- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Get ready for a bunch of unskilled people making the shittiest apps imaginable.
And I wonder how easy it will be to get Claude to create malware with just a few prompts…
You must log in or register to comment.
Bit of a rambly story, but I swear it is relevant.
So previously I worked as a consultant for a company that manufactured a relatively small number of high value (tens of thousands of dollars each) Gizmos in a lightly regulated industry - the requirements weren’t too crazy, basically that everything has a serial number and they can prove that any given serial passed the full range of tests before it left the factory. Pretty much the sort of thing you’d want to have if you gave a crap about quality products anyway.
Initially they were using Excel to keep track of this - they manufactured 10 units a week, it worked well enough. Eventually, they got more successful and needed to scale up to 50 units a week, and it was decided that they needed A System to keep track of testing and manufacturing. Their head of manufacturing “looked around and couldn’t find anything off the shelf that was suitable” (ie, cost $0, and perfectly matched his aesthetic tastes; mistake #1), so they decided to build their own system.
They had a few in house developers, but they were focused on building new features (things that drive sales, unlike maintaining their reputation for delivering reliable products), so head of manufacturing decided to get one of the production line techs (who was “good with computers” by virtue of having built the Excel system, but was not a software developer mistake #2) to do it.
Eventually, they decided to use Microsoft PowerApps to build the new system - for those with the good fortune never to have seen PowerApps, it’s essentially a “no code required” drag and drop UI tool that you script using Excel formulas. Think Visual BASIC or Scratch, but Cloudy.
On the surface this made sense - the developer was proficient in Excel, so use what you know. Unfortunately, PowerApps is designed to rapidly build throwaway UIs over simple data models and lacks some of the things that actual software developers would have thought to ask about:
- It lacks real version control - you can “undo” a deploy, but there is no way to discover what changed between versions, or do branches, or code review
- Because you can’t effectively manage changes to the system, you can’t do pre-production releases
- Its native database system doesn’t do referential integrity
- There is no straightforward way to do any kind of locking - and because there is no referential integrity, it’s really easy for concurrent users to really mess up the data
- There is no way to do automated testing
- The development group could have actually documented how stuff worked, requirements, specs etc but didn’t, so any time there was any issue you had to play the game of “is this a bug or bad design?”
Eventually, these chickens came home to roost in the form of a defect that slipped through testing that they then couldn’t isolate to a particular batch because none of their testing data could be trusted. I was brought in to try and unpick this mess and advise on a replacement system, but between the cost to fix the issue and the lost sales from it they ended up in a pretty bad spot financially and ended up being acquired by an investment group.
Anyway, the takeaway from this is that you disregard experience and judgement at your own peril, up front savings generally don’t manifest in the long term and I expect there is going to be a thriving market of consultants brought in to point and laugh at companies that decided that a bunch of cheap, inexperienced developers and a magic talking parrot would build better software than cheap, inexperienced developers being guided and upskilled by an experienced senior developer
I hope that some of the coders losing their jobs to AI find a way to poisoning the well somehow and create tools to undermine the technology, the companies paying for it, and the oligarchs that want it.
This clickbait headline has been making the rounds for a few days now. Replit’s CEO is not saying that AI has “replaced” professional coders, he’s talking about their company’s target market.
It’s like a website provider making tools to simplify website creation for small businesses so that any mom-and-pop store can have a basic website, and saying “we’re not aiming these tools at professional website authors.” They’re simply not trying to occupy that niche.
Get ready for a bunch of unskilled people making the shittiest apps imaginable.
Those apps have their place. Why shouldn’t an “unskilled” person be able to make some little tool that does some specific task they need done? I’m a professional coder and I make “shitty little apps” all the time for throwaway tasks. I think it’ll be empowering for the average user to be able to do that sort of thing too.
Obviously, don’t go buying such apps and installing them on your own phone or whatever. That’s where professionals still have their place.
Why shouldn’t an “unskilled” person be able to make some little tool that does some specific task they need done?
The problem isn’t that they’re going to use it for themselves. The problem is they’re going to either try to make money with it or do some black hat shit that this will help facilitate.
(Also, saying to us that it’s obvious not to buy it doesn’t really matter considering the huge number of people out there with smartphones and no idea how any of it works.)
The problem is they’re going to either try to make money with it or do some black hat shit that this will help facilitate.
And then they will fail at it, because that’s not what these tools are for. I don’t see why this is a problem.
If someone is asking you “hey, I want to use this Replit thing to build a competitor to Amazon, I have an MBA so I’m sure I can do it. Want to invest?” Then by all means try to talk them down off the ledge or make sure you’re far enough away to not be in the splash zone.
But this is someone saying “I want to make tools that non-experts can use to do productive things.” I think it’s not fair or reasonable to oppose that. Making computers more accessible and generally useful to the public is a good thing.
Yeah, OK. I just watched a complete novice ask ChatGPT how to go through installing node, pip, and creating a react app (of course ChatGPT being of 2021 suggested CRA). After 2 minutes, his confidence was soaring. And then he tried to run the react app and ran into an issue that required 2 days of troubleshooting for him to resolve. (When he asked me about it I told him he could have just deleted the file and moved on.)
So, yah, just let the CEO type in the code into the magic box, what could go wrong.
That site went from useful to a complete pile of trash. Maybe the chat bots can use it or something.
Should be a nice salary boost for developers in a year or two when all these companies desperately need to rehire to fix whatever AI slop mess they have created.
And I hope every developer demands 2x their current salary if they are tasked with re-engineering that crap.
Like when they stopped trying to Outsource to India or other places where the labor was extremely cheap. But all the code that came back from it was useless and had to be Rewritten by the remaining software engineers still at the company anyway. They’ll never learn. They’ll simply find a new anti-worker efficiency to Chase.
But during a shory period of time,managers could force workers to stay late and overwork themselves without pushback.
/s
I’d go further and demand that the team I’m hired for re-write the app completely and not just re-engineer it from the AI slop codebase.
tbh that’s probably going to be cheaper
Get ready for a bunch of unskilled people making the shittiest apps imaginable.
We currently have skilled coders making the shittiest apps imaginable, due to shitty direction by management.
And this will make those apps look amazing in comparison.
I have no idea what this company is…who this person is…and by the looks of it, I’ll never need to.
Replit is an in browser IDE. I met the founder once at a tech event. He struck me as a little arrogant.
To explain the clickbaity title: it means their product won’t target professional coders, not that they won’t hire them.
Honestly, that makes sense, since anyone who knows a bit about Software development can see that handing off control of your app to a large language model in a way you have no clue of what’s going on in the back is not sustainable at all.
Customers could, in theory, use Claude directly to create software, but then they’d have to handle everything else that goes along with it. “What you’d have to do is pay for Claude, go to AWS to start an EC2 machine, go into that, install Git and Python. Already, most people are just gone at this point,” he said.
so their competitive advantage is not having to start an ec2 instance lol
As a developer I always enjoy asking these clowns why anybody should buy their products when AI will soon allow consumers to build these apps themselves, which is just a logical progression if you don’t need coders to create software.
I know of course that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon. It’s wishful thinking from their part and it shows a complete lack of understanding both what LLMs can and cannot do and what it takes to design and implement anything bigger than a batch script.
Edit: I also can’t help but feel personally offended whenever some corporate drone gloats about replacing developers. It didn’t happen with low-code, it didn’t happen with no-code and it won’t happen with AI. But it hurts every time.
I mean, project managers have been not caring about professional coders since way before the current LLM hype.
Ahh, replit. Wanna know how to completely destroy your service, community, workforce and reputation in less than a year? Ask them.
I used to use replit at the height of its popularity. If any of you know what Glitch was, it was like that but way cooler.
You could program in virtually every programming language, write Discord bots, make games, talk to people about coding and get viral from your programs. It was basically programming but with social media and with extremely easy to use text editor and theme support basically made Replit the #1 place to program on the Internet.
Then, the AI boom happened. And replit wanted quick cash immediately. So they up their subscription prices slightly with Replit Agent, basically ChatGPT but for programming. They then removed their school system, and decided to stop virtually all community support. Now a lot ot the top projects were AI based but at least you could progran right? Not anymore.
Halfway through 2024, Replit decided to kill the platform in one fell swoop. They restricted all free users to only 3 projects, 1 GB of storage and severely throttled CPUs as well. This made the replit userbase tank. They removed all community features and essentially ghosted everyone. Anyone with a brain abandoned replit and just programmed on their own computers.
It’s so sad what happened but hey, at least replit made people who would never program once in their lives programmers through ease of use and social factors.
And all they had to do was not be completely idiotic and greedy.
deleted by creator
Isn’t layoffs his point?
deleted by creator
If it wasn’t for his claim that he was using AI instead of people, you’d have a point.
His success is making more money for himself, not creating a better product.
Do I smell pump and dump?
We don’t care about professional coders any more. You know, the people making all these “breakthroughs” we are so happy about.
Black hat hackers are drooling at the thought.
I have a novice programmer friend who created an app with authentication with AI. It used create-react-app (deprecated for years now) and had him roll his own OAuth layer manually with Express. When you refresh, you get logged out.
It’s an awesome project to learn some skills, but only a seasoned programmer would know to never roll your own auth, or to not use CRA, etc.
We are in for some interesting times.
