I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before. Sure, things will look a lot different than they used to, but we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before. We're not going to simply automate 2022 levels of producing software and stop there, we're going to leverage this new technology to move faster and build more complicated things that wouldn't be realistic with hand-coding. I don't know what that will look like yet, but human history has shown that when we get some advanced technology, it's leveraged to create more than was ever possible before, not just stopping at making what existed in the past automatic.
Well, even if the demand for software engineers ends up not going down, there’s going to be a HUGE downskilling. The things built might be more complicated, but that complexity will only be understood by the AI. (If we had to slow down so that humans could understand the code, all of the productivity benefits from AI would be lost.) The human might “understand the system at a high level and how things work together”, but why does that even matter? The AI can do that too… I don’t see a way where the human engineers provide value other than being liability meat shields.
And even if there ends up being some kind of new future SWE work that AI is bad at, how long would that last? People aren’t realizing that AI isn’t just a way to replace current human work, it’s a framework to replace all future human work too. Wouldn’t companies be tripping over themselves to feed AI as much data on this new task as possible, so that they can replace those human workers ASAP?
I don’t see a future where humans do long term meaningful software work unless AI improvement plateaus quickly or there’s some kind of regulation slowing down future AI training.
jrflo · · focus · HN ↗
demibabs · · focus · HN ↗
And even if there ends up being some kind of new future SWE work that AI is bad at, how long would that last? People aren’t realizing that AI isn’t just a way to replace current human work, it’s a framework to replace all future human work too. Wouldn’t companies be tripping over themselves to feed AI as much data on this new task as possible, so that they can replace those human workers ASAP?
I don’t see a future where humans do long term meaningful software work unless AI improvement plateaus quickly or there’s some kind of regulation slowing down future AI training.