- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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A person who hasn’t debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of “AI”.
Oh no. Anyways.
It’s even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.
I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like “Eh, don’t worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing and screw things up on purpose.” Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.
As an end user with little knowledge about programming, I’ve seen how hard it is for programmers to get things working well many times over the years. AI as a time saver for certain simple tasks, sure, but no way in hell they’ll be replacing humans in my lifetime.
Yeah DHH is a problematic person to root for.
I have mixed feelings about that company. They have some interesting things “going against the flow” like ditching the cloud and going back to on prem, hating on microservices, advocating against taking money from VCs, and now hiring juniors. On the other hand, the guy is a Musk fanboy and they push some anti-DEI bullshit. Also he’s a TypeScript hater for some reason…
The day that AI can program perfectly is the day it can improve the itself perfectly and it’s the day that we’ll all be fucked.
I personally vote for some sort of direct brain interface (no Elmo, you’re not allowed to play) that DOES allow direct recall of queries but does NOT allow ads ffs) that allows us to grow with AI in intelligence. If you can’t beat em (we can’t), join em.
I highly doubt some of these rich fucks would pass up an opportunity to put ads straight into people’s brains.
AI is certainly a very handy tool and has helped me out a lot but anybody who thinks “vibe programming” (i.e. programming from ignorance) is a good idea or will save money is woefully misinformed. Hire good programmers, let them use AI if they like, but trust the programmer’s judgement over some AI.
That’s because you NEED that experience to notice the AI is outputting garbage. Otherwise it looks superficially okay but the code is terrible, or fragile, or not even doing what you asked it properly. e.g. if I asked Gemini to generate a web server with Jetty it might output something correct or an unholy mess of Jetty 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 with annotations and/or programmatic styles, or the correct / incorrect pom dependencies.
AI is great for learning a language, partly because it’s the right combination of useful and stupid.
It’s familiar with the language in a way that would take some serious time to attain, but it also hallucinates things that don’t exist and its solution to debugging something often ends up being literally just changing variable names or doing the same wrong things in different ways. But seeing what works and what doesn’t and catching it when it’s spiraling is a pretty good learning experience. You can get a project rolling while you’re learning how to implement what you want to do without spending weeks or months wondering how. It’s great for filling gaps and giving enough context to start understanding how a language works by sheer immersion, especially if the application of that language comes robust debugging built in.
I’ve been using it to help me learn and implement GDscript while I’m working on my game and it’s been incredibly helpful. Stuff that would have taken weeks of wading through YouTube tutorials and banging my head against complex concepts and math that I just don’t have I can instead work my way through in days or even hours.
Gradually I’m getting more and more familiar with how the language works by doing the thing, and when it screws up and doesn’t know what it’s talking about I can see that in Godot’s debugging and in the actual execution of the code in-game. For a solo indie dev who’s doing all the art, writing, and music myself, having a tool to help me move my codebase forward while I learn has been pretty great. It also means that I can put systems in place that are relevant to the project so my modding partner who doesn’t know GDScript yet has something relevant to look at and learn from by looking through the project’s git.
But if I knew nothing about programming? If I wasn’t learning enough to fix its mistakes and sometimes abandon it entirely to find solutions to things it can’t figure out? I’d be making no progress or completely changing the scope of the game to make it a cookie cutter copy of the tutorials the AI is trained on.
Vibe coding is complete nonsense. You still need a competent designer who’s at least in the process of learning the context of the language they’re working with or your output is going to be complete garbage. And if you’re working in a medium that doesn’t have robust built-in debugging? Good luck even identifying what it’s doing wrong if you’re not familiar with the language yourself. Hell, good luck getting it to make anything complex if you have multiple systems to consider and can’t bridge the gaps yourself.
Corpo idiots going all in on “vibe coding” are literally just going to do indies a favor by churning out unworkable garbage that anyone who puts the effort in will be able to easily shine in comparison to.
It’s a good teacher, though, and a decent assistant.
The way I see it, there are two types of developers we should take into consideration for this discussion:
- Software Engineers
- Code editors
Most “programmers” these days are really just code editors, they know how to search stack overflow for some useful pointers, copy that code and edit it to what they need. That is absolutely fine, this advances programming in so many ways. But the software engineers are the people that actually answer the stack overflow questions with detailed answers. These engineers have a more advanced skillset in problem solving for specific coding frameworks and languages.
When people say: programmers are cooked, I keep thinking that they mean code editors, not software engineers. Which is a similar trend in basically all industries in relation with AI. Yes, AI has the potential to make some jobs in health care obsolete (e.g. radiologist), but that doesn’t mean we no longer need surgeons or domain expert doctors. Same thing applies to programming.
So if you are a developer today, ask yourself the following: Do actually know my stuff well, am I an expert? If the answer is no, and you’re basically a code editor (which again, is fine), then you should seriously consider what AI means for your job.
If the “code editor” uses AI they will never become a software engineer.
“Oh I will just learn by asking AI to explain” that’s not happening. You won’t learn how to come.up with a solution. Mathematiciams know better than anyone you can’t just memorize how the professor does stuff and call yourself a problem solver. Now go learn the heruistic method.
As much as people hate it, stackoverflow people rarely give the answer directly. They usually tell you easier alternative methods or how to solve a similar problem with explanation.
They way it will work is that every single college student that relies on AI and gets away with “academic dishonesty, the tool” will become terrible programmers that can’t think for themselves or read a single paragraph of documentation. Similar consequences for inexperienced developers.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but I’d like to add two points:
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Everyone starts off as a code editor, and through a combination of (self-)education and experience can become a software engineer.
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To the point of code editors having to worry about LLM’s taking their job, I agree, but I don’t think it will be as over the top as people literally being replaced by “AI agents”. Rather I think it will be a combination of code editors becoming more productive through use of LLMs, decreasing the demand for code editors, and lay people (i.e. almost no code skills) being able to do more through LLMs applied in the right places, like some website builders are doing now.
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AI isn’t ready to replace just about anybody’s job, and probably never will be technically, economically or legally viable.
That said, the c-suit class are certainly going to try. Not only do they dream of optimizing all human workers out of every workforce, they also desperately need to recoup as much of the sunk cost that they’ve collectively dumped into the technology.
Take OpenAI for example, they lost something like $5,000,000,000 last year and are probably going to lose even more this year. Their entire business plan relies on at least selling people on the idea that AI will be able to replace human workers. The minute people realize that OpenAI isn’t going to conquer the world, and instead end up as just one of many players in the slop space, the entire bottom will fall out of the company and the AI bubble will burst.
Never? That’s a long time. How specific a definition of AI are you using?
Well if you’re that deep into losses, spending 10M in marketing goes a long way.
I had a dude screaming pretty much the same thing at me yesterday on here (on a different account), despite the fact that I’m senior-level, near the top of my field and that all the objective data as well as anecdotal reports from tons of other people says otherwise. Like, okay buddy, sure. People seem to just like fighting things online to feel better about themselves, even if the thing they’re fighting doesn’t really exist.
I’m a senior BA working on a project to replace some outdated software with a new booking management and payment system. One of our minor stakeholders is an overly eager tech bro who insists on bringing up AI in every meeting, he’s gone as far as writing up and sending proposals to myself and project leads.
We all just roll our eyes when a new email arrives. Especially when there’s almost no significant detail in these proposals, it’s all conjecture based of what he’s read online…on tech bro websites.
Oh and the best part, this guy has no experience in system development or design or anything AI related. He doesn’t even work in IT. But he researchs AI in his spare time and uses it as a side hustle…
English isn’t my first language, so I often use translation services. I feel like using them is a lot like vibe coding — very useful, but still something that needs to be checked by a human.
People who think AI will replace X job either don’t understand X job or don’t understand AI.
It’s both.
This is the correct answer.
For basically everyone at least 9 in 10 people you know are… bless their hearts…not winning a nobel prize any time soon.
My wife works a people-facing job, and I could never do it. Most people don’t understand most things. That’s not to say most people don’t know anything, but there are not a lot of polymaths out and about.
Yeah, particularly with CEOs. People don’t understand that in an established company (not a young startup), the primary role of the CEO is to take blame for unpopular decisions and resign or be fired so it would seem like the company is changing course.
Ha I never thought of CEOs this way but now so many things make sense. Especially things being exactly as they were when CEOs change, but with a mountain of meaningless changes that never do any good.
Not that I ever thought they know what they were doing, but now I get what they’re used for.
Yup. It’s kinda my conspiracy theory, but also, it’s really not, it’s like a public secret at this point.
They don’t get these huuuuge golden parachutes for nothing. They get it precisely because they need to take the fall at some point, and if the fall is big enough, they might not even get a new job at a similar level.
It’s a disgusting system, but I’m not trying to absolve CEOs of anything here. They very much know what they’re getting into when they sign contracts for tens of millions per year in total comp, with generous exit packages. I’m just saying that’s why companies won’t replace them with AI, or even just cheaper proven leaders, any time soon, despite the fact that no CEO is worth the amount of money they make, in actual productivity.
AI isn’t ready to replace programmers, engineers or IT admins yet. But let’s be honest if some project manager or CTO somewhere hasn’t already done it they’re at least planning it.
Then eventually to save themselves or out of sheer ignorance they’ll blame the chaos that results on the few remaining people who know what they’re doing because they won’t be able to admit or understand the fact that the bold decision they took to “embrace” AI and increase the company’s bottom line which everyone else in their management bubble believes in has completely mangled whatever system their company builds or uses. More useful people will get fired and more actual work will get shifted to AI. But because that’ll still make the number go up the management types will look even better and the spread of AI will carry on. Eventually all systems will become an unwieldy mess nobody can even hope to repair.
This is just IT, I’m pretty sure most other industries will eventually suffer the same fate. Global supply chains will collapse and we’ll all get sent back to the dark ages.
TL,DR: The real problem with AI isn’t that it’ll become too powerful and choose to kill us, but that corporate morons will overestimate how powerful it already is and that will cause our eventual downfall.
AI isn’t ready to replace programmers, engineers or IT admins yet.
On the other hand… it’s been about 2.5 years since chatgpt came out, and it’s gone from you being lucky it could write a few python lines without errors to being able to one shot a mobile phone level complexity game, even with self hosted models.
Who knows where it’ll be in a few years
Lmfao I love these threads. “I haven’t built anything myself with the thing I’m claiming makes you obsolete but trust me it makes you obsolete”
I’m still waiting for the release of 100% A1 written software.
(Spoiler: when it comes, it will have been heavily edited by meat popsicles).
I’ve made 100% AI software already. It was slightly more complex than a hello world, tho.
Pinky is on form!
AI is a tool, Ashish is 100% correct in that it may do some things for developers but ultimately still needs to be reviewed by people who know what they’re doing. This is closer to the change from punch cards to writing code directly on a computer than making software developers obsolete.
