24 months from now? Unlikely lol
15 years at least. probably more like 30. and it will be questionable, because it will use a lot of energy for every query and a lot of resources for cooling
it will use a lot of energy for every query and a lot of resources for cooling
Well, so do coders. Coffee can be quite taxing on the environment, as can air conditioning!
That’s probably the amount of time remaining before they move on to selling the next tech buzz word to some suckers.
And just like that, they’ll forget about these previous statements as well.
I fear Elon Musk’s broken promises method is being admired and copied.
I’m sure they’ll hold strong to that prediction in 24 mo. It’s just 24 more months away
We’ll have full self driving next year.
This is the year of the Linux Desktop
I remember a little over a decade ago while I was still in public school hearing about super advanced cars that had self driving were coming soon, yet we’re hardly anywhere closer to that goal (if you don’t count the Tesla vehicles running red lights incidents).
A subscription to Popular Science magazine through most of my teen years did wonders for my skepticism.
We should all be switched to hydrogen fuel by now, for our public transport lines with per person carriages that can split off from the main line seamlessly at speed to go off on side routes to your individual destination, that automatically rejoin the main line when you’re done with it. They were talking about all of that pre-2010.
I think I remember the hydrogen fuel thing.
Also, fuck Popular Science for making me think there was gonna be a zombie apocalypse due to some drug that turns you into a zombie.
In Phoenix you can take a Waymo (self driving taxi) just like an Uber. They have tons of ads and they’re everywhere on the roads.
I am in Phoenix and just took one to the airport. First time riding in a Waymo. It was uncannily good and much more confident than the FSD Tesla I’ve ridden in a few times.
I haven’t taken one yet but have several friends who have. Besides being generally good, one of the best parts is unlike Uber, there’s no chance that you have a weird driver that wants to talk to you the whole ride
Cloud tech seller sells cloud
I know just enough about this to confirm that this statement is absolute horseshit
It isn’t that AI will have replaced us in 24 months, it’s that we will be enslaved in 24 months. Or in the matrix. Etc.
Will the matrix it puts us in be in 1999? Because I’d take that deal.
Matrix lookin pretty good rn - 1999, stable climate, free apartment, 90s gf (she loves u) etc
Sounds like the no-ops of a decade ago and cloud will remove the need for infrastructure engineers. 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂😂😂🤣
SHUT UP AND GO BACK TO OUR SHITTY YAML BASED INFRASTRUCTURE!
Fuck yml, all my homies hate yml
JSON or bust!
Ok, since YAML is a superset, I can just put the JSON into the YAML.
🤣😂😪😥😢😭
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.
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.
Yes… because there will be users who will always refuse to fix their own computer issues. Even if there’s an easy solution at their fingertips. Many don’t even try to reboot. They just tell IT to fix it… then go get coffee for a half hour.
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.
Well if it works, means that job wasn’t that important, and the people doing that job should improve themselves to stay relevant.
😜 👢
Define “works.”
Because the goals of a money-hungry CEO don’t always align with those of the workers in the company itself (or often, even the consumer). I imagine this guy will think it worked just fine as he’s enjoying his golden parachute.
Oh perhaps the CEOs are the ones that need to be replaced?
Yup, notice nowhere did I say they shouldnt. People read and infer what they want
Like in Twitter?
Nah that was just a bad CEO
Define “works”?
If you’re a CEO, cutting all your talent, enshittifying your product, and pocketing the difference in new, lower costs vs standard profits might be considered as “working”.
Hmmm maybe you’re misunderstanding me.
What I mean is “coding” is basically the grunt work of development. The real skill is understanding the requirements and building something efficiently. Tbh, I hate coding.
What tools like Gemini or ChatGPT brings to the table is the ability to create small, efficient snippets of code that works. We can then just modify it to meet our more specific requirements.
This makes things much faster, for me at least. If the time comes when the AI can generate more efficient code, making my job easier, I’d count that as “works” for me.
job wasn’t that important
I keep telling you that changing out the battery in the smoke alarm isn’t worth the effort and you keep telling me that the house is currently on fire, we need to get out of here immediately, and I just roll my eyes because you’re only proving my point.
Sure, believe what you want to believe. You can either adapt to what’s happening, or just get phased out. AI is happening whether you like it or not. You may as well learn to use it.
I get why you’re enthusiastic about AI. This whole comment reads like it was AI generated.
It has already happened… And the results are a bit… “Cringe”
You can adapt, but how you adapt matters.
AI in tech companies is like a hammer or drill. You can either get rid of your entire construction staff and replace them with a few hammers, or you can keep your staff and give each worker a hammer. In the first scenario, nothing gets done, yet jobs are replaced. In the second scenario, people keep their jobs, their jobs are easier, and the house gets built.
Yup. Most of us aren’t CEOs, so we don’t have a lot of say about how most companies are run. All we can do is improve ourselves.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to be against that. They prefer to whine.
AI can’t do anything that hasn’t been done before. That’s never going to change.
!remindme in 24 months
I will put down a solid grand that this exact same article will be printed by the exact same website 24 months from now and it will receive the exact same reception.
Nah, if it doesn’t pan out then all these folks will pretend they never said this, but in 24 months programming will be obsoleted by <insert fresh buzz here>
Guys selling something claim it will make you taller and thinner, your dick bigger, your mother in law stop calling, and work as advertised.
I guess the programmers should start learning how to mine coal…
We will all be given old school Casio calculators a d sent to crunch numbers in the bitcoin mines.
Nonsense. But then CEOs rarely know what the hell they’re talking about.
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 AI could replace anyone… it’s those dingbats. I mean, what would you say, in this given example, the CEO does… exactly? Make up random bullshit? AI does that. Write a speech? AI does that. I love how these overpaid people think they can replace the talent but they… they are absolutely required and couldn’t possibly be replaced! Talent and AI can’t buy and enjoy the extra big yacht, or private jets, or over priced cars, or a giant over sized mansion… no you need people for that.
Everybody talks about AI killing programming jobs, but any developer who has had to use it knows it can 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”
Copilot can’t even suggest a single Ansible or Terraform task without suggesting invalid/unsupported options. I can’t imagine how bad it is at doing anything actually complex with an actual programming language.
It also doesn’t know what’s going on a couple line before it, so say I am in a language that has options for functional styling using maps and I want to keep that flow going, it will start throwing for loops at you, so you end up having to rewrite it all anyway. I have find I end up spending more time writing the prompts then validating it did what I want correctly (normally not) than just looking at the docs and doing it myself, the bonus being I don’t have to reprompt it again later because now I know how to do it
Trouble is, you’re basing all that on now, not a year from now, or 6 months from now. It’s too easy to look at it’s weaknesses today and extrapolate. I think people need to get real about coding and AI. Coding is language and rules. Machines can learn that enormously faster and more accurately than humans. The ones who survive will be those who can wield it as a tool for creativity. But if you think it won’t be capable of all the things it’s currently weak at you’re just kidding yourself unfortunately. It’ll be like anything else - a tool for an operator. Middlemen will be wiped out of the process, of course, but those with money remain those without time or expertise, and there will always be a place for people willing to step in at that point. But they won’t be coding. They’ll be designing and solving problems.
It’s based on the last few years of messaging. They’ve consistently said AI will do X, Y, and Z, and it ends up doing each of those so poorly that you need pretty much the same staff to babysit the AI. I think it’s actually a net-negative in terms of productivity for technical work because you end up having to go over the output extremely carefully to make sure its correct, whereas you’d have some level of trust with a human employee.
AI certainly has a place in a technical workflow, but it’s nowhere close to replacing human workers, at least not right now. It’ll keep eating at the fringes for the next 5 years minimum, if not indefinitely, and I think the net result will be making human workers more productive, not replacing human workers. And the more productive we are per person, the more valuable that person is, and the more work gets generated.
We are 18 months into AI replacing me in 6 months. I mean… the CEO of OpenAI as well as many researchers have already said LLMs have mostly reached their limit. They are “generalizers” and if you ask them to do anything new they hallucinate quite frequently. Trying to get AI to replace developers when it hasn’t even replaced other menial office jobs is like saying “we taught AI to drive, it will replace all F1 drivers in 6 months”.
McDonald’s tried to get AI to take over order taking. And gave up.
Yeah, it’s not going to be coming for programmer jobs anytime soon. Well, except maybe a certain class of folks that are mostly warming seats that at most get asked to prep a file for compatibility with a new Java version, mostly there to feed management ego about ‘number of developers’ and serve as a bragging point to clients.
It’s tons easier to repkace CEOs, HR, managers and so on than coders. Coders needs to be creative, an HR or manager not so much. Are they leaving three months from now you think?
I’ll start worrying when they are all gone.
The real work of software engineering isn’t the coding. That is like saying that being a doctor is all about reading health charts. Planning, designing, testing and maintaining software is the hard part, and it is often much more political than it is a technical challenge. I’m not worried about getting replaced by AI. In fact, LLMs ability to generate high volumes of code only makes the skills to understand it to be more in demand.
An inherent flaw in transformer architecture (what all LLMs use under the hood) is the quadratic memory cost to context. The model needs 4 times as much memory to remember its last 1000 output tokens as it needed to remember the last 500. When coding anything complex, the amount of code one has to consider quickly grows beyond these limits. At least, if you want it to work.
This is a fundamental flaw with transformer - based LLMs, an inherent limit on the complexity of task they can ‘understand’. It isn’t feasible to just keep throwing memory at the problem, a fundamental change in the underlying model structure is required. This is a subject of intense research, but nothing has emerged yet.
Transformers themselves were old hat and well studied long before these models broke into the mainstream with DallE and ChatGPT.
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.
If we replace all the low level coders with this fancy, expensive, environmentally destructive autocomplete - where are all the high level coders going to come from? Just spring from clone vats?
There will still be people who are able to rapidly learn with AI on their side and people who fail to do it. The fast ones are able to focus much more on the underlying problems and less on language specifics. The definition of low level and high level programers will change in the context of AI. Nobody today is implementing a linked list outside of university and in the future nobody will be needed to write the repeated code which still is needed in a lot of frameworks.
But of course there might the point of a critical collapse if AI only learns from its own code and inefficient code gets repeated constantly.
The thing about co-pilot is if you don’t do anything with it, it just sits there.
You can’t give it a prompt, you actually have to code stuff. It is a more advanced version of autocomplete. Now admittedly, it can write very large chunks of boilerplate code, which is extremely helpful, but it can’t code the entire app, and it can’t work with natural language prompts, at all.
Technically that makes chatGPT, (It really needs a better name) a more capable coder than copilot.
GitHub Copilot does chat like ChatGPT, and writes code based on a prompt. I have decades of experience programming and I use it a lot. It gives me starting points, boilerplate and examples. It won’t build a whole application with no coding work from the human.
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
It’ll replace brain dead CEOs before it replaces programmers.
I’m pretty sure I could write a bot right now that just regurgitates pop science bullshit and how it relates to Line Go Up business philosophy.
ChatJippity
I’ll start using that!
if lineGoUp { CollectUnearnedBonus() } else { FireSomePeople() CollectUnearnedBonus() }
I think we need to start a company and commence enshittification, pronto.
This company - employee owned, right?
I’m just going to need you to sign this Contributor License Agreement assigning me all your contributions and we’ll see about shares, maybe.
Yay! I finally made it, I’m calling my mom.
I love how even here there’s line metric coding going on