In a leaked recording, AWS CEO tells most developers could stop coding soon

So many bad takes in that article. It will be interesting to look back in 5+ years to see how things play out vs this unlimited optimism.

> "everyone is a programmer now"

I’ve heard this about so many things. Various tool they make everyone a programmer, or everyone a DBA. Nice dreams, that never seem to play out.

Being a programmer isn’t about the syntax, it’s about breaking problems down, so they can logically be built back up in code. I have yet to see anyone without an extensive background in programming write good spec for what they want code to do. How many assumptions are we comfortable having AI make?

On my last project I was given 1 sentence of direction, and the people giving the direction truly thought that’s all they needed to say… or it was the extent of their understanding of the topic. It took thousands of lines of code, backed by a bunch of testing and design decisions, informed by 15+ years with the company and the various personalities involved, to make that 1 sentence a reality in a way that would make sense for the organization. Call me a cynic, but I don’t see AI doing a good job with something like that in a world where “everyone is a programmer.”

I did try putting it in Copilot at the start, just to see what it dumped out. It gave me maybe 40 lines of broken code. It was the blog post version of how to do it, not an enterprise solution.

I’m so glad I left. The execs there are comically incompetent.

I have yet to see a significant increase in productivity from AI. I wonder where they are extrapolating from?

I’m waiting for the story where a developer says that AI is equally able to replace senior managers; I can only imagine the blustering and outrage that would result!

"If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in"

I am happy to change my title from Software Engineer to AI Software Debugger if it means more money and prestige.

AWS CEO is just catching up now. Most developers have stopped coding since several years now and have been dancing around with JSON, yaml, helm charts, terraform and docker files.

In the last 100 years, software adoption went from non-existant to being used everywhere, so even through programmer productivity was increasing, we stil always needed more programmers. But maybe the growth of programmer productivity will be higher than the growth of software demand at some point?

Thing is that the new crop of LLM AI systems are far more suited to replace the vagueries and multiway interpretable and broadly generic outputs of positions like sales and marketing, and yes, management, than they are at replacement in engineering based environments where output and performance is highly specific, knowledge very fractal and volatile, and unforgiving in the slightest.

I' productively using LLM coding assistants daily, but if I had to choose between having to go with the unmodified LLM output of codebase or a marketing plan, it would not even be a question.

I've got a tinfoil hat that says this AI hype cycle is ~20% no-kidding tech, and ~80% fig leaf for offloading expensive employees.

I actually have a different hypothesis. The amount of professional developers is increasing exponentially since the invention of computers, at a pretty steady rate. It’s only possible because of increased tooling. I’m hoping that ai is powerful enough to keep this trend going

This is why 'leaders' should spend some time in the trenches, doing the job of those they 'lead', so that they have at least a basic understanding of the actual difficulties, limitations, possibilities, etc.

In other news, Amazon investors just found out the AWS CEO could be replaced by a chatbot and nothing of value would be lost.

Worrisome. If I were heavily dependent on AWS I’d start thinking about plan B.

AWS CEO: https://xkcd.com/605/

They have to say that to make the number go up. All these companies have heavily invested in AI.

AI is just another tool whose output depends on the skill of the user. You can't put people without domain knowledge in front of a LLM and get good results. It's very good at producing output that's looks good enough to convince non experts that it can do the job.

CEO could stop manage sooner

In the meantime, CEOs will increase their pay by 10x-100x, because, obviously, they do the most important work out there. /s

I'm sorry, please don't downvote me for a low-quality reply - but my only reaction after reading that is ... "sure, Jan."