- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Yeah DHH is a problematic person to root for.
THAT is the message you took from all this? What you’re going to root for the smug ignorant asshole?
People who think AI will replace X job either don’t understand X job or don’t understand AI.
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.
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.
It’s both.
This is the correct answer.
I’ve always said as a software developer that our longterm job is to program ourselves out of a job. In fact, in the long term EVERYBODY is “cooked” as automation becomes more and more capable. The eventual outcome will be that nobody will have to work. AI in its present state isn’t ready at all to replace programmers, but it can be a very helpful assistant.
but it can be a very helpful assistant.
can, but usually when stuff gets slightly more complex, being a fast typewriter is usually more efficient and results in better code.
I guess it really depends on the aspiration for code-quality, complexity (yes it’s good at generating boilerplate). If I don’t care about a one-time use script that is quickly written in a prompt I’ll use it.
Working on a big codebase, I don’t even get the idea to ask an AI, you just can’t feed enough context to the AI that it’s really able to generate meaningful code…
I actually don’t write code professionally anymore, I’m going on what my friend says - according to him he uses chatGPT every day and it’s a big help. Once he told it to refactor some code and it used a really novel approach he wouldn’t have thought of. He showed it to another dev who said the same thing. It was like, huh, that’s a weird way to do it, but it worked. But in general you really can’t just tell an AI “Create an accounting system” or whatever and expect coherent working code without thoroughly vetting it.
Working on a big codebase, I don’t even get the idea to ask an AI, you just can’t feed enough context to the AI that it’s really able to generate meaningful code…
That’s not a hard limit, for example google’s models can handle 2-million-token context window.
Ughh I tried the gemini model and I’m not too happy with the code it came up with, there’s a lot of intrinsities and concepts that the model doesn’t grasp enough IMO. That said I’ll reevaluate this continuously converting large chunks of code often works ok…
Management can’t blame AI when shit hits the fan, though. We’ll be fine. Either that or everything just collapses back into dust, which doesn’t sound so bad in the current times.
That’s the beauty of AI tho - AI shit rolls uphill, until it hits the manager who imposed the decision to use it (or their manager, or even their manager).
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.
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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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).
Pinky is on form!
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.
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.
You can say “fucked” on the internet, Ace Rbk.
Oh no, he’s a cannibal.
It’s better to future-proof your account for when Gilead is claimed.
This was so frustrating to read!
We’re as cooked as artists (when asked to do shit jobs for non paying customers)
I had an AI render a simple diagram for a presentation with explicit instructions. It rendered a Rube Goldberg nonsense graphic. I included it anyway for the lulz. Sure, they will get better, and maybe some day be almost as useful as the Enterprise computer. No way they’ll be Lt. Cmdr. Data this century.
AI also isn’t close to replacing other industries. They are both wrong.
Only if you confine “ai” to mean an LLM.
Automation has replaced so many jobs already. More to come. Head in the sand won’t help anyone.
Today’s “AI” is just a buzz word for Machine learning code. ML has been around for a few decades and has been used in predictive analytics for those same decades.
A machine that automates a job in a factory does one thing and never changes from that. It doesn’t learn and doesn’t make adjustments. When talking about “AI” no one is talking about the robot arm in a factory that does 5 total movements and repeats endlessly.
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.
The best part is how all programmers at Google, Apple, and Microsoft have been fired and now everything is coded by AI. This guy seems pretty smart.
OpenAI hasn’t even replaced their own developers, and they push out the biggest LLM turd around.
There actually isn’t a single human programmer in the entire world. Every single one was fired and replaced by Grok, ChatGPT and Deepseek.
I know all my old friends who worked at Microsoft are now janitors!
Tinfoil hat time:
That Ace account is just an alt of the original guy and rage baiting to give his posting more reach.
Counter-tinfoil hat time:
That Ace account is an AI.
Everyone being a bot is just a given on Shitter
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.
