Programmer Humor

A person who hasn't debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of "AI".

Oh no. Anyways.

As an end user with little knowledge about programming, I've seen how hard it is for programmers to get things working well many times over the years. AI as a time saver for certain simple tasks, sure, but no way in hell they'll be replacing humans in my lifetime.

It's even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like "Eh, don't worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you're doing and screw things up on purpose." Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.

The day that AI can program perfectly is the day it can improve the itself perfectly and it's the day that we'll all be fucked.

I personally vote for some sort of direct brain interface (no Elmo, you're not allowed to play) that DOES allow direct recall of queries but does NOT allow ads ffs) that allows us to grow with AI in intelligence. If you can't beat em (we can't), join em.

Yeah DHH is a problematic person to root for.

I have mixed feelings about that company. They have some interesting things "going against the flow" like ditching the cloud and going back to on prem, hating on microservices, advocating against taking money from VCs, and now hiring juniors. On the other hand, the guy is a Musk fanboy and they push some anti-DEI bullshit. Also he's a TypeScript hater for some reason...

The reason programmers are cooked isn't because AI can do the job, bit because idiots in leadership have decided that it can.

"Programmers are cooked," he says in reply to a post offering six figures for a programmer

Co"worker" spent 7 weeks building a simple C# MVC app with ChatGPT

I think I don't have to tell you how it went. Lets just say I spent more time debugging "his" code than mine.

Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn't a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.

After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I've ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.

I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.

everytime i see a twitter screenshot i just know im looking at the dumbest people imaginable

AI is fucking so useless when it comes to programming right now.

They can't even fucking do math. Go make an AI do math right now, go see how it goes lol. Make it a, real world problem and give it lots of variables.

Tinfoil hat time:

That Ace account is just an alt of the original guy and rage baiting to give his posting more reach.

In all seriousness though I do worry for the future of juniors. All the things that people criticise LLMs for, juniors do too. But if nobody hires juniors they will never become senior

Personally I prefer my junior programmers well done.

Everyone's convinced their thing is special, but everyone else's is a done deal.

Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.

You can say “fucked” on the internet, Ace Rbk.

I take issue with the "replacing other industries" part.

I know that this is an unpopular opinion among programmers but all professions have roles that range from small skills sets and little cognitive abilities to large skill sets and high level cognitive abilities.

Generative AI is an incremental improvement in automation. In my industry it might make someone 10% more productive. For any role where it could make someone 20% more productive that role could have been made more efficient in some other way, be it training, templates, simple conversion scripts, whatever.

Basically, if someone's job can be replaced by AI then they weren't really producing any value in the first place.

Of course, this means that in a firm with 100 staff, you could get the same output with 91 staff plus Gen AI. So yeah in that context 9 people might be replaced by AI, but that doesn't tend to be how things go in practice.

My mate is applying to Amazon as warehouse worker. He has an IT degree.

My coworker in the bookkeeping department has two degrees. Accountancy and IT. She can't find an IT job.

At the other side though, my brother, an experienced software developer, is earning quite a lot of money now.

Basically, the industry is not investing in new blood.

People who think AI will replace X job either don't understand X job or don't understand AI.

AI isn't ready to replace just about anybody's job, and probably never will be technically, economically or legally viable.

That said, the c-suit class are certainly going to try. Not only do they dream of optimizing all human workers out of every workforce, they also desperately need to recoup as much of the sunk cost that they've collectively dumped into the technology.

Take OpenAI for example, they lost something like $5,000,000,000 last year and are probably going to lose even more this year. Their entire business plan relies on at least selling people on the idea that AI will be able to replace human workers. The minute people realize that OpenAI isn't going to conquer the world, and instead end up as just one of many players in the slop space, the entire bottom will fall out of the company and the AI bubble will burst.