, if the alternative is to commission the art assets with money you don’t have.
Similar idea applies to companies building a website. Why pay for a licence to download some stock images or design assets if you can just get a GenAI to pump out hundreds for you that are very convincing (and probably even better) for a couple bucks?
Can I join anyone’s band of AI server farm raiders 24 months from now? Anyone forming a group? I will bring my meat bicycle.
Let’s assume this is true, just for discussion’s sake. Who’s going to be writing the prompts to get the code then? Surely someone who can understand the requirements, make sure the code functions, and then test it afterwards. That’s a developer.
I don’t believe for a single instance that what he says is going to happen, this is just a play for funding… But if it were to happen I’m pretty sure most companies would hire anything that moves for those jobs. You have many examples of companies offloading essential parts of their products externally.
I’ve also seen companies hiring tourism graduates (et al non engineering related) giving them a 3/4 week programming course, slapping a “software engineer” sticker on them and off they are to work on products they have no experience to work on. Then it’s up to senior engineers to handle all that crap.
This explains so much about 1 in 4 IT people I meet.
I think that’s the point? They’re saying that those coders will turn into prompt engineers. They didn’t say they wouldn’t have a job, just that they wouldn’t be “coding”.
Which I don’t believe for a minute. I could see it eventually, but it’s not “2 years” away by any stretch of the imagination.
Definitely be coding less I think. Coding or programming is basically the “grunt work”. The real skill is understanding requirements and translating that into some product.
Possibly. But… Here’s the thing. I’ve dealt with “business rules” engines before at a job. I used a few different ones. The idea is always to make coding simpler so non technical people can do it. Unless you couldn’t tell from context, I’m a software engineer lol. I was the one writing and troubleshooting those tools. And it was harder than if it was just in a “normal” language like Java or whatever.
I have a soft spot for this area and there’s a non zero chance this comment makes me obsess over them again for a bit lol. But the point I’m making is that “normal” coding was always better and more useful.
It’s not a perfect comparison because LLMs output “real” code and not code that is “Scratch-like”, but I just don’t see it happening.
I could see using LLMs exclusively over search engines (as a first place to look that is) in 2 years. But we’ll see.
No, going by them, they just talk to an AI voice and it will pop out a finished product.
I know just enough about this to confirm that this statement is absolute horseshit
Sounds like the no-ops of a decade ago and cloud will remove the need for infrastructure engineers. 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂😂😂🤣
SHUT UP AND GO BACK TO OUR SHITTY YAML BASED INFRASTRUCTURE!
Fuck yml, all my homies hate yml
JSON or bust!
Ok, since YAML is a superset, I can just put the JSON into the YAML.
🤣😂😪😥😢😭
It isn’t that AI will have replaced us in 24 months, it’s that we will be enslaved in 24 months. Or in the matrix. Etc.
Will the matrix it puts us in be in 1999? Because I’d take that deal.
Matrix lookin pretty good rn - 1999, stable climate, free apartment, 90s gf (she loves u) etc
Of course they won’t be; somebody has to debug all the crap AI writes.
They aren’t wrong, just late. Coding is already dead. Most coders I know spend very little time writing new code. Meeting/discussions about requirements, debugging, fighting with pipelines or tests. I once read that a good programmer writes 10 to 100 lines of fully functional, tested, working, and meeting the actual need code a day. I believe it.
Okay but you literally said they’re still writing the code though lmao.
It’s dead, not eradicated. It’s just not what people spend all day doing like they used tp.
Coding is already dead. Most coders I know spend very little time writing new code.
Oh no, I should probably tell this my whole company and all of their partners. We’re just sitting around getting paid for nothing apparently. I’ve never realised that. /s
How many times does the public have to learn if the CEO says it, he probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If the devs say it, listen
Cloud tech seller sells cloud
That’d be an exciting world, since it’d massively increase access to software.
I am also very dubious about that claim.
In the long run, I do think that AI can legitimately handle a great deal of what humans do today. It’s something to think about, plan for, sure.
I do not think that anything we have today is remotely near being on the brink of the kind of technical threshold required to do that, and I think that even in a world where that was true, that it’d probably take more than 2 years to transition most of the industry.
I am enthusiastic about AI’s potential. I think that there is also – partly because we have a fair number of unknowns unknowns, and partly because people have a strong incentive to oversell the particular AI thing that they personally are involved with to investors and the like – a tendency to be overly-optimistic about the near-term potential.
I have another comment a while back talking about why I’m skeptical that the process of translating human-language requirements to machine-language instructions is going to be as amenable as translating human-language to human-consumable output. The gist, though, is that:
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Humans rely on stuff that “looks to us like” what’s going on in the real world to cue our brain to construct something. That’s something where the kind of synthesis that people are doing with latent diffusion software works well. An image that’s about 80% “accurate” works well enough for us; the lighting being a little odd or maybe an extra toe or something is something that we can miss. Ditto for natural-language stuff. But machine language doesn’t work like that. A CPU requires a very specific set of instructions. If 1% is “off”, a software package isn’t going to work at all.
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The process of programming involves incorporating knowledge about the real world with a set of requirements, because those requirements are in-and-of-themselves usually incomplete. I don’t think that there’s a great way to fill in those holes without having that deep knowledge of the world. This “deep knowledge and understanding of the world” is the hard stuff to do for AI. If we could do that, that’s the kind of stuff that would let us create a general artificial intelligence that could do what a human does in general. Stable Diffusion’s “understanding” of the world is limited to statistical properties of a set of 2D images; for that application, I think that we can create a very limited AI that can still produce useful output in a number of areas, which is why, in 2024, without producing an AI capable of performing generalized human tasks, we can still get some useful output from the thing. I don’t think that there’s likely a similar shortcut for much by way of programming. And hell, even for graphic arts, there’s a lot of things that this approach just doesn’t work for. I gave an example earlier in a discussion where I said “try and produce a page out of a comic book using stuff like Stable Diffusion”. It’s not really practical today; Stable Diffusion isn’t building up a 3D mental model of the world, designing an entity that stably persists from image to image, and then rendering that. It doesn’t know how it’s reasonable for objects and the like to interact. I think that to reach that point, you’re going to have to have a much-more-sophisticated understanding of the world, something that looks a lot more like what a human’s looks like.
The kind of stuff that we have today may be a component of such an AI system. But I don’t think that the answer here is going to be “take existing latent diffusion software and throw a lot of hardware at it”. I think that there’s going to have to be some significant technical breakthroughs that have not happened yet, and that we’re probably going to spend some time heading down dead-end approaches before we get to that. There’s probably going to be a lot of hard R&D before we get there, and that’s going to take time.
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I left my job in fast food to go to school for tech because it seemed like the thing to do and I wanted to have a good life and be able to afford stuff. So I ruined my life getting a piece of paper only for them to enshittify things to oblivion and destroy the job market to the point it’s fast food or retail only again. I suppose getting a masters in something is the logical next step but at a certain point a scam’s a scam and I’m not digging a deeper hole.
Look, if you go back to fast food after getting a B.S. because some disconnected CEO said that programmers aren’t going to exist in a couple years, you’re not digging a hole, you’re jumping head first into it.
Fast food and retail are fucked too tbh
He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.
–Lao Tzu…
Great answer to interview questions
