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 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.
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.
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.
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.
No, going by them, they just talk to an AI voice and it will pop out a finished product.
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.
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Fast food and retail are fucked too tbh
Of course they won’t be; somebody has to debug all the crap AI writes.
It’ll replace brain dead CEOs before it replaces programmers.
I’m pretty sure I could write a bot right now that just regurgitates pop science bullshit and how it relates to Line Go Up business philosophy.
if lineGoUp { CollectUnearnedBonus() } else { FireSomePeople() CollectUnearnedBonus() }I love how even here there’s line metric coding going on
I think we need to start a company and commence enshittification, pronto.
This company - employee owned, right?
I’m just going to need you to sign this Contributor License Agreement assigning me all your contributions and we’ll see about shares, maybe.
Yay! I finally made it, I’m calling my mom.
ChatJippity
I’ll start using that!
Says the person who is primarily paid with Amazon stock, wants to see that stock price rise for their own benefit, and won’t be in that job two years from now to be held accountable. Also, who has never written a kind of code. Yeah…. Ok. 🤮
As software developer I am not scared that A.I will take away our jobs. What I am scared is that at that point A.I good enough to do most jobs out there.
All it really needs to do is replace large chunk of the service industry to do wreck massive havock in our society.
Connecting human existence to their labour has a designed defect
If enshitification isn’t stopped, the job market could devolve to the point everyone that isn’t an “elite” will be living in a medival-like society and the only way to get food is by using a barter system to trade with other destitute poor people. The second hyperinflation hits, the rich and the poor will practically be living in different worlds. Learn either a medival skill or a skill that would be beneficial in such a society. I’m doing machining and blacksmithing. Might start dabbling in chemistry too. If I can’t be successful in modern society maybe I can be highly skilled and successful in whatever secondhand society emerges.
How will federal contracts work?
Seriously how can these CEOs of a GPU company not talk to a developer. You have loads of them to interview
They obviously have to sell something. I doubt that they honestly think that this will happen.
I feel sorry for all those people in AWS that now have him as a leader…
Translation: “We’re going to make the suite for building, testing, and deploying so obnoxiously difficult to integrate with your work environment that in two years nobody in your DevOps team will be able to get anything to a release state.”
Me, fiddling with a config file for a legacy Perl script that’s been holding up the ass-end of the business since 1996: “Uh, yeah that’s great.”
A company I used to work for outsourced most of their coding to a company in India. I say most because when the code came back the internal teams anways had to put a bunch of work in to fix it and integrate it with existing systems. I imagine that, if anything, LLMs will just take the place of that overseas coding farm. The code they spit out will still need to be fixed and modified so it works with your existing systems and that work is going to require programmers.
So instead of spending 1 day writing good code, we’ll be spending a week debugging shitty code. Great.
It’s the same claim when tools like Integromat, WayScript, PureData, vvvv and other VPLs (Visual Programming Languages) started to get some hype. I once worked for a company that strongly believed they’d “retire the need for coding”, and my ex-boss was so confident and happy about that… Although VPLs were a practical thing, time is the ruler of truth, and for every dev-related job vacancy I see, they ask some programming language, the written ones (JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, Lua, and so on).
Because if you look closely, deep inside, voila, there’s code in anything that is claimed to be no-code! Wow, could anyone imagine that? 🤯 /sarcasm
I made this meme a while back and I think it’s relevant
Looking at your examples, and I have to object at putting scratch in there.
My kids use it in clubs, and it’s great for getting algorithmic basics down before the keyboard proficiency is there for real coding.
It’s still code. What makes scratch special is that it structurally rules out syntax errors while still looking quite like ordinary code. Node editors – I have a love and hate relationship with them. When you’re in e.g. Blender throwing together a shader it’s very very nice to have easy visualisation of literally everything, but then you know you want to compute
abs(a) + sin(b) + c^2and yep that’s five nodes right there because apparently even the possibility to type in a formula is too confusing for artists. Never mind that Blender allows you to input formulas (without variables though) into any field that accepts a number.that’s just how the code is rendered. There’s still all the usual constructs
I’m curious about what the “upskilling” is supposed to look like, and what’s meant by the statement that most execs won’t hire a developer without AI skills. Is the idea that everyone needs to know how to put ML models together and train them? Or is it just that everyone employable will need to be able to work with them? There’s a big difference.
I’m going with the latter. Even my old college which is heavily focused on development is incorporating AI into the curriculum. Mainly because they’re all using it to solve their assignments anyway. Since it isn’t likely to go away and it’s a ‘tool’ they’ll have available when they hit the workforce they are allowing its use.
I’m not looking forward to seeing code written by some of these people in the wild. Most of the AI code I’ve seen is truly horrendous. I can’t imagine an entire business application of just strung together AI code being maintainable at all.
I’ll just leave this here cause this future reality is even worse since they likely don’t understand the code to begin with.
I know how to purge one off of a system, does that count?
If that’s true, how come there isn’t a single serious project written exclusively or mostly be an LLM? There isn’t a single library or remotely original application made with Claude or Gemini. Not one.
there isn’t a single serious project written exclusively or mostly by an LLM? There isn’t a single library or remotely original application
IMHO “original” here is the key. Finding yet another clone of a Web framework ported from one language to another in order to push online a basic CMS slightly faster, I can imagine this. In fact I even bet that LLM, because they manipulate words in languages and that code can be safely (even thought not cheaply) tested within containers, could be an interesting solution for that.
… but that is NOT really creating value for anyone, unless that person is technically very savvy and thus able to leverage why a framework in a language over another creates new opportunities (say safety, performances, etc). So… for somebody who is not that savvy, “just” relying on the numerous existing already existing open-source providing exactly the value they expect, there is no incentive to re-invent.
For anything that is genuinely original, i.e something that is not a port to another architecture, a translation to another language, a slight optimization, but rather something that need just a bit of reasoning and evaluating against the value created, I’m very skeptical, even less so while pouring less resources EVEN with a radical drop in costs.
Lets wait for any LLM do a single sucessful MR on Github first before starting a project on its own. Not aware of any.
My last employer had many internal tools that were fine.
They had only a moderate amount of oversight.
I had to find a new job, I’m actually thinking of walking away from software development now that there are so few jobs :(
It sucks but there’s no sense pretending this won’t have a large impact on the job landscape.
What did these tools do? I don’t see any LLm being used to creating anything working from scratch, without the human propmter doing most of the heavy lifting.
Mostly internal data cleaning stuff, close etc, which I accept is less in scope than you’re original comment.
The things you are describing sound like if-statement levels of automation, GitHub Actions with preprogrammed responses rather than LLM whatever.
If you’re worrying about being replaced by that… Go find the code, read it, and feel better.
The code was non trivial and relatively sophisticated. It performed statistical analysis on ingested data and the approach taken was statistically sound.
I was replaced by that. So was my colleague.
The job market is exceptionally tough right now and a large part of that is certainly llms.
I think taking people with statistical training out of the equation is quite dangerous, but it’s happening. In my area, everybody doing applied mathematics, statistics or analysis has been laid off.
In saying that, the produced program was quite good.
Certainly sounds more interesting than my original read of it! Sorry about that, I was grumpy.
If, 24 months from now, most people aren’t coding, it’ll be because people like him cut jobs to make a quicker buck. Or nickel.
Well if it works, means that job wasn’t that important, and the people doing that job should improve themselves to stay relevant.
Define “works.”
Because the goals of a money-hungry CEO don’t always align with those of the workers in the company itself (or often, even the consumer). I imagine this guy will think it worked just fine as he’s enjoying his golden parachute.
😜 👢
Like in Twitter?
Nah that was just a bad CEO
Define “works”?
If you’re a CEO, cutting all your talent, enshittifying your product, and pocketing the difference in new, lower costs vs standard profits might be considered as “working”.
Hmmm maybe you’re misunderstanding me.
What I mean is “coding” is basically the grunt work of development. The real skill is understanding the requirements and building something efficiently. Tbh, I hate coding.
What tools like Gemini or ChatGPT brings to the table is the ability to create small, efficient snippets of code that works. We can then just modify it to meet our more specific requirements.
This makes things much faster, for me at least. If the time comes when the AI can generate more efficient code, making my job easier, I’d count that as “works” for me.
Oh perhaps the CEOs are the ones that need to be replaced?
Yup, notice nowhere did I say they shouldnt. People read and infer what they want
job wasn’t that important
I keep telling you that changing out the battery in the smoke alarm isn’t worth the effort and you keep telling me that the house is currently on fire, we need to get out of here immediately, and I just roll my eyes because you’re only proving my point.
Sure, believe what you want to believe. You can either adapt to what’s happening, or just get phased out. AI is happening whether you like it or not. You may as well learn to use it.
AI can’t do anything that hasn’t been done before. That’s never going to change.
You can adapt, but how you adapt matters.
AI in tech companies is like a hammer or drill. You can either get rid of your entire construction staff and replace them with a few hammers, or you can keep your staff and give each worker a hammer. In the first scenario, nothing gets done, yet jobs are replaced. In the second scenario, people keep their jobs, their jobs are easier, and the house gets built.
Yup. Most of us aren’t CEOs, so we don’t have a lot of say about how most companies are run. All we can do is improve ourselves.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to be against that. They prefer to whine.
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I get why you’re enthusiastic about AI. This whole comment reads like it was AI generated.
