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 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.
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.
Okay but like again, I’m not afraid of losing my job. I’m afraid that we’re going to lose real capability as a society. It’s how our oligarchs are practically morons compared to past oligarchs who built hundreds of libraries, or how we don’t have the real capacity in the US to build rail.
I’m currently working as a platform architect coordinating 5 teams over multiple products building a platform for authoring, publishing and managing rich educational courses across multiple different grade levels. I do most of the greenfield development still, I personally manage a DSL and tools for it, while figuring out platform requirements and timelines for other teams including my own. I used to work on a real time EEG system doing architecture and signal processing. I’ve architected and implemented medical logistics platforms. I’ve been a first engineer at a couple of startups. I’ve literally written purpose built ORMs, schedulers, middleware frameworks, and query frameworks from scratch. I’ve worked at almost every major common role at a principal level except security (which is mostly fake) and embedded so front end, back end, database optimization/integration, infrastructure, machine code on JVM and X86, and distributed computing. I haven’t work in niches like networking, industrial, ML or quantum, I’d only really want to explore quantum or networking in reality. But quantum is something you typically need PhDs for otherwise it’s gonna be a bit grunty. OSS may bring up engineers for some of these roles, but in practice the majority of OSS projects don’t reach the level of complexity that I’ve worked at – the ones that do aren’t community projects they’re corporate ones.
Very few people can step into my shoes, most principal engineers I’ve met average out at a large project where they implemented a strangler once or twice. The system currently has a hard time reproducing me, if the bottom falls out it’s gonna be good game. I’m happy that LLMs are helping you rediscover your passion, but the kind of stuff you’re talking about are toys. Personally they’re not fun, they’re mostly boring, I enjoy building large technical systems in complex problem spaces in a high level reproducible way. Everything else gets stale quickly. I’ve built out systems where if you blow on the code the tests turn red without test maintenance and creation being a burden. The goal was high value test in 5 minutes in that system. The future I see is that everything is just shittier because the skill that is hard to find and is dying is understanding the essential complexity at the 10,000 ft view, the 100 ft view, the 1 ft view, and the 1 micrometer view. I can barely find developers who can innately understand essential complexity at one of those view points. I’ve met about 20 who can do all 4 and I’ve met maybe like 400-ish devs in my life.
The only passion project I wanted to start I basically decided to call off because if successful it would be bad for the world. I wanted to build a high level persona management software that could build swarms in the tens of thousands without being discovered.
If LLM removes programming as a job, might be nice, but in practice it’s just gonna mean more people on the struggle bus.
That’s just a straw man, because there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be looking through your code. What LLM does is help you find areas of the code that are worth looking at.
It’s not a strawman because classifying unperformant code is a different task than generating performant replacement code. LLM can only generate code via it’s internal weights + input it doesn’t guarantee that that code is compilable, performant, readable, understandable, self documenting or much of anything.
The performance gain here is coincidental simply because the generated code uses functions that call processor features directly rather than get optimized into processor features by a compiler. LLM classifiers are also statistically analyzing the AST for performance they aren’t actually performing real static analysis of the AST or it’s compiled version. It doesn’t calculate a BigO or really know how to reason through this problem, it’s just primed that when you write the for loop to sum, that’s “slower” than using _mm_add_ps. It doesn’t even know which cases of the for loop compile down to a _mm_add_ps instruction on which compilers and which optimization levels.
Lastly you injected this line of reasoning when you basically said “why would I do this boring stuff as a programmer when I can get the LLM to do it”. It’s nice that there’s a tool that you can politely ask to parse your garbage and replace with other garbage that happens to use a function that’s more performant. But not only is this not Software Engineering, but a performant dot product is a solved problem at EVERY level of abstraction. This programming equivalent of tech bros reinventing the train every 5 years.
The fact that this is needed is a problem in and of itself with how people are building this software. This is machine spirit communion with technojargon. Instead of learning how to vectorize algorithms you’re feeding your garbage code through a LLM to produce garbage code with SIMD instructions in it. That is quite literally stunting your growth as a Software Engineer. You are choosing to ignore learning how things actually work because it’s too hard to parse through the existing garbage. A SIMD dot product algo is literally a 2 week college junior homework assignment.
Understanding what good uses for it are and the limitations of the tech is far more productive than simply rejecting it entirely.
I quite literally pointed several limitations in the post you replied to and in this post from a Software Engineering perspective.
Hey so I read your comments and found them insightful. Me being a Software Engineer who just started his first job, what would be your advice for the right approach to grow and learn as a software engineer? Both in general and with respect to using LLMs while learning/coding.
I’m afraid that we’re going to lose real capability as a society.
The US has far bigger problems than LLMs to worry about in the near future. Personally, I’d be far more worried about the rate of deindustrialization in the states, lack of people who know trades, engineers, farmers, and so on. All of that is far more crucial than the software industry. Meanwhile, even if people started losing this expertise, it’s not like it can’t be learned again if needed. The whole software industry has only existed for a handful of decades, and society got on just fine before it appeared. This is just complete hyperbole I’m afraid.
What I think is most likely to happen with serious engineering going forward is that the human aspect of the work will shift towards writing formal specifications that encode the desired constraints for the system, including things like memory usage, runtime complexity, and so on, and then having LLMs figure out how to generate code that passes the spec.
Incidentally, you can do this stuff without LLMs as well, for example Barliman is a program synthesis engine that is able to take a signature for a function and figure out an implementation, it can even compose functions it already wrote to solve more complex problems. Combining something like that with LLMs could be very effective.
I see this is as a similar advancement as creation of high level languages. Plenty of people moaned that nobody learned assembly anymore when C showed up, and making very similar arguments to the ones you’re making. Then people started moaning about garbage collection, and how you weren’t a real programmer if you weren’t managing memory by hand. Every time a new technology comes around that makes programming easier and more accessible, there are inevitably people screaming that the sky is falling. LLMs is just the latest iteration of this phenomenon.
And more people struggling on the bus because we have more automation is a result of capitalist relations. That’s where the ire should be directed.
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.
Okay but like again, I’m not afraid of losing my job. I’m afraid that we’re going to lose real capability as a society. It’s how our oligarchs are practically morons compared to past oligarchs who built hundreds of libraries, or how we don’t have the real capacity in the US to build rail.
I’m currently working as a platform architect coordinating 5 teams over multiple products building a platform for authoring, publishing and managing rich educational courses across multiple different grade levels. I do most of the greenfield development still, I personally manage a DSL and tools for it, while figuring out platform requirements and timelines for other teams including my own. I used to work on a real time EEG system doing architecture and signal processing. I’ve architected and implemented medical logistics platforms. I’ve been a first engineer at a couple of startups. I’ve literally written purpose built ORMs, schedulers, middleware frameworks, and query frameworks from scratch. I’ve worked at almost every major common role at a principal level except security (which is mostly fake) and embedded so front end, back end, database optimization/integration, infrastructure, machine code on JVM and X86, and distributed computing. I haven’t work in niches like networking, industrial, ML or quantum, I’d only really want to explore quantum or networking in reality. But quantum is something you typically need PhDs for otherwise it’s gonna be a bit grunty. OSS may bring up engineers for some of these roles, but in practice the majority of OSS projects don’t reach the level of complexity that I’ve worked at – the ones that do aren’t community projects they’re corporate ones.
Very few people can step into my shoes, most principal engineers I’ve met average out at a large project where they implemented a strangler once or twice. The system currently has a hard time reproducing me, if the bottom falls out it’s gonna be good game. I’m happy that LLMs are helping you rediscover your passion, but the kind of stuff you’re talking about are toys. Personally they’re not fun, they’re mostly boring, I enjoy building large technical systems in complex problem spaces in a high level reproducible way. Everything else gets stale quickly. I’ve built out systems where if you blow on the code the tests turn red without test maintenance and creation being a burden. The goal was high value test in 5 minutes in that system. The future I see is that everything is just shittier because the skill that is hard to find and is dying is understanding the essential complexity at the 10,000 ft view, the 100 ft view, the 1 ft view, and the 1 micrometer view. I can barely find developers who can innately understand essential complexity at one of those view points. I’ve met about 20 who can do all 4 and I’ve met maybe like 400-ish devs in my life.
The only passion project I wanted to start I basically decided to call off because if successful it would be bad for the world. I wanted to build a high level persona management software that could build swarms in the tens of thousands without being discovered.
If LLM removes programming as a job, might be nice, but in practice it’s just gonna mean more people on the struggle bus.
Hey so I read your comments and found them insightful. Me being a Software Engineer who just started his first job, what would be your advice for the right approach to grow and learn as a software engineer? Both in general and with respect to using LLMs while learning/coding.
The US has far bigger problems than LLMs to worry about in the near future. Personally, I’d be far more worried about the rate of deindustrialization in the states, lack of people who know trades, engineers, farmers, and so on. All of that is far more crucial than the software industry. Meanwhile, even if people started losing this expertise, it’s not like it can’t be learned again if needed. The whole software industry has only existed for a handful of decades, and society got on just fine before it appeared. This is just complete hyperbole I’m afraid.
What I think is most likely to happen with serious engineering going forward is that the human aspect of the work will shift towards writing formal specifications that encode the desired constraints for the system, including things like memory usage, runtime complexity, and so on, and then having LLMs figure out how to generate code that passes the spec.
Incidentally, you can do this stuff without LLMs as well, for example Barliman is a program synthesis engine that is able to take a signature for a function and figure out an implementation, it can even compose functions it already wrote to solve more complex problems. Combining something like that with LLMs could be very effective.
I see this is as a similar advancement as creation of high level languages. Plenty of people moaned that nobody learned assembly anymore when C showed up, and making very similar arguments to the ones you’re making. Then people started moaning about garbage collection, and how you weren’t a real programmer if you weren’t managing memory by hand. Every time a new technology comes around that makes programming easier and more accessible, there are inevitably people screaming that the sky is falling. LLMs is just the latest iteration of this phenomenon.
And more people struggling on the bus because we have more automation is a result of capitalist relations. That’s where the ire should be directed.