[pmarreck]

I'm sure this exact topic has been argued hundreds of times already on HN, but I think I have a new "possibly agreeable to both sides" perspective on this after having lost man-years to retired corporate code aka "FAIAP, throwaway code"

Let LLMs write the corpo code, as it will be unlikely to still be running in 5-10 years. Frontier AI is already at the point where it writes fewer bugs per LOC than humans. By a lot.

Go ahead and do your bespoke coding on your side-project loves and core libraries... The stuff that will last, anyway.

But if you're working for a corpo and still doing bespoke... That's... not gonna last, I'm afraid. Well, either you remaining there, or that, as it were.

[allknowingfrog]

There's a whole spectrum of employment between faceless corporations and personal side projects. AI will replace humans because giant business believe they can do the same work, not because they will actually be able to.

The correctness of an application is limited by your ability to understand and describe what you need. We have a word for an application specification tool so detailed it eliminates all ambiguity. It's called a "programming language".

The mistakes are always in the transfer from human to machine. I still find a high-level programming language to be the best way to express my intent. Humans will make mistakes in the hand-off to AI just like they make mistakes in the hand-off to code, but at least code is deterministic.

[pmarreck]

> AI will replace humans because giant business believe they can do the same work, not because they will actually be able to.

This has been being claimed for at least 2 years now. Wouldn't we already be seeing disasters if this was the case? It's certainly been around long enough to cause some real damage. Instead there is a slow trickle of things that makes the news by people who didn't bother instituting a single fucking control. For example, I am completely immune to `rm -rf` style fuckups because I wrote rm-safe years ago and it is mapped to `rm` in any environment that the LLM will run in: https://github.com/pmarreck/rm_safe

In any event, it's not a replacer, it's an augmenter. Nothing will replace humans, because we are the stakeholders; it may shift them around, though.

> The correctness of an application is limited by your ability to understand and describe what you need.

If you write code in Lean 4 or Idris 2, you may not completely understand why it is or isn't correct, but their respective compilers will certainly prove it to you one way or the other.

We already are perfectly functional with incomplete understandings. An entire generation of web developers have had successful careers without having a single clue how compilers work or how machine code works. Now is there a type of problem that sometimes comes along that DOES require deep understanding? Of course, that's when you call in the heavy artillery. Or the advanced LLM. Or both. See my point?

[fluoridation]

>If you write code in Lean 4 or Idris 2, you may not completely understand why it is or isn't correct, but their respective compilers will certainly prove it to you one way or the other.

No, the prover can only prove that the implementation matches the formal language specification. That's different from the application being correct.

[pjmlp]

I can easily assert than in corporation consulting there are no human translation teams any longer, all translations are AI driven, and at very least there might exist some QA regarding those translations.

Likewise for image assets for CMS and ecommerce sites, now instead of hiring agencies, many of those images are AI generated.

Just because it hasn't come yet to some coder jobs, doesn't mean others haven't been already displaced by it.

[pmarreck]

And what has happened in the past any time there was job displacement? Should we have continued to employ the manual knitters after looms came out?