Comment by flowerlad
3 hours ago
This is not a problem unique to the mathematical community.
What about software developer community? AI has eliminated the need for junior software engineers. Almost no one is hiring junior software engineers. But companies still need senior software engineers. Without junior engineers how will there be senior software engineers in the future?
What is the solution? I don't think the solution is to say AI progress in software, mathematics etc. should be halted.
Junior software engineers not being hired is not the same as not needing them. Now I have to fight senior employees that do worse things than junior employees (and produce worse software than two years ago), because they delegate their work to the AI without checking or reviewing anything at all, or questioning the AI architecture "decisions", and we have more incidents than ever...
It's really depressing watching brilliant software developers and engineers producing the worst, unmaintainable code imaginable, and being okay with shipping it because it's passing the test suite. Assuming the test suite is any good anyway (because holy crap, the nonsensical tests AI writes...)
Your code used to be a masterpiece, so well crafted it's easy for AI to tweak and modify because you've got everything so logically organised and scoped... and now this is what you're producing? Hard to debug monstrosities that only an LLM can realistically bolt new features or tweaks onto, because it can do the kinds of refactoring necessary each time.
We use to talk about the fact that code should be readable because you spend more time reading it than writing it, but I think that misses the key part that readable code is also typically easier to debug. If you can read and understand the code, you can follow the logic when things are wrong in production, and you can more easily reason about the emergent properties of interactions between the complex systems that are involved.
I always like to say that LLM-produced test suites aren't for testing software correctness or validity, they're for testing to make sure that stuff that was previously in place stays unchanged. This, of course, is six-in-one-hand-half-a-dozen-in-the-other since the agent will often just update tests to match the updates it just made, but I do find value in providing some kind of continuity to a codebase that's being modified at breakneck pace. YMMV
1 reply →
Your code used to be a masterpiece? Ours was more… Amazon basics wall art.
I jest, while in agreement with this whole comment. We used to care about fostering informed developers and maintaining high standards and good quality software.
I literally compared it to being an expert woodworker. Beautiful ornate decoration. Rich, sturdy mahogany, one of a kind, beveled edges and a fantastic stained hardwood.
Now it’s the 30$ Ikea cardboard stuff.
My biggest question is how many tables does the world need, and how many woodworkers will be required to build + maintain those table factories.
this is so accurate it hurts. the amount of my coworkers who just outright have handed any and all thinking over to the computer is staggering. its not just senior either, plenty of devs at the lead and staff level are producing complete garbage that has to be rolled back within an hour of deploy because it is extremely broken, no one verified, and it passed automated checks.
there are several features over the last few months that were obviously made and deployed and no one even launched the dev server and tried a single thing to verify if it was right. just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."
Managers can be even worse. I’ve seen an entire roadmap mostly AI generated. Director+ across the company approving based on it having the right keywords, without nuance or detail.
I’ve seen monthly and quarterly executing results AI generated with plainly wrong factual information.
1 reply →
> just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."
IME a lot of people are now subject to output-rate expectations that preclude doing much else, honestly.
Yeah, it's not actually really about coding, it's about thinking. Anyone with any software experience knows the job is 90% thinking and 10% typing. At first I thought AI agents were just a faster keyboard, but no, they think for you too. For many people it's going to be very difficult to force themselves to think when they have a magic thinking machine that makes it look they thought it through.
TECH! PRIESTS!
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tech-Priest
[flagged]
> This is not a problem unique to the mathematical community.
Ahh that's OK then. Everyone's in this same boat simultaneously in multiple industries! Cool!
> What is the solution? I don't think the solution is to say AI progress in software, mathematics etc. should be halted.
I think the solution from the maths world is to not grant these AI papers (or their human sponsors) the normal courtesies of "regular order", just as you would not with an AI lawyer or someone who was just pressing enter at a law firm.
But in the software world, nobody gives a shit, apparently. We are collectively morally bankrupt and should not be granted the regular order to help other people to decide what to do with us.
There is nothing preventing Junior Developers to develop their own systems and understand it.
In fact, the world is always filled with curious people who like to go one level below.
This hysteria about losing "Junior Software Engineers" -- most of them in it for money, promotion rather than craftmanship, is over-rated.
People who love solving puzzles will always find ways to sharpen their mind.
People who love understanding things, will always find ways (AI will help them tremendously).
People who love taking shortcuts will always find ways for it (AI or not)
Aren't you forgetting that they need to eat? Pay rent?
We are not in the 1930s.
If you have made it to the point of being a Junior Developer, I can assure you food and shelter is not a problem for them. You just have to adjust to a standard of living like the other 7 Billion people on this world.
Also, if a Junior Developer can show me(or anyone) they have built an entire system on their own and explain key concepts, there is no dearth of jobs for them
1 reply →
> There is nothing preventing Junior Developers to develop their own systems and understand it.
Eh? Apart from it not being what they are paid to do on their 9/9/6 jobs, when will they have the time to make it happen?
What is going to happen is that the remnants of the open source community will do the job of educating juniors for free, when the university degree system collapses. Just like it currently keeps a bunch of systems going with inadequate compensation.
The corporate world gets the problem off its balance sheet. Again.
The argument you respond to here is "it is impossible for anyone to be Junior Software Engineer because AI". That is a straw-man.
The actual argument is "there will be no jobs for Junior Engineers, so there will be far fewer, and as a result there will be a huge shortage of Senior Software Engineers".
You are responding to the problem as if it some kind of extinction event, like a rare bird, where if we can find a breeding population we save the day. A few curious people, self training for the love of the game, and as a result we still have a few Software Engineers so everything is fine. It is not like that, and I haven't heard anyone suggest that is the issue. The potential problem is a massive shortage of workers with skills that are currently essential to the functioning of a large fraction of the economy, whom we might still need in the future.
The continued existence of talented enthusiasts does not establish an adequate workforce pipeline. If paid entry level experience contracts, what replaces it, and why should we expect that replacement to operate at sufficient scale?
If there is a market demand, skills will find a way, especially in non-regulated industries like Software Engineering with $0 barriers to entry and no government certification
It would be exceptionally fascinating, if AI, due to the limitations of how it models information, and the way that it warped incentives, if AI ended up being a net inhibitor of progress than accelerator.
Going fast, and sustained speed, are very different things. I've often felt, in many different areas of life, that a shortcut will pay off in the short term, but if you take nothing but shortcuts then you will do terribly long term.
You have to do the hard thing eventually, or you never get anywhere.
Oh, yes... the progress... You measure it by LOC, right?
We know how this goes, at least in broad strokes. We've been through it before, just not with "knowledge" work. If there is demand for something then supply will show up to provide it.
Some jobs will stick around in vastly diminished numbers with tasks that are completely different than what they used to be to produce the same output (e.g. farmer). Other jobs will be eliminated entirely (e.g. switchboard operator). I'm guessing things like software engineering will go the way of the farmer, with the main unknown being just how much demand for software there is.
Why do people think that people displaced by AI in one industry will get a job in another industry?
The entire valuation of the AI industry is predicated on people not just losing individual jobs, but being taken out of the workforce entirely on an economic level.
They are talking about the workforce of the entire economy shrinking. People will lose their livelihoods for good.
This has the potential to be even worse than the second agricultural revolution to industrial revolution phase, which made ordinary workers lives absolutely miserable for maybe a hundred and fifty years.
This time, there will be no jobs. If you are displaced from one industry by AI, you will end up in another industry also being decimated by AI; if you get a job at all, you will do so by working lower pay than other workers, who will in turn be pushed down the ladder.
And that is if you are lucky: if you have only IT skills, why should you be the first to get a fruit picking or plumbing job?
I would argue that how it goes ends up with the main downstream effect of shifting knowledge growth and therefore expertise and therefore economic power away from the people who outsource it and to the people who do that outsourced work.
In this case with AI that power will shift to the companies that run the AIs
> Without junior engineers how will there be senior software engineers in the future?
My take is: the bar to what counts to HR as "senior" will go down as businesses everywhere try to adapt and hire more seniors - "senior" now just a name, as it becomes the new "junior". Then everyone will pat each other on the back till it all goes down in the flames of bankruptcy.
I'm not old enough to have gone through the revolution that was programming languages that got increasingly more abstract and decoupled from the metal, but surely there's a lesson that can be learned from that era?
Those abstractions are deterministic. LLMs are not.
Human’s aren’t deterministic either.
1 reply →
Garbage collection and what the JIT decides to do often isn't.
2 replies →
more importantly those abstractions were designed to try to make it easier to reason about what was going on for the author, build additional internal abstractions and to allow a reader to follow along and gain an understand of the structure. unless we believe that we can completely punt on having agency over the codebase, then llm code is only as valuable as it is readable.
3 replies →
Or the broader reproducibility problem that’s been silently plaguing most of academia for decades with little to no mention. Many, many, many papers and theses and assumptions we build on may be bunk.
AI development should be harnessed in such a way that AI augments humans without replacing them. Tools that replace human intelligence altogether are not true progress for humanity.
I hope we discover a solution before innovation totally stalls, but I do not think any solution has been found yet. And I agree that halting AI is unlikely to be the solution because even if we halt the big companies China for example can still do AI.
Some people hope AI will get good enough in a few years that it can innovate without human experts. Maybe? But that remains to be seen.
It does remain to be seen.
By the progress of AI from ChatGPT to now is horrifyingly fast.
Trendlines and basic reasoning point to a most probable future where the AI is superior. We can’t just say “that remains to be seen” because the alternative is the least probable future.
Anticipate the change and act prior.
I think we will see the same trend as other industries. “Good enough” but produced cheap is better business than “really good” but expensive. I assume most software will go that way, or has gone that way already. AI will probably cover most of it and only a few senior engineers will be needed. Basically like any other industry where it went from everybody being a craftsman to a few people building the machines that then can be used by relatively untrained people.
AI models and tooling has advanced significantly in the last 6 months. Give it a couple of years and the companies will not need senior software engineers. They will need someone to steer the AI, maybe. Why would anyone need senior software engineers?
> Give it a couple of years and the companies will not need senior software engineers. They will need someone to steer the AI, maybe. Why would anyone need senior software engineers?
Right, companies won't need software engineers. They'll just need someone who can use tools to produce source code and maintain the generated artifacts, plus make domain-specific technical decisions like "what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time" or "how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed".
We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.
> We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.
agent herder!
If that comes to pass, I will have to re-evaluate my career options
What makes you think the LLM won’t just handle that on its own, or ask the person doing the “development”?
1 reply →
I honestly don't think that these people will need to think in this level. `message in the queue` is an implementation detail..
I do not know or care what my if statement turned into in x86 assembly unless it becomes a performance problem and even then, I'm not profiling or debugging in machine language. Neither do most developers these days. A message in a queue becomes something akin to that in this era.
I see that I got downvoted there. This is not something I advocate or look forward to but I feel this is where it is going.
4 replies →
Exactly these people will be experts at typing this:
“ Claude! what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time, explain to me with full clarity”
or "Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".
If you think that there is no future where software engineers don’t matter then you are delusional. While the future is not set in stone the pace and trendline of AI point to this future as a MORE realistic future then the alternative.
Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it. Agents at my company already handle our infra.
3 replies →
Because the models do what you ask them. "Claude, do this thing, be thorough, no mistakes" is not a good prompt.
Maybe for some value of "what you ask them."
I have a data pipeline with 6 steps, A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F. I asked Codex to make some specific optimizations to step B and benchmark them. It did what I asked. Then it decided to also benchmark the entire pipeline, and after noticing that step E was slow it decided to make some optimizations that I had not asked for on step E. It was at this point that I wondered why it was taking so long, saw what it was doing, and stopped it.
This is GPT-6.1 Sol High.
What do you think "steering the AI" means? It is not like we need someone to sit at a desk and type "yes, implement it". Of course if you are a sane person you mean someone who will determine if the AI is doing "the right thing" and change its direction if it is wrong. That person is almost by definition a senior engineer.
Someone making sure that the business requirements are implemented properly and correctly. Basically a project manager. Maybe also someone testing the output and providing feedback. Not someone that says `we might have a race condition here, lets implement a distributed lock`.
I think that person does not need to know about locks anymore.
2 replies →
[flagged]
I think this will be a self-correcting problem once the damage is done, and the only cure is more cowbell, I mean - TIME.
In the age of extraction capitalism where building sustainable, profitable companies is not the goal, no one will care.
Hopefully, there are some sustainable, profitable companies that keep a low profile now and will take over after the "self correction" happens, and whoever invested in them will become very rich.
AI slop is basically the grey goo scenario but happening on the level of information and thought.
You see in this thread. Even seniors are shipping slop because at the end of the day its the companies shitheap of a codebase, not theirs, they will ship with slop code all the same.
In other words, they are increasingly devauing their own senior position and discarding their hard earned skills that make them seniors in the first place.
There will be no more seniors. Tech companies will hire junior llm agent wranglers who took a class in undergrad doing this. That is probably the nearterm.
Tons of corporations rely on the fact that human interaction within software production will be as minimal as possible, and no one actually cares who trains the seniors of the future.