Amazon cloud boss echoes NVIDIA CEO on coding being dead in the water: "If you go forward 24 months from now, it's possible that most developers are not coding"

The only people who would say this are people that don’t know programming.

LLMs are not going to replace software devs.

It’ll replace brain dead CEOs before it replaces programmers.

I know just enough about this to confirm that this statement is absolute horseshit

I'll take "things business people dont understand" for 100$.

No one hires software engineers to code. You're hired to solve problems. All of this AI bullshit has 0 capability to solve your problems, because it can only spit out what it's already stolen from seen somewhere else

Guys that are putting billions of dollars into their AI companies making grand claims about AI replacing everyone in two years. Whoda thunk it

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

--Lao Tzu...

But coding never was the difficult part. It's understanding a concept, identify a problem and solve it with the possible methods. An AI just makes the coding part faster and gives me options to quicker identify a possible solution. Thankfully there's a never ending pile of projects, issues, todos and stackholder wants, that I don't see how we need less programmers. Maybe we need more to deal with AI, as now people can do a lot more in house instead of outsourcing, but as soon as that threshold is reached, companies will again contact large software companies. If people want to put AI into everything, you need people feeding the AI with company specific data and instruct people to use this AI.

All I see is middle management getting replaced, because instead of a boring meeting, I could just ask an AI.

CEOs without a clue how things work think they know how things work.

I swear if we had no CEOs from today on the only impact would be that we wouldve less gibberish being spoken

If, 24 months from now, most people aren't coding, it'll be because people like him cut jobs to make a quicker buck. Or nickel.

This will be used as an excuse to try to drive down wages while demanding more responsibilities from developers, even though this is absolute bullshit. However, if they actually follow through with their delusions and push to build platforms on AI-generated trash code, then soon after they'll have to hire people to fix such messes.

How many times does the public have to learn if the CEO says it, he probably doesn't know what he's talking about. If the devs say it, listen

Of course they won't be; somebody has to debug all the crap AI writes.

Permanently Deleted

Todays news: Rich assholes in suits are idiots and don’t know how their own companies are working. Make sure to share what they’re saying.

Yeah, that's not going to happen.

Good luck debugging AI-generated code...

It's the same claim when tools like Integromat, WayScript, PureData, vvvv and other VPLs (Visual Programming Languages) started to get some hype. I once worked for a company that strongly believed they'd "retire the need for coding", and my ex-boss was so confident and happy about that... Although VPLs were a practical thing, time is the ruler of truth, and for every dev-related job vacancy I see, they ask some programming language, the written ones (JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, Lua, and so on).

Because if you look closely, deep inside, voila, there's code in anything that is claimed to be no-code! Wow, could anyone imagine that? 🤯 /sarcasm

A company I used to work for outsourced most of their coding to a company in India. I say most because when the code came back the internal teams anways had to put a bunch of work in to fix it and integrate it with existing systems. I imagine that, if anything, LLMs will just take the place of that overseas coding farm. The code they spit out will still need to be fixed and modified so it works with your existing systems and that work is going to require programmers.

While I highly doubt that becoming true for at least a decade, we can already replace CEOs by AI, you know? (:

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html

Everybody talks about AI killing programming jobs, but any developer who has had to use it knows it can’t do anything complex in programming. What it’s really going to replace is program managers, customer reps, makes most of HR obsolete, finance analysts, legal teams, and middle management. This people have very structured, rule based day to days. Getting an AI to write a very customized queuing system in Rust to suit your very specific business needs is nearly impossible. Getting AI to summarize Jira boards, analyze candidates experience, highlight key points of meetings (and obsolete most of them altogether), and gather data on outstanding patents is more in its wheelhouse.

I am starting to see a major uptick in recruiters reaching out to me because companies are starting to realize it was a mistake to stop hiring Software Engineers in the hopes that AI would replace them, but now my skills are going to come at a premium just like everyone else in Software Engineering with skills beyond “put a react app together”

I feel sorry for all those people in AWS that now have him as a leader...

24 months from now? Unlikely lol

If generative AI hasn't replaced artists, it won't replaced programmers.

Generative AI is much better at art than coding.

Seriously how can these CEOs of a GPU company not talk to a developer. You have loads of them to interview

Sure, Microsoft is happy to let their AIs scan everyone else’s code., but is anyone aware of any software houses letting AIs scan their in-house code?

Any lawyer worth their salt won’t let AIs anywhere near their company’s proprietary code intil they are positive that AI isn’t going to be blabbing the code out to every one of their competitors.

But of course, IANAL.

Let's assume this is true, just for discussion's sake. Who's going to be writing the prompts to get the code then? Surely someone who can understand the requirements, make sure the code functions, and then test it afterwards. That's a developer.

I seem to recall about 13 years ago when "the cloud" was going to put everyone in IT Ops out of a job. At least according to people who have no idea what the IT department actually does.

"The cloud" certainly had an impact but the one thing it definitely did NOT do was send every system and network admin to the unemployment office. If anything it increased the demand for those kinds of jobs.

I remain unconcerned about my future career prospects.

I'm going to call BS on that unless they are hiding some new models with huge context windows...

For anything that's not boilerplate, you have to type more as a prompt to the AI than just writing it yourself.

Also, if you have a behaviour/variable that is similar to something common, it will stubbornly refuse to do what you want.

I'm curious about what the "upskilling" is supposed to look like, and what's meant by the statement that most execs won't hire a developer without AI skills. Is the idea that everyone needs to know how to put ML models together and train them? Or is it just that everyone employable will need to be able to work with them? There's a big difference.

!remindme in 24 months

If you go forward 12 months the AI bubble will have burst. If not sooner.

Most companies who bought into the hype are now (or will be soon) realizing it's nowhere near the ROI they hoped for, that the projects they've been financing are not working out, that forcing their people to use Copilot did not bring significant efficiency gains, and more and more are realizing they've been exchanging private and/or confidential data with Microsoft and boy there's a shitstorm gathering on that front.

Says the person who is primarily paid with Amazon stock, wants to see that stock price rise for their own benefit, and won’t be in that job two years from now to be held accountable. Also, who has never written a kind of code. Yeah…. Ok. 🤮

Cloud tech seller sells cloud

All the manufacturers of mechanical keyboards just cried 🥺

Translation: "We're going to make the suite for building, testing, and deploying so obnoxiously difficult to integrate with your work environment that in two years nobody in your DevOps team will be able to get anything to a release state."

Me, fiddling with a config file for a legacy Perl script that's been holding up the ass-end of the business since 1996: "Uh, yeah that's great."

I left my job in fast food to go to school for tech because it seemed like the thing to do and I wanted to have a good life and be able to afford stuff. So I ruined my life getting a piece of paper only for them to enshittify things to oblivion and destroy the job market to the point it's fast food or retail only again. I suppose getting a masters in something is the logical next step but at a certain point a scam's a scam and I'm not digging a deeper hole.

I wonder how they think that's possible, the attempts I've made at having an "AI" produce working code have failed spectacularly.

Nonsense. But then CEOs rarely know what the hell they’re talking about.

It will be interesting to find out if these words will come back and haunt them.

• “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”.
• “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

Can I join anyone's band of AI server farm raiders 24 months from now? Anyone forming a group? I will bring my meat bicycle.

Guys selling something claim it will make you taller and thinner, your dick bigger, your mother in law stop calling, and work as advertised.

That'd be an exciting world, since it'd massively increase access to software.

I am also very dubious about that claim.

In the long run, I do think that AI can legitimately handle a great deal of what humans do today. It's something to think about, plan for, sure.

I do not think that anything we have today is remotely near being on the brink of the kind of technical threshold required to do that, and I think that even in a world where that was true, that it'd probably take more than 2 years to transition most of the industry.

I am enthusiastic about AI's potential. I think that there is also -- partly because we have a fair number of unknowns unknowns, and partly because people have a strong incentive to oversell the particular AI thing that they personally are involved with to investors and the like -- a tendency to be overly-optimistic about the near-term potential.

I have another comment a while back talking about why I'm skeptical that the process of translating human-language requirements to machine-language instructions is going to be as amenable as translating human-language to human-consumable output. The gist, though, is that:

• Humans rely on stuff that "looks to us like" what's going on in the real world to cue our brain to construct something. That's something where the kind of synthesis that people are doing with latent diffusion software works well. An image that's about 80% "accurate" works well enough for us; the lighting being a little odd or maybe an extra toe or something is something that we can miss. Ditto for natural-language stuff. But machine language doesn't work like that. A CPU requires a very specific set of instructions. If 1% is "off", a software package isn't going to work at all.

• The process of programming involves incorporating knowledge about the real world with a set of requirements, because those requirements are in-and-of-themselves usually incomplete. I don't think that there's a great way to fill in those holes without having that deep knowledge of the world. This "deep knowledge and understanding of the world" is the hard stuff to do for AI. If we could do that, that's the kind of stuff that would let us create a general artificial intelligence that could do what a human does in general. Stable Diffusion's "understanding" of the world is limited to statistical properties of a set of 2D images; for that application, I think that we can create a very limited AI that can still produce useful output in a number of areas, which is why, in 2024, without producing an AI capable of performing generalized human tasks, we can still get some useful output from the thing. I don't think that there's likely a similar shortcut for much by way of programming. And hell, even for graphic arts, there's a lot of things that this approach just doesn't work for. I gave an example earlier in a discussion where I said "try and produce a page out of a comic book using stuff like Stable Diffusion". It's not really practical today; Stable Diffusion isn't building up a 3D mental model of the world, designing an entity that stably persists from image to image, and then rendering that. It doesn't know how it's reasonable for objects and the like to interact. I think that to reach that point, you're going to have to have a much-more-sophisticated understanding of the world, something that looks a lot more like what a human's looks like.

  The kind of stuff that we have today may be a component of such an AI system. But I don't think that the answer here is going to be "take existing latent diffusion software and throw a lot of hardware at it". I think that there's going to have to be some significant technical breakthroughs that have not happened yet, and that we're probably going to spend some time heading down dead-end approaches before we get to that. There's probably going to be a lot of hard R&D before we get there, and that's going to take time.

I guess the programmers should start learning how to mine coal...

As software developer I am not scared that A.I will take away our jobs. What I am scared is that at that point A.I good enough to do most jobs out there.

All it really needs to do is replace large chunk of the service industry to wreck massive havock in our society.

How will federal contracts work?

While I do understand all of the scepticism in this thread, I have to say that I am personally amazed by GitHub Copilot.

I am just ramping up in a new company working on web development with Angular and Spring Boot. Even though I have 0 experience with this and have a background in python and C++, I got productive extremely quickly thanks to Copilot. Of course it does not work without flaws and you still need programming knowledge to wirte proper prompts and fix smaller issues in the resulting code. But without it I would be much further behind. It was even able to fix some issues in the html just based on a description of the issue I am observing in the webpage.

I do not think it will replace all programmers, but I do think it will replace some low level programmers who did repetitive tasks as the good programmers are extremely accelerated by only having to type subsets of what was needed before.

They aren't wrong, just late. Coding is already dead. Most coders I know spend very little time writing new code. Meeting/discussions about requirements, debugging, fighting with pipelines or tests. I once read that a good programmer writes 10 to 100 lines of fully functional, tested, working, and meeting the actual need code a day. I believe it.