Until an AI can get clear, reasonable requirements out of a client/stakeholder our jobs are safe.
In Leaked Audio, Amazon Cloud CEO Says AI Will Soon Make Human Programmers a Thing of the Past
Submitted 2 months ago by shish_mish@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/the-byte/aws-ceo-human-devs-ai
Comments
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Beetschnapps@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So never right?
If the assumption is that a PM holds all the keys…
yarr@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Let me weigh in with something. The hard part about programming is not the code. It is in understanding all the edge cases, making flexible solutions and so much more.
I have seen many organizations with tens of really capable programmers that can implement anything. Now, most management barely knows what they want or what the actual end goal is. Since managers aren’t capable of delivering perfect products every time with really skilled programmers, if i subtract programmers from the equation and substitute in a magic box that delivers code to managers whenever they ask for it, the managers won’t do much better. The biggest problem is not knowing what to ask for, and even if you DO know what to ask for, they typically will ignore all the fine details.
By the time there is an AI intelligent enough to coordinate a large technical operation, AIs will be capable of replacing attorneys, congressmen, patent examiners, middle managers, etc. It would really take a GENERAL artificial intelligence to be feasible here, and you’d be wildly optimistic to say we are anywhere close to having one of those available on the open market.
Tamo240@programming.dev 2 months ago
I agree with you completely, but he did say no need for ‘human programmers’ not 'human software engineers. The skill set you are describing is one I would put forward is one of if not the biggest different between the two.
yarr@feddit.nl 2 months ago
This is really splitting hairs, but if you asked that cloud CEO if he employed programmers or ‘software engineers’ he would almost certainly say the latter. The larger the company, the greater the chance they have what they consider an ‘engineering’ department. I would guess he employs 0 “programmers” or ‘engineeringless programmers’.
Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
For like, a couple years, sure. Then there will be a huge push to fix all the weird shit generated by AI.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t get how it’s not that AI would help programmers build way better things. Like if it replaces Google programmers than couldn’t I replace Google oh and if it can actually replace a programmer I think it’s probably just as capable of replacing a CEO. I bet it’s a better use case to replace someone out of any careers
collapse_already@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
You can hire a lot of programmers for the cost of one CEO.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s a bit nuts actually when I think about it. AI could really be useful for replacing CEO’s. The more I think about it the more it makes sense. Its one career that makes sense for it to replace.
Solemarc@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Something I’ve always found funny about the “AI will replace programmers soon” is that this means AI’s can create AI’s and isn’t this basically the end of the economy?
Every office worker is out of a job just like that and labourers only have as long as it takes to sort out the robot bodies then everyone is out of a job.
You thought the great recession was bad? You ain’t seen nothing!
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But like I just keep going back to the idea that no invention in history ever had reduced our work load. It has always only shifted the work to the other end of what the invention can produce. I just always expect a human is still need to glue some process together and in that niche little area, whole industries are created and the rest of us have to learn it
irotsoma@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And anyone who believes that should be fired, because they don’t understand the technology at all or what is involved in programming for that matter. At the very least it should make everyone question the company if its leadership doesn’t understand their own product.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That is what happens when you mix a fucking CEO with tech “How many workers can I fire to make more money and boost about my achievements in thr annual conference of mega yacht owners” where as the correct question should obviously have always been (unless you are a psychopath) “how can I use this tech to boost productivity of my workers so they can produce the same amount of work in less amount of time and have more personal time for themselves”
rsuri@lemmy.world 2 months ago
To predict what jobs AI will replace, you need to know both of the following:
- What’s special about the human mind that makes people necessary for completing certain tasks
- What AI can do to replicate or replace those special features
This guy has an MA in industrial engineering and an MBA, and has been in business his whole career. He has no knowledge of psychology and whatever knowledge of AI that he’s picked up on the side as part of his work. He’s not the guy to ask.
Prandom_returns@lemm.ee 2 months ago
“Full-self-driving”-soon?
VantaBrandon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
3 months maybe, 6 centuries definitely
forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
The sentiment on AI in the span of 10 years went from “it’s inevitable it will replace your job” to “nope not gonna happen”. The difference back then the jobs it was going to replace were not tech jobs. Just saying.
Fades@lemmy.world 2 months ago
From the very beginning people were absolutely making connections between ai and tech jobs like programming.
The fuck are you talking about? Are you seriously trying to imply that now that it’s threatening tech jobs (it’s not) suddenly the narrative around how useful it will be changes (it didn’t)
forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
From the very beginning
When is that exactly do you have in mind? I’m talking about automation which roughly around 2010 the discourse was primarily centered around blue collar jobs. The discussion was about these careers becoming obsolete if AI ever advanced to the point where it involved little to no humans to perform the tasks.
AI with regards to white collar jobs was no where near the primary focus of discourse much less programming.
Are you seriously trying to imply
You’re way off the mark. Save your outrage.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I await the day that AI makes CEOs a thing of the past…
telllos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
When my job was outsouced a few years back, I was thinking there is probably a boat load of indien coming out of management schools that would do a great job at C level ! For a fraction of the price.
TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 2 months ago
yup
and humans soon won’t be the target audience for anything
sumguyonline@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Until you ask it to do something never done before and it has a meltdown.
auzy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah nah. We already have copilot and it introduces so many subtle bugs.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 months ago
I managed to get an AI to build pong in assembly. Are they all pretty cool things but I didn’t just say build pong in assembly I have to hand hold it a little bit. You need to be a programmer to understand how to guide the AI to do the task so I can’t see the job actually going anywhere.
That was something very simple, I doubt that you can get it to do more complex tasks without a more lot of back and forth.
To give you an example I had a hard time getting it to understand that the ball needed to bounce off at an angle if intercepted at an angle, it just kept snapping it to 90° increments. I couldn’t fix it myself because I don’t really know assembly well enough to really get into the weeds with it so I was sort of stuck until I was finally able to get the AI to do what I wanted it to. I sort of understood what the problem was, there was a number somewhere in the system and it needed to make the number negative, but it just kept setting the number to a value. A non-programmer wouldn’t really understand that’s what the problem was and so they wouldn’t be able to explain to the AI how to fix it.
I believe AI is going to become an unimaginably useful tool in the future and we probably don’t really yet understand how useful it’s going to be. But unless they actually make AGI it isn’t going to replace programmers.
If they do make AGI all bets are off it will probably go build a Dyson Sphere or something at that point and we will have no way of understanding what it’s doing.
VantaBrandon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I tried to get it to build a game of checkers, spent an entire day on it, in the end I could have built the thing myself. Each iteration got slightly worse, and each fix broke more than it corrected.
AI can generate an “almost-checkers” game nearly perfectly every time, but once you start getting into more complex rules like double jumping it just shits the bed.
What these headlines fail to capture is that AI is exceptionally good at bite sized pre-defined tasks at scale, and that is the game changer. Its still very far from being capable of building an entire app on its own. That feels more like 5-10 years out.
wccrawford@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I haven’t tried to scaffold whole projects, but otherwise that lines up with my usage of AI copilots so far.
At this point, they’re good at helping you interface with the built in commands and maybe some specific APIs, but it won’t do your thinking for you. It just removes the need for some specific base-level knowledge.
hroderic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, I don’t see AI replacing any developers working on an existing, moderately complex codebase. It can help speed up some tasks, but it’s far from being able to take a requirement and turn it into code that edits the right places and doesn’t break everything.
datelmd5sum@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I admit that I work faster with AI help and if people get more stuff done in less time there might be less billable hours in the future for us. But AI did not replace me, a 10 times cheaper dude from India did.
militaryintelligence@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They could churn out garbage and scams for the idiots on Facebook, sure.
exanime@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Wasn’t it the rabbit 1 scammer who said programmers would be gone in 5 years, like 3 years ago?
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Everyone was always joking about how AI should just replace CEOs, but it turns out CEOs are so easily to lead by the nose that AI companies practically already run the show.
Grofit@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Most companies can’t even give decent requirements for humans to understand and implement. An AI will just write any old stuff it thinks they want and they won’t have any way to really know if it’s right etc.
They would have more luck trying to create an AI that takes whimsical ideas and turns them into quantified requirements with acceptance criteria. Once they can do that they may stand a chance of replacing developers, but it’s gonna take far more than the simpleton code generators they have at the moment which at best are like bad SO answers you copy and paste then refactor.
This isn’t even factoring in automation testers who are programmers, build engineers, devops etc. Can’t wait for companies to cry even more about cloud costs when some AI is just lobbing everything into lambdas 😂
mvirts@lemmy.world 2 months ago
😂
Emerald@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Honestly I feel even an AI could write better code then some big tech software lol
headset@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Big words from someone who can’t even write “than” properly.
Emerald@lemmy.world 2 months ago
?
FunnyUsername@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The paramount+ app doesn’t even know how to properly hide the pause icon after you hit resume ffs. It’s been months.
readbeanicecream@lemm.ee 2 months ago
But Human QAs … Human QAs everywhere!
yarr@feddit.nl 2 months ago
How much longer until cloud CEOs are a thing of the past? Wouldn’t an AI sufficiently intelligent to solve technical problems at scale also be able to run a large corporate division? By the time this is actually viable, we are all fucked.
vga@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
I wish.
Matriks404@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s a good thing. After all, I don’t care when Amazon goes down.
BigBenis@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Lol, as a programmer who uses generative AI myself, I would genuinely love to see them try.
letsgo@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Don’t worry guys. As long as project managers think “do the thing … like the thing … (waves hands around) … you know … (waves hands around some more) … like the other thing … but, um, …, different” constitutes a detailed spec, we’re safe.
w3dd1e@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The thing that I see most is that AI is dumb and can’t do it yet so we don’t need to worry about this.
To me, it’s not about whether it can or not. If the people in charge think it can, they’ll stop hiring. There is a lot of waste in some big companies so they might not realize it’s not working right away.
Source: I work for a big company that doesn’t do things efficiently.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That big company will go through a crisis realize it’s mistake and start quickly hiring again or it will fail and disappear
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I worked at a different MAANG company and saw internal slides showing that they planned on being able to replace junior devs with AI by 2025. I don’t think it’s going according to plan.
At the end of the day, one thing people forget about with these things is that even once you hit a point where an AI is capable of writing a full piece of software, a lot of businesses will still pay money to have a human read through, validate it, and take ownership of it if something goes wrong. A lot of engineering is not just building something for a customer, but taking ownership of it and providing something they can trust.
Weirdfish@lemmy.world 2 months ago
20 years ago at a trade show, a new module based visual coding tool was introduced in my field which claimed “You’ll never need another programmer”.
Oddly enough, I still have a job.
The tools have gotten better, but I still write code every day because procedural programming is still the best way to do things.
It is just now reaching the point that we can do some small to medium scale projects with plug and play systems, but only with very specific equipment and configurations.
ZephyrXero@lemmy.world 2 months ago
20 years ago while learning web development Dreamweaver was going to supposedly eliminate the need for code on websites too. lol
But sadly, the dream of eliminating us seems like it will never die
yarr@feddit.nl 2 months ago
It’s because people trying to sell silver bullets is nothing new.
Weirdfish@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The pace of change is about every five years, and some elements are always in transition.
All in one turn key solutions are always one to two cycles behind, so may work great with the stuff I’m already replacing.
I think these are honest attempts to simplify, but by the time they have it sorted its obsolete. If I have to build modules anyway to work with new equipemnt, might as well just write all the code in my native language.
These also tend to be attempts at all in one devices, requiring you to use devices only compatible with those subsystems. I want to be able to use best tech from what ever manufacturer. New and fancy almost always means a command line interface, which again means coding.