Imagine a company that fires its software engineers, replaces them with AI-generated code, and then sits back, expecting everything to just work. This is like firing your entire fire department because you installed more smoke detectors. It’s fine until the first real fire happens.
Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
Submitted 2 months ago by fusspilz@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://defragzone.substack.com/p/techs-dumbest-mistake-why-firing
Comments
cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
athairmor@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sure but they’re not going to fire all of them. They’re going to fire 90% then make 10% put out the fires and patch the leaks while working twice as many hours for less pay.
The company will gradually get worse and worse until bankrupt or sold and the c-suite bails with their golden parachutes.
Pregnenolone@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is a bad analogy.
It would be more akin to firing your fire departments, because you installed automatic hoses in front of everyone’s homes. When a fire starts, the hoses will squirt water towards the fire, but sometimes it’ll miss, sometimes it’ll squirt backwards, sometimes it’ll squirt the neighbour’s house, and sometimes it’ll squirt the fire.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
I don’t know. I look at it like firing all your construction contractors after built out all your stores in a city. You might need some construction trades to maintain your stores and your might need to relocate a store every once in a while, but you don’t need the same construction staff on had as you did with the initial build out.
cestvrai@lemm.ee 2 months ago
In my experience, you actually need more people to maintain and extend existing software compared to the initial build out.
Usually because of scalability concerns, increasing complexity of the system and technical debt coming due.
BangBoomBamboozle@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
While true, that is a weak analogy. Software rots and needs constant attention of competent people or shit stacks.
thequickben@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Software engineer here. You’re completely wrong. The amount of work it takes to maintain and extend functionality to existing software is even bigger than the original cost of building it. Get some time understanding how software teams work and you’ll understand. There’s a reason C Suites are hoping AI generated code can replace developers. They can’t hire enough of them.
RideAgainstTheLizard@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
The irony of using an AI generated image for this post…
AI imagery makes any article look cheaper in my view, I am more inclined to “judge the book by its cover”.
Why would you slap something so lazy on top of a piece of writing you (assuming it isn’t also written by AI) put time and effort into?
pyre@lemmy.world 2 months ago
this post is about programmers being replaced by ai. the writer seems ok with artists being replaced.
Michal@programming.dev 2 months ago
I thought it was intentional AI slop
essteeyou@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, I’m sure they left the spelling mistake in the image on purpose to get increased engagement from pedants like me, I’m sorry, it works on me.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I know that it’s a meme to hate on generated images people need to understand just how much that ship has sailed.
Getting upset at generative AI is about as absurd as getting upset at CGI special effects or digital images. Both of these things were the subject of derision when they started being widely used. CGI was seen as a second rate knockoff of “real” special effects and digital images were seen as the tool of amateur photographers with their Photoshop, acting as a crutch in place of photography talent.
No amount of arguments film purist or nostalgia for the old days of puppets and models in movies was going to stop computer graphics and digital images capture and manipulation. Today those arguments seem so quaint and ignorant that most people are not even aware that there was even a controversy.
Digital images and computer graphics have nearly completely displaced film photography and physical model-based special effects.
Much like those technologies, generative AI isn’t going away and it’s only going to improve and become more ubiquitous.
This isn’t the hill to die on no matter how many upvoted you get.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
But people still complain about CGI in film, likely for the same reason it was criticised in the past that you mention - it looks like ass, if done cheaply (today) or with early underdeveloped tech (back in the past). Similarly so, the vast majority of AI-generated images look lazy, generic (duh) and basically give me the “ick”.
Yeah, maybe they’ll get better in the future. But does that mean that we can’t complain about their ugliness (or whatever other issue we have with them) now?
fart@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
people don’t like generated so bc it’s trainer on copyrighted data but if you don’t believe in copyright then it’s a tool like any other
RideAgainstTheLizard@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
As a software engineer, I’m perfectly happy waiting around until they have to re-hire all of us at consulting rates because their tech stacks are falling the fuck apart <3
themaninblack@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The jabronigrammers before me seem to have made a fine mess without the aid of an AI tool as it is…
meyotch@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
This is prophetic and yet as clear as day to anyone who has actually had to rely on their own code for anything.
I have lately focused all of my tech learning efforts and home lab experiments on cloud-less approaches. Sure the cloud is a good idea for scalable high traffic websites, but it sure also seems to enable police state surveillance and extreme vendor lock-in.
It’s really just a focus on fundamentals. But all those cool virtualization technologies that enable ‘cloud’ are super handy in a local system too. Rolling back container snapshots on specific services while leaving the general system unimpacted is useful anywhere.
But it is all on hardware I control. Apropos of the article, the pendulum will swing back toward more focus on local infrastructure. Cloud won’t go away, but more people are realizing that it also means someone else owns your data/your business.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think they were suckered in also by the supposed lower cost of running services, which, as it happens, isn’t lower at all and in fact is more expensive. But you laid off the Datacenter staff so. Pay up, suckers.
Neat toolsets though.
lumpybag@reddthat.com 2 months ago
The cloud provides incredible flexibility, scale, and reliability. It is expensive to have 3+ data centers with a datacenter staff. If the data center was such a great deal for the many 9s of reliability provided by the cloud, company’s would be shifting back in mass at this point
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 months ago
[deleted]CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 2 months ago
There’s also the tribal knowledge of people who’ve worked somewhere for a few years. There’s always a few people who just know where or how a particular thing works and why it works that way. AI simply cannot replace that.
fritobugger2017@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Institutional knowledge takes years to replace.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
That’s what I expect if I’m fired and rehired: at least +25% on my salary.
We hired a junior at work from a prestigious university. He uses ChatGPT all the time but denies it. I know that because all his comments in the code are written like some new Tolkien book. Last time I checked his code, I told him it had something like 20 bugs and told him how to fix that because I’m not a bad guy. The next day, he came back with a program that was very very different. Not knowing how to apply my fixes, he used another prompt and the whole thing was different with new bugs. I told my boss I was not wasting time on that shit again.
FatCrab@lemmy.one 2 months ago
Well, also if the guy was just dumping AI generated code arbitrarily into your product, that pretty significantly risks the copyright over the entire product into which the generated stuff was integrated (meaning, anyone can do whatever the fuck they want with it).
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Literally anybody who thought about the idea for more than ten seconds already realized this a long time ago; apparently this blog post needed to be written for the people who didn’t do even that…
MITM0@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You underestimate the dumbassery of Pencil-Pushers in tech companies (& also how genuinely sub-human they can be)
Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 2 months ago
MBAs are like surgeons; their every solution is to cut.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 months ago
adminofoz@lemmy.cafe 2 months ago
To your point at my last company party i got drunk and kept complimenting people by calling them human.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Although I agree, I think AI code generation is the follow up mistake. The original mistake was to offshore coding to fire qualified engineers.
Not all of offshore is terrible, that’d be a dumb generalization, but there are some terrible ones out there. A few of our clients that opted to offshore are being drowned is absolute trash code. Given that we always have to clean it up anyway, I can see the use-case for AI instead of that shop.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think the core takeaway is your shouldn’t outsource core capabilities. If the code is that critical to your bottomline, pay for quality (which usually means no contractors - local or not).
If you outsource to other developers or AI it means most likely they will care less and/or someone else can just as easily come along and do it too.
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
…shouldn’t outsource core capabilities.
This right here.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The core takeaway is that except for a few instances the executives still don’t understand jack shit and when a smooth talking huckster dazzles them with ridiculous magic to make them super rich they all follow them to the poke.
Judges and Executives understand nothing about computers in 2025. that’s the fucked up part. AI is just how we’re doing it this time.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
I’m just a dabbler at coding and even i can see getting rid of programmers and relying to ai for it will lead to disaster. Ai is useful, but only for smallest scraps of code because anything bigger will get too muddled. For me, it liked to come up with its own stupid ideas and then insist on getting stuck on those so i had to constantly reset the conversation. But i managed to have it make useful little function that i couldnt have thought up myself as it used some complex mathematical things.
Also relying on it is quick way to kind of get things done but without understanding at all how things work. Eventually this will lead to such horrible and unsecure code that no one can fix or maintain. Though maybe its good thing eventually since it will bring those shitty companies to ruin.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Even if I ask AI for how to do a process it will frequently respond with answers for the wrong version, even though I gave the version, parameters that don’t work, hand waving answers that are useless, etc.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I find it’s the most useful when asking it for small snippets of code or dealing with boilerplate stuff. Anything more complicated usually results in something broken.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
yeah, there are many things its easier to just give up having the ai do it. even if you somehow succeed it will likely be such mess it gives you its not worth it
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Like relying on automated systems for aircraft so much. You get things like planes going into landing mode because they think they are close to the runway.
DrFistington@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What most people forget is that as a programmer/designer/etc, your job is to take what your client/customer tells you they want, listen to them, then try to give them what they ACTUALLY NEED, which is something that I think needs to be highlighted. Most people making requests to programmers, don’t really even know what they want, or why they want it. They had some meeting and people decided that, ‘Yes we need the program to do X!’ without realizing that what they are asking for won’t actually get them the result they want.
AI will be great at giving people exactly what they ask for…but that doesn’t mean its what they actually needed…
RedSeries@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Great points. Also:
… AI will be great at giving people exactly what they ask for …
Honestly, I’m not even sure about this. With hallucinations and increasingly complex prompts that it fails to handle, it’s just as likely to regurgitate crap. I don’t even know if AI will get to a better state before all of this dev-firing starts to backfire and sour most company’s want to even touch AI for most development.
Humans talk with humans and do their best to come up with solutions. AI takes prompts and looks at historical human datasets to try and determine what a human would do. It’s bound to run into something novel eventually, especially if there aren’t more datasets to pull in because human-generated development solutions become scarce.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 months ago
AI will never not-require a human to hand hold it. Because AI can never know what’s true.
Because it doesn’t “know” anything. It only has ratios of usage maps between connected entities we call “words”.
Sure, you can run it and hope for the best. But that will fail sooner or later.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Also, LLM doesn’t usually have memory or experience. It’s the first page of Google search every time you put in your tokens. A forever trainee that would never leave that stage in their career.
Human’s abilities like pattern recognition, intuition, acummulation of proven knowledge in combination makes us become more and more effective at finding the right solution to anything.
The LLM bubble can’t replace it and also actively hurts it as people get distanced from actual knowledge by the code door of LLM. They learn how to formulate their requests instead of learning how to do stuff they actually need. This outsourcing makes sense when you need a cookie recipe once a year, it doesn’t when you work in a bakery. What makes the doug behave each way? You don’t need to ask so you wouldn’t know.
And the difference between asking like Lemmy and asking a chatbot is the ultimative convincing manner in which it tells you things, while forums, Q&A boards, blogs handled by people usually have some of these humane qualities behind replies and also an option for someone else to throw a bag of dicks at the suggestion of formating your system partition or turning stuff off and on.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Yesterday the test team asked me for 3 new features to help them. I thought about it for a few minutes and unederstood that these features are all incompatible. You can get one and only one. Good luck one finding an AI that understands this.
DrFistington@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Exactly. And if AI somehow finds a way to do it, end users will find even more ways to do it wrong
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
A reason I didn’t see listed: they are just asking for competition. Yes by all means get rid of your most talented people who know how your business is run.
curiousaur@reddthat.com 2 months ago
And can reproduce the whole business in a weekend with the help of AI. There are no moats anymore.
mohammed_alibi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I wonder if there will eventually be a real Butlerian Jihad
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Maybe after Herbert’s idiot son dies and someone else gets the rights
sirboozebum@lemmy.world 2 months ago
His books are so shit.
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 months ago
The jihad starts with the tech bros’ butlers, that’d be very poetic
meyotch@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Find one named Iain and radicalize him! So it would be the Butler Iain Jihad.
Etterra@discuss.online 2 months ago
I’m fine with this. Let it all break, we’ve earned it.
Nursery2787@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I haven’t seen anybody point this out yet. The owners of tech were never in it for the “tech”. It’s just a tool for them to wiggle their way up to the top. Trying to hit the jackpot so that they can wrest control of society from the current “old rich”.
halcyonloon@midwest.social 2 months ago
I just hope people won’t go back to these abusive jobs. The oligarchy that runs the US has shown it is more than happy to lay people off to cool wages and the Fed is more than happy to blame workers getting paid a reasonable amount as the cause of inflation.
Krudler@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I was a mf’ing hard core rider of the tech boom, was a sought-after consultant, and I and my colleagues rode the razor’s edge of what was possible in online gaming for 2 decades… and I can tell you now, AI presents to creative individuals who have a clue, the greatest opportunity ever handed to them. Look at how AI destroys things and “invent” solutions and you’ll pay yourself well.
Now more than ever a “programmer” is a guy that can plug other people’s modules together and pray it works. Notice that now and git gud at what you do.
TammyTobacco@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
You spend all your work day in meetings bragging about yourself while never actually doing any work, aren’t you?
Krudler@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ve been retired for a decade, moron
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 months ago
Look at how AI destroys things and “invent” solutions and you’ll pay yourself well.
Yeah, I’m seeing the absolute deluge of AI shovelware games. I know it generates money due to sheer volume, but to me that’s just like all those online courses of “how to dropship”. You’re being one of the worst literal definitions of “waste of resources”.
Krudler@lemmy.world 2 months ago
None of you can hear. You’re all so afraid. There is OPPORTUNITY EVERYWHERE but you’re so locked into your script there’s no talking to any of you. It’s so sad to see you limit yourselves. But in a way it’s revelatory of the truth I’m speaking… the “i’m a porgammer” because ya downloaded other people’s work is over, and the path is open to those ready to work and innovate. Good luck, but you don’t need that because you’ve already decided you’ve lost.
FangedWyvern42@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Article about bad AI decisions
Thumbnail is AI
Lmao
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I studied webdev and coding the hard way and I loved it. I felt unstoppable. But I still never got the job. But watching those people fail is still quite satisfying.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 months ago
I ever so slightly miss all of the Internet Explorer 6 hacks. Sure it was utterly stupid they were required and we are in a much better position now, but it’s less fun now. Everything just uses Chromium.
Fortunately Safari is still utter garbage so we’ve got that.
JoeDyrt@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
It’s hard for people who haven’t experienced the loss of experts to understand. Not a programmer but I worked in aerospace engineering for 35 years. The drive to transfer value to execs and other stakeholders by reducing the cost of those who literally make that value always ends costing more.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
those executives act like parasites. They bring no value and just leech the life from the companies.
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 months ago
WE MAED TEH PROFITZ!!!1!!1
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Executives think they are the most important part of the company. They are high level managers, that is all.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’d argue the CEO is the most important person, usually. We see dipshits like Musk and turn around and bag on all of them.
Think of a business, doesn’t matter if it’s local or national. How do the employees act? Are they happy and seem to be doing useful work? Are they downcast and depressed looking?
Sometimes it’s the local manager staving off corporate bullshit, but company culture mostly rolls down from the CEO. They saying, “Shit rolls downhill.”, works both ways.
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Well, yeah, but those costs are for tomorrow’s executive to figure out, we need those profits NOW
splinter@lemm.ee 2 months ago
It’s utterly bizarre. The customers lose out by receiving an inferior product at the same cost. The workers lose out by having their employment terminated. And even the company loses out by having its reputation squandered. The only people who gain are the executives and the ownership.
JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
On a more generic scale (whatever that means), we went from coding serious stuff in Ada with contracts and designs and architectures, to throwing everything in the trash while forgetting any kind of pride and responsibility in less than 50 years. AI is the next step in that global engineering enshittification (I hate that word but it’s appropriate).
sudo42@lemmy.world 2 months ago
<cough>Boeing<cough>
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Everyone. But Boeing did a pretty fucked up job of it.