A.I. Is Coming for the Coders Who Made It

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/opinion/ai-coders-jobs.html

by donohoe • 1 year ago

34 31 1 year ago

So far AI seems to better in generating technical debt than value. Not exactly worried - in 3-4 years there will be a lot of investment in clearing up the currently created vibe mess.

ashoeafoot• 1 year ago

Do we get a mass layoff of "nocode"-mbas? That would be a appropriate response to "i tanked the company to remove a dependency ".

msgodel• 1 year ago

So far that's what most of the layoffs have been.

sph• 1 year ago

“Vibe cleaner”

czue• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/msi41

alienbaby• 1 year ago

I gave co-pilot a shot this weekend. Building a toy app for doing a bunch of text processing.

Last time I tried, when this stuff was 'new' , I was thoroughly unimpressed.

This weekend, I did about 8 hours work in 2 hours. Copilot worked _almost flawlessly.

I cam away very impressed. I still wonder how well it would work against a large established repository where it isn't free to re-invent the wheel and doesn't know about established architecture and methods etc..

But it did change my perception overalll. They are getting better, and fast...

datadrivenangel2• 1 year ago

The tools have gotten a lot better for sure. Still not good at scale, but for narrow things that are well solved, they crank it out.

lapcat4• 1 year ago

This weekend, I did about 8 hours work in 2 hours.

How long until managers expect employees to do 4x as much work per week in the same amount of time, for no additional compensation?

atonse4• 1 year ago

Are you trying to mix two payment models together though?

To provide a counterpoint:

With almost all traditional employment, people are paid for their time. Their output is more an expectation based on the time put in.

So if you want to bill by output, that's always an option as a consultant (fixed price).

But as a business owner, I would absolutely expect my employees (and vendors) to use these tools to go faster, just like laptops make them go faster than typewriters. It's not like it's causing the employee 4x more effort for that 4x output, is it?

If you were digging ditches by hand, but now you have an excavator with you, are you expecting 10x payment just because you can now do it 10x faster? Nobody will pay for that. Instead, you would now charge by a different metric (say, length of the ditch, rather than hours). And you would now be able to handle more customers since you can provide the same outcome to more people in less time.

I have no problem if someone wanted to charge by outcome. I think the concept of paying for "time" is going to go extinct in this new world. Think of lawyers who bill $500/hour. Now they can't say "I need 4 hours to have my team review this" and send you a $4k bill for their whole team to bill, because expectations have changed.

But framing this as an "us vs. them" thing by comparing apples and oranges isn't going to get us anywhere.

andrewstuart2• 1 year ago

> still wonder how well it would work against a large established repository where it isn't free to re-invent the wheel and doesn't know about established architecture and methods etc..

You’re missing the point of AI coding if you think that’s the measure of its capabilities.

francisofascii• 1 year ago

I admit, have a negative feeling that if my Computer Science discipline is going down in the Titanic, then other disciplines should go down with me. I know its not a good attitude. It feels unfair that CS job will be the first to fall, but we have had it so good for so long, maybe it is fair. Our industry moves so fast. I suspect lawyers, doctors, other "white collar" jobs will take longer and be slower to disrupt due to societal delays and protections (unions, laws, etc.), even though AI could potentially affect these disciplines more down the road.

datadrivenangel2• 1 year ago

The number of jobs doing low-level code will likely increase even as AI reduces the premium for the skills.

eyesofgod2• 1 year ago

Eh most of the jobs that will survive over time are already shit jobs. I cant wish too ill on people in those situations.

xianshou• 1 year ago

AI is, currently, coming not for the coders who made it but for the coders who didn't contribute to or ignored it. The foundation labs are all quite committed to recursive self-improvement of coding tools as a general research accelerant.

iLoveOncall• 1 year ago

When I see how unsupervised LLMs struggle with coding tasks (see public PRs from Copilot on Microsoft codebases) I don't see how recursive self-improvement can lead to any actual improvement rather than the total opposite.

bwfan123• 1 year ago

Can we have a rule which says - "those who have not coded for a living shall not make sweeping statements about the future of coding" ?

All sorts of academic and management folks are coming out of the woodwork making predictions about the future of coding when they dont know what the hell it is ?

eyesofgod2• 1 year ago

Academics are of no concern really. They aren't treated seriously, but I do care what management things. Even if they're blowhard retards with no idea what they're talking about, they're still calling the shots and still making the decisions

andrewstuart2• 1 year ago

Far from the truth.

If anything, more than ever you need to be a great programmer to know how to direct the process to a worthwhile outcome.

A.I. Is Coming for the Coders Who Made It

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