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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

#491

Post by coffeebeqn »

kabes wrote: post #110

I'm not at all concerned with AI. On the short to mid term it's making my life easier by relieving me of the boring parts of my job. It's pretty good at writing unit tests for example. But I don't see the current generation of AI making complete software architectures. However, even when it does get there or in the long term a new generation comes along that can do it, then I'm still not concerned. I have enough soft…

If programmers are truly displaced then we’ll have something like a StartupGPT where anyone can create a software business in days. Heck I’ll be a owner instead of a worker

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

#492

Post by cableshaft »

RivieraKid wrote: post #283

Here's my current thinking on the impact of GPT-4 on the developer job market: - I expect developer productivity to go up 1.5x - 15x over the next several years assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs. - There will be two opposing forces acting on developer wages. First, developers will be more productive, therefore the price of one hour of work should go up. But - the supply of developer output will inc…

> On the other hand, people working in agriculture have become much more effective, which lead to much fewer people working in agriculture, maybe because people need to eat as much calories per day as they did 100 years ago.

Except population exploded also, and the only reason we could support such a population has been thanks to advances in agriculture (it could be argued that's not a good thing, as the larger population is helping fuck our planet up in other ways, but that's for a different thread). So there has been an increased demand for food.

However, there's only so much arable land on this planet. The planet is finite in size. So when basically the entire planet is already being farmed, you can't really add more farmers, so further efficiency is just leading to less farmers.

Software is not so finite. It technically is, as we only have so many servers or whatever, but we're nowhere near the upper limits of what all we can handle or the appetite for software that companies have (which seems about infinite). Additionally, we have a habit of rebuilding and replacing software every few years, so even if we reach capacity limits, there's still demand for new software to replace the old, or working on new features for existing software.

So it's a bit different of a situation and not really comparable.

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

#493

Post by steve1977 »

carlmr wrote: 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…

> I said it then and I will say it now. If your managers could specify what they need in a manner that no-code tools, or now AI, can generate the code they want, they will have to be extremely exact in their language. So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language.

I think it’s more probable that managers get replaced by AI first.

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

#494

Post by coffeebeqn »

krsna wrote: post #476

The discussion here has me wondering whether code produced by an advanced AI would need to use the same coding patterns / abstractions that we've come up with over the past several decades. If a human won't be maintaining the code and a v2 could literally be rewritten from scratch, would we end up with giant balls of spaghetti code that only the AI could truly understand? At some point will we treat this code like a…

We already don’t understand the AIs inner workings exactly. If those algorithms keep getting optimized then maybe we’ll just have black boxes of “neurons” that somehow does the thing. Machine code could be just used to run the GPU instance

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

#495

Post by uh_uh »

wizofaus wrote: post #244
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.

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…

> You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human.

Why wouldn't it? It's trained on code generated by humans and already generates code that is more readable than the output of many humans me included.

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

#496

Post by marvin »

qsort wrote: post #250
anon7725 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? This is the doomsday argument. What would I do if there's a nuclear apocalypse before lunch? I guess I'll die like everyone else. An AI sufficiently advanced to do that is also sufficiently advanced to run the entire business in the first place, and also argue cases in court, do my taxes, run for president and so on.…

This is far from the doomsday argument, but maybe it's the "AI can do everything that has significant economic value today" argument.

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

#497

Post by coffeebeqn »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #85
pharmakom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2008 wasn’t so different was it? I guess the big new thing in work since then is the “gig economy”.

Well I'm in web dev (though I was studying CS in 2008) and the 2008 landscape had almost none of the same things. jQuery was not yet a household name, let alone SPAs. Facebook had barely 100 million users. Marc Andreessen yet hadn't written about "software eating the world". Personally I was more optimistic. If anything, the last 15 years have seen the growth of an attitude of tech "entitlement" because hackers got t…

I totally don’t see that. If you showed me AWS and modern machines and Go and React in 2008 I would certainly see that yeah there was some incremental progress but by no means would my mind be blown. Not much has changed. We still write clients and servers and use http and most of the same languages are still popular but slightly updated. Databases are essentially the same.. how good phones are would probably be the most exciting thing apart from GPT.

Or typescript! I was writing actionscript 3 in 2008 which is essentially the same spec

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

#498

Post by rightbyte »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #490
BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There exist many no-code tools that do exactly what you say is impossible. Do I program when I retouch photos in Photoshop? It's a no-code environment that an artist can easily learn and use with no programmers needed. What's new here is that you DO NOT NEED TO BE EXACT with AI. AI knows human nature and human speech and it can infer what you say and what you need, if you're approximately close, and then make the exa…

They're working on the 200 programs that suddenly became economically viable to create because of the vastly decreased cost of making programs. It takes drastically less programming effort to create programs than it did 50 years ago. Did that decrease demand for programmers? No, it drastically increased it.

> It takes drastically less programming effort to create programs than it did 50 years ago.

I got a feeling programmer efficiency peaked in the 90s with VB or Pascal desktop GUI apps.

There is so much bloat demanded to create a minimal product now.

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

#499

Post by naasking »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #317
chiefalchemist wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: idea people True. And once their product hits the market, if it ever gets there, they don't thrive. Prior to launch they are sooooo in love with their idea that they are meticulous about features all the while thinking they're smarter than the market. They don't understand and appreciate the value of execution. Ideas are easy. Execution - because it involves people as well as adapting to change - is 10x harder. Y…

One of the things that I'm fairly good at, is walking people from "Crazy Idea That Will Never Work," through to "Finished Product That People Want." It tends to be a very long process, and often involves a lot of "trial balloons." I just went through that, in the last couple of years. The project we're realizing, looks absolutely nothing at all like what the CEO originally dreamed up, but everyone that has seen it, l…

> It's more like, "OK, so let's walk through what we'll need to do, to make it work."

Socratic Software development is the way to go.

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