this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025

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486

Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything (defragzone.substack.com)

submitted 1 day ago by fusspilz@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 29 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Although I agree, I think AI code generation is the follow up mistake. The original mistake was to offshore coding to fire qualified engineers.

Not all of offshore is terrible, that'd be a dumb generalization, but there are some terrible ones out there. A few of our clients that opted to offshore are being drowned is absolute trash code. Given that we always have to clean it up anyway, I can see the use-case for AI instead of that shop.

[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 19 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

I think the core takeaway is your shouldn't outsource core capabilities. If the code is that critical to your bottomline, pay for quality (which usually means no contractors - local or not).

If you outsource to other developers or AI it means most likely they will care less and/or someone else can just as easily come along and do it too.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 12 points 20 hours ago

...shouldn't outsource core capabilities.

This right here.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

The core takeaway is that except for a few instances the executives still don't understand jack shit and when a smooth talking huckster dazzles them with ridiculous magic to make them super rich they all follow them to the poke.

Judges and Executives understand nothing about computers in 2025. that's the fucked up part. AI is just how we're doing it this time.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

Companies that are incompetently led will fail and companies that integrate new AI tools in a productive and useful manner will succeed.

Worrying about AI replacing coders is pointless. Anyone who writes code for a living understands the limitations that these models have. It isn't going to replace humans for quite a long time.

Language models are hitting some hard limitations and were unlikely to see improvements continue at the same pace.

Transformers, Mixture of Experts and some training efficiency breakthroughs all happened around the same time which gave the impression of an AI explosion but the current models are essentially taking advantage of everything and we're seeing pretty strong diminishing returns on larger training sets.

So language models, absent a new revolutionary breakthrough, are largely as good as they're going to get for the foreseeable future.

They're not replacing software engineers, at best they're slightly more advanced syntax checkers/LSPs. They may help with junior developer level tasks like refactoring or debugging... but they're not designing applications.

[–] DrFistington@lemmy.world 25 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

What most people forget is that as a programmer/designer/etc, your job is to take what your client/customer tells you they want, listen to them, then try to give them what they ACTUALLY NEED, which is something that I think needs to be highlighted. Most people making requests to programmers, don't really even know what they want, or why they want it. They had some meeting and people decided that, 'Yes we need the program to do X!' without realizing that what they are asking for won't actually get them the result they want.

AI will be great at giving people exactly what they ask for...but that doesn't mean its what they actually needed...

[–] RedSeries@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Great points. Also:

... AI will be great at giving people exactly what they ask for ...

Honestly, I'm not even sure about this. With hallucinations and increasingly complex prompts that it fails to handle, it's just as likely to regurgitate crap. I don't even know if AI will get to a better state before all of this dev-firing starts to backfire and sour most company's want to even touch AI for most development.

Humans talk with humans and do their best to come up with solutions. AI takes prompts and looks at historical human datasets to try and determine what a human would do. It's bound to run into something novel eventually, especially if there aren't more datasets to pull in because human-generated development solutions become scarce.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago

AI will never not-require a human to hand hold it. Because AI can never know what's true.

Because it doesn't "know" anything. It only has ratios of usage maps between connected entities we call "words".

Sure, you can run it and hope for the best. But that will fail sooner or later.

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 3 points 20 hours ago

Also, LLM doesn't usually have memory or experience. It's the first page of Google search every time you put in your tokens. A forever trainee that would never leave that stage in their career.

Human's abilities like pattern recognition, intuition, acummulation of proven knowledge in combination makes us become more and more effective at finding the right solution to anything.

The LLM bubble can't replace it and also actively hurts it as people get distanced from actual knowledge by the code door of LLM. They learn how to formulate their requests instead of learning how to do stuff they actually need. This outsourcing makes sense when you need a cookie recipe once a year, it doesn't when you work in a bakery. What makes the doug behave each way? You don't need to ask so you wouldn't know.

And the difference between asking like Lemmy and asking a chatbot is the ultimative convincing manner in which it tells you things, while forums, Q&A boards, blogs handled by people usually have some of these humane qualities behind replies and also an option for someone else to throw a bag of dicks at the suggestion of formating your system partition or turning stuff off and on.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 2 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

that stuff should really get worked out in the agile process as the customer reacts to each phase of the project.

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[–] ignirtoq@fedia.io 16 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I'm sorry, I mostly agree with the sentiment of the article in a feel-good kind of way, but it's really written like how people claim bullies will get their comeuppance later in life, but then you actually look them up later and they have high paying jobs and wonderful families. There's no substance here, just a rant.

The author hints at analogous cases in the past of companies firing all of their engineers and then having to scramble to hire them back, but doesn't actually get into any specifics. Be specific! Talk through those details. Prove to me the historical cases are sufficiently similar to what we're starting to see now that justifies the claims of the rest of the article.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 9 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Come back in 3 years and the "historical cases" will have appeared.

https://old.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/1inh2hl/meta_just_laid_off_3600_peopleheres_why_this/

or just wait 14 hours

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[–] halcyonloon@midwest.social 7 points 21 hours ago

I just hope people won't go back to these abusive jobs. The oligarchy that runs the US has shown it is more than happy to lay people off to cool wages and the Fed is more than happy to blame workers getting paid a reasonable amount as the cause of inflation.

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