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The Dumbest Move in Tech Right Now: Laying Off Developers Because of AI (ppaolo.substack.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250515190754/https://ppaolo.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-move-in-tech-right-now

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

AI can absolutely save you time, if you use it right. Don't expect it to magically be as good as a real programmer... but for instance I made an HTML visualisation of some stuff using Claude, and while it got it a bit wrong, fixing it took me maybe 20 minutes, while writing it from scratch would have taken me at least a couple of hours.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I guess for some simple stuff it can work fine, but the majority of the code I write is not at all simple, and it’s all highly dependent on the libraries I’ve written, which the AI is really bad at learning.

    And then in terms of documentation, it is just hopelessly inept.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    AI can absolutely save you time, if you use it right.

    That's a very "you" statement.

    For all we know, AI cannot in any way save this developer time.

    Some developers know their area so well that there's no reason for them to waste time dictating non-code into a guessing machine.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    I think you'd have to be a very limited kind of developer - only working in some tiny niche - to make AI completely useless for you. Most programmers occasionally have to do tedious but simple throw-away tasks, or tasks in systems they aren't familiar with. AI absolutely can save you time in these cases.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    But many of us automated those tasks out of our workflows decades ago.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Unless you're never doing new development you can't automate them. The kinds of tasks I've used this for:

    • Making an HTML visualisation of some complex function inputs. One-off project. I could totally do this but it would take me way longer.
    • Formatting a complex and very long SystemVerilog file. There aren't any existing SystemVerilog formatters (and certainly none that would handle the insane level of ifdefs in this file).
    • Writing a script to delete all Git branches at a particular commit. I only used this once.
    • Writing an Asciidoctor custom annotation. I don't know Ruby so...

    You can't automate any of those.

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