We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

https://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1cmi5gj/bp_earnings_call_we_need_70_less_coders_from/

by cachehit • 2 years ago

54 82 2 years ago

old.reddit.com

yahoobing4• 2 years ago

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!

dyauspitr3• 2 years ago

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.

kadoban• 2 years ago

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.

kaptainscarlet2• 2 years ago

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.

martindbp• 2 years ago

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

strken• 2 years ago

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.

ein0p2• 2 years ago

We’re just going to write a lot more code than we could before. With higher quality

RexM• 2 years ago

I’m unsure about the higher quality part. I’ve seen code written by both AI and some humans — it’s a toss up.

ein0p2• 2 years ago

That’s the thing: I think it’s not one vs the other. The correct way to think about this is: AI augmented humans.

steve1977• 2 years ago

The quote actually says "We need 70% less coders from third parties to code".

willvarfar2• 2 years ago

The IT is almost certainly outsourced. It's all contractors.

willvarfar2• 2 years ago

They are probably right about the coders. Extrapolating from my brushes with big corp IT efforts and confidently generalising it to BP too, it is likely that the standard of what they have today is so underwhelming that an AI will do no worse.

This is because the corporate culture and reward structure incentivise using the cheapest labour to spend as much money as possible delaying delivery for so long that accountability doesn't come home to roost and the system can instead be scheduled to be replaced by a bigger worse new project before it ever gets finished.

Yeap I'm cynical but there are precious few 'wow they are doing it right' 'efficient and effective' stories from big corp IT.

They are probably right about their help desks too. And so on.

Oras• 2 years ago

From the earnings PDF, reference 2

Due to GenAI and in-house built developer productivity tools, we have increased the output of our software developers by around 70% year-over-year. In parallel, we have been carrying out a large-scale digital talent transformation, accelerated by our in-house AI + human-powered code-reviews-as-a-service capability. As a part of this we have been reducing 3rd party software engineers in our organization by around 60% percent in the last 6 months.

They have increased in-house developers' productivity, which means they are less reliant on 3rd party developers.

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

This is not the first time programmers became more efficient. We've had that happen before; usually because of new languages, tools, and other things that help people become more productive. AI is just another productivity enhancing tool.

Some studies suggest that the lines of codes produced per time unit is more or less constant across different languages. What matters is what those lines do. If you are programming in assembly, it's going to take ages of very verbose programming to get anything done. Do the same in Haskell and you might reduce it to a couple of lines of code.

Based on what happened in the past, we might expect programming work to outgrow the efficiency gains. That's what has happened every time there was a step change reduction in cost for producing software. The community of developers keeps expanding and isn't shrinking.

dymk• 2 years ago

This is an earnings call, so take it with a grain of salt. There's a strong incentive to represent expenses as low as possible.

faeriechangling3• 2 years ago

They must have quite the sparkling crystal ball at BP headquarters. What a specific estimate, not even a range.

elric• 2 years ago

If this number is anywhere near accurate across companies, this might end up having far ranging consequences that we're not ready for. Aside from the obvious unemployment of those replaced by AI, why would anyond still want become CS/IT graduate? Might as well close down 70% of CS/IT departments.

lionkor2• 2 years ago

I believe only people with a serious lack of skill and lack of drive to change that are in danger here.

When AI starts to produce compilable non-trivial code, I'll consider changing my mind, but that has yet to happen.

Visual Studio can auto suggest me stuff while I'm refactoring, that easily saves me an hour a week of work during a busy week. The rest of my work can't be automated by any current AI, because most of my work is thinking, debugging and testing.

LLMs can only go "Oh, i'm so sorry, let me just try brute forcing the problem! Heres another variation of the solution, please spend 5-15 minutes testing it to exhaustion!" - "Ah, my bad, heres another fix that doesnt work: ..."... etc.

imtringued• 2 years ago

AST input is a tiny fraction of computer science.

torginus2• 2 years ago

I believe it's the other way around - most people who have computer science degrees have attended university with a rigorous math, engineering and theoretical computer science curriculum. And despite that, they struggle to use any of it in any meaningful capacity.

Months can go by before I get to solve a good DS & A problem in production. Most of my job consits of fighting with the mundane drudgery of fighting with cloud providers or getting crappy frameworks to do what I want.

I think the value of people who have a deep understanding is about to skyrocket.

danpalmer4• 2 years ago

What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%). It's creating dashboards in BI tools, it's tweaking Wordpress themes, it's writing custom business processes in ABAP for SAP deployments, or it's 3-10 engineers doing the work of 1 so that a outsourcing company can bulk up its bills.

This is the sort of work that AI is coming for. It's low impact, low effort, low paid, and importantly it doesn't get automated (often). This means there is a lot of low hanging fruit for automation, whether that's by regular tooling or LLMs.

On the other hand, if you're a highly paid software engineer, it's likely you're already working with highly automated and abstracted systems, so there's much less opportunity for LLMs. If your deployment process is a Word doc specifying the 120 steps you have to run in bash to deploy that takes 1 eng day, that's going to be automated, but if you're git-pushing and having Kubernetes roll it out in your CI/CD flow, automation has already raised the level of abstraction that you need to work at and there are fewer opportunities.

Yes there's Copilot/etc which will reduce boilerplate, but the only way a company achieves "70% less coders" is by wholesale automation of large parts of their process that must be horribly basic already.

faeriechangling3• 2 years ago

I'm well aware of this and in those sorts of jobs, most of the work isn't programming, it's sitting in meetings and communicating. While AI might help with this simply by shrinking the amount of people needed to do a job, I'm very dubious about a 70% efficiency gain when you look at the entire scope of what these workers do.

The entire concept that if you make coding 70% more efficient that you'll make coders 70% more efficient is simply wrong.

gexla2• 2 years ago

Maybe you need to be more specific about which workers you're talking about.

Given a full time worker vs a contractor, I'm guessing the contractor has far less knowledge of the system as a whole, and ripe for being replaced. Then with freed up funds, maybe they hire more internal developers. It could be more of a reshuffling than anything else.

wakawaka283• 2 years ago

On the other hand, if you're a highly paid software engineer, it's likely you're already working with highly automated and abstracted systems, so there's much less opportunity for LLMs.

I think you're wrong about this. There are people today getting paid lots of money for basic jobs, and people with real difficult jobs that don't get paid much. Pay rate is as much a function of location and your particular company or industry as it is the actual nature of what you are doing.

Yes there's Copilot/etc which will reduce boilerplate, but the only way a company achieves "70% less coders" is by wholesale automation of large parts of their process that must be horribly basic already.

The basics often only seem basic because we've done them a great deal. When the machines are charged with doing a lot of stuff, will the basics still appear basic? Will you be able to spot the critical yet tricky errors buried inside reams of code for a process that you never have to develop yourself? Furthermore, will you be able to skip all the basics in your career development and work on advanced things? I have my doubts. A lot of "horribly basic" "drudgery" will have to be done manually, because it is too important to leave to the whims of a LLM and people have no other way to develop the necessary skills to sustain the industry.

danpalmer4• 2 years ago

Fair points, although I think you may be reading my points as more concrete than intended.

When I'm talking about pay I'm thinking location-agnostic, i.e. low to high pay within a comparable region. For every engineer in London earning £100k there's many earning £26k doing more basic work.

And when I say "basic" I don't just mean working with low level systems, I mean working with systems that are un-automated. Working with processes where someone has made the judgement call that it's cheaper to throw large numbers of cheap engineers at the problem rather than fewer highly paid engineers to automate it all away.

That's not to say that highly paid engineers don't need to get into the basics, they definitely do, but that digging into the depths of an automated deployment system is not the same as running repetitive manual tasks.

soco4• 2 years ago

Here is a question worth answering yet often overlooked: if AI helps the newbs generate useful stuff but which they don't properly understand, and also helps experienced find the issues on AI generated stuff based on their experience, WHERE is the middle ground where newbs can gain the experience to bring them to that senior level? I see no path going from there to there, unless the juniors start doing things by hand again, for which nobody will want to pay them (hey why don't you use AI instead). And seniors don't live forever...

Roark66• 2 years ago

70%... By lines written? Or by time taken? There is a huge difference. Sometimes you spend days trawling old code, even older dependencies to discover adding a line may fix your problem. In the meantime you may've read hundreds of pages of docs, seen dozens of diagrams. Hunted people that moved between departments and "worked on this before" etc. Then after you fix it yours in charge of organising testing and deployment to cert/prod including representing the change in risk assessment meetings. Good luck using AI to replace this work.

danpalmer4• 2 years ago

I'm talking about time spent. I completely agree that all the work you've mentioned is stuff that takes time and that AI won't replace any time soon, but I strongly doubt that it's the bulk of the work.

I'm talking about the programmers that a friend of mine works with who take several quarters to produce a dashboard, or the entry level PHP jobs that make barely above minimum wage and sell custom websites and hosting to real-estate companies in small towns, or the outsourced programmers that other friends interact with, who spent ~10 eng over 2 years building a "PaaS" style system in shell scripts that no one in their company actually uses because surprise surprise no one ever thought to ask whether it was necessary or had the right feature set or even worked (but management paid for it).

These people are spending a significant amount of their time coding, but they're not spending time automating, or improving the process for next time, and so the work they're doing is fairly trivial and is most likely to be impacted by AI.

chipdart• 2 years ago

What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%).

What I find odd is that AI tools are used to create new code but the bulk of the work is in rewriting and changing existing software,and fixing issues by touching single lines of code spread throughout the project.

Perhaps AI tools will improve, but today you need an awful lot of prompting to get a single decent usable starting point. In some applications you end up spending far more time prompting the AI tool than what you would end up doing by simply writing the thing.

soco4• 2 years ago

My usual dialogues with ChatGPT now 4o: I need a SQL to do 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. GPT: sure thing. Me: umm you forgot 4. GPT: oops sorry, here. Me: now you forgot 3. GPT oops sorry, here. Me: you forgot 4 again. Make sure you do both 3 and 4. GPT: oops sorry, here. Me: you forgot 4 again the fuck I'll do it.

gofreddygo• 2 years ago

  > boring low paid drudgery

  > the sort of work that AI is coming for

This is NOT what AI is coming for. Its too far from even barely capable for that sort of work. BI tools, Wordpress themes, layers and layers of internal tools for custom business processes are all incredibly fragile and intricately balanced. It will have to learn systems where extra empty tags in the xml response get accounts flagged for removal, systems where the output must be a zip file archived within a .cab file for the downstream systems to be able to process it. Its an insanely stupid house of cards held together by bottom feeding groups of human intelligence. There's no budget to fix it. No incentive to improve it. It will never change, till its replaced with garbage from an even lower bottom feeding group.

AI is hopeless, because of the sheer lack of anything to accurately train itself for this task. It is trying to sell itself to the OEMs and platforms with shiny demos as an even cheaper alternative to the bottom feeding group of outsourced labor.

The joke is going to be real when the $$$ are spent on AI and the outcome is outsourced to the bottom feeding group to maintain.

spaceman_20202• 2 years ago

They literally said in the earnings call that they now need fewer third party developers because of AI. And this is one of the biggest legacy companies on the planet.

Strange that the people in the trenches are saying that AI is helping them, but people on HN are screaming that AI is useless…

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

So true. What it did come for was my part time job of taking a png in a folder, create 5 sizes with the size appended to the file names, put these in a subfolder, convert all sizes to avif and webp and generate the picture html block for the image (avif with fallback webp. png sizes are deleted, original png archived). It took one prompt to get that script and I only changed the name of it to dothis.sh it works with one or 258 .png files in the folder.

I fired the me responsible last week.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of this can be actually automated by LLMs. Isn't substantial amount of time be just lazily spend tracking down what ever variable name or mapping to right thing?

Just spend time adding very simple script as cronjob by CI/CD... And everything was copy paste. But it still took time to set up and name things. To get the small inconsequential details right.

danpalmer4• 2 years ago

LLMs are fairly good at understanding how a bunch of naming in slightly different forms maps around a system. This is basically the one trick that transformers/attention does! I think a smart copy/paster is what LLMs will be good at.

What they won't be good at is when there are deeper semantics, when there are performance requirements, when there's a complex data model, or when you need to come up with the data model and consider how that will work over time.

anonzzzies2• 2 years ago

I seems that the current AI is rather good at stomping together projects made of react saas starters with nano/microservices (workers etc) where everything is one shot and complete replace and some api routes. People who cannot code at all without AI are now making products that work and sell.

thefz• 2 years ago

Good luck when you have to hunt a bug, though.

ac130kz• 2 years ago

GPT 4 Turbo can't even write good automations most of the time, these companies absolutely don't care about the quality of their product.

yen223• 2 years ago

Original source:

Page 7 of the "BP 1Q 2024 Results: Webcast Q&A Transcript"

https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

faeriechangling3• 2 years ago

My impression is that AI has done more for the accessibility of coding than the efficiency of coding.

Sure, it's much more possible for bob from accounting to throw together some trivial python script than it was a few years ago, but it seems the main benefit more skilled programmers get from it seems to be helping with syntax and pumping out boilerplate. Which is quite a bit of programming work but well less than 70% of it.

When a problem is tricky, it seems people turn off the autopilot.

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

Bob from accounting will not even know how to run a Python script, how to deploy it, install required modules. Programming is in a significant part about knowing how to break a solution to a problem into small, testable, reusable chunks of code and knowing when a one-file script is fine or when a framework (3rd-party or written in house) may be a better solution. Programming is also about knowing the tooling for your language, the operating system, protocols, formats. AI won't help Bob with that.

gexla2• 2 years ago

This isn't telling me much. They are less reliant on contractors. I'm guessing these contractors have far greater overhead and handle things which require the least knowledge of the systems they are working on. This could create more full time jobs for BP, by freeing up funds to put more internal people behind AI assisted dev.

akmarinov• 2 years ago

Seriously guys, what am I missing that they can do that?

I’ve tried doing just basic json printing apps and the AIs (GPT-4o, Claude Opus, Gemini) often fail me after digging into what needs to be done.

They do great at scaffolding things and getting you maybe 40-50% there, then they hit a brick wall of awful code and not doing what I want.

How can you replace devs for even these simplest cases? It just doesn’t work at the end.

fxtentacle2• 2 years ago

I can tell you from first-hand experience that a wall of source code which only works 50% of the time is precisely the level of quality that you can expect from cheap outsourcing. I believe what AI can do is change managers' expectations so that smaller teams become more accepted. And by kicking out the worst performers, you increase average productivity, no matter what the AI does or doesn't do.

colechristensen2• 2 years ago

I’d believe if you did nothing with AI and just fired a big chunk of your bottom tier cheap outsourced programming “talent” your productivity would significantly increase as a result of your actual talent no longer being occupied with managing and reacting to low quality code contribution and contributor hand holding.

pllbnk• 2 years ago

The difference between cheap outsourcing by humans and LLMs is that in the former case this 50% of working code remains more or less constant, while with LLMs, I would assume, it gets exponentially lower with every iteration. I use LLMs for my daily work and personal matters a lot and I certainly admire the value they bring but the shortcomings cannot be unseen.

janosdebugs• 2 years ago

My experience is that the more experienced you are the less benefit you will see from coding asistants. If you are at the beginning of your career and writing a simple for loop requires serious brain power, an AI coding assistant will seriously speed you up. The same goes for task complexity. Mainstream tasks will work better than specialized ones simply due to the lack of adequate training material.

lionkor2• 2 years ago

7/10 devs being obsoleted by AI must mean that the company employs about 3 actual engineers per 10 people it hires, and the rest just push around copy pasted code

wakawaka283• 2 years ago

BP the oil company? If they are actually using AI to write their code, it sounds like criminal negligence and a disaster in the making.

yellow_lead• 2 years ago

We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding, the human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it, that's a big savings for the company moving forward.

Reading code is sometimes much harder than writing it yourself. If you still have to validate the code, I don't understand how it's a net gain.

colechristensen2• 2 years ago

lol, on an earnings call. Someone is lying and being lied to.

Unless they were paying a whole bunch of programmers to do not much useful at all or just incredibly simple repetitive things, this is obviously not true to anyone who has tried to use LLMs to solve problems.

I’m guessing some mid management sold the idea of firing 2/3 of the development staff and somebody is declaring victory a bit early.

throwaway290• 2 years ago

I like how all comments here are "surely it's all just bad coders and not a threat for my big brain" and not like "all our source is being used against us-- today it's juniors, tomorrow it's me".

w10-1• 2 years ago

Contract agencies have strong incentives to pad work and payrolls and use process controls to coordinate production. It's perfect for AI disruption because you can test replacements at process boundaries, and there's plenty of excess.

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

Meanwhile in India... https://www.bp.com/en_in/india/home/news/press/bp-to-establi...

torginus2• 2 years ago

Honestly I believe that should wholesale replacement of people come about, programmers will be one of the last ones to be replaced, with the first ones being probably translators, then customer service, help desk clerks etc.

Basically almost all intellectually challenging problems have a major component of programming, to the point that most engineering professions are thought of a special case of 'programmer'. Data Scientists', ML engineers', Electrical engineers' valuable outputs are usually some kind of computer code.

moneywoes2• 2 years ago

as a backend dev what do i do to stay safe from this?

yashg• 2 years ago

"Second things like call centers, the language models have become so sophisticated now. They can operate in multiple languages, 14, 15 languages easily. In the past, that hasn't been something we can do. So we can redeploy people off that given that the AI can do it." For the customers this is going to be a horrible experience and frustration of going in a loop with an AI model. Anyone facing a problem not listed in the 10-15 predefined problems and resolutions is going to have an excruciating time trying to get any meaningful resolution.

netsharc• 2 years ago

Some company's call centers are designed to fuck around and frustrate you until you give up trying to get what you want (e.g. compensation). Here's looking at you AirBnB. Hah, imagine making something that evil with AI, you don't even need to destroy your outsourced call-center workers' souls...

JSDevOps• 2 years ago

Someone is definitely lieing to someone else here.

koonsolo• 2 years ago

AI is StackOverflow on steroids. That's how I see it from a programmer's perspective.

It's excellent at getting code snippets, suggesting possible ways on how to handle something, etc. I recently had to help out my son with Arduino programming, which I'm totally new at, and thanks to ChatGPT this was super fast and easy.

But to handle an actual codebase, even a single developer codebase, it just doesn't have enough context for that.

I'm sure some day computers will be smarter than us, but some people are still seriously overestimating this.

joak• 2 years ago

AI makes coding cheaper, easier.

With an elastic demand there will be more code not less coders.

djaouen• 2 years ago

I seriously doubt this figure.

boring-alterego• 2 years ago

AI can help those of us on the edges of what the "coder" of an environment is. Things like getting the right syntax for a given set of pseudocode instructions. Background is EE, inherited an airgapped DCS with everything from things running Fortran from the early 1980s to modern controllers in a heavily regulated industry. Time savings do matter. And for low end little things we could never get an external contract on we are enabling those that take more of the system owner type role to have more tools in their bag for response.

We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

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