In a leaked recording, AWS CEO tells most developers could stop coding soon(businessinsider.com) |
In a leaked recording, AWS CEO tells most developers could stop coding soon(businessinsider.com) |
> "everyone is a programmer now"
I’ve heard this about so many things. Various tool they make everyone a programmer, or everyone a DBA. Nice dreams, that never seem to play out.
Being a programmer isn’t about the syntax, it’s about breaking problems down, so they can logically be built back up in code. I have yet to see anyone without an extensive background in programming write good spec for what they want code to do. How many assumptions are we comfortable having AI make?
On my last project I was given 1 sentence of direction, and the people giving the direction truly thought that’s all they needed to say… or it was the extent of their understanding of the topic. It took thousands of lines of code, backed by a bunch of testing and design decisions, informed by 15+ years with the company and the various personalities involved, to make that 1 sentence a reality in a way that would make sense for the organization. Call me a cynic, but I don’t see AI doing a good job with something like that in a world where “everyone is a programmer.”
I did try putting it in Copilot at the start, just to see what it dumped out. It gave me maybe 40 lines of broken code. It was the blog post version of how to do it, not an enterprise solution.
Helps devs get 'unstuck' if they get the writers block. It's absolutely changing the game for marketing, bizdev, and programmers now. Intel layoffs ~20,000, IBM ~24,000. Kind of scary.
Smart people with better tools can be a dominant force. So, yeah programmers might be looking for newer skillsets.
Operations and Sysadmins I don't forsee ever changing, especially with AI.
As you said, will be interesting to look back in five years and see.
2 seniors + AI may be able to have the same output at the 2 seniors + 6 juniors you mention. But if their competitors keep all those people and add AI, will they accelerate past the company when the layoffs by moving faster? Cost savings aren’t so great if they are at the expensive of remaining competitive in the market and retaining customers.
This is the perspective I hope takes hold. I think the layoffs you mentioned from Intel and IBM were very premature, if AI was the only basis for them.
Why not?
And they put so much effort into this side-quest. No code, low code, everyone codes, simple languages, uml-programing,graph-based programing, so easy my intern can do it, outsourced programming, code by specs, all just to get rid of that dependency that can not be- and it never works out. The complexity was inside the company and its product all along.
Amazon ain't it. "Democratizing AI" is a cover for the fact that Amazon has no models worthy of contention, so they have to save face by funding and serving up other company's models.
One could argue, "oh they have that guy from AllenAI." But where are AllenAI's code generation models? Where are AllenAI's LLMs? Nowhere.
Amazon leadership is horribly incompetent.
You could start at the first quoted remark: "If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can't exactly predict where it is — it's possible that most developers are not coding."
1. Doesn't seem to demonstrate understanding of what developers actually do.
2. Poor understanding of the limitations of the technology he's talking about.
3. Totally unrealistic timeline.
4. The kind of claim that has been made countless times, about countless technologies, and has never panned out yet. That doesn't mean it won't ever pan out, but it means it warrants a huge amount of skepticism.
And last time I checked AWS’ AI assistant won’t even handle IAM policies. So at least those jobs should be safe.
I am happy to change my title from Software Engineer to AI Software Debugger if it means more money and prestige.
I' productively using LLM coding assistants daily, but if I had to choose between having to go with the unmodified LLM output of codebase or a marketing plan, it would not even be a question.
But, really, I do think I’m right and they are wrong…
AI is just another tool whose output depends on the skill of the user. You can't put people without domain knowledge in front of a LLM and get good results. It's very good at producing output that's looks good enough to convince non experts that it can do the job.
They have to believe that AI will lower their staffing costs and start generating serious revenues because to admit otherwise means they have failed to present an honest picture to their investors.
I swear that covers an embarrassingly large fraction of tech industry reasoning.
And everybody thinks they're so smart.
Overall I would say that it’s not a revolution but definitely significant at this point. With and without copilot is as big a difference as coding in notepad vs an IDE when it comes to productivity gains for me.
AI tools has made a significant impact already. But that significant number isn't '100%'.
On the main topic, of course you can't replace a team of 8 compromised of seniors, mids, and juniors with just 2 seniors. Nowhere near that.
(mostly copilot).
> If AI makes programmers more productive, and everyone is getting it, they will need everyone to keep up with the competition.
This assumes that there's competition. When money is expensive to borrow, companies stop throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, they start being more conservative with where they expend their capital. Efficiency will absolutely be the name of the game for 2-3 of the next 5 years. I don't really see AI being a huge part of it. Writing code doesn't take up the majority of my time as a senior engineer.
When I say operations I don't mean devops, there's that too, but I mean the actual operations of an organization. The team leaders, go-getters, etc. Everybody has their niche.
Even today I got terrible advice from Claude about calling Close() on a database in Golang. This kind of stuff would screw over a junior Dev who didn't know better:
"You're right to question this, and I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. Let me clarify: If you're using a connection pool (which is typically the case with sql.Open), you generally don't need to (and shouldn't) call Close() on the *sql.DB object after each operation."
I feel like all AI is doing atm is giving me extreme paranoia from being gaslit so much lol
Asking about specific Microsoft documentation it will just immediately bail and tell me to look that up on my own because it was built on training data up to 2022 and may not be fully up to date on the latest documentation. It won’t even link to the page last time I tried. It makes up PowerShell commands and suggested completely out of date options.
So Microsoft’s own AI assistant cannot even provide accurate information about the Microsoft products it is integrated with let alone anything else.
It can be useful for a short script but anything beyond that it is slower and less reliable than doing things myself.
For some reason I don't run into hallucinations as much as other people seem to, assumedly because I'm on well trod paths, but being lied to like that is always a fear. I asked it about argocd and it told me there is a command line program for it and I didn't believe it and had to Google it for myself, which didn't save me time or energy, but I got to ask it how to do things instead of hooting hoping the documentation had the right example.