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Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#12I don’t know anyone who’s looking for junior devs today. That was not the case 3 years ago. Re LLMs: most people responding here seem to assume there will be zero progress in ML after today. I don’t understand why. It’s likely we will get gpt-5 later this year, followed by Opus 3.5 and Ultra 1.5. I expect all three to be significantly better at coding than current models. Again, all three are expected within the next…
define “better at coding” and also estimate cost of fixing generated solutions
“Better at coding” as defined by seniority levels: GPT4 - an intern; GPT5 - a junior developer; GPT6 - a senior developer.
Yes, GPT5 will do a lot of damage, as it will be the first model replacing actual human coders. But GPT6 should be able to fix most of the issues. During this transition period I expect human senior developers mostly doing code reviews.
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#13All my devs who try to use ChatGPT or similar tools end up wasting more time that those who just jump into the code and try to work everything out themselves. How long till this balance changes is not known to me.
I did a small survey around my circle and I got response that I did not believe. The majority of developers are using LLMs at least 10-20% time. There are some developers that more than 40% of their code are written by LLMs.
It would be great if stackoverflow and/or similar companies do the developer survey in the industry.
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
define “better at coding” and also estimate cost of fixing generated solutions
“Better at coding” as defined by seniority levels: GPT4 - an intern; GPT5 - a junior developer; GPT6 - a senior developer. Yes, GPT5 will do a lot of damage, as it will be the first model replacing actual human coders. But GPT6 should be able to fix most of the issues. During this transition period I expect human senior developers mostly doing code reviews.
By this logic, Photoshop 6 or 7 should have replaced designers.
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Better at coding” as defined by seniority levels: GPT4 - an intern; GPT5 - a junior developer; GPT6 - a senior developer. Yes, GPT5 will do a lot of damage, as it will be the first model replacing actual human coders. But GPT6 should be able to fix most of the issues. During this transition period I expect human senior developers mostly doing code reviews.
By this logic, Photoshop 6 or 7 should have replaced designers.
It will, as soon as it becomes “powered by GPT6”.
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
define “better at coding” and also estimate cost of fixing generated solutions
“Better at coding” as defined by seniority levels: GPT4 - an intern; GPT5 - a junior developer; GPT6 - a senior developer. Yes, GPT5 will do a lot of damage, as it will be the first model replacing actual human coders. But GPT6 should be able to fix most of the issues. During this transition period I expect human senior developers mostly doing code reviews.
i have seen no proof of actual reasoning or intelligence
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
the cost of fixing and maintaining the AI generated code will turn out to be enormous and a lot of code will need to be thrown away and re-written from scratch by experienced developers
But maybe the quality of the code will be very good in the long run. Why do you think that developer will write better code than LLMs in the long run?
why do you think LLMs will achieve actual intelligence and reasoning matching that of humans?
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Better at coding” as defined by seniority levels: GPT4 - an intern; GPT5 - a junior developer; GPT6 - a senior developer. Yes, GPT5 will do a lot of damage, as it will be the first model replacing actual human coders. But GPT6 should be able to fix most of the issues. During this transition period I expect human senior developers mostly doing code reviews.
i have seen no proof of actual reasoning or intelligence
I think this is not actually a reasonable marker to compare against in this case.
Neither of these are actually needed, all that is needed is to be able to disrupt the pipeline of jobs that interns/junior developers would normally build their initial skills on before moving on to more senior positions. Cutting these entry positions out means continually fewer replacements, and less talent (a deflationary trend, the limited number of positions acts as a filter, and its not necessarily merit based).
Without replacement, eventually older more senior developers will age out, retire, and then everyone will panic but by then it will be far too late (its already cascaded).
If it is not economical to develop or maintain a skill set, the knowledge involved becomes lost knowledge when that population dies out (as we all do given sufficient time).
A perfect corollary is the repair of electronics in the US. There might be 1 person per population of 100-200,000 that goes into business for this sector. If they get hit by a bus, its no longer locally available, and mortality happens to us all.
This is one of the main structural problems with burning bridges in blind marches towards some idealized progress.
How can you go back when all your competitors do the same thing and its no longer economic to run the business except by following the same doom loop as your competitors.
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#19I dont think I'd suggest a computer science or engineering degree. Maybe something quicker/shorter. being a junior myself (almost 4 years as a data professional) I must say that I lost the will to learn programming deeply. For many reasons: bosses already demanding high productivity knowing that you can use LLMs for faster coding (in the python/sql realm). But ofc knowing the basics of logic and how to ask/prompt helps a lot
Re: Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
But maybe the quality of the code will be very good in the long run. Why do you think that developer will write better code than LLMs in the long run?
why do you think LLMs will achieve actual intelligence and reasoning matching that of humans?
It was only seven years ago that Google introduced “Transformers,” and today we see a completely different level of LLMs. Do you think this development will stop? Maybe it won’t be LLMs alone that do reasoning better than humans, but five years ago, nobody expected that we would have today’s performance.