11–20 of 117 posts
It's hard to predict the future. One aspect that's being slighly neglected is that programming isn't that special - tools like ChatGPT can potentially impact any kind of knowledge work. So it's not like there's a safe white-collar career track that you can easily move to.
For the same reason why companies pay $2000 per day for an experienced consultant when an employee could theoretically build the same stuff at minimum wage. Sometimes, mistakes are expensive. And then you need people who can reason about why they are doing what they are doing. AI can maybe churn out CRUD better than other generators, but when you have any significant amount of money depending on the software working, nobody is going to use ChatGPT without a human code review.
But ChatGPT code is typically overly lengthy and complicated, just like what a beginner would produce. And that makes for expensive and slow code reviews. That's why in the end it's cheaper overall to skip all that and just hire a professional.
There's no shortage that is not followed by a glut..
Of course not. For the same reason why companies pay $2000 per day for an experienced consultant when an employee could theoretically build the same stuff at minimum wage. Sometimes, mistakes are expensive. And then you need people who can reason about why they are doing what they are doing. AI can maybe churn out CRUD better than other generators, but when you have any significant amount of money depending on the so…
Of course not. For the same reason why companies pay $2000 per day for an experienced consultant when an employee could theoretically build the same stuff at minimum wage. Sometimes, mistakes are expensive. And then you need people who can reason about why they are doing what they are doing. AI can maybe churn out CRUD better than other generators, but when you have any significant amount of money depending on the so…
My take is that it will decrease the "value" of developers by reducing the demand for them. If a company can be 10x more productive it will probably need less developers. if you can do your job 10x faster it will mean your team would less team members. There's no shortage that is not followed by a glut..
Just as vertical integration in the auto industry killed off the auto startup ecosystem, vertical integration in the tech industry will kill off tech startups. This isnt because there won't be demand for innovative new tech or that startups won't be able to innovate, but because control of core platforms will allow the bigger players more leeway to crush and swallow smaller companies as well as to siphon their profit margins.
Think what aws is doing to elastic on a large scale.
Once the tech startup ecosystem dies (which could be soon; high interest rates will suck capital away from startups), the behemoths will probably stop innovating and slash headcounts.
Once that happens, I'm pretty sure that the stewards of capital and captains of industry will scapegoat AI and the Economist and Time magazine and the like will dutifully believe them and so will most of the people who read them.
Not too different from interpreting lighthouse scores.
It can make anyone with the means to access it a bad coder but the value of a professional has always been in picking the best solution from the possible ones.