Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

I only use AI for software development. For writing, I don't use it at all except to translate source materials. So yes, AI is only for software development in my case. The real question is whether I have any value outside of software development. Sometimes I get the feeling that AI is replacing the value I have in society.

View on HN

I have no doubt that as AI gets more expensive, my employer would lay off more developers to pay for more AI tokens, until there are very few developers left. And the hilariously sad part is, the current developers keep training the AI to do their job. Eventually I expect they will lay off almost all the developers. It really feels like we're going to be stabbing each other in the back just to be the last one to get let go.

What are they doing to train AI to do their job?

Nobody writes any code any more at all. Nobody even writes Jira tickets anymore. They don't even review code, and I think we're lucky if they even test it. The AI does all of that.

A small group of developers at my company have set up volumes of skill.md and other instructions for the AI to write Jira tickets, then take action on those Jira tickets by writing the code. The AI submits a pull request. Then there's another AI to review the code. They've written the game plan for the AI to do all of this. All the human does now is click "approve" without even reading the PR, and then someone clicks "merge". There's no coding, no critical thinking by a human anymore except for telling the AI what to do... which really anyone at the company could do. I doubt I'll have a job at this company much longer after 8 years employed there.

I don't think AI has any real value for software development, personally. The quality just isn't there, unless you invest so much effort that you may as well have written it yourself. But the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and even though I think the industry will get over the idiocy of having LLMs write software, there's no telling how long that will take. So it's a scary time to work in tech even if I think the trend will ultimately reverse.

I envy you. For me, AI is faster than the code I write myself in many, many cases. It might replace the average developer, but a talented developer like you probably won't be replaced

I was not hired to write code, but to solve problems (where often the end result is code, but it’s not the whole process). But the message from management is that our bottleneck was coding, and by using AI to code, we’ll be 10x faster and all the company problem will be solved. Essentially 1. Use AI everywhere 2. ??? 3. Profit.

Where I work, the CTO drank a whole bunch of AI kool-aid recently, so now we're expected to "10x" our output with AI. I don't think he realizes this also means 10x more problems of all kinds. But I fully expect him to double-down and when AI costs skyrocket, he'd lay off more developers to pay for more AI.

I am constantly looking for a new job, but all of them are also require AI coding experience.

As of ~8 months ago the quality is most definitely there, for almost every form of programming I've experienced.

If you're working in some vanishingly rare domain then maybe it's not yet, but most coding challenges are very much in the wheelhouse of the current frontier models.

> So it's a scary time to work in tech even if I think the trend will ultimately reverse.

I honestly can't see things going back to what it was 5 years ago. We will probably not have the future that Anthropic hopes for, but I think every developer will be required to chat with AI as part of the planning process to reduce a companies "bus factor" risk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com