Cannibalism

"Fourth, we will not find ourselves working less. Rather, there will be a bimodal outcome: those unable to find a place in the new AI-powered industry will fall out of it entirely, while those that remain are worked harder and harder as they drive automated development systems. Five PRs a week? Hah! Try fifty. Or five hundred."

My experience with AI/LLMs summed up. The baseline expectation got higher. I didn't get any time back. My life didn't become easier.

I think this is largely right. Software engineering as a stable, high-earning and in demand career is a thing of the past.

Those who make it work from here are those who've changed their work completely to resemble something more like a hands-off tech lead. There will of course be the lucky few who've made it work as artisans without direct commercial pressures to conform to the new "right way to do it". But the careers many of us have had is not a path available for others to follow anymore.

The irony of automating away "inefficiencies", "drudgery" and the "labour intensive" parts of other professions stings all the more when the sharp end of that shtick is pointed back in our direction.

Fantastic article. However author never considered that I'm looking forward to my job being automated. That's like a whole point of programming.

> Third, once destroyed those industries will not meaningfully return. This is not a process that will result in a natural ebb and flow. Once the software development profession is disrupted, it will stay that way as talent pipelines dry up and expertise ages out

I can echo that. If/when I am replaced with an LLM, I plan on switching to a hands-on profession - welder, electrician, machinist. I am also not planning on ever going back to software... errr... prompt "engineering". Maybe for twice my pre-LLM salary at a place with a no-LLM policy? More at a prompt-engineering place.

> These tools are here. They’re not going away.

They might very well go away. There is definitely an AI bubble, and it remains to be seen whether it deflates gradually or pops spectacularly. Geoeconomics might destroy them by constraining their access to hardware. The capabilities are real, but whether those capabilities are realised is a different matter.

I was with the article - especially the bit about the 10% an LLM loses and how that loss can be de-amplified across eventual meaning, but then...

"My first instinct is to laugh and shake my head. One need not look very far to find indignant software developers absolutely certain that their jobs cannot possibly be automated away by the very tools their industry contemporaries are creating to replace them. I suspect you’d also not have to look far into their posting histories to find those same people comparing cabbies to buggy whip makers."

What a rude and callous comment. I'm one of those developers, I'd love to see an LLM even fractionally capable of some of the things my job entails. Laugh at me as I defend my lifelong career, why don't you? I'm also one who decries such things as the removal of local services, taxi and otherwise, for those in the cloud. Screw you, man.

Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts.

The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.

We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.

I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.

Are people seriously getting use out of LLMs? Everything they produce is extermely sloppy in my experience, like actually mostly useless. I really dont understand the hype. Its very confusing.

Meh just another anti AI rant - this time with the cloak of legitimacy taken from a market downturn.