Gabe Newell reckons AI tools will result in a 'funny situation' where people who can't program become 'more effective developers of value' than those who've been at it 'for a decade'
Posted by Imnotneeded@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 63 comments
EliSka93@reddit
Reeeeally depends on how you define "value".
Value to the pump and dump hell scape economy we're living in? Oh yeah.
Value to anyone's lives? There's going to be one or two hits on that, I'm sure, but overwhelmingly no.
Serenade314@reddit
Sure. I know plenty of people who love food, but can’t cook to save their lives. They can still tell me what tastes good to them. And if they had a magic cooking robot they would be able to instruct it what they want the food to taste like and, if it sucks, what to change about it, even without knowing specific ingredients, cooking temperature and all that.
robotlasagna@reddit
I have to say this is very short sighted.
I can give an example of a guy I know who ran an upholstery shop. Their problem was they had to measure material against patterns and match bolt length to what they to cut. The two options previously were:
Fiver coder: completely failed.
Proper coder: wanted $5K to do the work but would have worked.
He instead had one of his leads use an LLM to code what they needed over a few days. Works 100% for what they needed without issue.
The result is the only thing that matters and the fact is that LLMs solve a whole bunch of small problems that are small and real programmers want too much money for.
beefcat_@reddit
Now ask the LLM to make changes to that code. Expand it's functionality. Fix bugs.
As the complexity of the app increases, the LLM will quickly start turning its simple solution into an incomprehensible mess that a human needs to come in and fix.
The thing you and the upholstery guy are missing here is that when you pay to develop a piece of software, you aren't just buying the code that makes it work. You are buying the mental model of how that code is organized, what problems it solves, and how it can be extended.
This is why companies that rely heavily on contract labor for software development struggle so much with quality and consistency. When you hire 3 contract devs to build an app over 12 months, then send them on their way, they take that mental model with them and you're left with a pile of tech debt that will end up being twice expensive to expand and maintain than if you had just hired your own engineers to work on it.
Vibe coding won't be any different, in fact it could end up being worse. Someone programming via an LLM who doesn't understand the fundamentals of programming and software design will be completely lost when the LLM inevitably fails to properly do what they ask of it.
lunchmeat317@reddit
You are correct....yet some solutions like this end up working for decades because they serve the business even if they are suboptimal. Think Excel documents with VBScript macros instead of an application. People do this becaise it solve their issues, even if it's suboptimal.
Chii@reddit
if it solves the problem, at the lowest cost, then it's not sub-optimal - it's actually optimal!
Like how anyone could build a bridge that can stand, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands. Now-a-days, anyone can rely on an AI to build this bridge.
robotlasagna@reddit
If this was r/Darkroomtechs or r/handillustrators 30 years ago when photoshop came on the scene there would have been similar pushback but those jobs are forever gone compared to what they were back then.
I am not missing anything and the upholstery guy does not care; his problem is solved. If he needs extended functionality he can still pay a proper programmer but he doesn't need anything more.
I am a software designer and product manager and I have junior devs that i delegate to. I can 100% tell when they are dragging their heels on a task I have delegated because it is code that I have written before and I know how long it would take me to do it. I have no idea if they think that they are getting one over on me but I have seen enough reddit posts about IT guy/ coder who has automated most of their job and fucks of on reddit all day to know what up. Plus full disclosure: I was that guy when I was younger.
So while I am attempting to be nice about this I am effectively calling BS here.
VelvetWhiteRabbit@reddit
LLMs or similar will eventually be able to pump out code at the same level that any human is capable of. It is what we call a solvable problem. Like the comment above mine, the ones who understand how to use these tools effectively and at the same time has a great understanding of customer needs and market fit will be way more valuable than the average senior/staff developer.
With any new technology shift there are two categories of people who remain: Those who are productive with the new technology, and those who develop the technology.
Understanding the fundamentals of the technology is you are working with is often not necessary. Paraphrasing Laurie Voss speaking on frontend technology cycles: Most developers working with HTML today have no idea what SGML is, when HTML was introduced you weren’t a real web developer if you only learned HTML.
Ok-Okay-Oak-Hay@reddit
I don't know why you're being downvoted; this is exactly how it'll shake out in my estimation.
VelvetWhiteRabbit@reddit
People like to hate. And my comment is slightly on the nose. But I think Laurie Voss is on the money with technology cycles. That’s doesn’t mean you have to be an early adopter or tech humper. But also decrying technological shifts as they happen around you is not going to let you keep your job. Be smart, pay attention, stay sceptical, but also learn, experiment, and understand how you will be impacted. Gabe Newell is right if you see the general comment section here. It will look funny. And it does when people with three years experience already push out features and products at much higher rates. Yeah code is filled with bugs and yeah code is maybe unsafe. It will eventually be solved. Is it LLMs? Unlikely, is it some evolution of them? More likely. Next year? I don’t think so. Three years from now? Quite certainly.
EliSka93@reddit
When is eventually? I don't disagree that it will happen, but I might dispute that it's anytime soon.
It's a bit of a "well have full self driving within three to six months"-situation to me.
I'm not saying "stay away at all costs from this technology.", just to actually examine what is being promised by the people selling you the technology and what the reality is.
Don't treat an imagined future like it's set in stone. The people hyping this stuff up aren't prophets. They're salesmen.
VelvetWhiteRabbit@reddit
I absolutely agree with this sentiment. My response is to the whole “AI bad, sucks, it won’t replace me”-crowd. Be careful, you are likely the first one to go if that’s the attitude.
krileon@reddit
An LLM is unlikely to ever be able to do that. It fundamentally goes against how an LLM works. For an AI to reliably provide functional code it needs to KNOW what it's doing. Our current AI does not know what it's doing. We need a different technology entirely, imo. One that can understand, and possibly test, the code it's providing. Maybe with the diffusion based LLM models that might be somewhat possible since those can better itinerate over their results, but frankly I don't see this happening anytime soon.
So with that said we're still going to have problems where the AI is over confidently correct. Situations of "No, that's not right you need to XYZ." and the AI responses "Ok, let me fix that for you." and it continues to still be wrong or as often in my case it just repeats the same wrong answer. Those are huge problems that need to be solved. AI needs to know when to say "I don't know." as well.
The biggest problem however, in my experience as a programmer for over 15 years, is that the AI introduces obscurity. So lets say it generates code. That code runs, but still has minor bugs in it. Bugs you may not see as they're obscured by the large amount of jargon it outputs. If you don't have the experience to doe a proper code review on that code you're introducing, potentially, critical bugs or security vulnerabilities into production code.
While LLMs have been getting better and better they've mostly been getting more efficient hardware wise. They haven't really solved these real problems yet. I'm not entirely sure they will as again I think we need something other than an LLM at this point.
beefcat_@reddit
100%. Over the last 3 years, LLMs have gotten better and better at producing increasingly complex results. But basic problems like hallucinations haven't improved at all because they are endemic to the underlying technology that powers them.
I think LLMs today are where microwave ovens were in the '50s. Back then, there were bold claims that the microwave would completely replace conventional ovens. Because who doesn't want a perfectly cooked turkey in 30 minutes instead of 4 hours? But that never happened, because fundamental problems with how microwaves heat food were never solved. The technology plateaued in the 1960s and has since settled in a nice productive niche of reaheating frozen food and leftovers, but not making your Thanksgiving dinner.
liamnesss@reddit
I kind of agree, we don't really know if LLMs are going to morph into an AGI, or if they're going to prove to be an evolutionary dead end. Even if they do become an AGI it might be at the cost of so much copyrighted data needing to be ingested (and the legality of doing this without compensating rights holders is still unclear), and so much energy expended, that it may still make sense a lot of the time to just let humans do so-called "knowledge work".
redheness@reddit
So it's a choice between not knowing the underlying structure and produce terrible output or knowing how to code but now you produce better code than AI so it's useless. So at the end the best way to make good code is to learn how to do it and write it yourself.
EliSka93@reddit
I mean, yeah, basically.
For a throwaway script, it's probably fine to let an AI do it, but for anything bigger what you're saying is pretty much true.
w1n5t0nM1k3y@reddit
Often the most useful people in a project aren't necessarily the best coders but the ones who can understand the customers requirements and come up with a solution that's not overly complicated.
Maybe AI wouldn't be best at this, but someone who has good domain knowledge and can understand what the end user is looking for and use AI to help them reach a solution might create a better product than someone who's got a master's in computer science but doesn't understand how to go back and forth with customers to determine what they are actually looking for and just gives them whatever is specified in the first email, even if that doesn't make any sense.
liamnesss@reddit
I feel like those are people who actually would have the aptitude to code if they needed to, though? Like for instance when I think of the best product / project management / design people I've ever worked with, typically they were great at breaking down requirements, understanding how a complex system interacts, and then coming up with solutions. And crucially, they were able to communicate those solutions with others, and collaborate when they needed to tap into someone else's knowledge / skills. So basically the same abilities as a good engineer, just focused in a different direction. I can also think of examples where they either came from, or subsequently moved into, engineering roles. I think all these base skills are much more transferable than people realise.
Many people's idea of a "brilliant engineer" seems to be pretty reductive, they think of this as someone who understands the code very well, essentially. But if they can't see the wood for the trees, in terms of how to bring others along with them, and how their contribution actually fits into the needs of their team / the wider org, they might not actually be all that "brilliant".
I think LLMs will definitely help some people contribute code who otherwise wouldn't have the time to get fully comfortable with software engineering. But it won't help people who don't put the time / effort to develop more than a surface level understanding of how applications work. Neither will it help people who could never learn how to code on their own, even if they somehow had no other responsibilities to distract them from said studies.
FourHeffersAlone@reddit
Presumably if devs have been at it for a decade, they've developed a good sense of how to serve the users.
waxroy-finerayfool@reddit
At some point we will reach an equilibrium where the economic value of general CS and SE knowledge will approach zero. The result won't be the end of the career, but median salaries will greatly deflate. Of course, there will still be high paying positions, but they'll be much more rare and reserved for machine learning specialists and super niche systems that can't rely on generative AI.
oneeyedziggy@reddit
I'm still skeptical... The skill in being an experienced dev isn't the details of the language you use... It's being analytical and thinking in terms of systems (which AI is terrible at) and remembering to account for secure implementation andpperformance and legal concerns and business requirements that diverge from the ideal... And balancing it with delivery timelines...
And cleaning up after people who commit vibe code so the business can keep running...
DirkTheGamer@reddit
This should be at the top. I’m all for AI coding but it requires very specific prompting (multiple paragraphs with tremendous detail) in order for it to put out anything useful, and you need to be a great programmer in order to write such specific prompts.
poonDaddy99@reddit
Also, AI is good at subtly losing context, to the point that when doing something in stages can diverge from what you intended subtly over time that it then becomes chasm. If you’re not experienced enough in programming and software development to catch this early on and rectify it, you will be in a vibe created hellscape. Waaaay too many people like gabe in high positions making stupid decisions based on this way of thinking.
In all honesty, ai is meant for experienced people in those industries (design, programming, writing, etc…) to use it to help them save time and get more to market faster. For example: instead of an artist creating everything from scratch, they could train a diffusion model on their style and generate something close to what they want and then go into photoshop or illustrator and tweak the generated images which would save them quite a bit of time vs a noob only generating images and praying to god after the 400th generation that it gets the hands, eyes, pose, and prospective right
trialbaloon@reddit
Maybe we should invent a special language so that we can prompt more effectively and tell the computer system what to do. Oh wait....
This is looking a lot like Low Code/No Code.
DirkTheGamer@reddit
I’m still writing and engineering code, I’m just not doing all the typing myself. It’s not the same as No Code / Low Code cause I still have to submit pull requests that other engineers have to approve before it gets pushed to prod.
trialbaloon@reddit
You're typing paragraphs and paragraphs to a LLM lol. Sounds like a lot of typing. But honestly, typing is the easiest part of my job, I can type like... really fast....
What language do you code in? I keep hearing people talk about boilerplate automation and I guess I just dont feel like I write much boilerplate... Maybe it's a language thing.
You can PR Low code stuff in theory. Granted most companies making those solutions didn't do that since it would expose how shit their whole approach was.
DirkTheGamer@reddit
Yes I can type the prompts faster than I can type the code, for sure. It’s far less characters total. And the AI is just so fast when you give it great instruction.
I am working in node.js and react now, but my core skill set is in Ruby on Rails.
trialbaloon@reddit
Lets dig a bit deeper. TS or JS? What framework do you use primarily (everyone uses a framework in node land lol).
DirkTheGamer@reddit
Both JS and TS. There is legacy code written in JS but we try to do all refactors and new features in TS.
We are using express as our framework. React on the front end.
trialbaloon@reddit
Express floored me a bit. I was expected something more boilerplate heavy. I just dont have many cases where my typing speed has ever been a bottleneck. Granted I work in a language with a hefty stdlib (Kotlin) most of the time.
Express is what I'd pick if I had to write in JS/JS.
DirkTheGamer@reddit
How much have you played around with Cursor using Claude? Claude 4 especially is just amazing. I think if you force yourself to use it for a couple weeks, try to prompt more than you code, and you’ll be blown away. It truly does things at a speed 100 times faster than any human could ever type. It’s quite incredible if you instruct it carefully.
trialbaloon@reddit
Not Claude 4 specifically no. I've used cursor though and found I am far slower at reading code than writing it? I cant actually trust the outputs so I need to verify. Keep in mind I am a Kotlin user so I am very accustomed to IDE tooling and it's a core part of my programming experience. In many ways, I think this gets me what cursor perhaps gets people on dynamic languages like JS. I can already get docs in my IDE and all sorts of deterministic refactoring tools based on a statically typed strict compiled language.
Switching IDEs is a huge loss for my productivity. I had to use cursor to generate code then review it in my IDE.
My whole line of questioning to you was my theory that stuff like Cursor feels more revolutionary to those not already using capable IDEs. Languages like JS have many issues gaining the same level of IDE support as a compiled statically typed language with APIs designed specifically for IDE integration. I have had amazing auto complete for a long time based on type information and the compiler literally running inside the API on files I have open to get me all sorts of information for automated refactoring, etc. This might be a huge part about why speed just wasn't a thing for me.
DirkTheGamer@reddit
Yeah perhaps. I’ve been using IDEs forever of course and lots of specific plugins, and since Cursor is based so heavily on VSCode it was a super natural transition for me.
I’m sure it varies greatly user to user and language to language. The important thing is it’s just a tool like any other IDE, like you pointed out, and using to use the tool might help you like any other tool can, but only if it’s the right tool for you.
oneeyedziggy@reddit
Right... Requires specific prompting, and works best on small units... Not great at big linked systems of discrete modules
DirkTheGamer@reddit
Yeah the biggest thing I’ve gotten it to do well was integrate with a partner system and it did quite well. Created the service and all the methods I needed to interface with the partner system API, then helped me build a nice UI for configuring it in our system including DB migrations to store the new settings. Wrote unit tests for the service as well. I had to clean it up a bit but was still quite a bit faster than doing it myself.
But yeah I had to be really specific with what I wanted from it. I didn’t just say “integrate with this partner and build me a service for it”.
oneeyedziggy@reddit
Well, and testing is its own whole discipline... If you don't know how to do it well AI may just help you delude yourself into a false sense of secure (or rather stability) faster...
I've had sr devs pr in a big set of tests that did exactly nothing useful... Just confirm the functions were functions... Nothing about their behavior, positive path tests, let alone any negative path cases...
DirkTheGamer@reddit
Yeah absolutely. I’m really glad I’ve mastered all these skills over the last 25 years so I am able to spot when it’s doing it well and when it’s not.
ABCosmos@reddit
If you know how to program and you learn to use AI, you'll be fast as shit and stop bad changes from going through. Just imagine it as an infinitely scalable team of interns.
Dragon_yum@reddit
Being a programmer means you need to always be learning new tools and technologies. Those who resist this will suffer because of it.
trialbaloon@reddit
Being a good programmer is about knowing which tools are technologies to spend your valuable time learning.
Dragon_yum@reddit
True. I’m not saying ask ChatGPT to write your code but using ai for boilerplate code is a serious time saver. Call it a glorified auto complete if you want but it’s very useful.
TankAway7756@reddit
Ah yes, the new flavor of Greenspun's 10th. Code generation, but now it's stochastic, is even harder to integrate in your build step, and the source material is an inherently ambiguous natural language prompt.
ABCosmos@reddit
There are an infinite number of ways to leverage AI, I'm not sure what the balance is right for your specific job, but if you're at 0 or 100 you probably want to consider the possibility that there's a better way to work.
trialbaloon@reddit
My preferred IDE has had local ML based Autocomplete for years. Not a LLM but AI sure. I also have wrote plenty of projects using classification AI. So I use AI quite a bit?
RealModeX86@reddit
Not necessarily. Is it faster to write decent code, or to massage broken garbage code into something that works?
Assuming the LLM stops emitting complete garbage, and it's instead just mediocre, is it faster to code review and vet that code, or again, to just write it yourself, understanding a thought process that went into it?
Jobidanbama@reddit
If you don’t understand the program the llm is shitting out you’ll just be adding tech debts forever
AzureAD@reddit
The stock mkt expects every business leader to spit out how their business is going to throw out devs and replace with AI, to keep their stock pice high
So expect these kind of statements to come out regularly ..
It’s up to you to get worked up all the time. Admittedly, a lot of business have used this AI hullabaloo to cut extra fat that they hired during COVID years, but most are smart enough to invest wisely to get the intended benefits and keep the business as usual
gragglethompson@reddit
Valve is privately owned
MagicalWhisk@reddit
I believe the point he was making is that the people who can use AI tools effectively will be incredibly useful. More so than a veteran developer who doesn't learn to use AI tools effectively.
BetafromZeta@reddit
What I really want is an AI dishwasher, instead I got an AI app on my phone and I'm still doing the dishes.
arkvesper@reddit
have you considered buying a non-AI dishwasher
BetafromZeta@reddit
No what I mean is I want a machine that can do another part of the process, e.g. scrape the dishes as well or put them back in the cabinet, not a fancier screen on the device or some "smart" feature.
awj@reddit
It's frustrating that the headline quote here is the absolute most inflammatory thing they got him to say.
There's quotes about how he thinks it will enable non-developers to scaffold out their ideas (reasonable), and how people will benefit significantly from understanding how the tool actually works instead of treating it like a magic programming black box (reasonable), but instead we get a cherry picked "head of Valve thinks programming is dead" headline.
liamnesss@reddit
I feel like you could also read it as him saying, just because someone has a decade of experience producing software the "traditional" way, that doesn't mean they're particularly difficult for up and comers to leapfrog.
After all it's not that unusual to have a situation where a new hire who perhaps has been writing software for less than a year, to be more effective than far more experienced colleagues. They just have to be quite gifted, plus determined to learn and improve. Maybe LLMs mean they could catch up even faster (in months, perhaps), and don't need to have quite the same level of raw talent.
TomWithTime@reddit
At least they included that he called it a funny situation. I preface every nightmarish or unlikely technology scenario the same way, so I would immediately read that as him suggesting an unlikely but possible future.
craigthackerx@reddit
For me, AI is better as a rubber duck that it is the developer.
"Hey look at this function, I am expecting it to XYZ and it's giving me ABC. Here is what I want to do and how I'd like to try it"
It'll run me through some ideas and I can tweak and get what I want.
What it's very poor at is "Hey I need a function that does XYZ, then I need to use that XYZ in here to do this thing which triggers this thing and then this thing happens. Please write all of that for me".
Although, I am moving from DevOps to MLOps currently, so I'm hoping my familiarity with that will keep my job security if AI ever becomes so good that that it's perfectly context aware (maybe not in my life time, we will see).
Without the business context, existing codebase, all the stuff I need to consider, no chance. It's going to get better, JetBrains AI Assistant has a nice Codebase flag which is nice, but it's leaps away from being able to give me exactly what I want from nothing. Much better at having a pop at something you've already written and suggesting improvements.
Leverkaas2516@reddit
This is like supposing John Henry using a rock drill instead of a hammer will be slower than someone who has never dealt with actual rock but knows how to operate the drill
Perhaps the first time around. Maybe.
But the thing about those who have been at it for a decade is that we've had to teach ourselves how to use new technology over and over. We're not just good at making web sites, we're good at adopting new technology too. It's inherent in the job.
shotgunocelot@reddit
We've been through this cycle many times already due to offshoring. Someone wants to save a quick buck by having low paid unskilled individuals do the work of highly paid skilled individuals because "how hard can it be?" The quality drops significantly, uncaught vulnerabilities cause costly security events, and iterative improvements become increasingly difficult due to the continuous accumulation of tech debt.
So then they pay through the nose to have the people who should have been doing the work in the first place come in and fix it all.
_DCtheTall_@reddit
Lmfao, that's bullshit only people who cannot code a calculator would believe
kooshipuff@reddit
I don't think it's even about coding. It's idea people who think AI can do all the work for them but don't realize that coding is just writing it down - there's still a mind boggling number of decisions to make on any project, and that's what they're mainly paying their technical staff for.
bravopapa99@reddit
Then he is full of shit.
Nkechinyerembi@reddit
I hate how he is likely right. This entire situation we find ourselves in is mind blowingly stupid...