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A comment on Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything. Parent comment

Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by RivieraKid on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @11:11AM (#43014536)
I'm surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here.

AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this year.

We have a system that is similar to top humans at competitive programming. This wasn't true 1 year ago. Who knows what will happen in 1 year.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by layer8 on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @11:32AM (#43014826)
When I see stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994610 (continued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996895), I think the field still has fundamental hurdles to overcome.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by lordswork on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @12:23PM (#43015460)
This kind of error doesn't really matter in programming where the output can be verified with a feedback loop.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by layer8 on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @01:18PM (#43016183)
This is not about the numerical result, but about the way it reasons. Testing is a sanity check, not a substitute for reasoning about program correctness.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by tmnvdb on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @03:07PM (#43017696)
Why do you think this is a fundamental hurdle, rather than just one more problem that can be solved? I dont have strong evidence either way, but I've seen a lot of 'fundamental unsurmountable problems' fall by the wayside over the past few years. So I'm not sure we can be that confident that a problem like this, for which we have very good classic algorithms, is a fundamental issue.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by Imanari on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @01:42PM (#43016538)
https://tinyurl.com/mrymfwwp

We will see, maybe models do get good enough but I think we are underestimating these last few percent of improvement.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by johnnyanmac on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:48PM (#43017468)
It's the opposite. I don't think it'll replace programmers legitimately within a decade. I DO think that companies will try a lot in the months and years anyway and that programmers will be the only ones suffering the consequences of such actions.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by cejast on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:49PM (#43017474)
Nobody can tell you whether progress will continue at current, faster or slower rates - humans have a pretty terrible track record at extrapolating current events into the future. It's like how movies in the 80's made predictions about where we'll be in 30 years time. Back to the Future promised me hoverboards in 2015 - I'm still waiting!
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by tmnvdb on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:57PM (#43017577)
Compute power increases and algorithmic efficiency improvements have been rapid and regular. I'm not sure why you thought that Back to the Future was a documentary film.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by cejast on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @03:04PM (#43017665)
Unless you have a crystal ball there is nothing that can give you certainty that will continue at the same or better rate. I’m not sure why you took the second half of the comment more seriously than the first.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by tmnvdb on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @03:12PM (#43017750)
Nobody has certainty about the future. We can only look at what seems most likely given the data.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by tmnvdb on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:55PM (#43017552)
People somehow have expectations that are both too high and too low at the same time. They expect (demand) current language models completely replace a human engineer in any field without making mistakes (this is obviously way too optimistic) while at the same time they are ignoring how rapid the progress has been and how much these models can now do that seemed impossible just 2 years ago, delivering huge value when used well, and they assume no further progress (this seems too pessimistic, even if progres is not guaranteed to continue at the same rate).
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by mirsadm on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @05:19PM (#43019097)
ChatGPT 4 was released 2 years ago. Personally I don't think things have moved on significantly since then.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by tmnvdb on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @06:10PM (#43019569)
Really now. I think that deserves a bit more explaination, given the cost per token has dropped by several orders of magnitude, we have seen large changes on all benchmarks (including entirely new capabilities), multimodality is now a fact since 4o, test time compute with reasoning models is making big strides since o1.... It seems on the surface a lot is happening. In fact, I wanted to share one of the benchmark overviews, but none include ChatGPT 4 anymore since it is totally not competitive anymore..
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by chrz on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @03:56AM (#43023333)
its bigger, shinier, faster, but still doesnt fly
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by morsecodist on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @09:17AM (#43025646)
Benchmarks are meaningless in and of themselves, they are supposed to be a proxy for usefulness. I have used Sonnet 3.5, ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4o, o1, o3-mini, o3-mini-high nearly daily for software development. I am not saying AI isn't cool or useful but I am experiencing diminishing returns in model quality (I do appreciate the cost reductions). The sorts of things I can have AI do really haven't changed that much since I got access to my first model. The delta between having no LLM to an LLM feels an order of magnitude bigger at least than the delta between the first LLM and now.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by yojat661 on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @05:39PM (#43019287)
Exactly. I have been waiting for gpt5 to see the delta, but after gpt4 things seemed to have stalled.
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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by tmnvdb on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @06:15PM (#43019606)
This seems like a bizarre claim on the surface, see also my other message above.

https://epoch.ai/data/ai-benchmarking-dashboard

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by nitwit005 on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @04:48PM (#43018775)
It's a bit paradoxical. A smart enough AI, and there is no point in worrying, because almost everyone will be out of a job.

The problem case is the somewhat odd scenario where there is an AI that's excellent at software dev, but not most other work, and we all have to go off and learn some other trade.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by thiht on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @07:17PM (#43020133)
> If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat?

Just use a state of the art LLM to write actual code. Not just a PoC or an MVP, actual production ready code on an actual code base.

It’s nowhere close to being useful, let alone replacing developers. I agree with another comment that LLMs don’t cut it, another breakthrough is necessary.

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Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by lurking_swe on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @08:06PM (#43020533)
depends on what you work on in the software field. Many of these LLM’s have pretty small context windows. In the real world when my company wants to develop a new feature, or change the business logic, that is a cross-cutting change (many repos/services). I work at a large org for background. No LLM will be automating this for a long time to come. Especially if you’re in a specific domain that is niche.

If your coding “context” is small, and it’s possible to feed your entire code base into an LLM in the near future, then you’re in trouble.

Also the problem is the LLM output is only as good as the prompt. 99% of the time the LLM won’t be thinking of how to make your API change backwards compatible for existing clients. Or how to help you do a zero-downtime migration. Or following security best practices. Etc.

Not to mention that what the product team _thinks_ they want (business logic) is not what they actually meant. Happens ALL THE TIME friend. :) It’s like the offshoring challenge all over again. Communication with humans is hard. Communication with an LLM is even harder. Writing the code is the easiest part of my job!

I think some jobs will definitely be at risk in the next 10-15 years. Thinking this will happen in 1 years time is myopic in my opinion.

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