• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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    20 hours ago

    If people figure out how to automate the entire coding pipeline then power to them. I don’t see this happening in the near future myself. In the meantime, I’m going to use tools that make my life better. Also, not sure why you’d assume people are getting data from me given that I run models locally with ollama. I find deepseek-coder works perfectly fine with local setup.

        • piggy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          19 hours ago

          StackOverflow copypasta wasn’t a productive processes that was seeking to remove the developer from the equation though.

          This isn’t about a tech scaling strategy of training high quality high productivity engineers vs “just throwing bodies at it” anymore. This is about the next level of “just throwing bodies at it”, “just throwing compute at it”.

          This is something technically feasible within the next decade unless, inshallah, these models collapse from ingesting their own awful data, rather than improving.

          • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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            19 hours ago

            StackOverflow copypasta very much did remove the developer from the equation. People would just mindlessly string code together without bothering to understand what they were doing or why the code worked. It has become a common practice in the industry at this point, and huge codebases have been erected using this method.

            Every large coporation uses this method because they want to have fungible devs. Since developers with actual skill don’t want to be treated as fungible cogs, the selection pressures ensure that people who can’t get jobs with better conditions end up working in these places. They’re just doing it to get a paycheck, and they basically bang their heads against the keyboard till something resembling working code falls out. I’ll also remind you of the whole outsourcing craze which was basically exact same goal corps want to accomplish with AI now.

            There’s absolutely nothing new happening here that hasn’t been going on for literally decades. What you’re describing is already very much feasible and it’s happening at scale.

            • piggy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              19 hours ago

              Every large coporation uses this method because they want to have fungible devs. Since developers with actual skill don’t want to be treated as fungible cogs, the selection pressures ensure that people who can’t get jobs with better conditions end up working in these places. They’re just doing it to get a paycheck, and they basically bang their heads against the keyboard till something resembling working code falls out. I’ll also remind you of the whole outsourcing craze which was basically exact same goal corps want to accomplish with AI now.

              Damn that’s crazy, imagine working a coding job for a paycheck! Soon you won’t even be able to!

              • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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                19 hours ago

                My point was that people working in large corps don’t care about beautiful engineering, and they are writing exactly the kind of slop you decry.

                • piggy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  19 hours ago

                  Yes and?

                  1. They’re getting paid.
                  2. It’s a job.
                  3. They’re humans who can choose to be better.
                  4. They’re humans who can choose to fight their bosses out of some idiotic love of the game to the detriment of their own mental health because they’re crazy. (I’m describing myself).
                  5. They’re humans who can stall or break awful things from coming to pass by refusing to work on something or sabotaging it.

                  This is about a door to those possibilities closing, not about how many software developers are forced through it. I’m not going to cheer on an awful totalizing future dark age of technology simply because the current odds are bad.

                  And yeah this won’t actually kill higher end devs in my understanding of the world, I’ll be able to find a job. But, it will kill the social reproduction of people like me. In the same way that the iPad killed broad user-focused technological literacy from zoomers to millenials, LLMs will ultimately destroy the current level of developer-focused technological literacy. There won’t even be guys who can’t code their way out of a paper bag using StackOverflow or guys who memorize LeetCode solutions. It will just be old-heads powerful enough to avoid the cull and nobody else, until we die.

                  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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                    18 hours ago

                    And as I already pointed out above, the problem here isn’t with automation but with capitalism. In a sane system, automation would mean more free time for people, and less tedium. People are doing these jobs not because they want to be doing them, but because it’s a way to survive in this shitty system.

                    Automation has been replacing jobs at an ever increasing rate ever since the industrial revolution started, and every time technological progress has been met with resistance. The whole idea that LLMs are going to kill social reproduction of developers is silly beyond belief. People who enjoy to code will do this because they enjoy doing it. The nature of work might change the same way it changed when we got compilers, garbage collectors, syntax highlighting, linters, and so on. There were people like you decrying all these things making exactly the same kind of argument how it’s going to destroy the programmer profession, and how nobody will know how to write proper code anymore. I’m old enough to have seen this nonsense many times during my career.