Hey cool, an AI can program itself as well as a human can now. Think of how this will impact the programmer job market! That's got to be like, the biggest implication of this development.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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I take issue with the "replacing other industries" part.
I know that this is an unpopular opinion among programmers but all professions have roles that range from small skills sets and little cognitive abilities to large skill sets and high level cognitive abilities.
Generative AI is an incremental improvement in automation. In my industry it might make someone 10% more productive. For any role where it could make someone 20% more productive that role could have been made more efficient in some other way, be it training, templates, simple conversion scripts, whatever.
Basically, if someone's job can be replaced by AI then they weren't really producing any value in the first place.
Of course, this means that in a firm with 100 staff, you could get the same output with 91 staff plus Gen AI. So yeah in that context 9 people might be replaced by AI, but that doesn't tend to be how things go in practice.
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Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn't a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.
After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I've ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.
I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.
AI is very very neat but like it has clear obvious limitations. I'm not a programmer and I could tell you tons of ways I tripped Ollama up already.
But it's a tool, and the people who can use it properly will succeed.
I'm not saying ita a tool for programmers, but it has uses
This. I have no problems to combine couple endpoints in one script and explaining to QWQ what my end file with CSV based on those jsons should look like. But try to go beyond that, reaching above 32k context or try to show it multiple scripts and poor thing have no clue what to do.
If you can manage your project and break it down to multiple simple tasks, you could build something complicated via LLM. But that requires some knowledge about coding and at that point chances are that you will have better luck of writing whole thing by yourself.
I think its most useful as an (often wrong) line completer than anything else. It can take in an entire file and just try and figure out the rest of what you are currently writing. Its context window simply isn't big enough to understand an entire project.
That and unit tests. Since unit tests are by design isolated, small, and unconcerned with the larger project AI has at least a fighting change of competently producing them. That still takes significant hand holding though.
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Most smart AI "developer"
"Programmers are cooked," he says in reply to a post offering six figures for a programmer
six figures for a junior programmer, no less
I almost added that, but I'll be real, I have no clue what a junior programmer is lmao
For all I know it's the equivalent to a journeyman or something
Most programmers don't go on many journeys, it's more like a basementman.
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We're still far away from Al replacing programmers. Replacing other industries, sure.
Right, it's the others that are cooked.
Fake review writers are hopefully retraining for in-person scams.
The reason programmers are cooked isn't because AI can do the job, bit because idiots in leadership have decided that it can.
- Programmers invent AI
- Executives use AI to replace programmers
- Executives rehire programmers for thousands of dollars an hour to fix AI mistakes.
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At the end of the day, they still want their shit to work. It does, however, make things very uncomfortable in the mean time.
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Personally I prefer my junior programmers well done.
As long as they keep the rainbow π socks on, I'll eat them raw.
Co"worker" spent 7 weeks building a simple C# MVC app with ChatGPT
I think I don't have to tell you how it went. Lets just say I spent more time debugging "his" code than mine.
I tried out the new copilot agent in VSCode and I spent more time undoing shit and hand holding than it would have taken to do it myself
Things like asking it to make a directory matching a filename, then move the file in and append _v1 would result in files named simply "_v1" (this was a user case where we need legacy logic and new logic simultaneously for a lift and shift).
When it was done I realized instead of moving the file it rewrote all the code in the file as well, adding several bugs.
Granted I didn't check the diffs thoroughly, so I don't know when that happened and I just reset my repo back a few cookies and redid the work in a couple minutes.
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