Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little), the programmers that (indirectly) helped build it are told they're fools for doing so, and threatened by losing their status if they don't adapt to the "entrepreneurial way" (well, the full promise is "you'll lose it anyway, but if you cooperate in stuffing sama's pockets then maybe you get to keep it a bit longer").
So what really surprises me is not that people are upset but that so few are.
There's always another feature that can be implemented or a new problem to be solved. Tools only ever accelerated the pace at which we were able to follow this insatiable hunger for more software.
Right now people are getting fired left and right because all the money that used to be spent on staff now goes to build more data centers and also because cutting corporate expenses is in vogue now.
This too shall pass and with demographics as they are and young people getting discouraged from pursuing this field I believe long term my position is safe.
Also a huge chunk of what AI company CEOs say is just pure bullshit that they only say because they need that sweet, sweet investor money. Bullshit writes a check that eventually must be cashed.
Big business is going to struggle with building software for a while. Writing code is often not the hard part there already, coordination, larger understanding of the system is I think.
FWIW, it's just a few large companies laying off large groups, not so much people getting fired left and right at a lot of companies. What is happening at a lot of companies is that they aren't hiring juniors, because, why would you when LLMs are cheaper and fill that role perfectly (if you actually treat them like juniors).
Having also done both: In legal drafting work, there's less systematic pre-release testing before the equivalent of a "program" is loosed upon the world. There's not much in the way of counterparts to software unit testing and regression testing, in part because legal-drafting clients can be vociferous in demanding that their lawyers keep costs down.
Lawyers who like to tinker with words can fuck things up more often and at greater scale — e.g., by inflicting compulsory burdens and costs on others — than can most programmers. That includes, e.g., contract drafters and litigation counsel, plus lobbyists trying to influence draft legislation and regulations.
I'm not-infrequently dismayed by the quality of the contracts I review for clients because of the "tinkering with words" by the lawyers on the other side of the deal. Back when I did IP litigation, I was sometimes likewise dismayed by the bullshit arguments that some lawyers felt free to make in their court papers because what the hell, the worst that can happen is almost never more than the judge just saying "no." And as mostly a law professor these days, I review court opinions all the time and am regularly amazed how judges (and their law clerks, such as Rayiner used to be) can be so patient in responding to such arguments.
Yeah, at least in litigation you get relatively immediate feedback in the form of a decision. Seems anxiety inducing to me to draft these contracts and have no feedback loop unless something blows up years later.
(I guess by now you have a solid retirement plan; maybe if the field had been burnt to the ground while you were younger, you'd have had a different opinion.)
I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.
I don't agree that all thoughts are created equal.
The older I get, I realize some people never change, will always have the same backwards or harmful thinking, and I avoid them instead of just accepting it.
Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.
The reason you think that is that you know nothing about agriculture. But it isn't true. Right now, farmers in the US grow about 5x as much food per acre as farmers in other countries. If you were in charge of farming in the US, that surplus would likely disappear in a single season. You would also likely damage the soil which would make cleaning up after you take 4-6 years.
Everyone thinks things they know nothing about are easy. But they rarely are.
PS This is why I never tell people I'm a programmer. I don't want to be associated with people who think like you.
"Programmers aren't really paid, they sell services at market prices." — I guess nobody gets paid?
As a farmer myself, when I give someone something I produced and they give me back something in return, I consider myself to be paid. If I did not receive much value in return for what I gave, I'd reasonably consider myself to have not been paid well. I have never met a farmer that would consider that usage unusual. Payment refers to a transaction within the realm of a human activity. The good or service that is being traded between humans is immaterial. While you are free to define words as you see fit, your assertion doesn't really reflect how this is actually used in practice, generally. The rest of the earlier comment makes it clear that the commenter understands how a farm business works.
PS To the "clear-thinking" guy at the top of this thread...this is why...you only think your thinking is clear. If its a topic you know nothing about, devs (not necessarily you) tend to assume there isn't anything to know and that's almost never true.
</sarcasm>
The skills necessary to develop efficient and effective software are much more scarce than those needed to remove trash, or pick crops, or provide elder care. That’s why the former is paid so much more.
Even take some sort of idealized anarcho-communal society. Imagine two people have a dispute and threaten to leave over it. One's a highly skilled doctor, and the other's a garbage collector. Our equal society's going to suddenly become just as unequal as any other simply because the doctor leaving would have a much greater negative effect than the garbage collector. And that reality would permeate in the day-to-day happenings, creating classes even in an idealized classless society.
(This did not happen that much, ofc.)
It's also funny to me to think that computer science got to be a trendy degree, vs the small programs back when I went to university, even at a top comp-sci school.
I have a theory that a lot of people who would have normally gone to Wall Street for their lucrative jobs, couldn't, because of the crash, and Sillicon Vally was about to start booming in big ways....
We need to make lawyering more like programming, in the sense that it should be open to the everyman... not make programming credentialed and licensed like a professional guild.
I do notice a lot of HN commenters seem to think that programmers are smug though, like we deserve to be knocked down a peg. I personally don't see it, but I also try not to work with jerks.
I remember talking to the biggest AI booster at my last job. When I got him one on one, he admitted that he actually doesn't like AI and that it terrifies him, but he wanted to be seen as pro AI to keep his job. Fair. (Sadly, like me, he was also laid off, so I guess it didn't work)
It is upsetting to see our work stolen and our livelihoods threatened by a group of (mostly) incompetent, arrogant assholes who are convinced that the "computer that lies" is somehow a better programmer than the programmers it stole knowledge from. I've already started looking for a way out of this industry, and I'm genuinely worried for the fall-out this will have for the tech industry and the economy as a whole.
I think people underestimate just how much users scorn buggy, flaky technology.
The main issue with solid, reliable technology which Just Works is that users have relatively few reliable cues to distinguish that from vibe coded crap.
A vibe coded piece of shit looks very similar to a well engineered product made with care. That's a problem which needs to be solved.
self hosted communities are reacting to this by trying to detect signals of if a product is vibe coded but that in and of itself is still quite a poor quality cue.
Carpenters, hatters, cobblers, miners, weavers, calculators, etc...
We can get mad about it, but it just is what it is. Ultimately for most people the loss of these jobs are a net-benefit because it's the result of better or cheaper alternatives.
The thing that worries me more specifically about AI is that it has the potential not to just disrupt an industry, or handful of industries, but in theory everything.
If machines are faster, strong, and more intelligent than humans, then you don't need human workers for anything. In the same way machines suddenly becoming faster and stronger than horses meant that the role of the horse in labour dropped rapidly during the industrial revolution.
It's not clear how civilisation functions if humans become effectively useless and the only thing of value is one's ownership of wealth producing assets.
Still, there's really no point in thinking about how we stop this. Humans are humans and we'll do the stupid thing then try to deal with the consequences after the fact. All regular people should be doing now is prepping for this outcome.
The US and Europe might have lost a lot of craftsmanship knowledge at a social level. Yet, what is left is so far ahead of what has ever existed in countries in South America for example. And China has gained a lot. Witness that youtuber trying to make grill brushes in the US. These differences have an impact in terms of opportunities and competition.
It's easy to sit at home, watch documentaries and picture history progressing along logical lines and imagine that the "industrial revolution" was this massive shift from craftsmanship to automation. Look closer and you'll see that what happened in the UK in the 1700s was in fact enabled by a long and deep tradition of craftsmanship that only got enriched by the rise of new power sources. Craftsmanship today is vastly more advanced than it ever was before industry.
And there is a lot to lose in the decline of craftsmanship, and it is by no means some sort of historical inevitability.
When you really start digging deep into history you realize most arguments of logical trends therein are mostly just misconceptions.
Real craftsmanship, the kind that leaves you in awe and feels like an exceptional display of human capacity, seems to be relegated, from my point of view, to a minority of well-off hobbyists who are already free from work and can do what they want without worrying about paying bills.
I’ve felt the same frustration doing excellent quality work on a 2nd or 3rd home that is empty most of the year.
yes, but no. Many craft skills used in jewelry, architecture and others are lost. For example, some goldsmithing techniques well-known in the 1700s are not reproducible today.
source: trained goldsmith
I suspect the horses are healthier and stronger than in the 1700s too. I'm not sure I understand your point?
I'd agree that the niche of extremely high quality, bespoke craftsmanship still exists, and that in some cases jobs were augmented by technology rather than entirely replaced, but the point still stands that the work these people used to do has been automated and disrupted by technology.
The fact some people upskilled or reskilled as a response is analogous to coders today. All I'd question is the extent of the disruption we'll see as a result of AI – I worry that this time things will change much more quickly and there may not be plenty of other jobs for people to upskill / reskill in to.
But if that's not true then perhaps whatever software engineering exists in the future will be far more complex than what software engineers have done for the last few decades.
Every random business has some machine that puts caps on bottles or something, and these things are ridiculously better designed, engineered, and fabricated than ever before, because the knowledge and tools available to the designer and fabricator are better than ever before.
You are surrounded by things that are insanely well made by all previous standards. Even the crappy stuff that you don't think of as well-made, because it is junk compared to everything else, still has many aspects that are almost magic.
Horses? I doubt it. They're still infamously fragile creatures today, even with penicillin and vaccinations existing; similarly for strength, not much call for shires and they're now on an "at risk" conservation list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire_horse -> https://www.rbst.org.uk/watchlist-breed/shire-horse/
Possibly also fewer horses in total, though I don't know any stats for that far back and may be over-estimating based on the stats I do have for c. 1900.
Of course the costs are higher too. Good horses in the above category can go for north of $100k.
You can get a hint of this by looking at the developing countries with high income inequality. Few rich people who typically own all the countries wealth (and access to it's natural resources) while everyone else lives in a slum.
California is a good example.
AI will not give us that result. It will give us shitty products and they will be far more costly. Not only will prices for consumers continue to rise regardless of how much money corporations save by using AI (because they'll just stuff their pockets with that cash) but the true costs of AI are largely externalized and include things like massive environmental damage, further concentration of wealth/power, the homogenization of culture, and the dumbing down of society. AI means paying more and getting less.
I think there's some progress, but I think the hype is so high that people don't have a clear view of what's realistic and what's not. IE, if you were to believe Amodei back in 2025 you'd believe none of us would even have jobs to complain about right now.. which hasn't happened. Altman is already declaring the singularity. It's unhinged. Anyone that says this is going to cure cancer or solve all problems is just living in a delusion.