Is AI Turning Coders Into Bystanders in Their Own Jobs? (msn.com)
- Reference: 0177757443
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/05/26/0059245/is-ai-turning-coders-into-bystanders-in-their-own-jobs
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-in/technology/artificial-intelligence/at-amazon-some-coders-say-their-jobs-have-begun-to-resemble-warehouse-work/ar-AA1FrEb4
And Amazon CEO Andy Jassy even recently told shareholders Amazon would "change the norms" for programming by how they used AI.
> Those changing norms have not always been eagerly embraced. Three Amazon engineers said managers had increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work over the past year. The engineers said the company had raised output goals [which affect performance reviews] and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new AI productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it was last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using AI.
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> Other tech companies are moving in the same direction. In a memo to employees in April, the CEO of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that "AI usage is now a baseline expectation" and that the company would "add AI usage questions" to performance reviews. Google recently told employees that it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating AI tools that could "enhance their overall daily productivity," according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000.
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> The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Jassy wrote last year that the company had saved "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years" by using AI to do the thankless work of upgrading old software... As at Microsoft, many Amazon engineers use an AI assistant that suggests lines of code. But the company has more recently rolled out AI tools that can generate large portions of a program on its own. One engineer called the tools "scarily good." The engineers said that many colleagues have been reluctant to use these new tools because they require a lot of double-checking and because the engineers want more control.
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> "It's more fun to write code than to read code," said Simon Willison, an AI fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channelling the objections of other programmers. "If you're told you have to do a code review, it's never a fun part of the job. When you're working with these tools, it's most of the job."
"This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel like bystanders in their own jobs," the article points out (adding "The automation of coding has special resonance for Amazon engineers, who have watched their blue-collar counterparts undergo a similar transition..."
"While there is no rush to form a union for coders at Amazon, such a move would not be unheard of. When General Motors workers went on strike in 1936 to demand recognition of their union, the United Auto Workers, it was the dreaded speedup that spurred them on."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-in/technology/artificial-intelligence/at-amazon-some-coders-say-their-jobs-have-begun-to-resemble-warehouse-work/ar-AA1FrEb4
If you have a mediocre workforce at best (Score:2)
like Amazon, then AI might be able to lend a hand.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is... fine.
How many companies really need better than mediocrity? This is a sincere question. I would argue that for most firms, hiring top tier talent is wasteful and unnecessary. You need somebody paying attention to security, for sure. But does it really matter all that much if your CRUD application suffers from insufficient inheritance, inefficient database design, or shitty code that runs fine but is just bad form?
I know this is distasteful. As somebody with three decades of background, I don't l
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe...
One of the benefits of "top" talent is influence that rubs off in other domains. 80/20 rule and all that.
On the other hand, overt specialization is suicide (which also seems to come with top talent).
The difficulty is (always) what excels in a particular environment varies dramatically. One persons' genius is anothers' prima donna.
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I am writing this as a software developer running Claude 4 Sonnet using auto-agentic mode in another window for programming.
I can say with 100% certainty, if you are not playing close attention to what it is doing to your code it is going to do a WHOLE lot of damage when it goes off the rails. I have to constantly watch the messages scrolling by in the window as it works in order to quickly stop it before it goes off on a tangent. If you think the tools are fire and forget you don't know what you are doin
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this is my issue with every company i worked at. the disconnect between expectation and "virtue signaling" developers
PRs become a playground of flex where "you should refactor this", or "you could have implemented it like this", or even "why are you doing this? let's just use product X instead"
my last PR has 58 nitpicks from a dev (50 of them were style stuff, things that shouldn't even be discussed, but enforced by the linter) and the rest were valid points, product of the original requirement being incomp
Re: If you have a mediocre workforce at best (Score:2)
I can sympathize with not wanting code that's not up to standards into the main branch. Often once it's in something else will take priority, then the less than ideal code gets used as a model by someone else, and standards start slipping. We tend to work off of feature branches if there is an integration point that's going to hold back progress for someone else while code goes through review.
Re: (Score:2)
> But does it really matter all that much if your CRUD application suffers from insufficient inheritance, inefficient database design, or shitty code that runs fine but is just bad form?
In the short run, no. In the long run, maybe. Technical debt tends to demand "interest payments" in the form of increased effort to maintain and/or debug the sub-optimal code, and it compounds over time. In the worst case, a company can end up spending its entire development budget just servicing the debt, and have no resources left over to actually accomplish any of its primary business objectives.
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And this is how you suddenly find yourself in a stagnant corporation where it's impossible to break new ground.
AIs are only decent at creating solutions from existing solutions. For new demands they'll get weird.
Evidence of AI Coding Efficacy (Score:2)
As far as evidence of AI coding efficacy goes, the NYT article [1]cites a recent a paper by six economists [ssrn.com] - all but one current/former Microsoft Research employees - which concludes with findings that software engineers may find less than impressive: "Our preferred estimates from an instrumental variable regression suggest that usage of the coding assistant causes a 26.08% (SE: 10.3%) increase in the weekly number of completed tasks [economist-speak for weekly pull requests] for those using the tool. When we
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566
Re: Evidence of AI Coding Efficacy (Score:1)
That's because junior SWEs are the ones writing code all the time. Senior SWEs are in meetings discussing how that code should be written.
Re: Evidence of AI Coding Efficacy (Score:2)
Fortunately where I work one can still write code for the majority of the time, well past the junior level. we even have a director who does IC work for a good portion of the day. The only folks stuck in constant meetings are managers of people.
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> That's because junior SWEs are the ones writing code all the time. Senior SWEs are in meetings discussing how that code should be written.
Alternatively, it's because senior SWEs recognize that the 26% increase in task completion mostly comes from extra tasks fixing bugs introduced by junior developers who didn't take the time to fully understand the task or the code, and instead used AI to avoid having to do so. So the senior SWEs don't bother really using it meaningfully, but get very good at making it look like they are using it so that the management folks will be satisfied.
Congrats you just discovered (Score:2)
The alienation of work. Something Marx discovered couple hundred years ago.
The other name for it is Taylorism. It's the practice of taking skilled labor and breaking it down into manageable chunks that do not require skill so that workers lose their leverage and ability to command decent pay.
Do you hate MBAs? The reason is their entire purpose is to help management get rid of you or failing that turn you into an easily replaceable cog.
AI is basically an automated MBA. It's a system for rapidly a
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> We are all crabs in a bucket.
The "crabs in a bucket" metaphor is more about a sabotaging of pure altruism, rather than a failure to work together for the collective good. The crabs sabotage each others' escape attempts, well, because they're crabs. But we attribute human behavioral attributes to their actions and see it as actively preventing their comrades from escaping because it provides no benefits whatsoever to the crabs who are left behind in the bucket. Presumably, their fate as someone's future seafood meal remains unchanged
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> I think it's safe to say the human brain is not prepared for the shit storm that's coming.
I use AI daily for software development. And I have been a big proponent of it. Maybe because my job isn't at risk from AI as I co-own the business. But the business is at increased risk. As business owners and managers, we don't have an option. We have to stay ahead of this beast.
What took us years of labor to build, can now be built by AI in months if not weeks. Business leaders are feeling the pressure. In my c
I know what they mean (Score:2)
Much of my coding activity these days consists of typing in prompts and reviewing the coding results which happen within a few minutes. Sometimes I have to make a tweak or two, or just tell the agent to do it. Maybe reject one approach and ask for another one. The AI will not only do what you ask, it will suggest 3-4 ways to move forward. Then I can just pick one. Definitely a different way of working.
> One engineer called the tools "scarily good."
And I can sympathize. Apparently something that has t
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How many "compile ai code - run and fail - find bug and rewrite" cycles do you go through?
If AI would actual compile and test their output, instead of just presenting a suggestion to review, it might actually be useful.
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You haven't been exposed to auto-agentic mode yet. Install Augment Code in VSCode; they have a free trial. Set it to Agent mode with Auto then tell it to do something. It defaults to Chat mode. After you see what it can do, you are going to be worried for your job. Myself, I am using it to 10x my productivity.
Warning, you need to take some time planning what you ask it to do. In general it is best to first ask it to write a plan to a file and then you review that plan -- after the plan is ok then tell it to
The Managers dilemma (Score:2)
Managers don't need the Bystanders until they need the Bystanders.
Hackathon (Score:2)
"Winning teams will receive $10,000" and a lead watch on the way out.
Product managers will program instead of engineers (Score:2)
As a former product manager you'll see more PM's start to generate code. More times than I care to count the engineer refused to hear what the product actually did and only wanted to code. I had to explain in such detail it was very similar to how AI needs prompts.
Imagine how many PM's will take advantage of getting their code created without delay. I get we aren't ready for that code to be enterprise ready. But there is no denying it, it's going to be enterprise ready soon enough.
Re: Product managers will program instead of engin (Score:2)
If product managers can generate unit-tested, maintainable code that conforms to standards they could put up pull requests themselves. I imagine the engineers would prefer that and be able to work on core infrastructure instead and leave the business logic to product folks.
Will reduce capable human programmers (Score:2)
AI has been so useful to non-programmers or those with limited understanding like myself because asking programmers at the office to help you is nearly impossible since they have more important tasks to deal with than you're little script needs.
So now we just ask the AI to either review your own code or create it based on details you feed it and voila!
That's the future most are looking at I think. People who understand just enough to tell the AI what to code but not be able to make complex programs themse
Stolen valor (Score:2)
"engineers" LMAO
managers argue that (Score:3)
"AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks" like having a job, going to work
Re: (Score:2)
> "AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks" like having a job, going to work
It's not really the lack of having a job/going to work part that's a problem, it's the absence of a paycheck that really puts the proverbial monkey in the wrench. Then of course, someone will inevitably follow that train of thought to its logical derailment point and suggest that what's actually needed is to just give people money for sitting on their asses . It's an idea that sounds reasonable on the surface, but falls apart once you consider the greater economic impacts of just redistributing a bunch of
Re: managers argue that (Score:1)
"the greater economic impacts of just redistributing a bunch of money to everyone"
Is it wrong to thonk that taxation is about state violence whereas printing an indexed basic income harms no one, because you can easily index savings and private income too, as Israel demonstrsted for decades, adapting to high inflation without the broader economic impacts you handwave at?
Re: (Score:2)
> [...] what's actually needed is to just give people money for sitting on their asses. It's an idea that sounds reasonable on the surface, but falls apart once you consider the greater economic impacts [...]
Let's think about that for a second. There are many people who get money just for sitting on their asses. They live a good life, having done nothing of consequence. Sometimes, they've done a lot of damage. Sound familiar? I'm sure every one here can list several such people.
And yet, these people are w
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> Something doesn't add up in your argument.
You're conveniently ignoring two things:
#1 The extremely wealthy are a very small percentage of the population. Even if say, Musk decided to be a bigger asshole than usual and buy up the entire output of the Papa Johns pizzerias in his neighborhood, those economic effects would be limited to just his specific sphere of influence. Which brings us to:
#2 The top 1% doesn't spend their money in the same places at the same proportions, as the bottom 99%. The rich aren't buying 50 Honda Civics just because the
Just wait. (Score:2)
Those managers will soon find themselves surplus to requirements when the people they manage are laid off.
Every cloud, and all that.
Re: (Score:2)
> "AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks" like having a job, going to work
Sadly, no, because they still need income.
To that end, I'm a little baffled by this bit:
> The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work.
I would argue that's still a negative. Employees, for the most part, don't want to have less tedious work so that we have more time to do hard work for a company that will pay us exactly the same for doing it. We want less tedious work so that we have more time for the things we want to do, while still getting paid a reasonable salary.
This does the opposite of that. It takes away all the tedious stuff that provides a