In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.
bgwalter 2 hours ago [-]
To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot.
Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely.
Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who often wrote the code that the LLM plagiarizes.
endymion-light 2 minutes ago [-]
are we using the same version of google? Unless incredibly specific I mostly see SEO optimized garbage.
3ln00b 1 hours ago [-]
I have experienced this a lot, I thought I was alone. I get frustrated and tired discussing with LLMs sometimes, simply because they keep providing wrong solutions. Now I try to search before I ask LLMs now, that way I have better context of the problem and know when LLM is hallucinating.
dboreham 32 minutes ago [-]
> an overconfident idiot
So we are close to an AI president.
jerf 13 minutes ago [-]
The accusations that politicians are already overusing AI are flying, and given the incentives I wouldn't be surprised more of the internal functioning of all modern governments are already more LLM-based AI than we'd realize. Or particularly appreciate.
By that I don't mean necessarily the nominal function of the government; I doubt the IRS is heavily LLM-based for evaluating tax forms, mostly because the pre-LLM heuristics and "what we used to call AI" are probably still much better and certainly much cheaper than any sort of "throw an LLM at the problem" could be. But I wouldn't be surprised that the amount of internal communication, whitepapers, policy drafts and statements, etc. by mass is probably already at least 1/3rd LLM-generated.
(Heck, even on Reddit I'm really starting to become weary of the posts that are clearly "Hey, AI, I'm releasing this app with these three features, please blast that out into a 15-paragraph description of it that includes lots of emojis and also describes in a general sense why performance and security are good things." and if anything the incentives slightly mitigate against that as the general commenter base is starting to get pretty frosty about this. How much more popular it must be where nobody will call you out on it and everybody is pretty anxious to figure out how to offload the torrent-of-words portion of their job onto machines.)
enraged_camel 1 hours ago [-]
>> To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot.
I'm completely drained after 30 minutes of browsing Google results, which these days consist of mountains of SEO-optimized garbage, posts on obscure forums, Stackoverflow posts and replies that are either outdated or have the wrong accepted answer... the list goes on.
pyman 6 hours ago [-]
I asked my students to write a joke about AI. Sometimes humor is the best way to get people to talk about their fears without filters. One of them wrote:
"I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concerned, and said I was hallucinating. It's not a hacker, he said. It's our new agent. While you were sleeping, it built the app we needed. Remember that promotion you always wanted? Well, good news buddy! I'm promoting you to Prompt Manager. It's half the money, but you get to watch TikTok videos all day long!'"
Hard to find any real reassurance in that story.
dakiol 3 hours ago [-]
Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money? As usual, what one brings to the company is value, and if AI-generated code needs to be prompted first and reviewed later, I don’t see how prompters in the future could earn less than software engineers now.
Prompt engineering is like singing: sure thing everyone can physically sing… now whether it’s pleasant listening to them is another topic.
cardanome 3 hours ago [-]
The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.
It can bounce back over time and maybe leave us better off than before but the short term will not be pretty. Think industrial revolution where we had to stop companies by law from working children to literal death.
Whether the working man or the capital class profits from the rise of productivity is a questions of political power.
Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field.
We already saw mass layoffs by the big tech leaders and we will see it in smaller companies as well.
Sure there will always be need for experienced devs in some fields that a security critical or that need to scale but that simple CRUD app that serves 4 consecutive users? Yeah, Greg from marketing will be able to prompt that.
It doesn't need be the case that prompt engineers are paid less money, true. But with us being so disorganized the corporations will take the opportunity to cut cost.
bgwalter 2 hours ago [-]
> Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field.
You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people.
You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.
This addresses the union part. It is true that software engineers tend to be conflict averse and not very socially aware, so many of them follow the current industry opinion like lemmings.
If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.
jopsen 57 minutes ago [-]
> If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.
Search youtube for "yes minister" :)
-----
On topic, I think it's a fair point that fighting is borderline useless. Companies that don't embrace new tech will go out of business.
That said, it's entirely unclear what the implications will be. Often new capabilities doesn't mean the industry will shrink. The industry haven't shrunk as a result of 100x increase in compute and storage, or decrease in size and power usage.
Computers just became more useful.
I don't think we should be too excited about AI writing code. We should be more excited about the kinds of program we can write now.
There is going to be a new paradigm of computer interaction.
jdright 2 hours ago [-]
> This addresses the union part.
lol, good luck with that.
you thinking that one or two people doing non organized _boycott_ is the same thing as an union tell a lot about you.
bgwalter 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't mention one or two people, I mentioned a theoretical strategy that is also employed by non-unionized bureaucracies. And I admitted that the strategy is impeded by the fact that many software developers are self-loathing people with no spine.
It is possible that obedient people need highly paid union bosses, i.e., new leaders they can follow.
jdright 1 hours ago [-]
You're wrong, obedient people are exactly the type that don't need unions, they are obedient and accept anything.
Unions are for people that don't accept anything and know that they are a target taking action alone or in non organized ways.
Unions are the way to multiply the forces and work as a group with common interests, it is for people that are not extremely selfish and egocentric.
redeeman 39 minutes ago [-]
why do you need a union? everyone should just set their personal standards for what they accept/demand, and then let the market sort it out? someone wants to work for $20/hour programming, in a fashion that can satisfy some demand? great, then I will simply NOT be doing that job. Everyone wins even though I do not get that particular job. Someone is willing to work 7 days a week as they prefer to grind to earn more money? good on them. Its not gonna be me, They win the job, I dont.
Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
aaronbaugher 26 minutes ago [-]
History, especially the industrial age, says that attitude leads to a race to the bottom. There's always someone who's willing to work for a little less, in a little shittier conditions, to pack a few more family members into a shitty apartment to make do.
If you leave it up to each worker to fend for himself with no negotiating power beyond his personal freedom to walk out, you get sweatshops and poorhouses in any industry where labor is fungible. If you want nice societies where average people can live in good homes with yards and nearby playgrounds and go to work at jobs that don't destroy their bodies and souls, then something has to keep wages at a level to support all that.
I'm not necessarily a fan of unions; I think in many cases you end up with the union screwing you from one side while the corporation screws you from the other. And the public sector unions we have today team up with the state to screw everyone else. But workers at least need the freedom to organize, or all the pressure on wages and conditions will be downward for any job that most people can do. The alternative is to have government try to keep wages and conditions up, and it's not good at that, so it just creates inflation with wages trailing behind.
paulcole 2 hours ago [-]
> The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.
Didn’t Greg-from-marketing’s life just get a lot better at the same time?
RugnirViking 3 hours ago [-]
There are people trying very hard (and succeeding) to CREATE the impression it will pay less money. Pay in general is extremely vibes based. A look at well... anything in the economy shows that. There are constant shortages of low paying jobs, and gluts of high paying jobs
giantg2 2 hours ago [-]
That's the opposite of what I'm seeing. I see plenty of openings at Walmart, bus drivers, etc. I see very few openings in many higher paying jobs (healthcare might be an exception). Even the dev jobs I'm finding are low paid at small companies, like $70k per year low (and this isn't a low cost area).
al_borland 2 hours ago [-]
I suspect it only looks like there are a lot of high paying jobs, because they are so much harder to fill, due to a there being so few qualified candidates... hence the high pay. Supply and demand.
bgwalter 2 hours ago [-]
Singing properly requires decades of training. Prompt engineering is like a 5 year old asking his parents for an ice cream. Some strategies are more successful than others.
giantg2 2 hours ago [-]
If you need fewer prompt engineers than developers to do the same work, and if prompt engineering is easier than developing meaning all developers can do it, then you need up with a massive labor oversupply.
bapak 2 hours ago [-]
How many programmers did you need 40 years ago to write MS DOS programs? As you become more productive, more is expected of you. Instead of spending 10 days coloring pixels on the screen, now you're expected to push whole UIs in the same amount of time. Whether this is enabled by high-level languages, tools or AI is irrelevant.
roland35 2 hours ago [-]
Well there's value, but also supply and demand! If prompt engineering is easier that means more people will be able to do it!
chii 3 hours ago [-]
> Prompt engineering is like singing
i think you got the analogy wrong. Not everyone can sing professionally, but most people can type text into a text-to-speech synthesis system to produce a workable song.
lubujackson 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe a better analogy is that now anyone can use autotune now and actually sing, but you still have to want to do it and put in the effort. Very few people do.
chasd00 2 hours ago [-]
"I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concerned, and said I was hallucinating. ..."
it would have been funnier if the story then took a turn and ended with it was the AI complaining about a human writing code instead of it.
giantg2 2 hours ago [-]
I don't feel this way at all. If anything, it's a morale drain. There's less cooperation since you're expected to ask AI. There's also limited career pathing since we want even fewer junior or mids, replacing them with AI.
anonzzzies 3 hours ago [-]
It is exactly how I use it personally the most: it will crap down a massive amount of plumbing that I really do not feel like doing myself at all. So when I think of procrastinating, I tell it to write something: after 30 minutes I will have something that would be procrastinate me from hours to never doing it at all. Now its 'almost done anyway, so might as well finish it'. Then I spend 3 months hacking on it while, at any point, getting the AI do the annoying stuff I know im not going to do or postpone. If only for that... I find bug fixing more rewarding and easier than writing crap from scratch anyway.
xeromal 2 hours ago [-]
I hate to admit this but I was struggling with a dbt at work and I had copilot scan what I Was doing and it found a type that was almost impossible for me to notice. lol. It really can be useful.
croes 17 minutes ago [-]
Could work in the other direction. When you are stuck and get the solution from the AI you lose the feeling of achievement because it’s done by somewhat/someone else
Kiro 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, I've been saying that AI helps with procrastination a lot.
psunavy03 21 hours ago [-]
"Great news, boss! We invented this new tool that allows nontechnical people to write code in English! Now anyone can deploy applications, and we don't have to hire all those expensive developers!"
"Wow, show it to me!"
"OK here it is. We call it COBOL."
musicale 9 hours ago [-]
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was another "AI" project in "automatic programming":
"Before 1954, almost all programming was done in machine language or assembly language. Programmers rightly regarded their work as a complex, creative art that required human inventiveness to produce an efficient program."
"The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System or briefly, FORTRAN, will comprise a large set of programs to enable the IBM 704 to accept a concise formulation of a problem in terms of a mathematical notation and to produce automatically a high speed 704 program for the solution of the problem."
Fortran promised to eliminate debugging. In 2015, I taught React is a functional programming way to create very fast, bug free apps and the project manager found ways to push us to the hair-on-fire status quo.
But it still has been immensely useful and a durable paradigm, even though usage hasn't been exactly as thought.
soco 5 hours ago [-]
Excel enters the chat
bonoboTP 1 hours ago [-]
For some strange reason Excel really managed to do it. Many many people who don't think of themselves anywhere near being a programmer, somehow get at ease in front of Excel enough that they often inadvertently and kind of unawarely end up learning programming concepts and creating much more complex computational applications than its been possible with any other tool for non-developers.
Izkata 34 minutes ago [-]
I have a theory on that, based on something I do that over the years I've learned a lot of my co-workers don't do: When I'm reading code, I have the contents of the variables all in mind and am manipulating them as I read the code. When describing it a couple of times they've said "oh, like a human compiler"... So I really don't know what's going on in their heads, but this seems like the reason I can understand code I haven't seen before faster than most of them.
Spreadsheets flip the usual interface from code-first to data-first, so the program is directly presenting the user with a version of what I'm doing in my head. It allows them to go step-by-step building up the code while focusing on what they want to do (transform data) instead of having to do it in their head while focusing on the how (the code).
You're joking but it's true. I'm sure you know that. SQL had similar claims... Declarative, say what you need and the computer will do for you. Also written in English.
charlieyu1 4 hours ago [-]
Don’t think the person was joking. It was literally the promise of COBOL
ako 21 hours ago [-]
And compared to what we had before SQL, it is much easier to use, and a lot more people are able to use it.
noworriesnate 20 hours ago [-]
But software developers often struggle to use sql and prefer using ORMs or analytical APIs like polars; the people who excel at sql are typically not programmers, they’re data engineers, DBAs, analysts, etc.
Maybe a similar bifurcation will arise where there are vibe coders who use LLMs to write everything, and there are real engineers who avoid LLMs.
Maybe we’re seeing the beginning of that with the whole bifurcation of programmers into two camps: heavy AI users and AI skeptics.
ruszki 9 hours ago [-]
What you can achieve with the standard SQL is taught on universities. The whole package. I’ve never met a developer, who struggled with that. When you use ORMs you need to follow SQL’s logic anyway. People use ORMs to avoid painful data conversions. Not to avoid the logic. Data engineers, DBAs, analysts, etc excel in specific databases, not in “SQL”.
FranzFerdiNaN 8 hours ago [-]
Ive worked in BI and data engineering my whole career and I’ve met plenty of programmers who struggled immensely with SQL once it went further than select and group by. And don’t get me started about their database design skills. It’s way too often a disaster hidden behind “it works for the software so good enough”.
Im more surprised by software engineers who do know these things than by the ones who don’t.
maccard 7 hours ago [-]
I’ve worked with gameplay programmers who can’t do simple 3D math, c++ programmers who fundamentally don’t understand pointers, backend developers who didn’t understand globals were shared state and cause race conditions, etc.
It’s not that SQL is hard, it’s that for any discipline the vast majority of people don’t have a solid grasp of the tools they’re using. Ask most tradespeople about the underlying thing they’re working with and you’ll have the same problem.
adalacelove 10 hours ago [-]
I'm a developer and:
- I hate ORMs, they are the source for a lot of obscure errors behind layers and layers of abstractions.
- I prefer analytical APIs for technical reasons, not just the language.
Reasons:
- I can compose queries, which in turn makes them easier to decompose
- It's easier to spot errors
- I avoid parsing SQL strings
- It's easier to interact with the rest of the code, both functions and objects
If I need to make just a query I gladly write SQL
eru 8 hours ago [-]
Well, the problem in ORM is the O. Objection-orientation is just a worse way to organise your data and logic than relational algebra.
It's just a shame that many languages don't support relational algebra well.
We had relations as a datatype and all the relevant operations over them (like join) in a project I was working on. It was great! Very useful for expressing business logic.
tpm 7 hours ago [-]
The problem in ORM is the M, the mapping is always lossy and a leaky abstraction.
idiotsecant 10 hours ago [-]
'real' engineers can use SQL just fine. This is a strange position to take.
collingreen 3 hours ago [-]
No true Scotsman would struggle with sql
sanderjd 9 hours ago [-]
> But software developers often struggle to use sql
Is this true? It doesn't seem true to me.
winnie_ua 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, sweet summer child.
Yes, there are so many so called developers in backend field of work who do not know how to do basic SQL. Anything bigger than s9imple WHERE clause.
I wouldn't even talk about using indexes in database.
nathanfig 20 hours ago [-]
Claude made this point while reviewing my blog for me: the mechanization of farms created a whole lot more specialization of roles. The person editing CAD diagrams of next year's combine harvester may not be a farmer strictly speaking, but farming is still where their livelihood comes from.
swader999 2 hours ago [-]
Land is scarce though. The amount of software work that needs doing might not be, it could be infinite or probably more tied to electrical capacity.
dredmorbius 20 hours ago [-]
Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production.
(Also of other food, energy, and materials sourcing: fishing, forestry, mining, etc.)
This was the insight of the French economist François Quesnay in his Tableau économique, foundation of the Physiocratic school of economics.
> Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production.
I don't think farming is special here, because food isn't special. You could make exactly the same argument for water (or even air) instead of food, and all of a sudden all our livelihoods would derive ultimately from the local municipal waterworks.
Whether that's a reductio ad absurdum of the original argument, or a valuable new perspective on the local waterworks is left as an exercise to the reader.
lipowitz 19 hours ago [-]
Removing jobs that could only be performed by those living near the particular fields with those that can be done anywhere makes jobs for the person willing to take the least satisfactory compensation for the most skill and work.
Working the summer fields was one of the least desirable jobs but still gave local students with no particular skills a good supplemental income appropriate for whichever region.
miki123211 4 hours ago [-]
depending on the job, it may also allow you to select for talent much better, which creates intense competition and raises salaries significantly.
A good example of this phenomenon is sports. Even thought it can't be done remotely, it's so talent dependent that it's often better to find a great player in a foreign country and ask them to work for you, rather than relying exclusively on local talent. If it could be a remote job, this effect would be even greater.
eru 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, but automating these away means that food becomes cheaper.
We increase the overall total prosperity with that automation.
lipowitz 5 hours ago [-]
Increasing total prosperity is the wrong goal if distribution is completely unregulated. Investor and real estate owning classes like the 1% get more, the salaries can trend down because food costs are down, in a deflation spiral the youth are perpetual dependents and/or debtors who can't possibly earn enough over day to day costs given global competition includes people with no debts or debts from an economy that was less wealthy.
20 hours ago [-]
ameliaquining 20 hours ago [-]
Is that really because of the English-esque syntax, rather than because it was a step forward in semantic expressivity? If SQL looked like, say, C#'s LINQ method syntax, would it really be harder to use?
9rx 20 hours ago [-]
> Is that really because of the English-esque syntax
Well, what we had before SQL[1] was QUEL, which is effectively the same as Alpha[2], except in "English". Given the previous assertion about what came before SQL, clearly not. I expect SQL garnered favour because it is tablational instead of relational, which is the quality that makes it easier to understand for those not heavy in the math.
[1] Originally known as SEQUEL, a fun word play on it claiming to be the QUEL successor.
[2] The godfather language created by Codd himself.
dmkolobov 8 hours ago [-]
Do you have any advice for understanding the difference between "relational" and "tablational"? I remember hearing something about how SQL is not really relational from my college professor, but we never really explored that statement.
AdieuToLogic 12 hours ago [-]
Before SQL became an industry standard, many programs which required a persistent store used things like ISAM[0], VISAM (a variant of ISAM[0]), or proprietary B-Tree libraries.
None of these had "semantic expressivity" as their strength.
> If SQL looked like, say, C#'s LINQ method syntax, would it really be harder to use?
SQL and many DSLs (JIRA…) are actually used by plenty of non-technical users. Anyone who wants to build their own reports and do basic data analysis has sufficient incentive to learn it.
They are very much the exception that proves the rule though.
rixed 7 hours ago [-]
Or QBE, "Query By Exemple", that was another try by IBM to make a query language directly usable by anyone.
veqq 20 hours ago [-]
Er, have you heard of datalog or Prolog? Declarative programming really does work. SQL was just... Botched.
sanderjd 9 hours ago [-]
I think SQL is better than datalog. I suspect this is one of those opinions that may be somewhat outside consensus on a forum like HN, but is strongly within the consensus more broadly.
glimshe 17 hours ago [-]
Yes. And I think SQL is actually pretty good for what it does. My point, as the parent's (I suppose) is that we've heard this "XYZ, which uses natural language, will kill software development" before.
dredmorbius 20 hours ago [-]
I'd long ago (1990s-era) heard that the original intent was that office secretaries would write their own SQL queries.
(I'd love for someone to substantiate or debunk this for me.)
rsynnott 1 hours ago [-]
That's always the promise of these things; non-specialists will be able to program now! This has been going on since COBOL. The one case where it arguably worked out to some extent was spreadsheets.
bazoom42 19 hours ago [-]
Early on, programming was considered secretarial work.
AdieuToLogic 13 hours ago [-]
> Early on, programming was considered secretarial work.
Incorrect.
Encoding a program was considered secretarial work, not the act of programming itself. Over time, "encoding" was shortened to "coding."
This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.
eru 8 hours ago [-]
> This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.
For some people some of the time. I don't think that's true in general.
0points 7 hours ago [-]
> This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.
It is not.
brabel 3 hours ago [-]
It used to be widely seen as such. See for example Stallmanns latest post where he mentions that. Coder was not the same as programmer, it was the lesser half of the job. Nowadays the term has lost its original meaning.
bitpush 21 hours ago [-]
Bravo. This is the exact sentiment I have, but you expressed in a way that I could never have.
Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before.
When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.
munificent 19 hours ago [-]
> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.
I disagree with the "only" part here. Imagine a distribution curve of photos with shitty photos on the left and masterpieces on the right and the height at the curve is how many photos there are to be seen at that quality.
The digital camera transition massively increased the height of the curve at all points. And thanks to things like better autofocus, better low light performance, and a radically faster iteration loop, it probably shift the low and middle ends to the right.
It even certainly increased the number number of breathtaking, life-changing photos out there. Digital cameras are game-changes for photographic journalists traveling in difficult locations.
However... the curve is so high now, the sheer volume of tolerably good photos so overwhelming, that I suspect that average person actually sees fewer great photos than they did twenty years ago. We all spend hours scrolling past nice-but-forgottable sunset shots on Instagram and miss out on the amazing stuff.
We are drowning in a sea of "pretty good". It is possible for there to be too much media. Ultimately, we all have a finite amount of attention to spend before we die.
DavidPiper 15 hours ago [-]
Thank you for describing this so eloquently.
Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware.
If we can get AIs to build "pretty good" things - or even just "pretty average" things - cheaply, then our app stores, news feeds, ad feeds, company directives, etc, will be continuously swamped with it.
eru 8 hours ago [-]
> Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware.
You can use AI to filter out the shovelware, so you never have to see it.
shinedog 11 hours ago [-]
You hit this so hard it was impossible not to recognize. In every sense there is too much "ok" shit (in every media realm) that we cannot help but miss amazing stuff. Knowing that I don't have enough time for all the incredible things that technology has enabled crushes me.
6 hours ago [-]
test6554 13 hours ago [-]
Experts warn that at current production levels, the supply of dick pics may actually outpace demand in a couple decades.
DavidPiper 11 hours ago [-]
I was under the impression that supply already vastly outstrips demand.
eru 8 hours ago [-]
Demand is very unevenly distributed. I think they are appreciated on Grindr.
kjkjadksj 12 hours ago [-]
It affects even the competent photographer. How many times do you see that photographer with all the gear sit in front of a literal statue and fire off a 30 shot burst in 2 seconds? I don’t envy these pro photo editors either today in sports. I wonder how many shots they have to go through per touchdown from all the photographers at the end zone firing a burst until everyone stands up and throws the ball back at the ref? After a certain point you probably have to just close your eyes and pick one of the shots that looks almost identical to another 400. Not a job for analysis paralysis people. I guess it sure beats having to wait for the slide film to develop.
dotancohen 6 hours ago [-]
The AI is already picking out the best photo in those 400-shot bursts.
And sometimes it is even combining elements from different photos: Alice had her eyes closed in this otherwise great shot, but in this other shot her eyes were open. A little touch-up and we've got the perfect photo.
socalgal2 9 hours ago [-]
don't you just let the AI pick? I'm only half joking. I thought that was a feature added to smartphones a year or two ago?
dijksterhuis 19 hours ago [-]
> That only made the world better
Did it?
people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.
people taking their phone out and videoing / photographing something awful happening, instead of doing something helpful.
people travel to remote areas where the population has been separated from humanity and do stupid things like leave a can of coke there, for view count.
it’s not made things better, it just made things different. whether that’s better or worse depends on your individual perspective for a given example.
so, i disagree. it hasn’t only made things better. it made some things easier. some things better. some things worse. some things harder.
someone always loses, something is always lost. would be good if more people in tech remembered that progress comes at a cost.
skeeter2020 11 hours ago [-]
Live music sucks when you're trying to watch the show and some dumb-dumb is holding their phone above their head to shoot the entire show with low-light, bad angle & terrible sound. NO ONE is going to watch that, and you wrecked the experience for many people. Put your phone away and live in the present, please...
thangalin 19 hours ago [-]
> people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.
There are other types of dances where dancers are far more interested in the dance than selfies: Lindy Hop, Blues, Balboa, Tango, Waltz, Jive, Zouk, Contra, and West Coast Swing to name a few. Here are videos from the Blues dance I help organize where none of the dancers are filming themselves:
Thank you for sharing your social media videos as evidence in a rebuttal to "camera phones are not all good; they're ubiquitous use has negative implication too". So delicious...
VonTum 14 hours ago [-]
The irony!
Though, I'll grant that there's not really a way to argue this without showing videos
kjkjadksj 12 hours ago [-]
That sort of dancing is basically a sport. You have to learn it, you have to get good at it after you learned it, and it is cardio after all. I think op was talking more about what you see in the edm scene these days. Where basically people aren’t there to dance like the old days or sing along like other genres, they are there to see a certain DJ and then they will post clips from the entire set on their instagram story. And they can do this because the dancing they are doing at the edm show is super passive kind of dancing where you are just swaying a little so you can hold the phone stably at the same time. If you were dancing like how they’d dance at the edm concerts in the 90s all rolling on molly it would be like your blues swing where its just too physical to do anything but rave around flinging your arms all around shirtless and sweaty.
ttoinou 8 hours ago [-]
Look into contact impro and ecstatic dance : cellphones are forbidden and you can dance however you like it
flashgordon 18 hours ago [-]
I would add one thing though. The pie definitely gets bigger - but i feel there is a period of "downsizing" that happens. I think this is becuase of lack of ideas. When you have tool that (say) 10xes your productivity, its not that bosses will have ideas to build 10x the number of things - they will just look to cut costs first (hello lack of imagination and high interest rates).
sarchertech 14 hours ago [-]
We’ve had many improvements that increased productivity at least as much as current LLMs, and I don’t think any of them ever temporarily caused downsizing in the total number of programmers.
pipes 19 hours ago [-]
I thought photographers don't get paid well anymore due market saturation and few skills required to get a good photo?
WJW 4 hours ago [-]
This implies photographers used to be paid well in the past, which isn't true. Like painting or rock music, photography has always been a winner-takes-all kind of market where a select few can get quite wealthy but the vast majority will be struggling forever.
kjkjadksj 12 hours ago [-]
It is still as hard as its been to get a good photo. They had full auto film cameras that could take good photos in the 70s but the devil is always the edge cases and the subconscious ability to take an evenly exposed (in the Ansel Adams definition not auto camera exposure definition), well composed image at the decisive moment. Understanding how lighting works (either natural, or different artificial light like flash or studio lighting) is also not easy.
It is pretty hard to break out but people still make names for themselves either from experience on assignments like the old days but also from instagram and other social media followings. People still need weddings shot and professional portraits taken which takes some skill in understanding the logistics of how to actually do that job well efficiently and managing your equipment.
bluefirebrand 16 hours ago [-]
> World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.
This is actually bad for existing programmers though?
Do you not see how this devalues your skills?
platevoltage 15 hours ago [-]
I see your point, but I'm having personally having a different experience.
A client of mine has gotten quite good at using Bolt and Lovable. He has since put me on 3 more projects that he dreamed up and vibe coded that would just be a figment of his imagination pre-AI.
He knows what's involved in software development, and knows that he can't take it all the way with these tools.
sarchertech 14 hours ago [-]
There are far more programmers now than in 1980, yet the average programmer makes far more (inflation adjusted) now.
Funes- 23 minutes ago [-]
And the quality of what they develop is in the gutter, on average.
kjkjadksj 12 hours ago [-]
Thank the Bangalore office for that.
FirmwareBurner 8 hours ago [-]
How much online shopping could you do from your PC in 1980? How many people had smartphones in 1980?
That's why sw devs salaries went up like crazy in our time and not in 1980.
But what new tech will we have, that will push the SW dev market demand up like internet connected PCs and smartphones did? All I see is stagnation in the near future, just maintaining or rewriting the existing shit that we have, not expanding into new markets.
WJW 4 hours ago [-]
Maintaining and rewriting existing shit is quite well paying though, and also something that AI seems to struggle with. (Funnily enough, AI seems to struggles even more with refactoring vibecoded projects than with refactoring human-written apps. What that says about the quality of the vibe coded code I don't know.)
bitpush 16 hours ago [-]
In the current state, yes. But that is also an opportunity, isn't it?
When online flight bookings came about, travel agents were displaced. The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
dijksterhuis 14 hours ago [-]
Why does every system need to be efficient?
hackernoops 12 hours ago [-]
Fractional reserve lending, rehypothecation, etc.
komali2 12 hours ago [-]
Under capitalism, because greater margins. Under not-capitalism, so as to free up resources and labor for other things or just increase available downtime for people.
Funes- 16 minutes ago [-]
>Under capitalism, because greater margins
Under capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, if you will, more efficient procedures aren't normally allowing for greater margins. There are countless examples of more exploitative and wasteful strategies yielding much greater margins than more efficient alternatives.
lupire 12 hours ago [-]
Sorry to be that guy, but would to prefer if your computer and phone each cost $5000?
dijksterhuis 30 minutes ago [-]
> The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
this is akin to the self-checkout aisles in supermarkets, some of which have been rolled back to add back in more human checkout staff.
why? people liked interacting with the inefficient humans. turns out efficiency isn’t ideal in all cases.
i wasn’t trying to argue that everything should be inefficient. i was trying to point out that not everything needs to be efficient.
two very different things, and it seems (?) you may have thought i meant the former.
tonyedgecombe 9 hours ago [-]
In some ways I would, computing lost something once normal people were allowed in.
20after4 21 hours ago [-]
And now the business of wedding / portrait photographer has become hyper-competitive. Now everyone's cousin is an amateur photographer and every phone has an almost acceptable camera built in. It is much more difficult to have a profitable photography business compared to 20 years ago.
ath92 5 hours ago [-]
The game has definitely changed. It used to be profitable to be a photographer for hire, and that’s no longer the case. But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot.
If today all you do as a programmer is open jira tickets without any kind of other human interaction, AI coding agents are bad news. If you’re just using code as a means to build products for people, it might be the best thing that has happened in a long time.
bachmeier 20 hours ago [-]
That's good to hear. Back when I got married there were some real jerks in the wedding photography business, and they weren't worried about running out of customers. Here's an actual conversation I had with one of them:
Me: "I'm getting married on [date] and I'm looking for a photographer."
Them, in the voice of Nick Burns: "We're already filling up for next year. Good luck finding a photographer this year."
Me: "I just got engaged. You never have anything open up?"
Them: "No" and hang up the phone.
The faster guys like that struggle to make a living, the better.
tonyedgecombe 9 hours ago [-]
I know a couple of professional photographers and neither of them will do weddings. It seems many of the clients are as bad as the photographers.
LargeWu 18 hours ago [-]
In the same breath, those photographers will complain about all the "amateurs" devaluing their services.
NewsaHackO 20 hours ago [-]
Definitely. What matters more is that the ability to take photos is available to more people, which is a net positive.
insane_dreamer 12 hours ago [-]
> everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.
Not sure I agree. I haven't seen much evidence of "better photography" now that it's digital instead of film. There are a million more photos taken, yes, because the cost is zero. But quantity != quality or "better", and if you're an average person, 90% those photos are in some cloud storage and rarely looked at again.
You could argue that drones have made photography better because it's enabled shots that were impossible or extremely difficult before (like certain wildlife/nature shots).
One thing digital photography did do is decimate the photographer profession because there is so much abundance of "good enough" photos - why pay someone to take good ones? (This may be a lesson for software development too.)
deanCommie 8 hours ago [-]
> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark.
In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.
With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera.
That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.
iamflimflam1 7 hours ago [-]
I think what we forget is these high level languages did open up programming to people who would have been considered “nontechnical” back in the day.
ath92 6 hours ago [-]
This is true, but:
- there are more programmers today than there were back then
- the best programmers are still those who would be considered technical back then
RickJWagner 2 hours ago [-]
Very true.
But consider this— back in the day, how many mainframe devs ( plus all important systems programmer! ) would it take to conjure up a CRUD application?
Did you forget the vsam SME or dba? The CICS programming?
Today, one person can do that in a jiffy. Much, much less manpower.
That might be what AI does.
platevoltage 15 hours ago [-]
Fast forward a couple decades and "Ok here it is. We call it Dreamweaver"
ashoeafoot 8 hours ago [-]
We now have assembler, now anyone can program.
No, wait it was called natural language coding, now anyone can code.
No, wait it was called run anything self fixing code.
No wait, simplified domain specific language.
No, wait it was uml based coding.
No, wait excel makros.
No, wait its node based drag and drop .
No, wait its LLMs.
The mental retardation of no code is strong with the deciding caste, every reincarnation must be taxed.
chii 8 hours ago [-]
The big difference with LLM is that you don't have to have a conherant and logical thought, and the LLM will "fix" that for you by morphing it into the nearest coherent expression and show you the result.
Presumably, the LLM user will have sufficient brain capacity to verify that the result works as they have imagined (however incomplete the mental picture might be). They then have an opportunity to tweak, in real time (of sorts), to make the output closer to what they want. Repeat this as many times as needed/time available, and the output gets to be quite sufficient for purpose.
This is how traditional, bespoke software development would've worked with contractor developers. Except with LLM, the turnaround time is in minutes, rather than in days or weeks.
soulofmischief 8 hours ago [-]
What's wrong with visual programming?
ashoeafoot 5 minutes ago [-]
Information density is low, some concepts are hard to display and thus absent by design from the language, the limitations of the display abd debug framework become the limitation of all code executed with them..etc., etc. list goes on forever
and the statement is still true, except that many devs nowadays are JS-only, and are too scared or lazy as shit to learn another, relatively simple language like SQL. ("it's too much work". wtf do you think a job is. it's another name for work.)
because, you know, "we have to ship yesterday" (which funnily enough, is always true, like "tomorrow never comes").
8note 10 hours ago [-]
SQL is straightforward enough, but its not the sketchy part. taking down the database so other people cant use it by running a test query is the bad part.
the explains are not nearly as straightforward to read, and the process of writing SQL is to write the explain yourself, and then try to coax the database into turning SQL you write into that explain. its a much less pleasent LLM chat experience
michaelteter 14 hours ago [-]
Having experienced several overhyped corporate knee-jerk (and further press-amplified) silver bullets, I expect this will play out about as well as the previous ones.
And by that, I mean corps will make poor decisions that will be negative for thought workers while never really threatening executive compensation.
I see this latest one somewhat like TFA author: this is a HUGE opportunity for intelligent, motivated builders. If our jobs are at risk now or have already been lost, then we might as well take this time to make some of the things we have thought about making before but were too busy to do (or too fatigued).
In the process, we may not only develop nice incomes that are independent of PHB decisions, but some will even build things that these same companies will later want to buy for $$$.
dotancohen 6 hours ago [-]
I've already started.
I've been recording to myself voice notes for years. Until now they've seemingly been near-read-only. The friction for recording them is often low (in settings where I can speak freely) but getting the information out of them has been difficult.
I'm now writing software to help me quickly get information out of the voice notes. So they'll be useful to me too, not just to future historians who happen upon my hard drive. I would not be able to devote the time to this without AI, even though most of the code and all the architecture is my own.
nathanfig 23 hours ago [-]
Hi all - I write a lot for myself but typically don't share, hence the stream-of-consciousness style.
But I thought this might be worth blogifying just for the sake of adding some counter-narrative to the doomerism I see a lot regarding the value of software developers. Feel free to tear it apart :)
jaza 2 hours ago [-]
Please share your writings more often. Nuclear attack combines, bring it on!
randfish 23 hours ago [-]
Thought it was great. Thanks for writing and submitting!
nathanfig 22 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
layer8 20 hours ago [-]
The humor was refreshing. :)
jonstewart 2 hours ago [-]
Most blog posts by devs these days are stultifying in their literal earnestness. Thanks for some sly sarcasm.
tasuki 7 hours ago [-]
I clicked only because I disagreed with the title. What a joy of an essay!
NoPicklez 12 hours ago [-]
My take just purely based on the title, I'm in the security space not a developer but I did study it during my degree.
I would say that when the fundamentals are easier to learn it becomes a great time to learn anything. I remember spending so much of my degree during software development trying to fix bugs and have things explained by trawling through online forums like many of us have. Looking for different ways of having concepts explained to me and how to apply them.
LLM's give us a fairly powerful tool to act as a sort of tutor in asking questions, feedback on code blocks, understanding concepts, where my code went wrong etc. Asking it all of the dumb questions we go trawling for.
But I can't speak to how this translates when you're a more intermediate developer.
el_benhameen 9 hours ago [-]
I have found them quite helpful in the same way. I can bounce ideas off of them or say “here’s my understanding of this; in what ways am I incorrect?”. I don’t trust them to have pinpoint accuracy on complex problems, but given the way they’re trained, I do trust them to be directionally correct. That makes getting past hangups faster and leads me to ask more, better questions of myself, which I think means I learn faster.
KurSix 4 hours ago [-]
Yep, once you hit intermediate and beyond, I think it shifts more to using them as an accelerant
dehrmann 21 hours ago [-]
The farming quote is interesting, but one of the Jevons paradox requirements is a highly elastic demand curve, and food is inelastic.
The open questions right now are how much of a demand is there for more software, and where do AI capabilities plateau.
9rx 20 hours ago [-]
Either way, as quite visibility seen by all the late-1800s mansions still lining the country roads, the era of farmers being "overpaid", as the link puts it, came about 50-75 years after the combine was invented. If the metaphor is to hold, we can assume that developers are currently poor as compared to what the LLM future holds for them.
But, there is a key distinction that we would be remiss to not take note of: By definition, farmers are the owners of the business. Most software developers aren't owners, just lowly employees. If history is to repeat, it is likely that, as usual, the owners are those who will prosper from the advancement.
slt2021 20 hours ago [-]
demand for food is very elastic. if beef becomes more expensive, cheaper protein options get more demand (chicken, pork, tofu, beans).
fruits and all non-essential food items are famously very elastic, and constitute large share of the spending.
for example: if cheap cereal becomes abundant, it is only at the cost of poor quality, so demand for high quality cereal will increase.
the LLM driven software engineering will continuously increase the bar for quality and demand for high quality software
7 hours ago [-]
fulafel 8 hours ago [-]
Demand for eaten calories is not very elastic but plentiful food crops lead to piping crops through the wasteful, environmentally harmful & unethical thingthat is meat production.
giraffe_lady 21 hours ago [-]
Reported numbers vary but household food waste seems to be fairly high in developed economies, so food demand might be more elastic than intuition would expect.
dredmorbius 20 hours ago [-]
I've seen consistent values for food waste reported for at least the past 40 years, if not the past 80, in various sources. I suspect it's something of a constant. One observation I've seen is that food wastage now occurs far later in the processing cycle, which is to say, after far more resources (transport, processing, refrigeration, cooking) have been invested in it.
In the long term, food demand is elastic in that populations tend to grow.
kwk1 20 hours ago [-]
Perhaps we should say something like "food demand has an elasticity floor."
giraffe_lady 17 hours ago [-]
For sure.
eqvinox 6 hours ago [-]
Metaphors are fun, they "feel" meaningful, but… you still need to back that up.
> mechanized farm equipment
Sure, that could be a valid analogy.
Or maybe we invented CAD software for mechanical engineering, where we were making engineering drawings by hand before?
And that doesn't quite ring the same way in terms of obsoleting engineers…
46 minutes ago [-]
clpmsf 39 minutes ago [-]
I don't think that now is the best time to learn software development, but I do think that now is the best time to learn computer science.
abalashov 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if I agree with every aspect of the framing here; specifically, I don't think the efficiency gains are anywhere on par with a combine harvester.
However, I do agree that the premium shifts from mere "coding" ability -- we already had a big look into this with the offshoring wave two decades ago -- to domain expertise, comprehension of the business logic, ability to translate fluidly between different kinds of technical and nontechnical stakeholders, and original problem-solving ability.
nathanfig 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah I think the combine-harvester analogy is tempting because it's so easy to visualize how wheat can scale over a big square field and project that visual onto lines of code generated on a big square screen... forgetting that lines-of-code-generated is not inherently useful.
temporallobe 19 hours ago [-]
Essentially it’s the same as it always was. Back in the day, Low-code or No-code solutions implemented by non-technical people have always resulted in engineers having to come in behind them to clean up their mess. I’ve had quite the lucrative career doing just that.
jaza 2 hours ago [-]
Hahaha... so ChatGPT-generated Node / React apps is the new Excel with VBA macros!
12 hours ago [-]
nathanfig 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah, with current-state AI I foresee more such opportunities.
Ekaros 17 hours ago [-]
I think I will have good while in security. That is pointing all the mistakes and faults... And telling why something AI came up might not fully solve the problem.
So much room left. As I doubt every developer will double check things every time by asking.
11 hours ago [-]
prisenco 19 hours ago [-]
Upwork is already filling up with people who have vibe-coded their way into a pit and need experienced developers to pull them out.
billy99k 19 hours ago [-]
You can find good contract on Upwork, but you need to go through lots of bad ones. I find around 5 good contracts there per year. I find that even when a client agrees on a rate, Upwork has the reputation of finding inexpensive workers, and you will get many clients trying to pay you less.
I'm also a bit tired of running into people that are 'starting a contracting firm' and have 0 clients or direction yet and just want to waste your time.
nathanfig 19 hours ago [-]
Really! That could make for some really interesting stories. Fascinating to think of LLMs as a customer acquisition pipeline for developers.
platevoltage 15 hours ago [-]
I've snagged at least one of them.
rossdavidh 14 hours ago [-]
All of this is good reason that orgs _shouldn't_ be laying off developers, but none of it is a reason that they won't/aren't. In any case, I see more "if they're remote why can't they be on the low-wage side of the planet" at the moment, than I do "use AI instead of a developer", although they are no doubt related.
The more awkward truth is that most of what developers have been paid to do in the 21st century was, from the larger perspective, wasted. We mostly spent a lot of developer time in harvesting attention, not in actually making anything truly useful.
MichaelZuo 14 hours ago [-]
How does that follow…?
Most organizations do derive net benefit from laying off the below average and hiring the above average for a given compensation range, as long as the turnover is not too high.
And this delta increases when the above average can augment themselves more effectively, so it seems we should expect an even more intense sorting.
mobiuscog 2 hours ago [-]
> The day we stop valuing human contribution is the day alignment has failed.
Unfortunately, that's many businesses already, even before AI.
It's all just one big factory line. Always has been (to those at the top).
KurSix 4 hours ago [-]
LLMs are amazing tools, but they don't (yet) replace deep understanding or critical thinking. And yeah, it is a super fun time to be learning/building.
boxed 7 hours ago [-]
> And like mechanized farm equipment, LLMs are cheap, plentiful, getting smaller every day, and- most importantly- require no training to operate.
I... assume that was meant sarcastically, but it's not at all clear from context I think.
karczex 22 hours ago [-]
It's like "we invented Fortran so there will be no need for so many developers"
nathanfig 22 hours ago [-]
An interesting parallel because there were undoubtedly some people who worried we would lose something important in the craft of instruction-level programming, and almost certainly we have in relative terms. But in absolute numbers I am confident we have more low-level programmers than we did before Fortran.
And if I were to jump into instruction-level programming today I would start by asking an LLM where to begin...
marcosdumay 19 hours ago [-]
Fortran was a much larger jump in productivity than agentic coding...
KurSix 4 hours ago [-]
Yet here we are, with more demand for developers than ever
giantg2 2 hours ago [-]
This article seems to ignore the 6% sector unemployment, massive layoffs, and the terrible interview processes.
Leo-thorne 7 hours ago [-]
Now really feels like a good time to start learning how to code. I used to get completely lost reading documentation, but with Copilot, I just type a few lines and it helps fill in the logic. It feels like having a more experienced person sitting next to me.
That said, I still try to figure out the logic myself first, then let AI help polish or improve it. It is a bit slower, but when something breaks, at least I know why.
AI has definitely lowered the barrier. But whether you can actually walk through the door still depends on you.
yodsanklai 21 hours ago [-]
> What do you do while awaiting the agents writing your code?
I browse the web. Eventually, I review the agent code and more often than not, I rewrite it.
I also remember this! Maybe a subconscious influence
ByteDrifter 6 hours ago [-]
Reading this reminded me how much the learning curve is flattening. You can now learn by doing and debugging AI output. That’s a very different entry point from five years ago. Less lonely, more interactive.
SeanDav 22 hours ago [-]
>> "ChadGPT"
There actually is a ChadGPT but I assume the OP meant ChatGPT
nathanfig 22 hours ago [-]
Oh I should have known - yeah I was just being facetious
irrational 9 hours ago [-]
> and historical romance novels will rightly remember us as rugged and sexy.
Damn straight we are.
agentultra 11 hours ago [-]
If you’re going to use LLMs to learn software development, great! Welcome!
Just, don’t skip out on learning the fundamentals. There’s no royal road to knowledge and skill. No shortcuts. No speed running, downloading kung fu, no passing go.
Why?
Because the only thing LLMs do is hallucinate. Often what they generate is what you’re looking for. It’s the right answer!
But if you don’t know what and L1 cache is or how to lay out data for SIMD; no amount of yelling at the bot is going to fix the poor performance, the security errors, and the logic errors. If you don’t know what to ask you won’t know what you’re looking at. And you won’t know how to fix it.
So just remember to learn the fundamentals while you’re out there herding the combine space harvesters… or whatever it is kids do these days.
everyone 8 hours ago [-]
I learned programming in 2013, I was asking questions on stack overflow constantly while learning, people there were super friendly and supportive and answered my questions. SO was pivotal for me learning so fast.. Ive been a game programmer ever since.. This year I learned web-dev and made my 1st commercial web app. SO is totally dead though, utterly useless these days, but I used chatGPT to fill the same role and it worked great. Its a shame about SO though.
spacecadet 2 hours ago [-]
Engineering problems are human problems. For now I guess? I saw a missinfo headline recently to the toon of, "AI is after all the water in X country" and I thought about the Anthropic paper where the model blackmailed the engineer. And then the Matrix. Cry, lol?
rr808 13 hours ago [-]
The management at my corporate job literally say in our townhalls that they expect AI to increase productivity and reduce costs. Makes logical sense to me, the glory days of high wages are over.
vincenthwt 12 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about the high wages of software engineers or management? Makes sense to me— the glory days of high management and CEO salaries are over.
22 hours ago [-]
somethingreen 4 hours ago [-]
Now might be the last time to learn software development.
ramesh31 1 hours ago [-]
>Now might be the best time to learn software development
Always has been.
revskill 9 hours ago [-]
The hardest part is debugging.
ed_mercer 6 hours ago [-]
In theory one should be able to hand this over to a MCP debugging server.
alganet 19 hours ago [-]
> and now with far greater reach and speed than ever before
I heard that before. Borland Delphi, Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Flash and so on. I learned how in 5 years or so, these new technologies would dominate everything.
Then I learned that two scenarios exist. One of them is "being replaced by a tool", the other is "being orphaned by a tool". You need to be prepared for both.
nathanfig 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, if you built your career on FrontPage you have probably had a bad time. Many such cases.
That said, even if the specific products like Cursor or ChatGPT are not here in 5 years, I am confident we are not going to collectively dismiss the utility of LLMs.
rsynnott 57 minutes ago [-]
I'm... slightly dubious, honestly, just because, historically, confident predictions of "this is the future of programming!" are almost always wrong. Throughout the 90s and into the early noughties, say, there was a very, very strong idea that things like VB and Delphi and Frontpage and Flash, where code was essentially intermingled with the UI, were The Future. And then all of that just died, to such an extent that there's really nothing like it at all today. Then there was the whole UML thing, and the "everything will run on XML" thing in the mid to late noughties...
alganet 18 hours ago [-]
I can see it being useful for summarization, or creative writing. What makes you so sure that LLMs will be useful _for programming_ in the long run?
wohoef 3 hours ago [-]
“The only weights I use are at the gym”
Lol
11 hours ago [-]
freekh 22 hours ago [-]
Nice article! Reflects my views as well!
fuzztester 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mirkodrummer 15 hours ago [-]
> LLMs really are like combine harvesters; allowing one to do the work of many.
Heck I'm so tired of statements like this, many who? It's already a lot an LLM that automate/help the boring/tedious part of my job, I have yet to see taking over 2, 5 or 10 of my collegues, just knowing what a hawful lot these tiredlessly dudes do I couldn't ever imagine doing also their job. imo such statements have very short shelf life
Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely.
Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who often wrote the code that the LLM plagiarizes.
So we are close to an AI president.
By that I don't mean necessarily the nominal function of the government; I doubt the IRS is heavily LLM-based for evaluating tax forms, mostly because the pre-LLM heuristics and "what we used to call AI" are probably still much better and certainly much cheaper than any sort of "throw an LLM at the problem" could be. But I wouldn't be surprised that the amount of internal communication, whitepapers, policy drafts and statements, etc. by mass is probably already at least 1/3rd LLM-generated.
(Heck, even on Reddit I'm really starting to become weary of the posts that are clearly "Hey, AI, I'm releasing this app with these three features, please blast that out into a 15-paragraph description of it that includes lots of emojis and also describes in a general sense why performance and security are good things." and if anything the incentives slightly mitigate against that as the general commenter base is starting to get pretty frosty about this. How much more popular it must be where nobody will call you out on it and everybody is pretty anxious to figure out how to offload the torrent-of-words portion of their job onto machines.)
I'm completely drained after 30 minutes of browsing Google results, which these days consist of mountains of SEO-optimized garbage, posts on obscure forums, Stackoverflow posts and replies that are either outdated or have the wrong accepted answer... the list goes on.
"I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concerned, and said I was hallucinating. It's not a hacker, he said. It's our new agent. While you were sleeping, it built the app we needed. Remember that promotion you always wanted? Well, good news buddy! I'm promoting you to Prompt Manager. It's half the money, but you get to watch TikTok videos all day long!'"
Hard to find any real reassurance in that story.
Prompt engineering is like singing: sure thing everyone can physically sing… now whether it’s pleasant listening to them is another topic.
It can bounce back over time and maybe leave us better off than before but the short term will not be pretty. Think industrial revolution where we had to stop companies by law from working children to literal death.
Whether the working man or the capital class profits from the rise of productivity is a questions of political power.
We have seen that productivity rises do not increase work compensation anymore: https://substack.com/home/post/p-165655726
Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field.
We already saw mass layoffs by the big tech leaders and we will see it in smaller companies as well.
Sure there will always be need for experienced devs in some fields that a security critical or that need to scale but that simple CRUD app that serves 4 consecutive users? Yeah, Greg from marketing will be able to prompt that.
It doesn't need be the case that prompt engineers are paid less money, true. But with us being so disorganized the corporations will take the opportunity to cut cost.
You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people.
You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.
This addresses the union part. It is true that software engineers tend to be conflict averse and not very socially aware, so many of them follow the current industry opinion like lemmings.
If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.
Search youtube for "yes minister" :)
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On topic, I think it's a fair point that fighting is borderline useless. Companies that don't embrace new tech will go out of business.
That said, it's entirely unclear what the implications will be. Often new capabilities doesn't mean the industry will shrink. The industry haven't shrunk as a result of 100x increase in compute and storage, or decrease in size and power usage.
Computers just became more useful.
I don't think we should be too excited about AI writing code. We should be more excited about the kinds of program we can write now. There is going to be a new paradigm of computer interaction.
lol, good luck with that.
you thinking that one or two people doing non organized _boycott_ is the same thing as an union tell a lot about you.
It is possible that obedient people need highly paid union bosses, i.e., new leaders they can follow.
Unions are for people that don't accept anything and know that they are a target taking action alone or in non organized ways.
Unions are the way to multiply the forces and work as a group with common interests, it is for people that are not extremely selfish and egocentric.
Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
If you leave it up to each worker to fend for himself with no negotiating power beyond his personal freedom to walk out, you get sweatshops and poorhouses in any industry where labor is fungible. If you want nice societies where average people can live in good homes with yards and nearby playgrounds and go to work at jobs that don't destroy their bodies and souls, then something has to keep wages at a level to support all that.
I'm not necessarily a fan of unions; I think in many cases you end up with the union screwing you from one side while the corporation screws you from the other. And the public sector unions we have today team up with the state to screw everyone else. But workers at least need the freedom to organize, or all the pressure on wages and conditions will be downward for any job that most people can do. The alternative is to have government try to keep wages and conditions up, and it's not good at that, so it just creates inflation with wages trailing behind.
Didn’t Greg-from-marketing’s life just get a lot better at the same time?
i think you got the analogy wrong. Not everyone can sing professionally, but most people can type text into a text-to-speech synthesis system to produce a workable song.
it would have been funnier if the story then took a turn and ended with it was the AI complaining about a human writing code instead of it.
"Wow, show it to me!"
"OK here it is. We call it COBOL."
"Before 1954, almost all programming was done in machine language or assembly language. Programmers rightly regarded their work as a complex, creative art that required human inventiveness to produce an efficient program."
-John Backus, "The History of Fortran I, II, and III", https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800025.1198345
"The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System or briefly, FORTRAN, will comprise a large set of programs to enable the IBM 704 to accept a concise formulation of a problem in terms of a mathematical notation and to produce automatically a high speed 704 program for the solution of the problem."
-IBM, "Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN", http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/10...
"FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970011
But it still has been immensely useful and a durable paradigm, even though usage hasn't been exactly as thought.
Spreadsheets flip the usual interface from code-first to data-first, so the program is directly presenting the user with a version of what I'm doing in my head. It allows them to go step-by-step building up the code while focusing on what they want to do (transform data) instead of having to do it in their head while focusing on the how (the code).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOO31qFmi9A
Maybe a similar bifurcation will arise where there are vibe coders who use LLMs to write everything, and there are real engineers who avoid LLMs.
Maybe we’re seeing the beginning of that with the whole bifurcation of programmers into two camps: heavy AI users and AI skeptics.
Im more surprised by software engineers who do know these things than by the ones who don’t.
It’s not that SQL is hard, it’s that for any discipline the vast majority of people don’t have a solid grasp of the tools they’re using. Ask most tradespeople about the underlying thing they’re working with and you’ll have the same problem.
Reasons: - I can compose queries, which in turn makes them easier to decompose - It's easier to spot errors - I avoid parsing SQL strings - It's easier to interact with the rest of the code, both functions and objects
If I need to make just a query I gladly write SQL
It's just a shame that many languages don't support relational algebra well.
We had relations as a datatype and all the relevant operations over them (like join) in a project I was working on. It was great! Very useful for expressing business logic.
Is this true? It doesn't seem true to me.
Yes, there are so many so called developers in backend field of work who do not know how to do basic SQL. Anything bigger than s9imple WHERE clause.
I wouldn't even talk about using indexes in database.
(Also of other food, energy, and materials sourcing: fishing, forestry, mining, etc.)
This was the insight of the French economist François Quesnay in his Tableau économique, foundation of the Physiocratic school of economics.
> Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production.
I don't think farming is special here, because food isn't special. You could make exactly the same argument for water (or even air) instead of food, and all of a sudden all our livelihoods would derive ultimately from the local municipal waterworks.
Whether that's a reductio ad absurdum of the original argument, or a valuable new perspective on the local waterworks is left as an exercise to the reader.
Working the summer fields was one of the least desirable jobs but still gave local students with no particular skills a good supplemental income appropriate for whichever region.
A good example of this phenomenon is sports. Even thought it can't be done remotely, it's so talent dependent that it's often better to find a great player in a foreign country and ask them to work for you, rather than relying exclusively on local talent. If it could be a remote job, this effect would be even greater.
We increase the overall total prosperity with that automation.
Well, what we had before SQL[1] was QUEL, which is effectively the same as Alpha[2], except in "English". Given the previous assertion about what came before SQL, clearly not. I expect SQL garnered favour because it is tablational instead of relational, which is the quality that makes it easier to understand for those not heavy in the math.
[1] Originally known as SEQUEL, a fun word play on it claiming to be the QUEL successor.
[2] The godfather language created by Codd himself.
None of these had "semantic expressivity" as their strength.
> If SQL looked like, say, C#'s LINQ method syntax, would it really be harder to use?
Yes.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM
They are very much the exception that proves the rule though.
(I'd love for someone to substantiate or debunk this for me.)
Incorrect.
Encoding a program was considered secretarial work, not the act of programming itself. Over time, "encoding" was shortened to "coding."
This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.
For some people some of the time. I don't think that's true in general.
It is not.
Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before.
When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.
I disagree with the "only" part here. Imagine a distribution curve of photos with shitty photos on the left and masterpieces on the right and the height at the curve is how many photos there are to be seen at that quality.
The digital camera transition massively increased the height of the curve at all points. And thanks to things like better autofocus, better low light performance, and a radically faster iteration loop, it probably shift the low and middle ends to the right.
It even certainly increased the number number of breathtaking, life-changing photos out there. Digital cameras are game-changes for photographic journalists traveling in difficult locations.
However... the curve is so high now, the sheer volume of tolerably good photos so overwhelming, that I suspect that average person actually sees fewer great photos than they did twenty years ago. We all spend hours scrolling past nice-but-forgottable sunset shots on Instagram and miss out on the amazing stuff.
We are drowning in a sea of "pretty good". It is possible for there to be too much media. Ultimately, we all have a finite amount of attention to spend before we die.
Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware.
If we can get AIs to build "pretty good" things - or even just "pretty average" things - cheaply, then our app stores, news feeds, ad feeds, company directives, etc, will be continuously swamped with it.
You can use AI to filter out the shovelware, so you never have to see it.
And sometimes it is even combining elements from different photos: Alice had her eyes closed in this otherwise great shot, but in this other shot her eyes were open. A little touch-up and we've got the perfect photo.
Did it?
people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.
people taking their phone out and videoing / photographing something awful happening, instead of doing something helpful.
people travel to remote areas where the population has been separated from humanity and do stupid things like leave a can of coke there, for view count.
it’s not made things better, it just made things different. whether that’s better or worse depends on your individual perspective for a given example.
so, i disagree. it hasn’t only made things better. it made some things easier. some things better. some things worse. some things harder.
someone always loses, something is always lost. would be good if more people in tech remembered that progress comes at a cost.
There are other types of dances where dancers are far more interested in the dance than selfies: Lindy Hop, Blues, Balboa, Tango, Waltz, Jive, Zouk, Contra, and West Coast Swing to name a few. Here are videos from the Blues dance I help organize where none of the dancers are filming themselves:
* https://www.facebook.com/61558260095218/videos/7409340551418...
* https://www.facebook.com/reel/3659488930863692
Though, I'll grant that there's not really a way to argue this without showing videos
It is pretty hard to break out but people still make names for themselves either from experience on assignments like the old days but also from instagram and other social media followings. People still need weddings shot and professional portraits taken which takes some skill in understanding the logistics of how to actually do that job well efficiently and managing your equipment.
This is actually bad for existing programmers though?
Do you not see how this devalues your skills?
A client of mine has gotten quite good at using Bolt and Lovable. He has since put me on 3 more projects that he dreamed up and vibe coded that would just be a figment of his imagination pre-AI.
He knows what's involved in software development, and knows that he can't take it all the way with these tools.
That's why sw devs salaries went up like crazy in our time and not in 1980.
But what new tech will we have, that will push the SW dev market demand up like internet connected PCs and smartphones did? All I see is stagnation in the near future, just maintaining or rewriting the existing shit that we have, not expanding into new markets.
When online flight bookings came about, travel agents were displaced. The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
Under capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, if you will, more efficient procedures aren't normally allowing for greater margins. There are countless examples of more exploitative and wasteful strategies yielding much greater margins than more efficient alternatives.
this is akin to the self-checkout aisles in supermarkets, some of which have been rolled back to add back in more human checkout staff.
why? people liked interacting with the inefficient humans. turns out efficiency isn’t ideal in all cases.
i wasn’t trying to argue that everything should be inefficient. i was trying to point out that not everything needs to be efficient.
two very different things, and it seems (?) you may have thought i meant the former.
If today all you do as a programmer is open jira tickets without any kind of other human interaction, AI coding agents are bad news. If you’re just using code as a means to build products for people, it might be the best thing that has happened in a long time.
Me: "I'm getting married on [date] and I'm looking for a photographer."
Them, in the voice of Nick Burns: "We're already filling up for next year. Good luck finding a photographer this year."
Me: "I just got engaged. You never have anything open up?"
Them: "No" and hang up the phone.
The faster guys like that struggle to make a living, the better.
Not sure I agree. I haven't seen much evidence of "better photography" now that it's digital instead of film. There are a million more photos taken, yes, because the cost is zero. But quantity != quality or "better", and if you're an average person, 90% those photos are in some cloud storage and rarely looked at again.
You could argue that drones have made photography better because it's enabled shots that were impossible or extremely difficult before (like certain wildlife/nature shots).
One thing digital photography did do is decimate the photographer profession because there is so much abundance of "good enough" photos - why pay someone to take good ones? (This may be a lesson for software development too.)
I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark.
In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.
With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera.
That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.
But consider this— back in the day, how many mainframe devs ( plus all important systems programmer! ) would it take to conjure up a CRUD application?
Did you forget the vsam SME or dba? The CICS programming?
Today, one person can do that in a jiffy. Much, much less manpower.
That might be what AI does.
No, wait it was called natural language coding, now anyone can code.
No, wait it was called run anything self fixing code. No wait, simplified domain specific language.
No, wait it was uml based coding.
No, wait excel makros.
No, wait its node based drag and drop .
No, wait its LLMs.
The mental retardation of no code is strong with the deciding caste, every reincarnation must be taxed.
Presumably, the LLM user will have sufficient brain capacity to verify that the result works as they have imagined (however incomplete the mental picture might be). They then have an opportunity to tweak, in real time (of sorts), to make the output closer to what they want. Repeat this as many times as needed/time available, and the output gets to be quite sufficient for purpose.
This is how traditional, bespoke software development would've worked with contractor developers. Except with LLM, the turnaround time is in minutes, rather than in days or weeks.
today:
s/COBOL/SQL
and the statement is still true, except that many devs nowadays are JS-only, and are too scared or lazy as shit to learn another, relatively simple language like SQL. ("it's too much work". wtf do you think a job is. it's another name for work.)
because, you know, "we have to ship yesterday" (which funnily enough, is always true, like "tomorrow never comes").
the explains are not nearly as straightforward to read, and the process of writing SQL is to write the explain yourself, and then try to coax the database into turning SQL you write into that explain. its a much less pleasent LLM chat experience
And by that, I mean corps will make poor decisions that will be negative for thought workers while never really threatening executive compensation.
I see this latest one somewhat like TFA author: this is a HUGE opportunity for intelligent, motivated builders. If our jobs are at risk now or have already been lost, then we might as well take this time to make some of the things we have thought about making before but were too busy to do (or too fatigued).
In the process, we may not only develop nice incomes that are independent of PHB decisions, but some will even build things that these same companies will later want to buy for $$$.
I've been recording to myself voice notes for years. Until now they've seemingly been near-read-only. The friction for recording them is often low (in settings where I can speak freely) but getting the information out of them has been difficult.
I'm now writing software to help me quickly get information out of the voice notes. So they'll be useful to me too, not just to future historians who happen upon my hard drive. I would not be able to devote the time to this without AI, even though most of the code and all the architecture is my own.
But I thought this might be worth blogifying just for the sake of adding some counter-narrative to the doomerism I see a lot regarding the value of software developers. Feel free to tear it apart :)
I would say that when the fundamentals are easier to learn it becomes a great time to learn anything. I remember spending so much of my degree during software development trying to fix bugs and have things explained by trawling through online forums like many of us have. Looking for different ways of having concepts explained to me and how to apply them.
LLM's give us a fairly powerful tool to act as a sort of tutor in asking questions, feedback on code blocks, understanding concepts, where my code went wrong etc. Asking it all of the dumb questions we go trawling for.
But I can't speak to how this translates when you're a more intermediate developer.
The open questions right now are how much of a demand is there for more software, and where do AI capabilities plateau.
But, there is a key distinction that we would be remiss to not take note of: By definition, farmers are the owners of the business. Most software developers aren't owners, just lowly employees. If history is to repeat, it is likely that, as usual, the owners are those who will prosper from the advancement.
fruits and all non-essential food items are famously very elastic, and constitute large share of the spending.
for example: if cheap cereal becomes abundant, it is only at the cost of poor quality, so demand for high quality cereal will increase.
the LLM driven software engineering will continuously increase the bar for quality and demand for high quality software
In the long term, food demand is elastic in that populations tend to grow.
> mechanized farm equipment
Sure, that could be a valid analogy.
Or maybe we invented CAD software for mechanical engineering, where we were making engineering drawings by hand before?
And that doesn't quite ring the same way in terms of obsoleting engineers…
However, I do agree that the premium shifts from mere "coding" ability -- we already had a big look into this with the offshoring wave two decades ago -- to domain expertise, comprehension of the business logic, ability to translate fluidly between different kinds of technical and nontechnical stakeholders, and original problem-solving ability.
So much room left. As I doubt every developer will double check things every time by asking.
I'm also a bit tired of running into people that are 'starting a contracting firm' and have 0 clients or direction yet and just want to waste your time.
The more awkward truth is that most of what developers have been paid to do in the 21st century was, from the larger perspective, wasted. We mostly spent a lot of developer time in harvesting attention, not in actually making anything truly useful.
Most organizations do derive net benefit from laying off the below average and hiring the above average for a given compensation range, as long as the turnover is not too high.
And this delta increases when the above average can augment themselves more effectively, so it seems we should expect an even more intense sorting.
Unfortunately, that's many businesses already, even before AI. It's all just one big factory line. Always has been (to those at the top).
I... assume that was meant sarcastically, but it's not at all clear from context I think.
And if I were to jump into instruction-level programming today I would start by asking an LLM where to begin...
That said, I still try to figure out the logic myself first, then let AI help polish or improve it. It is a bit slower, but when something breaks, at least I know why.
AI has definitely lowered the barrier. But whether you can actually walk through the door still depends on you.
I browse the web. Eventually, I review the agent code and more often than not, I rewrite it.
There actually is a ChadGPT but I assume the OP meant ChatGPT
Damn straight we are.
Just, don’t skip out on learning the fundamentals. There’s no royal road to knowledge and skill. No shortcuts. No speed running, downloading kung fu, no passing go.
Why?
Because the only thing LLMs do is hallucinate. Often what they generate is what you’re looking for. It’s the right answer!
But if you don’t know what and L1 cache is or how to lay out data for SIMD; no amount of yelling at the bot is going to fix the poor performance, the security errors, and the logic errors. If you don’t know what to ask you won’t know what you’re looking at. And you won’t know how to fix it.
So just remember to learn the fundamentals while you’re out there herding the combine space harvesters… or whatever it is kids do these days.
Always has been.
I heard that before. Borland Delphi, Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Flash and so on. I learned how in 5 years or so, these new technologies would dominate everything.
Then I learned that two scenarios exist. One of them is "being replaced by a tool", the other is "being orphaned by a tool". You need to be prepared for both.
That said, even if the specific products like Cursor or ChatGPT are not here in 5 years, I am confident we are not going to collectively dismiss the utility of LLMs.
Lol
Heck I'm so tired of statements like this, many who? It's already a lot an LLM that automate/help the boring/tedious part of my job, I have yet to see taking over 2, 5 or 10 of my collegues, just knowing what a hawful lot these tiredlessly dudes do I couldn't ever imagine doing also their job. imo such statements have very short shelf life