PR by Xuan-Son Nguyen for `llama.cpp`: > This PR provides a big jump in speed for WASM by leveraging SIMD instructions for `qX_K_q8_K` and `qX_0_q8_0` dot product functions. > > …
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
There are certainly bad programming jobs, but programming jobs in general are extreme labor aristocracy. Yes people are chasing the bag, but they’re certainly not “survival jobs”. Within the system until you reach senior levels is no real discriminator between “bag chaser” and “person who is trying to learn”, both these are going to get squad wiped.
There’s certainly still going to be a path to being a SE. But it’s going to be autodidact hobbyists who start extremely young. As a person who has been running Linux since 5th grade, who got a CCNA at 16, who has only had programming or network jobs since high school, this is the worst path because the reality of the career at scale murders your passion. If I don’t age out I’m betting my next 10 years are going to be uncomfortably close to Player Piano, and that’s something that’s entirely dreadful. Instead of teaching juniors to program at scale while giving them boring CRUD tasks, I’ll be communing with machine spirits so “they” can generate the basic crud endpoints and the component screens.
The reality of being a greybeard is that if you’re close to retirement in this industry like my dad is, you’re gonna do the same shit jobs as the bag chasers. They’ll stick you in the basement and steal your stapler if you even make it past the vibe check interview. The only way to avoid this is to be a lifer somewhere, but that in itself is a challenge.
The difference between the previous developments and now, is that it may improve productivity now in your case and the case of the 1000 juniors, but tomorrow it’s going to actually undercut demand for people. Building a system that builds and deploys applications has been the goal of several public and private projects I’ve been privy to. I agree this exact use-case that you linked is an example of a way to not have to learn ANTLR or how an AST works and flip a coin if it works. In practice though, this is step 1. Code generation has improved significantly in the last year alone across the whole LLM ecosystem. The goal isn’t’ to write maintainable code or readable code, the goal is to write deploy-able code with 90% feature coverage. Filling the last 10% with freelancers or in house engs. depending on scale. To me that’s a worse job than the job I have now, at least now I can teach others how to do what I do. If that’s taken away from me I’m not fucking doing this job anymore. I don’t care about computers because in reality this job at scale is about convincing morons to stop micromanaging how you build things.
What you’re afraid of is precisely what was tried with outsourcing dev jobs. That proved to work in some areas where you have very boring crud apps, but was a complete failure in others. I expect LLMs are just going to work out in a very similar fashion.
Meanwhile, the most enjoyable coding I’ve done was never done for money. If anything, I can see AI taking over work turning programming away from being a career and into a way for people to express themselves artistically the way you see with demo scene, live coding, generative art and so on. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
Sure, but and before there were a 1000 junior engineers mindlessly copy/pasting stuff from stackoverflow till it sort of works.
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.
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.
Damn that’s crazy, imagine working a coding job for a paycheck! Soon you won’t even be able to!
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.
Yes and?
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.
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.
There are certainly bad programming jobs, but programming jobs in general are extreme labor aristocracy. Yes people are chasing the bag, but they’re certainly not “survival jobs”. Within the system until you reach senior levels is no real discriminator between “bag chaser” and “person who is trying to learn”, both these are going to get squad wiped.
There’s certainly still going to be a path to being a SE. But it’s going to be autodidact hobbyists who start extremely young. As a person who has been running Linux since 5th grade, who got a CCNA at 16, who has only had programming or network jobs since high school, this is the worst path because the reality of the career at scale murders your passion. If I don’t age out I’m betting my next 10 years are going to be uncomfortably close to Player Piano, and that’s something that’s entirely dreadful. Instead of teaching juniors to program at scale while giving them boring CRUD tasks, I’ll be communing with machine spirits so “they” can generate the basic crud endpoints and the component screens.
The reality of being a greybeard is that if you’re close to retirement in this industry like my dad is, you’re gonna do the same shit jobs as the bag chasers. They’ll stick you in the basement and steal your stapler if you even make it past the vibe check interview. The only way to avoid this is to be a lifer somewhere, but that in itself is a challenge.
The difference between the previous developments and now, is that it may improve productivity now in your case and the case of the 1000 juniors, but tomorrow it’s going to actually undercut demand for people. Building a system that builds and deploys applications has been the goal of several public and private projects I’ve been privy to. I agree this exact use-case that you linked is an example of a way to not have to learn ANTLR or how an AST works and flip a coin if it works. In practice though, this is step 1. Code generation has improved significantly in the last year alone across the whole LLM ecosystem. The goal isn’t’ to write maintainable code or readable code, the goal is to write deploy-able code with 90% feature coverage. Filling the last 10% with freelancers or in house engs. depending on scale. To me that’s a worse job than the job I have now, at least now I can teach others how to do what I do. If that’s taken away from me I’m not fucking doing this job anymore. I don’t care about computers because in reality this job at scale is about convincing morons to stop micromanaging how you build things.
What you’re afraid of is precisely what was tried with outsourcing dev jobs. That proved to work in some areas where you have very boring crud apps, but was a complete failure in others. I expect LLMs are just going to work out in a very similar fashion.
Meanwhile, the most enjoyable coding I’ve done was never done for money. If anything, I can see AI taking over work turning programming away from being a career and into a way for people to express themselves artistically the way you see with demo scene, live coding, generative art and so on. I don’t see that as a bad thing.