It's not there yet, but it could certainly be there in the near future. It will of course depend on the level of complexity of whatever it is being written, but grunt coders could very well go the way of the dodo, much like grunt labourers who were replaced by engines. Nowadays, labour is skilled, even if it is "unskilled" labour such as being a construction grunt - the level of complexity is still far beyond that of "move this rock from point A to point B on a clear path".

Sure, I agree with that.

Over 25% of code at google is already written by AI, what do you think they're doing over there?
The engineers I was partying with for Diwali last week held it at an office of theirs and had their workflow rather garishly on a large poster on the wall and showed just how they're using AI for image mapping during data analysis for commercial missions
You understand the Ukraine war is already being fought with AI on drones, right?

What does this even mean? How is it measured? Like 25% of the lines of code committed at Google are written by AI? And lines of code is supposed to be an accurate measurement of productivity?

I'm skeptical that this is actually evidence that AI is replacing developers.

Don't trust me, just read the reaction of people who actually code for a living:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1gfcj2q/breaking_google_announces_in_earnings_call_that/

This post was edited by IceMage on Nov 13 2024 04:30pm

People whose jobs are on the line are often the least aware of how quickly the company plans to automate them.

why would google even need more code at this point, their product barely changes

they could probably lay off all but 1 or 2 good coders and be fine

I use an AI tool at my job and sometimes it produces useful code that I don't have to write myself. But there's a pretty big difference between something that can help a developer, and something that can replace a developer.

People are conflating a lot of different things under AI nowadays. Things like process improvement, systems modernization & optimization, machine learning aren't the same things as generative AI/AGI. The former are being implemented all over. My job for example, we're seeing outdated systems being modernized and reformatted in a way to make certain parts automated/streamlined reduce human touchpoints, ultimately to drive higher productivity and basically eventually lead to shrinking head count (they don't explicitly tell you the latter but that's what it is lol). But this IMO is not AI and that's what's actually happening at most of corporate America.

It's going to be years for some of these actual true AI things to work their way into wide usage IMO. Having copilot basically web crawl and give me the best result for my question is not something that will replace swathes of tens of millions of jobs currently.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Nov 13 2024 04:46pm

This isn't a low-skill factory job that makes widgets. It's a high-skill field. If AI is going to replace developers, it will happen because developers helped it along, so I think a thread of developers reacting to this Google news is useful, especially for people who aren't developers.

Unless a programmer is young enough to have grown up with an iphone in their cradle they'd know that KLOC was a standard metric for productivity in programming despite, and in full knowledge of how little it meant. Its a shorthand that gives some idea of the scale of a project and its requirements when there's no other reasonable way to quantify it, and google has the internal analytics to come up with numbers like that.