Programmer Humor

The reason programmers are cooked isn't because AI can do the job, bit because idiots in leadership have decided that it can.

"Programmers are cooked," he says in reply to a post offering six figures for a programmer

everytime i see a twitter screenshot i just know im looking at the dumbest people imaginable

A person who hasn't debugged any code thinks programmers are done for because of "AI".

Oh no. Anyways.

Co"worker" spent 7 weeks building a simple C# MVC app with ChatGPT

I think I don't have to tell you how it went. Lets just say I spent more time debugging "his" code than mine.

AI is fucking so useless when it comes to programming right now.

They can't even fucking do math. Go make an AI do math right now, go see how it goes lol. Make it a, real world problem and give it lots of variables.

Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn't a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.

After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I've ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.

I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.

Tinfoil hat time:

That Ace account is just an alt of the original guy and rage baiting to give his posting more reach.

AI isn't ready to replace just about anybody's job, and probably never will be technically, economically or legally viable.

That said, the c-suit class are certainly going to try. Not only do they dream of optimizing all human workers out of every workforce, they also desperately need to recoup as much of the sunk cost that they've collectively dumped into the technology.

Take OpenAI for example, they lost something like $5,000,000,000 last year and are probably going to lose even more this year. Their entire business plan relies on at least selling people on the idea that AI will be able to replace human workers. The minute people realize that OpenAI isn't going to conquer the world, and instead end up as just one of many players in the slop space, the entire bottom will fall out of the company and the AI bubble will burst.

People who think AI will replace X job either don't understand X job or don't understand AI.

In all seriousness though I do worry for the future of juniors. All the things that people criticise LLMs for, juniors do too. But if nobody hires juniors they will never become senior

Lmfao I love these threads. “I haven’t built anything myself with the thing I’m claiming makes you obsolete but trust me it makes you obsolete”

I had a dude screaming pretty much the same thing at me yesterday on here (on a different account), despite the fact that I'm senior-level, near the top of my field and that all the objective data as well as anecdotal reports from tons of other people says otherwise. Like, okay buddy, sure. People seem to just like fighting things online to feel better about themselves, even if the thing they're fighting doesn't really exist.

My mate is applying to Amazon as warehouse worker. He has an IT degree.

My coworker in the bookkeeping department has two degrees. Accountancy and IT. She can't find an IT job.

At the other side though, my brother, an experienced software developer, is earning quite a lot of money now.

Basically, the industry is not investing in new blood.

Everyone's convinced their thing is special, but everyone else's is a done deal.

Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.

AI isn't ready to replace programmers, engineers or IT admins yet. But let's be honest if some project manager or CTO somewhere hasn't already done it they're at least planning it.

Then eventually to save themselves or out of sheer ignorance they'll blame the chaos that results on the few remaining people who know what they're doing because they won't be able to admit or understand the fact that the bold decision they took to "embrace" AI and increase the company's bottom line which everyone else in their management bubble believes in has completely mangled whatever system their company builds or uses. More useful people will get fired and more actual work will get shifted to AI. But because that'll still make the number go up the management types will look even better and the spread of AI will carry on. Eventually all systems will become an unwieldy mess nobody can even hope to repair.

This is just IT, I'm pretty sure most other industries will eventually suffer the same fate. Global supply chains will collapse and we'll all get sent back to the dark ages.

TL,DR: The real problem with AI isn't that it'll become too powerful and choose to kill us, but that corporate morons will overestimate how powerful it already is and that will cause our eventual downfall.

As an end user with little knowledge about programming, I've seen how hard it is for programmers to get things working well many times over the years. AI as a time saver for certain simple tasks, sure, but no way in hell they'll be replacing humans in my lifetime.

Personally I prefer my junior programmers well done.

The best part is how all programmers at Google, Apple, and Microsoft have been fired and now everything is coded by AI. This guy seems pretty smart.

You can say “fucked” on the internet, Ace Rbk.

I work in QA, even devs who've worked for 10+ years make dumb mistakes every so often. I wouldn't want to do QA when AI is writing the software, it's just gonna give me even more work 🫠

We're as cooked as artists (when asked to do shit jobs for non paying customers)

I take issue with the "replacing other industries" part.

I know that this is an unpopular opinion among programmers but all professions have roles that range from small skills sets and little cognitive abilities to large skill sets and high level cognitive abilities.

Generative AI is an incremental improvement in automation. In my industry it might make someone 10% more productive. For any role where it could make someone 20% more productive that role could have been made more efficient in some other way, be it training, templates, simple conversion scripts, whatever.

Basically, if someone's job can be replaced by AI then they weren't really producing any value in the first place.

Of course, this means that in a firm with 100 staff, you could get the same output with 91 staff plus Gen AI. So yeah in that context 9 people might be replaced by AI, but that doesn't tend to be how things go in practice.

It's even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like "Eh, don't worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you're doing and screw things up on purpose." Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.