alt Hacker NewsI think the important thing is this is much cheaper than hiring a software engineering team. They could have hired me for 200k and I could not do this in a year. I do not have the context, and I do not know Zig or Rust, perhaps I could pick it up in a month, but I would be extremely slow.
Forgetting all the predictions about singularity etc, at the very least AI as it is now, is going to make it very hard to justify hiring a SWE for 200k. I will say, at the very top for a software heavy company like Google or Anthropic, they will still hire excellent engineers to create new software that AI is not very good at.
But for companies where software is simply a cost center. Like Walmart, or Target, companies that were already outsourcing software development, or using cheap H1bs, now they have the alternative of AI which is much better than even hiring an average software engineer for 200k. This is a sea change in the job market, it’s going to have a pretty big effect as it is right now. US has around 1.6 Million software developers, this number is going to get cut drastically, the very top, say an L6 quality in FAANG will be fine, the average in a no name Bank, or the guy building the website for McDonalds is out, he needs to learn something else or he’ll end up without a job soon.
I would not have predicted this a year ago, now it seems clear that this will happen. Just shows how much of a sea change we have witnessed just like that.
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I'm not so pessimistic. There is an infinite amount of work that could be done. No one would have entertained the idea of rewriting a project in Rust before this. It hasn't replaced anyone's actual job and they still had to hire a high paid employee to pull it off.
I suspect rather than hire less people we will just produce more code changes.
I think this problem is especially perfect for an LLM though. Its effectively translating with a great test harness.
As for your other arguments, I’m not certain we won’t just Jevon's Paradox into more work.
> They could have hired me for 200k and I could not do this in a year. I do not have the context, and I do not know Zig or Rust, perhaps I could pick it up in a month, but I would be extremely slow.
All that really proves is that you’d be an astoundingly poor choice to hire. If you’re spending $200k on someone that doesn’t know at least two out of three (context, Rust, or Zig), you’re just burning money.
That’s not to say that experienced engineers familiar with the stack would or wouldn’t be able to do it in a year, but they’d certainly have a better shot at it.
It’s also not that this project sprung into thin air from a quick prompt and LLM magic… it was driven by a dedicated, highly talented, subject matter expert with extensive SWE background and extensive support from the leading experts in the world. You’ll continue to need someone to steer the ship, even in the Wal-Marts and Targets. An LLM is only ever as good as the input it’s given.
Ehh, I think this take needs a grain of salt.
There's a few significant facts here:
- They had an existing functional Zig implementation
- They had an existing test suite for the Zip implementation
- They had a separate JavaScript compliance test suite with ~ 1 million tests
- The person overseeing the rewrite was responsible for a huge portion of the existing codebase and was very familiar with the existing architecture and problems
I don't think that middle management at most companies is going to be starting from that same point when it comes to building or updating something. Generally, I don't think there are many projects out there that have such robust existing tests and specifications.
In this case, the engineering behind the tests and specifications need to also be considered part of the process, since without those you wouldn't be able to build a control loop in the same way.
Also I'm pretty sure Walmart directly hires software engineers and doesn't just outsource everything - https://careers.walmart.com/us/en/results?searchQuery=softwa...
If you already employed the engineers the extra cost would have been $0.
It's funny, I see the opposite and I would only trust a senior engineer with conducting such a wide-reaching change. I would be more likely to hire a senior engineer who might now be able to effect such change.