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Comment by yahoobing | Hacker News Reader

If 7 out of 10 coders are made redundant because of AI right now in May 2024 then you had very bad coders to begin with.

If you do the same with translators now in May 2024 you will provide a horrible service.

June may be a different kettle of fish!

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Most coding is not rocket science, just drudgery. Still, 7/10 implies some very junior level tasks.

The thing about outsourcing is that you need to break tasks into tiny well-specified units for your contractors to do, not because they're idiots but because they have little context on anything and often need to be able to work from a different time zone without much back-and-forth. Tiny well-specified units are exactly what copilot speeds up, but they come at the price of increased costs elsewhere: more PMs/business analysts, more managers, onshore engineers whose job is solely to support offshore staff, etc.

Most big corps just need a lot of decent coders to pump out a lot of business logic and UI. AI is definitely going to be able to do that with some basic human validation along the way.

The problem with the validation part is that the human has to go through all the code written by AI. Guess what, understanding someone's code takes almost as much effort as writing the code yourself. Therefore you require just about the same amount of human beings verify AI's code.

Can an AI make a useful PR on a 1million LOC project even.

People take like 2% of the time to review and approve a PR compared to the person writing it.

2% time is superficial review.

For a 40h all week job that is less than 1h

Not enough time to even understand the requirements of a 40h job.

10h would be minimum.

Unless you are just checking that the style guide is correct and obvious missed null checks.

For this reason I feel code reviews are a bit silly and pair programming is way better (pairing with a mix of sync and async work) but that is an aside.

In addition a code review being short is usually because the coder and reviewer are both very competent. Once AI enters the chat the reviewer needs to look very closely at every line.

Code reviews are more of a formality, a pointless one. There's little to no value in one code reviewing a piece of code without the background business problem being solved by it.

Sure but a “superficial” review is what most corps currently run on. Certain crucial code gets looked at more throughly. If there are any bugs QA catches it.

It’s going to be the same with AI. It pumps out a lot of code. Human does spot checks and probably uses other AI to help with the code review. A real human does the really hard, critical code directly. A more robust QA team makes sure it all works.

I think you are right in the near future but not today. I don’t think we are quite there yet with AI but the pace of improvement is breathtaking and producing code (and more generally “logic” which could be code but also machine code, system design, LLM prompts and so on) is such a pot of gold the AI companies will go for it.

Yeah thats because then they don‘t really look at it and certainly don‘t really understand it.

In some way reviewing code is more complicated and hard than actually writing it.

I really like the „reverse centaur“ metaphor by Doctorow regarding the automation AI will bring us - humans having to double check the stuff AI wrote for correctness in AI pace.

At a big corp: 90% of my job is talking to various people to figure out what we want to code, who has to approve it, who I have to coordinate changes with, etc. AI can currently _maybe_ do half of the 10% that's left, with good amounts of supervision.

The supervision is also difficult to do unless people get enough experience actually doing the job, so expect it to take even longer to get people to verify the code once it's written by AI. This is the same concern people have about autonomous driving. If you let the machine take over, then you'll be out of touch when you're called on to do the real tricky bits of work.

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