Posted by dinvlad 3 days ago
Which includes this excellent line:
> Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible. The continuing drop in cost of computers has now passed the point at which computers have become cheaper than people. The number of programmers available per computer is shrinking so fast that most computers in the future will have to work at least in part without programmers.
This confused my teacher as he knew this guy wasn’t super technical, and asked him more about it. I may have the details not exactly right but the man said something like “I use lotus notes every day!”
The word programmer had a very different meaning 40 years ago.
Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling. Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs taking software jobs, but it is possible they will require the level of skill to be employable to spike.
Democracy is about governance, not access.
A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
(Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)
What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers
I could learn plumbing skills and do the plumbing around my house. I've chosen not to.
The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this learning less expensive for those with little of both time and money. That's what's meant by democratised.
If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental freedom gain an “individuals can make tools without knowing coding” isn’t going anywhere
I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't.
Will the AIs get good enough so they/we won't have to? Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?
The Mythical Man Month is just over half a century old, yet still reads like it was written yesterday.
Somehow civilization continues to function!
Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.
I started coding 8 months ago at 45 with zero experience. I now have a production app processing real payments. That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance. Not because I lacked the ability to think through problems, but because the skill floor was too high to clear while also being a parent with no spare years to invest.
The spreadsheet analogy is apt. Most of those amateur spreadsheets aren't replacing finance teams; they're solving small problems that would otherwise go unsolved. That's closer to what's happening with AI-assisted development, I feel, than the "eliminate programmers" framing suggests.
It turns out that in many of these cases, code is an effective way of doing it, but there may be other options. For a storefront, there are website builders that let you do it very effectively if your needs match one of their templates, there are game engines that require no code, and a lot of accounting can be done in Excel.
What I wanted to say is that maybe you could have done without code, but thanks to LLMs making code a viable option even for beginners, that's what you went for. In fact, vibe coding is barely even coding in the strictest sense of writing something in a programming language, since you are using natural language and code is just an intermediate step that you can see.
The reason programmers use programming languages is not gatekeeping, unlike what many people who want to "eliminate programmers" think. It is that programming languages are very good at what they do, they are precise, unambiguous, concise and expressive. Alternatives like natural languages or graphical tools lack some of these attributes and therefore may not work as well. Like with many advanced tools, there is a learning curve, but once you reach a certain point, like when you intend to make it your job, it is worth it.
It was an institutional failure, and the software involved had hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it and was built by supposed professionals.
Or if you want compare vibe coding with any technology, like electricity. Sure, that one person got electrocuted or their house burned down. But it's just so useful, and "somehow civilization continues to function". I guess they should've known better.
I'm personally not comfortable hyping up the benefits whilst ignoring the risks, especially for lay people.
We are not ignoring it. It is just not an example of a load bearing excel sheet.
The difference is those spreadsheets were buried on a company internal fileshare and the blast radius would be contained to that organization.
Today vibe coders can type a prompt, click a button, and their thing is exposed directly to the internet and ready to suck up any data someone uploads.
Worse, they were doing functional programming just by chaining formulas without side effects, surpassing the skills of most self-proclaimed programmers out there.
Using excel in the traditional sense isn't the same as programming. Unless they were doing some VBA or something like that which the vast majority of excel/spreadsheet users don't.
> spreadsheet formulae
formulas. We aren't speaking latin here.
> I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't.
Programming isn't really about edge cases or errors.
Define "here", please! Perhaps your "here" and mine differ, but the view from my here is that while all three plurals are generally acceptable, formulae is the correcter double plus good spelling for this context.
But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are in big trouble.
So, while the core, say, 10% of people I think should remain in the system. This 90% periphery of pretty bad programmers will probably need to move on to other jobs.
I mean.. I am ok with you saying saying yes. In a sense, I half expect it. I will be very subtle, I don't believe the issue lies with the tooling ( AI or not ).
My impression is that the main reason most people have so many meetings is because meetings are equated to work. If you are in a meeting, you are at work and you need to work. This is because, in a meeting, everyone is looking at everyone else with the expectation that they are working. But if you are not in a meeting, this expectation doesn't exist, so you are basically not at work and you don't need to work.
In particular, thinking only occurs during meetings. And if it didn't happen during a meeting, it didn't happen.
Call me cynical, but it explains immediately why the vast majority of companies don't tolerate remote work unless they're forced to by a pandemic. Office work means someone could be watching you outside meetings, which causes some work to happen outside of meetings and raises productivity.
Just one example of how this has happened again and again.
To ignore that pattern and say everything's going to be automated and humanity will be irrelevant seems to me to be... more of a death wish against human agency, than a prediction based on reality.
The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence. The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavor, and which works for dollars an hour. The goal is also for this machine to be infinitely copyable for the cost of some GPUs and hard drives.
The next goal after that will be to give that machine hands, so that it can do any physical labor or troubleshooting a human can do. And again, the goal is for the hands to be cheaper to produce and cheaper to automate than humans.
You may ask yourself, who would need humans in a future where all intellectual and physical tasks can be done better and cheaper by a machine? You may also ask yourself, who would control the machines? You may ask yourself, what leverage would ordinary humans have in a future that no longer needed them for anything? Or perhaps you would not ask those questions.
But this is the future investors are dreaming of, and the future that they're investing trillions of dollars to reach. That's the dream.
I believe that full automation of the mundanities of human life is coming in the fullness of time. But for that insight to be helpful to me, I have to get the timing right, and the data suggests I should be extremely skeptical about excitable tech guys predicting big things in short time frames.
Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system.
We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement.
I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum, they were worse off. It took time for the conditions of the working class to improve.
Basic income is touted as the solution, but then globalisation means workers are moving much more and I'm not sure the 2 are compatible. Not that I have a better idea.
I do think we need a cultural change decoupling work from self worth. It's becoming less and less defensible to require everyone to work to be 'deserving'.
All that being said, there will still be jobs, there will always be demand for hand made, or something that isn't soulless corporatism. Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable
They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.
Also worth noting that even in Star Trek, which is viewed as a utopian vision of the future, the sort of societal changes you are talking about only came after humanity almost wiped itself out in a third world war (which coincidentally happened to start in 2026)
I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom engineering" in my entire life.
All the sheets we saw in that factory, and in our hotels, were noticeably thicker and stiffer than American sheets, somewhere between American sheets and denim. When we asked about that, they seemed to feel sorry that we only had thin, flimsy sheets.
The only reason I remember this encounter so clearly was because he got rather annoyed, to the point of being aggressive, when I pointed out that most of the computing landscape was built on C and this wasn’t going to change any time soon.
Multiple decades later, and C-derived languages still rule the world. I do sometimes wonder if his opinion mellowed with time.
Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My LLM experience makes me seriously doubt it.
Back in the 80's there were ads for tools to "dinosaurs" who everyone looked to when their 4GL language failed to solve the problem.
A couple of years later, Microsoft came out with Visual Basic, and I thought, OMG, I'm toast. Secretaries are going to be writing code. I was a developer by this time, writing code in FoxPro and getting into PowerBuilder.
All this to say, "I've been in IT for many years, and companies promise a lot but rarely deliver completely on their promises." Do programmers and others in the tech field need to adapt? Yes. Is AI going to be disruptive to some extent? Yes. Are all jobs going away? No.
Don’t facilitate losing your job.
Two years ago, one former exec at my place was perfectly happy to throw resources ( his word ) from India at a problem, while unwilling to pay the vendor for the same thing. I voiced my objection once, but after it was dismissed I just watched the thing blow up.
I am not saying current situation is the same. It is not. But, it is the same hubris, which means miscalculations will happen ( like with Dorsey's Block mass firing ).
Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuffling of shit" is just going to also be agents themselves. Prompted by a more senior slop-grammer specialized in orchestrating "shuffling of shit".
This task was famously incredibly difficult back when we had people producing unmaintainable mountains of millions of lines of code, to the point where shipping anything sizable in a working state on time without last minute scope reductions is nearly unheard of.
I can't imagine using AI to add another one to two zeroes to the lines of code counter would help reach the goal post.
LLMs can write a lot of code. they can even write a comprehensive test suite for that code. However they can't tell you if it doesn't work because of some interaction with something else you didn't think about. They can't tell you that all race conditions are really fixed (despite being somewhat good at tracking them down when known). They can't tell you that the program doesn't work because it doesn't do something critical that nobody thought to write into the requirements until you noticed it was missing.
Of course, in the end, it won't do us humans any good, because when the Singularity AKA Rapture comes, we'll all be converted to Computronium. :-)