Programmers Will Be Replaced by People with Ideas

[blackbear_]

> Error establishing a database connection

Oh, the irony.

[misiek08]

Damn, was just writing that, you won.

Mid engineers will disappear, but people who know what they are doing - in a few years will be kidnapped to cleanup LLM generated mess.

[Traubenfuchs]

Ah, I get it. There is no real article with that title.

It‘s just some kind of ironic art. Clever!

[shadowgovt]

Maybe they can get an LLM to replace their dynamic blog site with a statically-generated HTML page.

[zwnow]

If I got a dollar for every time someone says "Programmers will be replaced by..." I'd be replaced by retirement.

[Suppafly]

I remember being in college in the early 2000s and asking a professor about that, and he mentioned that they'd been saying it since the 70s (at least) and it hasn't gotten any closer to being a reality.

[nunez]

Yeah, cool; I got into this industry because coding is fun.

If the future of the profession is endless meetings about ideas while AI does the work for me, then that's a crappy future and, honestly, there are people who are loads better at ideas than me.

[exolymph]

Programmers are people with ideas. Without the ideas, you can't write the code.

[actsasbuffoon]

Seriously. Last Thursday I experimented with making a prototype. I showed it at standup the following day. Literally five minutes after standup an executive PM’d me and said, “Can you show me what you just showed to the other engineers?”

And now we’re rapidly adjusting our roadmap and a bunch of people on the business side of the company have been reaching out to find out more about my prototype. The executive even called me on Saturday because he was so excited that he’d been doing research and wanted more details.

I had one guy in sales today tell me that this was the most exciting thing he’s seen in the 3+ years he’s been with the company.

Developers have ideas and skills. Everyone has ideas. Developers are the ones who can execute on those ideas.

[nunez]

Right, but the juniors that are just starting their careers don't generally have the experience to know what ideas are good, and that's exactly the segment whose existence LLMs are threatening.

[incomingpain]

There is no chatgpt prompt that takes IDEA to functioning software program in rust in 1 go.

Even prompts that are good to produce the individual functions needed that make up the whole isn't really there. You still need to personalize or ask for further tuning of the code.

Which takes a programmer.

But now you dont have a programmer and language mess. You now have AI mess and language mess.

[brador]

AI has been the greatest boost to my productivity since the instant feedback loop of PHP.

Every step it’s right there making me faster. It’s like horse drawn cart straight to a rocket ship. Invigorating, stimulating. I’m averaging 4 hours sleep because I just love creating with this tool.

[hbogert]

my rocket seems to want to only orbit the earth b/c it doesn't know what else there is.

[brg]

Every big tech company has tried to do this, replacing programmers and engineers with product management and designers. Depending on the company, the trajectory of growth and development inversely correlates with the ratio of engineering to non-engineering.

[system2]

Error establishing a database connection is a good way of backing up this theory.

[mamcx]

Well, I don't deny the possibility, but...

Have you looked at the ideas people had?

[mysterydip]

It's a jump... to conclusions mat!

[jasonthorsness]

The act of programming is changing, but I doubt LLMs are ready to replace clear thinking and the ability to maintain simplicity in the face of the ambiguity and complexity requirements.

[MattPalmer1086]

I get it - programmers are seeing an existential threat to their livelihood and they're trying to figure out what comes next. Some talk about how it will boost their productivity. Others talk about how coding wasn't what they really did, it was understanding business requirements. Some point out that AI is actually really crap and it can't really replace them. This is saying they should leverage it to become entrepreneurs.

These are all good conversations to have. We don't know where all this is going, but things are going to change.

[smtuttle13]

Isn't anyone going to mention Fred Brooks' "No Silver Bullet" paper? 8-)

[johnea]

"See, I'm an idea man, Chuck. I got ideas coming at me all day..."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Night_Shift_(film)

The drop line is the funniest though:

"Wait a second... hold the phone! Hold the phone! [speaking into tape recorder] Idea to eliminate garbage. Edible paper. You eat it, it's gone! You eat it, it's outta there! No more garbage!"

What'll they think of next? Just wait till "vibe ideas" put the idea men out of work 8-/

[johnaspden]

Programmers will be replaced by whatever the superintelligence makes out of their atoms.

[jemmyw]

Lots of people have ideas. Good ideas. I've got ideas. Ideas are hard to execute on, and not just the programming side. LLMs aren't going to help as much as the author thinks, you get about 1 level of complexity down and they need a lot more direction.

[drewcoo]

Ideas are cheap.

[ravish0007]

good luck with that!

[juancn]

Yeah, because the hard part of a business is the ideation not the execution

/s