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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#411
21st century Luddites, afraid machines will threaten their jobs.

If we're smart we will continue to find new ways to use new technology to make more new technology. Software written by hand is like a brick building. Certainly it can be nice, but it requires skilled labor. Faster and cheaper with less skill would be pre-fab units.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the…

> It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that... It's inevitable that we'll reach AGI. It's inevitable that humans will extinct. Everything you described is not how today's AI works. It's not even a stretch, it's just pure sci-fi.

I don’t think it is inevitable we’ll reach AGI. I think that question is very much up in the air at the moment.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#413
I don't find such perspectives useful because they only consider two extremes: either we keep our jobs or become jobless.

The fact is, AI is currently capable of replacing some jobs, and it will likely replace even more in the future. However, this does not mean that we will all become jobless. Instead, engineers will become more valuable as they are needed to support and develop these complex systems.

Though, the amount of engineers will be reduced for sure.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#414
post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

An older developer I once worked with said his manager (in the late 1970s) started hiring typists as programmers since with upcoming programming languages, the hardest part was typing it into the system.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#415
post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interac…

In that case, how is the AI going to keep tens or hundreds of thousand of lines in memory to produce cohesive code that works with the rest of the codebase?

It seems prohibitely expensive to build and run transformer models with that much capacity.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#416

Software Engineering is just 10% writing code. The other 90% is understanding specifications of requirements (sometimes even helping customers write them), produce detailed functional specifications, cost analysis, prototyping, meeting with third party vendors over interface design specifications, determine the project's scope, testing, delivery, integration and commissioning, bug fixing, identifying and managing sco…

> Software Engineering is just 10% writing code.

That really depends on the type of "Software Engineering" you're doing. In my experience, in greenfield projects, boring CRUD-type programming can easily take up 50% of your time.

It'd be great if AI could automate this boring CRUD-type programming away, and let me focus on the architecture and interesting algorithms.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#417
post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

As soon as making major changes is fast and cheap, this becomes much less of a problem. If your first iteration has some glaring issue, even if it's a fundamental one, just fix the specification.

You can't do that today because fixing the specification after the fact means waiting 6 months and paying 60+ man-months. Once fixing the specification means waiting 10 minutes and paying $10 for inference compute, the idea guys can afford to learn by doing.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper. I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. Hasn't happened yet. > I'd be surprised if the next st…

Wait until managers realize that their jobs are a lot easier to automate away with AI than the jobs of software developers.

What makes you think that’s true?

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#420
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now it is a kindergarten child at cognitive level, and like humans it will grow up and evolve, unless we nuke ourselves before it happens.

It's not kindergarten child at congitive level. It's a different kind of cognition than humans, if you can call it "cognition" at all.

The lesson I've taken from ChatGPT so far is that "consciousness" may be much less interesting or "special" than we thought. It may turn out that it's nothing more than an emergent property of a shared language that models the world around us and gives us capacity to plan and communicate our actions.
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