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Accountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”

> Why can't LLMs and agents progress further to do this software engineering job better than an actual software engineer?

Because a machine can never take accountability. If a software engineer throughout the entire year has been directing AI with prompts that created weaker systems then that person is on the chopping block, not the AI. Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams.

Who is better positioned to pilot the LLM than a domain expert?

"Software engineer" as a job title has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder, for years prior to LLMs. People assuming the only, or even primary, function of the job is outputting code reveal a profound lack of understanding of the industry in my opinion. Beyond the first year or two it has been commonly accepted that the code is the easy part of the job.

It's not about whether they make mistakes (they do! although the exact definition of a mistake is nuanced), but whether they can take accountability if the software fails and millions are lost or people die. A large part of the premium paid on software engineers is to take accountability for their work. If a "business person" directs their agent to build some software and takes accountability -- congrats! They are also now a software engineer :)

The lines between a software engineer / business person / product / design and everything else will blur, because AI increases the individual person's leverage. I posit that there will be more 'software engineers' in this new world, but also more product people, more business people, more companies in general.

> It's why I just can't understand the mindset of software engineers who are giddy about this brave new world. There really is nothing special about your expertise that an LLM can't achieve, theoretically.

They’re stupid or they’re already set up for success. The general ideas seems to be generalists are screwed, domain experts will be fine.

Eh, this sounds like the people that have been replaced at a lot of companies already.

>"the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal"

For example, why modern certificates are being dropped down to very short times. The push to automate everything.

>"unpaid bills are handled this way"

Any company that has things like this will start changing their process.

You have this idea (and maybe the AI company CEOs do too) that this will be like a container drop in. No, instead these things will be part of a gradual process change and human parts will eventually disappear.

>So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.

What percent. This is what matters at the end of the day. Once unemployment reaches high rates over all age groups in a society that is used to low unemployment things go bad. It can take longer to go bad where you have social safety nets and jobs programs, but in places like the US that is communism, so expect the haves to shoot at the have nots.

That's true, too. I guess we will see if executive pay and credentials start going down. They could technically have AI make all the decisions while someone just plays the patsy.

Heh, how long before someones agent starts looking for these 3 so it can run the business in the background and feeding them all the reports they need to sign.

Thank you for this--I remember reading this paper when it came out, but forgot it by the time I wrote this section. Will add a citation.

Thank you, I had not found this one.

What I had considered is that in the case of self-driving cars, nobody is criminally accountable, even though the rest of us may be criminally negligent should we make some horrific error. Philosophically, there is some kind of reason that criminal acts require punishment beyond mere financial liability (e.g., prison time) and self-driving cars are exempted from this. Currently, self-driving cars are also exempt from the actual laws of the road because the police are dis-empowered to enforce anything on the self-driving car.

why can't the name be 'scape goat'? Since that's what they are - the "real" responsibility rests on the owners, and they happily shed it as limited liability ownership of shares.

The human species. "We" doesn't include everyone and doesn't necessarily imply the process happens through collaboration and planning (conspiracy). The race to automation is happening as expected; outside any group control and bound by competition. Game theory suggests the end result is us being replaced, if we make it that far. "We" as a species are the ones making it happen.

Funny enough, I think github and communication are still a huge part of what I see.

Github code itself maybe irrelevant, but is the product KISS/UNIX? Or is it an demonstration of complete lack of discipline about what "feature" should be added. If you see something that have multiple weakly or completely irrelevant feature strung together, it's saying something. Additionally, AI would often create speghetti structures, and require human shepherding to ensure the structure remain sound.

Same with communication. I have AI smell, I know if something is AI slop. In my current job, docs sent with expectation for others to read always prefaced with -- this section typed 100% by aperocky -- and I dispensed with grammar and spelling checks for added authenticity. I'll then add -- following section is AI generated -- to mark the end of my personal writing.

I think that is the way to go in the future. I pass intentional thinking into AI, not the other way around. There are knowledge flowing back for sure, but only humans possess intention, at least for now.

Those things are all still signals. If taken from a snapshot of the Internet pre-AI.

> But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.

Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of the usual "it's not X, it's Y", full of AI-slop. Most of the text is filler, with a few tidbits of real content here and there.

I don't know before, but now blog posts have become more noise than signal.

Anecdotally I've been observing a significant uptick in the amount of code being produced by my peers who are in senior engineer, leadership and engineering management positions.

They can take their 20+ years of experience and use it to build working systems in the gaps between meetings now. Previously they would have to carve out at least half a day of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done.

If the team does the exact same thing, not very long.

The ability to know what to build and what not to build is going to be as important as knowing how to build it. I still think engineers have an edge here. All my childhood dreams of what I should be able to do or build are coming to a reality and the only thing that is blocking me is lack of time. I want to go faster still

When I was in automation a decade ago, they keep telling us to never tell people this is going to replace them. What you tell them is it will allow their teams to finally focus on what really matters. Instead of working on all these repetitive tasks, now they can focus on the much larger issues. Everybody bought in, teams felt like the automation we were doing was really going to make their jobs easier.

It never did.

Managers realized they could trim their teams down after we were done and did in fact, layoff people by the hundreds. Doing the same work with less people was beneficial to them because now they got bigger bonuses and salary increases for adding to the bottom line of the company. Many managers who did nothing more than layoff half their team were promoted faster up the ranks.

So yes, be scared, be VERY scared and have a Plan B and a Plan C going forward. The people who created this have rose colored glasses on how its going to revolutionize business. The actual businesses owners and CEO's just a see another new way to reduce human capital in order to increase profits.

As someone in 99th percentile in terms of token usage, it's super clear to me where the agent will not be able to replace my judgement, two areas:

1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure.

2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build.

As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent agents working fo rme, because there is still a limit to my output of engineering judgement. I do get better, both at generating and delivering this judgement. Exceeding this limit, the output becomes garbage.

At this current year and date, the AI does not automate me in anyway, I have something that they just flat out don't have.

> How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?

Yeah, no one ever thinks beyond "whoa, how cool, I cloned Slack in 15 minutes!"

Personally, the thing I find more depressing is turning a career that was primarily about solving interesting puzzles in elegant ways into managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands.

"otherwise the site owner would have to check if their content is considered adult in the UK and implement something"

IMO a small blog website is not going to get pulled-up for this - it's about the author making a point. They're entitled to do so of course.

It's self-imposed, I think? curl connects to the same aphyr.com in both cases, but when connecting from the UK it receives a different response body. Probably sensible I expect, if you just want things to work, legally speaking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779352

Can people make a soft assumption that if somebody went through the trouble of digging up an archive link, then access to the article is limited in some way?

So you are thinking that the UK government is going to do an international criminal investigation against aphyr for posting an archive link on a hacker news thread.

That's hilarious given that this entire site here is using the term unironically to refer to people in general, good stuff

> someone with a heartbeat they can blame when stuff inevitably goes wrong.

if said person can be blamed (and take on the liability), but cannot stop the action or audit the action, take preventative measures (which costs money) etc, then they cannot take responsibility for real and thus whether the blame falls on them on paper is irrelevant - if there's real punishment (like jail time), but no real power to enforce anything, then who would be stupid enough to take on this job? If there's no real punishment, then what does it matter that the blame on paper is there?

stone age gets a vote from me!

Yeah, that was what I was refering to, no the specific part of the article. I've seen it much more here recently. Kind of disgusting and sad, but on the other hand it's good if people show their real face that way.