7 ms·

We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

54 points by cachehit 2y ago

yahoobing 2y ago
If 7 out of 10 coders are made redundant because of AI right now in May 2024 then you had very bad coders to begin with. If you do the same with translators now in May 2024 you will provide a horrible service. June may be a different kettle of fish!
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Most big corps just need a lot of decent coders to pump out a lot of business logic and UI. AI is definitely going to be able to do that with some basic human validation along the way.
  - kadoban 2y ago
    At a big corp: 90% of my job is talking to various people to figure out what we want to code, who has to approve it, who I have to coordinate changes with, etc. AI can currently _maybe_ do half of the 10% that's left, with good amounts of supervision.
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      The supervision is also difficult to do unless people get enough experience actually doing the job, so expect it to take even longer to get people to verify the code once it's written by AI. This is the same concern people have about autonomous driving. If you let the machine take over, then you'll be out of touch when you're called on to do the real tricky bits of work.
  - kaptainscarlet 2y ago
    The problem with the validation part is that the human has to go through all the code written by AI. Guess what, understanding someone's code takes almost as much effort as writing the code yourself. Therefore you require just about the same amount of human beings verify AI's code.
    - yahoobing 2y ago
      Can an AI make a useful PR on a 1million LOC project even.
    - dyauspitr 2y ago
      People take like 2% of the time to review and approve a PR compared to the person writing it.
      - yahoobing 2y ago
        2% time is superficial review. For a 40h all week job that is less than 1h Not enough time to even understand the requirements of a 40h job. 10h would be minimum. Unless you are just checking that the style guide is correct and obvious missed null checks. For this reason I feel code reviews are a bit silly and pair programming is way better (pairing with a mix of sync and async work) but that is an aside. In addition a code review being short is usually because the coder and reviewer are both very competent. Once AI enters the chat the reviewer needs to look very closely at every line.
        kaptainscarlet 2y ago
        Code reviews are more of a formality, a pointless one. There's little to no value in one code reviewing a piece of code without the background business problem being solved by it.
        dyauspitr 2y ago
        Sure but a “superficial” review is what most corps currently run on. Certain crucial code gets looked at more throughly. If there are any bugs QA catches it. It’s going to be the same with AI. It pumps out a lot of code. Human does spot checks and probably uses other AI to help with the code review. A real human does the really hard, critical code directly. A more robust QA team makes sure it all works.
        yahoobing 2y ago
        I think you are right in the near future but not today. I don’t think we are quite there yet with AI but the pace of improvement is breathtaking and producing code (and more generally “logic” which could be code but also machine code, system design, LLM prompts and so on) is such a pot of gold the AI companies will go for it.
- martindbp 2y ago
  Most coding is not rocket science, just drudgery. Still, 7/10 implies some very junior level tasks.
  - strken 2y ago
    The thing about outsourcing is that you need to break tasks into tiny well-specified units for your contractors to do, not because they're idiots but because they have little context on anything and often need to be able to work from a different time zone without much back-and-forth. Tiny well-specified units are exactly what copilot speeds up, but they come at the price of increased costs elsewhere: more PMs/business analysts, more managers, onshore engineers whose job is solely to support offshore staff, etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ein0p 2y ago
We’re just going to write a lot more code than we could before. With higher quality
- RexM 2y ago
  I’m unsure about the higher quality part. I’ve seen code written by both AI and some humans — it’s a toss up.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    That’s the thing: I think it’s not one vs the other. The correct way to think about this is: AI augmented humans.
steve1977 2y ago
The quote actually says "We need 70% less coders from third parties to code".
- willvarfar 2y ago
  The IT is almost certainly outsourced. It's all contractors.
willvarfar 2y ago
They are probably right about the coders. Extrapolating from my brushes with big corp IT efforts and confidently generalising it to BP too, it is likely that the standard of what they have today is so underwhelming that an AI will do no worse. This is because the corporate culture and reward structure incentivise using the cheapest labour to spend as much money as possible delaying delivery for so long that accountability doesn't come home to roost and the system can instead be scheduled to be replaced by a bigger worse new project before it ever gets finished. Yeap I'm cynical but there are precious few 'wow they are doing it right' 'efficient and effective' stories from big corp IT. They are probably right about their help desks too. And so on.
Oras 2y ago
From the earnings PDF, reference 2 > Due to GenAI and in-house built developer productivity tools, we have increased the output of our software developers by around 70% year-over-year. In parallel, we have been carrying out a large-scale digital talent transformation, accelerated by our in-house AI + human-powered code-reviews-as-a-service capability. As a part of this we have been reducing 3rd party software engineers in our organization by around 60% percent in the last 6 months. They have increased in-house developers' productivity, which means they are less reliant on 3rd party developers.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
This is not the first time programmers became more efficient. We've had that happen before; usually because of new languages, tools, and other things that help people become more productive. AI is just another productivity enhancing tool. Some studies suggest that the lines of codes produced per time unit is more or less constant across different languages. What matters is what those lines do. If you are programming in assembly, it's going to take ages of very verbose programming to get anything done. Do the same in Haskell and you might reduce it to a couple of lines of code. Based on what happened in the past, we might expect programming work to outgrow the efficiency gains. That's what has happened every time there was a step change reduction in cost for producing software. The community of developers keeps expanding and isn't shrinking.
dymk 2y ago
This is an earnings call, so take it with a grain of salt. There's a strong incentive to represent expenses as low as possible.
faeriechangling 2y ago
They must have quite the sparkling crystal ball at BP headquarters. What a specific estimate, not even a range.
elric 2y ago
If this number is anywhere near accurate across companies, this might end up having far ranging consequences that we're not ready for. Aside from the obvious unemployment of those replaced by AI, why would anyond still want become CS/IT graduate? Might as well close down 70% of CS/IT departments.
- lionkor 2y ago
  I believe only people with a serious lack of skill and lack of drive to change that are in danger here. When AI starts to produce compilable non-trivial code, I'll consider changing my mind, but that has yet to happen. Visual Studio can auto suggest me stuff while I'm refactoring, that easily saves me an hour a week of work during a busy week. The rest of my work can't be automated by any current AI, because most of my work is thinking, debugging and testing. LLMs can only go "Oh, i'm so sorry, let me just try brute forcing the problem! Heres another variation of the solution, please spend 5-15 minutes testing it to exhaustion!" - "Ah, my bad, heres another fix that doesnt work: ..."... etc.
- imtringued 2y ago
  AST input is a tiny fraction of computer science.
- torginus 2y ago
  I believe it's the other way around - most people who have computer science degrees have attended university with a rigorous math, engineering and theoretical computer science curriculum. And despite that, they struggle to use any of it in any meaningful capacity. Months can go by before I get to solve a good DS & A problem in production. Most of my job consits of fighting with the mundane drudgery of fighting with cloud providers or getting crappy frameworks to do what I want. I think the value of people who have a deep understanding is about to skyrocket.
danpalmer 2y ago
What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%). It's creating dashboards in BI tools, it's tweaking Wordpress themes, it's writing custom business processes in ABAP for SAP deployments, or it's 3-10 engineers doing the work of 1 so that a outsourcing company can bulk up its bills. This is the sort of work that AI is coming for. It's low impact, low effort, low paid, and importantly it doesn't get automated (often). This means there is a lot of low hanging fruit for automation, whether that's by regular tooling or LLMs. On the other hand, if you're a highly paid software engineer, it's likely you're already working with highly automated and abstracted systems, so there's much less opportunity for LLMs. If your deployment process is a Word doc specifying the 120 steps you have to run in bash to deploy that takes 1 eng day, that's going to be automated, but if you're git-pushing and having Kubernetes roll it out in your CI/CD flow, automation has already raised the level of abstraction that you need to work at and there are fewer opportunities. Yes there's Copilot/etc which will reduce boilerplate, but the only way a company achieves "70% less coders" is by wholesale automation of large parts of their process that must be horribly basic already.
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  I'm well aware of this and in those sorts of jobs, most of the work isn't programming, it's sitting in meetings and communicating. While AI might help with this simply by shrinking the amount of people needed to do a job, I'm very dubious about a 70% efficiency gain when you look at the entire scope of what these workers do. The entire concept that if you make coding 70% more efficient that you'll make coders 70% more efficient is simply wrong.
  - gexla 2y ago
    Maybe you need to be more specific about which workers you're talking about. Given a full time worker vs a contractor, I'm guessing the contractor has far less knowledge of the system as a whole, and ripe for being replaced. Then with freed up funds, maybe they hire more internal developers. It could be more of a reshuffling than anything else.
- 2y ago
yen223 2y ago
Original source: Page 7 of the "BP 1Q 2024 Results: Webcast Q&A Transcript" https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/investors/bp-first-quarter-2024-results-qa-transcript.pdf https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
faeriechangling 2y ago
My impression is that AI has done more for the accessibility of coding than the efficiency of coding. Sure, it's much more possible for bob from accounting to throw together some trivial python script than it was a few years ago, but it seems the main benefit more skilled programmers get from it seems to be helping with syntax and pumping out boilerplate. Which is quite a bit of programming work but well less than 70% of it. When a problem is tricky, it seems people turn off the autopilot.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Bob from accounting will not even know how to run a Python script, how to deploy it, install required modules. Programming is in a significant part about knowing how to break a solution to a problem into small, testable, reusable chunks of code and knowing when a one-file script is fine or when a framework (3rd-party or written in house) may be a better solution. Programming is also about knowing the tooling for your language, the operating system, protocols, formats. AI won't help Bob with that.
gexla 2y ago
This isn't telling me much. They are less reliant on contractors. I'm guessing these contractors have far greater overhead and handle things which require the least knowledge of the systems they are working on. This could create more full time jobs for BP, by freeing up funds to put more internal people behind AI assisted dev.
akmarinov 2y ago
Seriously guys, what am I missing that they can do that? I’ve tried doing just basic json printing apps and the AIs (GPT-4o, Claude Opus, Gemini) often fail me after digging into what needs to be done. They do great at scaffolding things and getting you maybe 40-50% there, then they hit a brick wall of awful code and not doing what I want. How can you replace devs for even these simplest cases? It just doesn’t work at the end.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  I can tell you from first-hand experience that a wall of source code which only works 50% of the time is precisely the level of quality that you can expect from cheap outsourcing. I believe what AI can do is change managers' expectations so that smaller teams become more accepted. And by kicking out the worst performers, you increase average productivity, no matter what the AI does or doesn't do.
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    I’d believe if you did nothing with AI and just fired a big chunk of your bottom tier cheap outsourced programming “talent” your productivity would significantly increase as a result of your actual talent no longer being occupied with managing and reacting to low quality code contribution and contributor hand holding.
    - fxtentacle 2y ago
      Agree. If someone's productivity is negative, bringing it closer to 0 is an improvement. That means keeping them busy with a useless AI is actually helpful.
  - pllbnk 2y ago
    The difference between cheap outsourcing by humans and LLMs is that in the former case this 50% of working code remains more or less constant, while with LLMs, I would assume, it gets exponentially lower with every iteration. I use LLMs for my daily work and personal matters a lot and I certainly admire the value they bring but the shortcomings cannot be unseen.
lionkor 2y ago
7/10 devs being obsoleted by AI must mean that the company employs about 3 actual engineers per 10 people it hires, and the rest just push around copy pasted code
wakawaka28 2y ago
BP the oil company? If they are actually using AI to write their code, it sounds like criminal negligence and a disaster in the making.
yellow_lead 2y ago
> We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding, the human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it, that's a big savings for the company moving forward. Reading code is sometimes much harder than writing it yourself. If you still have to validate the code, I don't understand how it's a net gain.
colechristensen 2y ago
lol, on an earnings call. Someone is lying and being lied to. Unless they were paying a whole bunch of programmers to do not much useful at all or just incredibly simple repetitive things, this is obviously not true to anyone who has tried to use LLMs to solve problems. I’m guessing some mid management sold the idea of firing 2/3 of the development staff and somebody is declaring victory a bit early.
throwaway290 2y ago
I like how all comments here are "surely it's all just bad coders and not a threat for my big brain" and not like "all our source is being used against us-- today it's juniors, tomorrow it's me".
w10-1 2y ago
Contract agencies have strong incentives to pad work and payrolls and use process controls to coordinate production. It's perfect for AI disruption because you can test replacements at process boundaries, and there's plenty of excess.
surfingdino 2y ago
Meanwhile in India... https://www.bp.com/en_in/india/home/news/press/bp-to-establish-a-new-centre-of-technical-excellence-in-pune.html https://www.bp.com/en_in/india/home/news/press/bp-to-establi...
torginus 2y ago
Honestly I believe that should wholesale replacement of people come about, programmers will be one of the last ones to be replaced, with the first ones being probably translators, then customer service, help desk clerks etc. Basically almost all intellectually challenging problems have a major component of programming, to the point that most engineering professions are thought of a special case of 'programmer'. Data Scientists', ML engineers', Electrical engineers' valuable outputs are usually some kind of computer code.
moneywoes 2y ago
as a backend dev what do i do to stay safe from this?
yashg 2y ago
"Second things like call centers, the language models have become so sophisticated now. They can operate in multiple languages, 14, 15 languages easily. In the past, that hasn't been something we can do. So we can redeploy people off that given that the AI can do it." For the customers this is going to be a horrible experience and frustration of going in a loop with an AI model. Anyone facing a problem not listed in the 10-15 predefined problems and resolutions is going to have an excruciating time trying to get any meaningful resolution.
- netsharc 2y ago
  Some company's call centers are designed to fuck around and frustrate you until you give up trying to get what you want (e.g. compensation). Here's looking at you AirBnB. Hah, imagine making something that evil with AI, you don't even need to destroy your outsourced call-center workers' souls...
JSDevOps 2y ago
Someone is definitely lieing to someone else here.
koonsolo 2y ago
AI is StackOverflow on steroids. That's how I see it from a programmer's perspective. It's excellent at getting code snippets, suggesting possible ways on how to handle something, etc. I recently had to help out my son with Arduino programming, which I'm totally new at, and thanks to ChatGPT this was super fast and easy. But to handle an actual codebase, even a single developer codebase, it just doesn't have enough context for that. I'm sure some day computers will be smarter than us, but some people are still seriously overestimating this.
joak 2y ago
AI makes coding cheaper, easier. With an elastic demand there will be more code not less coders.
nisarg2 2y ago
[flagged]
djaouen 2y ago
I seriously doubt this figure.
boring-alterego 2y ago
AI can help those of us on the edges of what the "coder" of an environment is. Things like getting the right syntax for a given set of pseudocode instructions. Background is EE, inherited an airgapped DCS with everything from things running Fortran from the early 1980s to modern controllers in a heavily regulated industry. Time savings do matter. And for low end little things we could never get an external contract on we are enabling those that take more of the system owner type role to have more tools in their bag for response.

54 points by cachehit 2y ago

If 7 out of 10 coders are made redundant because of AI right now in May 2024 then you had very bad coders to begin with. If you do the same with translators now in May 2024 you will provide a horrible service. June may be a different kettle of fish!

dyauspitr 2y ago
Most big corps just need a lot of decent coders to pump out a lot of business logic and UI. AI is definitely going to be able to do that with some basic human validation along the way.
- kadoban 2y ago
  At a big corp: 90% of my job is talking to various people to figure out what we want to code, who has to approve it, who I have to coordinate changes with, etc. AI can currently _maybe_ do half of the 10% that's left, with good amounts of supervision.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    The supervision is also difficult to do unless people get enough experience actually doing the job, so expect it to take even longer to get people to verify the code once it's written by AI. This is the same concern people have about autonomous driving. If you let the machine take over, then you'll be out of touch when you're called on to do the real tricky bits of work.
- kaptainscarlet 2y ago
  The problem with the validation part is that the human has to go through all the code written by AI. Guess what, understanding someone's code takes almost as much effort as writing the code yourself. Therefore you require just about the same amount of human beings verify AI's code.
  - yahoobing 2y ago
    Can an AI make a useful PR on a 1million LOC project even.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    People take like 2% of the time to review and approve a PR compared to the person writing it.
    - yahoobing 2y ago
      2% time is superficial review. For a 40h all week job that is less than 1h Not enough time to even understand the requirements of a 40h job. 10h would be minimum. Unless you are just checking that the style guide is correct and obvious missed null checks. For this reason I feel code reviews are a bit silly and pair programming is way better (pairing with a mix of sync and async work) but that is an aside. In addition a code review being short is usually because the coder and reviewer are both very competent. Once AI enters the chat the reviewer needs to look very closely at every line.
      - kaptainscarlet 2y ago
        Code reviews are more of a formality, a pointless one. There's little to no value in one code reviewing a piece of code without the background business problem being solved by it.
      - dyauspitr 2y ago
        Sure but a “superficial” review is what most corps currently run on. Certain crucial code gets looked at more throughly. If there are any bugs QA catches it. It’s going to be the same with AI. It pumps out a lot of code. Human does spot checks and probably uses other AI to help with the code review. A real human does the really hard, critical code directly. A more robust QA team makes sure it all works.
        yahoobing 2y ago
        I think you are right in the near future but not today. I don’t think we are quite there yet with AI but the pace of improvement is breathtaking and producing code (and more generally “logic” which could be code but also machine code, system design, LLM prompts and so on) is such a pot of gold the AI companies will go for it.
martindbp 2y ago
Most coding is not rocket science, just drudgery. Still, 7/10 implies some very junior level tasks.
- strken 2y ago
  The thing about outsourcing is that you need to break tasks into tiny well-specified units for your contractors to do, not because they're idiots but because they have little context on anything and often need to be able to work from a different time zone without much back-and-forth. Tiny well-specified units are exactly what copilot speeds up, but they come at the price of increased costs elsewhere: more PMs/business analysts, more managers, onshore engineers whose job is solely to support offshore staff, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ein0p 2y ago

We’re just going to write a lot more code than we could before. With higher quality

RexM 2y ago
I’m unsure about the higher quality part. I’ve seen code written by both AI and some humans — it’s a toss up.
- ein0p 2y ago
  That’s the thing: I think it’s not one vs the other. The correct way to think about this is: AI augmented humans.

steve1977 2y ago

The quote actually says "We need 70% less coders from third parties to code".

willvarfar 2y ago
The IT is almost certainly outsourced. It's all contractors.

willvarfar 2y ago

They are probably right about the coders. Extrapolating from my brushes with big corp IT efforts and confidently generalising it to BP too, it is likely that the standard of what they have today is so underwhelming that an AI will do no worse. This is because the corporate culture and reward structure incentivise using the cheapest labour to spend as much money as possible delaying delivery for so long that accountability doesn't come home to roost and the system can instead be scheduled to be replaced by a bigger worse new project before it ever gets finished. Yeap I'm cynical but there are precious few 'wow they are doing it right' 'efficient and effective' stories from big corp IT. They are probably right about their help desks too. And so on.

Oras 2y ago

From the earnings PDF, reference 2 > Due to GenAI and in-house built developer productivity tools, we have increased the output of our software developers by around 70% year-over-year. In parallel, we have been carrying out a large-scale digital talent transformation, accelerated by our in-house AI + human-powered code-reviews-as-a-service capability. As a part of this we have been reducing 3rd party software engineers in our organization by around 60% percent in the last 6 months. They have increased in-house developers' productivity, which means they are less reliant on 3rd party developers.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

This is not the first time programmers became more efficient. We've had that happen before; usually because of new languages, tools, and other things that help people become more productive. AI is just another productivity enhancing tool. Some studies suggest that the lines of codes produced per time unit is more or less constant across different languages. What matters is what those lines do. If you are programming in assembly, it's going to take ages of very verbose programming to get anything done. Do the same in Haskell and you might reduce it to a couple of lines of code. Based on what happened in the past, we might expect programming work to outgrow the efficiency gains. That's what has happened every time there was a step change reduction in cost for producing software. The community of developers keeps expanding and isn't shrinking.

dymk 2y ago

This is an earnings call, so take it with a grain of salt. There's a strong incentive to represent expenses as low as possible.

faeriechangling 2y ago

They must have quite the sparkling crystal ball at BP headquarters. What a specific estimate, not even a range.

elric 2y ago

If this number is anywhere near accurate across companies, this might end up having far ranging consequences that we're not ready for. Aside from the obvious unemployment of those replaced by AI, why would anyond still want become CS/IT graduate? Might as well close down 70% of CS/IT departments.

lionkor 2y ago
I believe only people with a serious lack of skill and lack of drive to change that are in danger here. When AI starts to produce compilable non-trivial code, I'll consider changing my mind, but that has yet to happen. Visual Studio can auto suggest me stuff while I'm refactoring, that easily saves me an hour a week of work during a busy week. The rest of my work can't be automated by any current AI, because most of my work is thinking, debugging and testing. LLMs can only go "Oh, i'm so sorry, let me just try brute forcing the problem! Heres another variation of the solution, please spend 5-15 minutes testing it to exhaustion!" - "Ah, my bad, heres another fix that doesnt work: ..."... etc.
imtringued 2y ago
AST input is a tiny fraction of computer science.
torginus 2y ago
I believe it's the other way around - most people who have computer science degrees have attended university with a rigorous math, engineering and theoretical computer science curriculum. And despite that, they struggle to use any of it in any meaningful capacity. Months can go by before I get to solve a good DS & A problem in production. Most of my job consits of fighting with the mundane drudgery of fighting with cloud providers or getting crappy frameworks to do what I want. I think the value of people who have a deep understanding is about to skyrocket.

danpalmer 2y ago

What I don't think the HN bubble is fully familiar with is the fact that probably 70% of programming happening today is boring low paid drudgery (or maybe 50-90%). It's creating dashboards in BI tools, it's tweaking Wordpress themes, it's writing custom business processes in ABAP for SAP deployments, or it's 3-10 engineers doing the work of 1 so that a outsourcing company can bulk up its bills. This is the sort of work that AI is coming for. It's low impact, low effort, low paid, and importantly it doesn't get automated (often). This means there is a lot of low hanging fruit for automation, whether that's by regular tooling or LLMs. On the other hand, if you're a highly paid software engineer, it's likely you're already working with highly automated and abstracted systems, so there's much less opportunity for LLMs. If your deployment process is a Word doc specifying the 120 steps you have to run in bash to deploy that takes 1 eng day, that's going to be automated, but if you're git-pushing and having Kubernetes roll it out in your CI/CD flow, automation has already raised the level of abstraction that you need to work at and there are fewer opportunities. Yes there's Copilot/etc which will reduce boilerplate, but the only way a company achieves "70% less coders" is by wholesale automation of large parts of their process that must be horribly basic already.

faeriechangling 2y ago
I'm well aware of this and in those sorts of jobs, most of the work isn't programming, it's sitting in meetings and communicating. While AI might help with this simply by shrinking the amount of people needed to do a job, I'm very dubious about a 70% efficiency gain when you look at the entire scope of what these workers do. The entire concept that if you make coding 70% more efficient that you'll make coders 70% more efficient is simply wrong.
- gexla 2y ago
  Maybe you need to be more specific about which workers you're talking about. Given a full time worker vs a contractor, I'm guessing the contractor has far less knowledge of the system as a whole, and ripe for being replaced. Then with freed up funds, maybe they hire more internal developers. It could be more of a reshuffling than anything else.
2y ago

yen223 2y ago

Original source: Page 7 of the "BP 1Q 2024 Results: Webcast Q&A Transcript" https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/investors/bp-first-quarter-2024-results-qa-transcript.pdf https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

faeriechangling 2y ago

My impression is that AI has done more for the accessibility of coding than the efficiency of coding. Sure, it's much more possible for bob from accounting to throw together some trivial python script than it was a few years ago, but it seems the main benefit more skilled programmers get from it seems to be helping with syntax and pumping out boilerplate. Which is quite a bit of programming work but well less than 70% of it. When a problem is tricky, it seems people turn off the autopilot.

surfingdino 2y ago
Bob from accounting will not even know how to run a Python script, how to deploy it, install required modules. Programming is in a significant part about knowing how to break a solution to a problem into small, testable, reusable chunks of code and knowing when a one-file script is fine or when a framework (3rd-party or written in house) may be a better solution. Programming is also about knowing the tooling for your language, the operating system, protocols, formats. AI won't help Bob with that.

gexla 2y ago

This isn't telling me much. They are less reliant on contractors. I'm guessing these contractors have far greater overhead and handle things which require the least knowledge of the systems they are working on. This could create more full time jobs for BP, by freeing up funds to put more internal people behind AI assisted dev.

akmarinov 2y ago

Seriously guys, what am I missing that they can do that? I’ve tried doing just basic json printing apps and the AIs (GPT-4o, Claude Opus, Gemini) often fail me after digging into what needs to be done. They do great at scaffolding things and getting you maybe 40-50% there, then they hit a brick wall of awful code and not doing what I want. How can you replace devs for even these simplest cases? It just doesn’t work at the end.

fxtentacle 2y ago
I can tell you from first-hand experience that a wall of source code which only works 50% of the time is precisely the level of quality that you can expect from cheap outsourcing. I believe what AI can do is change managers' expectations so that smaller teams become more accepted. And by kicking out the worst performers, you increase average productivity, no matter what the AI does or doesn't do.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  I’d believe if you did nothing with AI and just fired a big chunk of your bottom tier cheap outsourced programming “talent” your productivity would significantly increase as a result of your actual talent no longer being occupied with managing and reacting to low quality code contribution and contributor hand holding.
  - fxtentacle 2y ago
    Agree. If someone's productivity is negative, bringing it closer to 0 is an improvement. That means keeping them busy with a useless AI is actually helpful.
- pllbnk 2y ago
  The difference between cheap outsourcing by humans and LLMs is that in the former case this 50% of working code remains more or less constant, while with LLMs, I would assume, it gets exponentially lower with every iteration. I use LLMs for my daily work and personal matters a lot and I certainly admire the value they bring but the shortcomings cannot be unseen.

lionkor 2y ago

7/10 devs being obsoleted by AI must mean that the company employs about 3 actual engineers per 10 people it hires, and the rest just push around copy pasted code

wakawaka28 2y ago

BP the oil company? If they are actually using AI to write their code, it sounds like criminal negligence and a disaster in the making.

yellow_lead 2y ago

> We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding, the human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it, that's a big savings for the company moving forward. Reading code is sometimes much harder than writing it yourself. If you still have to validate the code, I don't understand how it's a net gain.

colechristensen 2y ago

lol, on an earnings call. Someone is lying and being lied to. Unless they were paying a whole bunch of programmers to do not much useful at all or just incredibly simple repetitive things, this is obviously not true to anyone who has tried to use LLMs to solve problems. I’m guessing some mid management sold the idea of firing 2/3 of the development staff and somebody is declaring victory a bit early.

throwaway290 2y ago

I like how all comments here are "surely it's all just bad coders and not a threat for my big brain" and not like "all our source is being used against us-- today it's juniors, tomorrow it's me".

w10-1 2y ago

Contract agencies have strong incentives to pad work and payrolls and use process controls to coordinate production. It's perfect for AI disruption because you can test replacements at process boundaries, and there's plenty of excess.

surfingdino 2y ago

Meanwhile in India... https://www.bp.com/en_in/india/home/news/press/bp-to-establish-a-new-centre-of-technical-excellence-in-pune.html https://www.bp.com/en_in/india/home/news/press/bp-to-establi...

torginus 2y ago

Honestly I believe that should wholesale replacement of people come about, programmers will be one of the last ones to be replaced, with the first ones being probably translators, then customer service, help desk clerks etc. Basically almost all intellectually challenging problems have a major component of programming, to the point that most engineering professions are thought of a special case of 'programmer'. Data Scientists', ML engineers', Electrical engineers' valuable outputs are usually some kind of computer code.

moneywoes 2y ago

as a backend dev what do i do to stay safe from this?

yashg 2y ago

"Second things like call centers, the language models have become so sophisticated now. They can operate in multiple languages, 14, 15 languages easily. In the past, that hasn't been something we can do. So we can redeploy people off that given that the AI can do it." For the customers this is going to be a horrible experience and frustration of going in a loop with an AI model. Anyone facing a problem not listed in the 10-15 predefined problems and resolutions is going to have an excruciating time trying to get any meaningful resolution.

netsharc 2y ago
Some company's call centers are designed to fuck around and frustrate you until you give up trying to get what you want (e.g. compensation). Here's looking at you AirBnB. Hah, imagine making something that evil with AI, you don't even need to destroy your outsourced call-center workers' souls...

JSDevOps 2y ago

Someone is definitely lieing to someone else here.

koonsolo 2y ago

AI is StackOverflow on steroids. That's how I see it from a programmer's perspective. It's excellent at getting code snippets, suggesting possible ways on how to handle something, etc. I recently had to help out my son with Arduino programming, which I'm totally new at, and thanks to ChatGPT this was super fast and easy. But to handle an actual codebase, even a single developer codebase, it just doesn't have enough context for that. I'm sure some day computers will be smarter than us, but some people are still seriously overestimating this.

joak 2y ago

AI makes coding cheaper, easier. With an elastic demand there will be more code not less coders.

nisarg2 2y ago

[flagged]

djaouen 2y ago

I seriously doubt this figure.

boring-alterego 2y ago

AI can help those of us on the edges of what the "coder" of an environment is. Things like getting the right syntax for a given set of pseudocode instructions. Background is EE, inherited an airgapped DCS with everything from things running Fortran from the early 1980s to modern controllers in a heavily regulated industry. Time savings do matter. And for low end little things we could never get an external contract on we are enabling those that take more of the system owner type role to have more tools in their bag for response.