You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is absolutely up to production quality! Also, you’re all…
To be honest, you sound like you’re only just starting to learn to code.
Will coding forever belong to humans? No. Is the current generative-AI technology going to replace coders? Also no.
The reaction you see is frustration because it’s obvious to anyone with decent skill that AI isn’t up to the challenge, but it’s not obvious to people who don’t have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses “no, that’s not actually correct”.
Someone else referenced Microsoft’s public work with Copilot. Here’s Copilot making 13 PRs over 5 days and only 4 ever get merged you might think “30% success is pretty good!” But compare that with human-generated PRs and you can see that 30% fucking sucks. And that’s not even looking inside the PR where the bot wastes everyone’s time making tons of mistakes. It’s just a terrible coworker and instead of getting fired they’re getting an award for top performer.
Didn’t look through all the issues but there were things like
The agent was blocked by configuration issues from accessing the necessary dependencies to successfully build and test. Those are being fixed and we’ll continue experimenting.
Been out less than a week, let’s see how it’s doing in a year.
To be honest, you sound like you’re only just starting to learn to code.
I definitely am. But I have no doubts that ai is going to take a lot of entry-level type jobs soon, and eventually higher end jobs.
We’ll always need good, smart coders. Just not as many as we have now.
but it’s not obvious to people who don’t have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses “no, that’s not actually correct”.
I get it. But those clueless people are gonna be the people in charge of hiring, and they’ll decide to hire less, and expect current staff to do more. I’ve seen in hundreds of time in industries, and it’s already happening now in yours.
For context, I’m old. So I’ve seen your arguments in many different industries.
And to your point, they’ll have ai replacing good people, long before ai is good enough to. But you’re approaching the issue with logic. Corporate lacks a lot of logic.
I’m already seeing it in your industry. Plenty of reddit/Lemmy posts talking about how coders have been laid off, and having a much much more difficult time getting another job than at any point in their careers.
Again, I’m saying AI is a good solution. I’m saying management will think that. Just like they did when they offshored jobs to much less skilled, yet way more inexpensive workers.
To copy what someone else in this thread said:
The idea that AI will some day be good at coding isn’t the issue. The issue is that some people in management think it’s already well on the way to being a good substitute, and they’re trying to do more with fewer coders to everyone’s detriment.
If I say, “now we have robots that can build a car from scratch!” the automakers will be salivating. But if my robot actually cannot build a car, then I don’t think it’s going to cause mass layoffs.
Many of the big software companies are doing mass layoffs. It’s not because AI has taken over the jobs. They always hired extra people as a form of anti-competitiveness. Now they’re doing layoffs to drive salaries down. That sucks and tech workers would be smart to unionize (we won’t). But I don’t see any radical shift in the industry.
To be honest, you sound like you’re only just starting to learn to code.
Will coding forever belong to humans? No. Is the current generative-AI technology going to replace coders? Also no.
The reaction you see is frustration because it’s obvious to anyone with decent skill that AI isn’t up to the challenge, but it’s not obvious to people who don’t have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses “no, that’s not actually correct”.
Someone else referenced Microsoft’s public work with Copilot. Here’s Copilot making 13 PRs over 5 days and only 4 ever get merged you might think “30% success is pretty good!” But compare that with human-generated PRs and you can see that 30% fucking sucks. And that’s not even looking inside the PR where the bot wastes everyone’s time making tons of mistakes. It’s just a terrible coworker and instead of getting fired they’re getting an award for top performer.
Been a few months since I used co-pilot, but they use a model that’s worse than GPT-4/4o which is a big step down from the reasoning models.
Try out Cline, aider, or one of the tools devs actually use with the latest models from Anthropic/Google/OpenAI.
https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
Didn’t look through all the issues but there were things like
Been out less than a week, let’s see how it’s doing in a year.
I definitely am. But I have no doubts that ai is going to take a lot of entry-level type jobs soon, and eventually higher end jobs.
We’ll always need good, smart coders. Just not as many as we have now.
I get it. But those clueless people are gonna be the people in charge of hiring, and they’ll decide to hire less, and expect current staff to do more. I’ve seen in hundreds of time in industries, and it’s already happening now in yours.
For context, I’m old. So I’ve seen your arguments in many different industries.
And to your point, they’ll have ai replacing good people, long before ai is good enough to. But you’re approaching the issue with logic. Corporate lacks a lot of logic.
I’m already seeing it in your industry. Plenty of reddit/Lemmy posts talking about how coders have been laid off, and having a much much more difficult time getting another job than at any point in their careers.
Again, I’m saying AI is a good solution. I’m saying management will think that. Just like they did when they offshored jobs to much less skilled, yet way more inexpensive workers.
To copy what someone else in this thread said:
I don’t understand how you think this works.
If I say, “now we have robots that can build a car from scratch!” the automakers will be salivating. But if my robot actually cannot build a car, then I don’t think it’s going to cause mass layoffs.
Many of the big software companies are doing mass layoffs. It’s not because AI has taken over the jobs. They always hired extra people as a form of anti-competitiveness. Now they’re doing layoffs to drive salaries down. That sucks and tech workers would be smart to unionize (we won’t). But I don’t see any radical shift in the industry.
Do you think I am the only one that thinks like this? You don’t think middle and upper management thinks like I do?
Oh, I’m saving this comment. Dude, go into any CSjobs forum and you tell me that there’s not a shift in the industry. lol
I’ll say this. I hope you’re right. (but you’re not)