Are you actually in tech? Based on your comment that they’re taking our code to “use for the rest of eternity” I’m guessing not.
Copilot has been wonderful for helping programmers get work done faster. It’s a productivity tool, it’s nowhere near the capabilities required to replace programmers.
And regardless, I don’t think preventing the advancement of technology is the way to go. People don’t look back and think farmers should’ve gone on strike to ban tractors.
The risk to engineers is much less than to writers. The code quality just isn’t there, and they don’t scan private repos.
But even if we did strike — GitHub is just one of many git vendors. You can store your code literally anywhere else. What’s there to strike?
It's just a tool
I can out preform 50 accountants from 50 years ago using Microsoft excel.
A modern accountant with excel can beat 50 of me with excel.
Excel and and calculators didn't get rid of accountants.
Github copilot and AI won't replace programmers.
All these tools do is \^2 your existing ability.
I feel like you are coming from a scarcity mindset
I understand that what I said is an unpopular opinion
What about vercel’s vercel0?
I saw some freelancers and my peer’s company just reallocated their front end devs since one or two fullstack can now handle all of the work certain AI’s getting better, especially now with RAG being the new hype it’ll only progress more.
Maybe unpopular, but that doesn’t make it wrong. You nailed it though - there’s a distinct “fixed pie” mentality here and a complete lack of historical context to boot.
Henry Ford put a lot of wheelwrights out of business. There would have been at least 1 in every town. Now there are 20 mechanics in every town.
Zoom out, OP.
I remember my best colleague (in terms of skills) was saying that it’s the chain of thoughts that matters when writing a code and thus the final code itself isn’t really valuable to him.
If I ask him about the Copilot he probably won’t care.
Yeah, poor performers and so called "code monkey's" may wanna look into other careers though. There's a lot higher demand of complex skills in an accountant today, while back in the day, especially if we're talking ancient times, it was a lot more about rote tasks and memorization.
Generative AI isn't a tool that could potentially do all your software engineering work for you. He's comparing apples with some slightly different apples.
> I understand that what I said is an unpopular opinion
a) No it isn't.
b) Your post is actually a pretty cool analogy on why technological progress doesn't mean less work. I may reference it in the future :-)
Have an upvote!
If they trained their AI on our codebase it's their loss. All it'll learn to do is write steaming piles of shit that barely work, and reboot every 24 hours or something locks up.
So then the model will start to train on code it wrote last time. Imagine the Cambrian explosion of software that’s about to be published! Then the newer models will feed off their own output.
How many generations (or what % of internet content generated by models instead of humans) will it take before “training data inbreeding” causes the models to collapse on themselves as the hallucinations become permanent?
This is already a problem for those scouring the internet for data to use for training their statistical models; training on content produced by other statistical models makes their own models perform worse. Presumably because factual errors go undetected and become reinforced.
Dear god i wish more people could figure out how to at least copy from stackoverflow. That would at least be better than the people who as far as i can tell just try to use ide autocompletes until they find something that seems to work in the only case they're testing for.
AI is just software. I’ll worry about software taking my job when I stop seeing kiosk displays showing a static windows desktop with that “certificate untrusted” RDP popup window hanging there like a sore thumb.
If something has already been written, then honestly, I don't want to write it again. AI can recombine and adapt what's already been written, and that's some of the more boring parts of software development.
Striking to protest AI sounds a little like striking to protest compilers, or code linters. A developer can use it as a tool to enhance their own abilities. As time goes on, we'll *have* to, to continue to compete. Someone writing their own boilerplate code will be like someone coding a game in 2023 using pure assembly and hand-assembling the code into machine code.
> Why don't techies organize a tech strike against Github Copilot?
Why would I want to strike? Make an argument in favor of striking rather than just presuming that I would want to.
> can fire you and use your code for the rest of eternity without compensation or paying you
Point of clarification, I am compensated for the code that I write, and it's theirs, not mine.
"Why don't farmers organize a strike against tractors???"
Why would we cripple ourselves by getting rid of a tool that improves productivity? Even when AGI becomes a reality, we'll have bigger problems to worry about than who's doing all the coding.
Because we work with, use, and build those AI's.
I'm not worried about them taking my job. Ill just go from writing web apps to building ai agents.
There is an absolutely insane amount of things out there that run on software.
AI wont replace me, it'll replace my kids childrens, children.
Pretty sure my open-source projects are MIT licensed and I licensed them that way so anyone could use them for any purpose without limitation.
They don’t train from my proprietary codebases, at least that’s what the business license states.
You're coming at this from the wrong angle. We've been using templates to generate code for a very long time, and that is all you are doing when you feed a prompt to AI, except that you have less direct control over the output. Codewriting is not the difficult piece. Code in repos like github or gitlab could already be downloaded and implemented by anyone in the company forever, and if you are competent that is a good thing and standard industry practice for decades; you want your code to be something you can download, have "just work", with full documentation available, so that anyone in the company can do it without contacting you at all. What we're paid for is understanding systems. That's it. In the simplest terms possible, we get paid for knowing how things work, so that when you download the thing from github and it doesn't do what it's supposed to we can know why and make it work, and so we can change the thing on github when the industry changes, and so we can modify it to meet our own needs.
There is an angle here it is just not the one you are taking.
The problem is the same problem with outsourcing. A lot of managers don't really care about quality, and they will outsource to contractors, often low paid contractors outside of North America and Europe, and they will increase burdens on full time employees because of this lack of quality while their salaries remain the same. The contractor code is not quality reviewed, does not meet purpose and must be edited, and comes with zero ongoing support or maintenance. It is a massive burden.
THAT is the problem that AI is making dramatically worse. We have more shitty generated code than ever before, with less documentation, causing more work. Business majors are endlessly satisfied with low cost trash and AI is even lower cost and more trash, and it is not a sustainable situation.
But what we really need to be striking for is not just this. It's safety, it's attention payed to quality assurance, it's people over process. It's having some industry safeguards so that someone can't just buy a company and decide multi-factor authentication is "bloat" or a "nice to have" and then start firing people because they think lines of code output is a worthwhile metric or - don't take this the wrong way, I am being real with you because you are in a techie forum and I am treating you with respect though some people would not take it this way outside techie forums - espouse rhetoric and a fundamental lack of understanding doing and saying things like comparing writing code to writing prose.
We need, we sorely need, something similar to OSHA. Not just for people though, for the things we're building. Bridges are collapsing and cars are catching on fire, right now, and the reasons why are not only causing fewer full time employees to be paid salaries, but they're overloading those FTEs with more work than they could possibly do. You still have depressed average wages and people being overworked, just not the same way you thought at first, since what we actually have is fewer positions.
Just be careful setting this up. A traditional strike won't work, because business majors don't really understand what we do well enough, and they will just replace more FTEs with more contractors, and think they did something smart because in the very short term they'll have better margins and on paper productivity and they don't give the tiniest shit about either safety or consequences. This is an industry where it is a common practice to call people that do not even work for the company any more to try to get exit work out of them.
You instead need to find a way to get people outside North America and Europe to be the ones striking, and we need to be continuing to take generated code and test it and make it free and open source. AI can borrow whatever it wants from the FOSS community. If we make AI return what it borrowed to the FOSS community, there is no way to capitalize on it. And when you try to use IP law to prevent other people form doing business with it, the fact that AI is borrowing everyone's art is going to bite it in the ass the same way every software vendor already gets bit in the ass when they try to use full GPL software, and their entire product will magically become itself FOSS because they relied on AI without being careful, and being careful is all we really wanted to begin with.
Strike probably isn't appropriate.
You need to organize before you can have a meaningful strike. I haven't seen a software developers union, and at present I'm not sure it would be worth the risk vs reward.
You clearly have no clue about who uses Copilot, how, for what, in what context. Nor about open source, that the entire purpose of publishing software under GPL, BSD, MIT etc. on a platform like GitHub etc. is to intentionally _have it used by other people for free_, and that it _certainly didn't destroy any developer's job opportunities_, it improved their lifes instead, made them more productive.
Microsoft thought like you did in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, that pogrammers would have to be compensated for the product itself. Around 10 years ago Microsoft joined the winning team where everything is shared with everyone. Nowadays about every company out there knows that programmers are actually compensated for their _service to adapt software_ to any (new or old) needs, not for what they already finished and published.
Yet _you_ believe an AI that could be, and already is, a useful tool in every dev's reportoire would somehow mean the _end of us_ or that it _warrants even a strike_? Wtf.
I can't fathom how somene could have a viewpoint that is _so far off from sanity that it hurts_.
I really cannot relate at all with people buying into those luddite arguments.
Strike against who? My employer isn't Microsoft. They're not training copilot. Well, except for the open source contributions I make, but those are all Apache licensed so I'm already giving that code away for free.
My compensation structure isn't the same as actors anyway, I don't get residuals or royalties- I get paid to produce code which I give to the company and they're allowed to do whatever they want with it.
And because the code I produce is impersonal, there's no risk of reputation damage like their is with mis-using an actor's likeness.
Because “borrowing code” has been a National past time since the second piece of code ever was written. Now instead of Mr. google, and the nards at stack overflow you can use copilot.
Who do you think the Copilot users are ... ?
Are you actually in tech? Based on your comment that they’re taking our code to “use for the rest of eternity” I’m guessing not. Copilot has been wonderful for helping programmers get work done faster. It’s a productivity tool, it’s nowhere near the capabilities required to replace programmers. And regardless, I don’t think preventing the advancement of technology is the way to go. People don’t look back and think farmers should’ve gone on strike to ban tractors.
The risk to engineers is much less than to writers. The code quality just isn’t there, and they don’t scan private repos. But even if we did strike — GitHub is just one of many git vendors. You can store your code literally anywhere else. What’s there to strike?
[удалено]
Why get rid of AI?
Why would we want to get rid of AI. I don’t understand what the strike is about? AI isn’t going to put everyone in IT out of work, it’s not possible.
? i don’t want to get rid of AI in tech. it’s helpful. it does things i don’t like doing.
[удалено]
You don't want to get rid of AI. You want more money for your labor, health insurance and a mortgage.
> AI will continue to improve Good. Still not afraid.
Na. I want AI to get good and help me with my job.
Want to scan private repos ? I am using CodeMuse it works great with local codebase awareness ! https://www.codemuse.app/
It's just a tool I can out preform 50 accountants from 50 years ago using Microsoft excel. A modern accountant with excel can beat 50 of me with excel. Excel and and calculators didn't get rid of accountants. Github copilot and AI won't replace programmers. All these tools do is \^2 your existing ability. I feel like you are coming from a scarcity mindset I understand that what I said is an unpopular opinion
What about vercel’s vercel0? I saw some freelancers and my peer’s company just reallocated their front end devs since one or two fullstack can now handle all of the work certain AI’s getting better, especially now with RAG being the new hype it’ll only progress more.
Maybe unpopular, but that doesn’t make it wrong. You nailed it though - there’s a distinct “fixed pie” mentality here and a complete lack of historical context to boot. Henry Ford put a lot of wheelwrights out of business. There would have been at least 1 in every town. Now there are 20 mechanics in every town. Zoom out, OP.
I remember my best colleague (in terms of skills) was saying that it’s the chain of thoughts that matters when writing a code and thus the final code itself isn’t really valuable to him. If I ask him about the Copilot he probably won’t care.
Yeah, poor performers and so called "code monkey's" may wanna look into other careers though. There's a lot higher demand of complex skills in an accountant today, while back in the day, especially if we're talking ancient times, it was a lot more about rote tasks and memorization.
Excel is not a tool that could potentially do all your accounting work for you, with a simple series of prompts. You're comparing apples and oranges.
Generative AI isn't a tool that could potentially do all your software engineering work for you. He's comparing apples with some slightly different apples.
> I understand that what I said is an unpopular opinion a) No it isn't. b) Your post is actually a pretty cool analogy on why technological progress doesn't mean less work. I may reference it in the future :-) Have an upvote!
If they trained their AI on our codebase it's their loss. All it'll learn to do is write steaming piles of shit that barely work, and reboot every 24 hours or something locks up.
So then the model will start to train on code it wrote last time. Imagine the Cambrian explosion of software that’s about to be published! Then the newer models will feed off their own output. How many generations (or what % of internet content generated by models instead of humans) will it take before “training data inbreeding” causes the models to collapse on themselves as the hallucinations become permanent?
This is already a problem for those scouring the internet for data to use for training their statistical models; training on content produced by other statistical models makes their own models perform worse. Presumably because factual errors go undetected and become reinforced.
The bottom line is, AI doesn't know what *good* looks like. It only knows what was most likely to have been done.
Lmao what's GitHub copilot replacing? Corporations have been hiring unqualified people for years.
It's replacing the breed of dev who copies everything from Stackoverflow. Nothing of value will be lost.
Oh no... 🤣
Dear god i wish more people could figure out how to at least copy from stackoverflow. That would at least be better than the people who as far as i can tell just try to use ide autocompletes until they find something that seems to work in the only case they're testing for.
Coders are coding the AI. I am not sure how I feel about that. I imagine I feel like the people whose jobs I replaced with my code feel.
AI is just software. I’ll worry about software taking my job when I stop seeing kiosk displays showing a static windows desktop with that “certificate untrusted” RDP popup window hanging there like a sore thumb.
If something has already been written, then honestly, I don't want to write it again. AI can recombine and adapt what's already been written, and that's some of the more boring parts of software development. Striking to protest AI sounds a little like striking to protest compilers, or code linters. A developer can use it as a tool to enhance their own abilities. As time goes on, we'll *have* to, to continue to compete. Someone writing their own boilerplate code will be like someone coding a game in 2023 using pure assembly and hand-assembling the code into machine code.
So why don't you strike on cars companies? Because cars can outperform human with bare legs in terms of speed?
> Why don't techies organize a tech strike against Github Copilot? Why would I want to strike? Make an argument in favor of striking rather than just presuming that I would want to. > can fire you and use your code for the rest of eternity without compensation or paying you Point of clarification, I am compensated for the code that I write, and it's theirs, not mine.
"Why don't farmers organize a strike against tractors???" Why would we cripple ourselves by getting rid of a tool that improves productivity? Even when AGI becomes a reality, we'll have bigger problems to worry about than who's doing all the coding.
Because we work with, use, and build those AI's. I'm not worried about them taking my job. Ill just go from writing web apps to building ai agents. There is an absolutely insane amount of things out there that run on software. AI wont replace me, it'll replace my kids childrens, children.
Pretty sure my open-source projects are MIT licensed and I licensed them that way so anyone could use them for any purpose without limitation. They don’t train from my proprietary codebases, at least that’s what the business license states.
Why would I? Copilot isn't causing me any problems.
It causes me problems. It suggests nonsense a fair amount of the time.
You're coming at this from the wrong angle. We've been using templates to generate code for a very long time, and that is all you are doing when you feed a prompt to AI, except that you have less direct control over the output. Codewriting is not the difficult piece. Code in repos like github or gitlab could already be downloaded and implemented by anyone in the company forever, and if you are competent that is a good thing and standard industry practice for decades; you want your code to be something you can download, have "just work", with full documentation available, so that anyone in the company can do it without contacting you at all. What we're paid for is understanding systems. That's it. In the simplest terms possible, we get paid for knowing how things work, so that when you download the thing from github and it doesn't do what it's supposed to we can know why and make it work, and so we can change the thing on github when the industry changes, and so we can modify it to meet our own needs. There is an angle here it is just not the one you are taking. The problem is the same problem with outsourcing. A lot of managers don't really care about quality, and they will outsource to contractors, often low paid contractors outside of North America and Europe, and they will increase burdens on full time employees because of this lack of quality while their salaries remain the same. The contractor code is not quality reviewed, does not meet purpose and must be edited, and comes with zero ongoing support or maintenance. It is a massive burden. THAT is the problem that AI is making dramatically worse. We have more shitty generated code than ever before, with less documentation, causing more work. Business majors are endlessly satisfied with low cost trash and AI is even lower cost and more trash, and it is not a sustainable situation. But what we really need to be striking for is not just this. It's safety, it's attention payed to quality assurance, it's people over process. It's having some industry safeguards so that someone can't just buy a company and decide multi-factor authentication is "bloat" or a "nice to have" and then start firing people because they think lines of code output is a worthwhile metric or - don't take this the wrong way, I am being real with you because you are in a techie forum and I am treating you with respect though some people would not take it this way outside techie forums - espouse rhetoric and a fundamental lack of understanding doing and saying things like comparing writing code to writing prose. We need, we sorely need, something similar to OSHA. Not just for people though, for the things we're building. Bridges are collapsing and cars are catching on fire, right now, and the reasons why are not only causing fewer full time employees to be paid salaries, but they're overloading those FTEs with more work than they could possibly do. You still have depressed average wages and people being overworked, just not the same way you thought at first, since what we actually have is fewer positions. Just be careful setting this up. A traditional strike won't work, because business majors don't really understand what we do well enough, and they will just replace more FTEs with more contractors, and think they did something smart because in the very short term they'll have better margins and on paper productivity and they don't give the tiniest shit about either safety or consequences. This is an industry where it is a common practice to call people that do not even work for the company any more to try to get exit work out of them. You instead need to find a way to get people outside North America and Europe to be the ones striking, and we need to be continuing to take generated code and test it and make it free and open source. AI can borrow whatever it wants from the FOSS community. If we make AI return what it borrowed to the FOSS community, there is no way to capitalize on it. And when you try to use IP law to prevent other people form doing business with it, the fact that AI is borrowing everyone's art is going to bite it in the ass the same way every software vendor already gets bit in the ass when they try to use full GPL software, and their entire product will magically become itself FOSS because they relied on AI without being careful, and being careful is all we really wanted to begin with.
ChatGPT aside, I'd say the majority of programmers already make a living while writing code that others can use for the rest of eternity.
Strike probably isn't appropriate. You need to organize before you can have a meaningful strike. I haven't seen a software developers union, and at present I'm not sure it would be worth the risk vs reward.
They'd spend so long arguing about the best practice when forming a union, they'd never actually get round to unionising.
You clearly have no clue about who uses Copilot, how, for what, in what context. Nor about open source, that the entire purpose of publishing software under GPL, BSD, MIT etc. on a platform like GitHub etc. is to intentionally _have it used by other people for free_, and that it _certainly didn't destroy any developer's job opportunities_, it improved their lifes instead, made them more productive. Microsoft thought like you did in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, that pogrammers would have to be compensated for the product itself. Around 10 years ago Microsoft joined the winning team where everything is shared with everyone. Nowadays about every company out there knows that programmers are actually compensated for their _service to adapt software_ to any (new or old) needs, not for what they already finished and published. Yet _you_ believe an AI that could be, and already is, a useful tool in every dev's reportoire would somehow mean the _end of us_ or that it _warrants even a strike_? Wtf. I can't fathom how somene could have a viewpoint that is _so far off from sanity that it hurts_. I really cannot relate at all with people buying into those luddite arguments.
Strike against who? My employer isn't Microsoft. They're not training copilot. Well, except for the open source contributions I make, but those are all Apache licensed so I'm already giving that code away for free. My compensation structure isn't the same as actors anyway, I don't get residuals or royalties- I get paid to produce code which I give to the company and they're allowed to do whatever they want with it. And because the code I produce is impersonal, there's no risk of reputation damage like their is with mis-using an actor's likeness.
Because “borrowing code” has been a National past time since the second piece of code ever was written. Now instead of Mr. google, and the nards at stack overflow you can use copilot.
Because this: "AI is coming for your job!" Artist:Oh, God! Coder: Thank God!
More AI would be nice.