Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
by lolinder on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @11:07AM
(#43014497)
The question isn't whether the code is complex algorithmically, the question is whether the code is:
* Too large to fit in the useful context window of the model,
* Filled with bunch of warts and landmines, and
* Connected to external systems that are not self-documenting in the code.
Most stuff that most of us are working on meets all three of these criteria. Even microservices don't help, if anything they make things worse by pulling the necessary context outside of the code altogether.
And note that I'm not saying that the tools aren't useful, I'm saying that they're nowhere near good enough to be threatening to anyone's job.
This assumes a typical project is fairly big and complex. Maybe I'm biased the other way, but I'd guess 90% of software engineers are writing boilerplate code today that could be greatly assisted by LLM tools. E.g., PHP is still one of the top languages, which means a lot of basic WordPress stuff that LLMs are great at.