Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

I have. If you're doing niche-er stuff it doesn't have enough data and hallucinates. The worst is when it spits two screens of code instead of 'this cannot be done at the level you want it'.

> that I couldn't even decipher

That's unrelated to code quality. Especially with C++ which has become as write only as perl.

So, either capitalism doesn't work, or your thesis isn't quite right...

I have two other counters to offer, first we have seen GDP per capita gradually increasing in major economies for the last 50 years (while the IT revolution has played out). There have been other technical innovations over this time, but I believe that GDP per capita has more than quadrupled in G8 economies. The USA and Canada have, at the same time, enjoyed a clear extra boost from fracking and shale extraction, and the USA has arguably enjoyed an extra extra boost from world dominance - but arguably.

The second one is simple anecdote. Hour for hour I now can do far more in terms of development than I did when I was a hard core techie in the 90's and 2000's. In addition I can manage and administer systems that are far more complex than those it took teams of people to run at that time (try running a 10gb size db under load on oracle 7 sitting on top of spinning rust and 64mb ram store for fun) I can also manage a team of 30's expenses, timesheets, travel requests and so on that again would have taken a person to do. I can just do these things and my job as well and I do it mostly in about 50 hrs a week. If I wasn't involved in my people's lives and happy to argue with customers to get things better I could do it in 40 hrs regularally, for sure. But I put some discretion in.

My point is - we are just more productive. It is hard to measure, and anecdote / "lived experience" is a bad type of evidence, but I think it's clearly there. This is why then accountants have been able to reorganise modern business organisations to use fewer people to do more. Have they destroyed value while doing this - totally - but they have managed to get away with it because 7/10 they have been right.

Personally I've suffered from the 3/10 errors. I know many of us on here have, but we shouldn't shut our eyes because of that.

This is a thought provoking phrase, and I liked that. Thinking a bit deeper, I'm not sure if it's accurate, practical or healthy though.

I've seen mediocrity produce excellent solutions, and excellence churn out rubbish, and I suspect most people with a few years and tech jobs under their belt have.

You could argue that if they turned out excellent things, then by definition, they're excellent, but that then makes the phrase uselessly tautological.

If it's true, then what's the advice to mediocre people and environments - just give up? Don't waste your time on excellent organisation, programming, testing, because it's a waste and you'll fail?

I think there's no 1 thing that can make excellence out of mediocrity for everyone. But I like to think that for every combination of work, people and environment, there's an optimal set of practices that will lead to them producing something better than average. Obviously a lot don't find that set of practices due to the massive search space.

"Water supply issues are already holding back housing development around the city. In its previous draft water resources management plan, Cambridge Water failed to demonstrate that there was enough to supply all of the new properties in the emerging local plan without risk of deterioration.

The Environment Agency recently confirmed that it had formally objected to five large housing developments in the south of the county because of fears they could not sustainably supply water. It has warned that planning permission for more than 10,000 homes in the Greater Cambridge area and 300,000 square metres of research space at Cambridge University are in jeopardy if solutions cannot be found.

A document published alongside the Case for Cambridge outlines the government’s plan for a two-pronged approach to solving the water scarcity issue, to be led by Dr Paul Leinster, former chief of the Environment Agency, who will chair the Water Scarcity Group.

In the long term, supply will be increased, initially through two new pieces of infrastructure: a new reservoir in the Fens will delivery 43.5 megalitres per day, while a new pipeline will transfer 26 megalitres per day from Grafham Water, currently used by Affinity Water.

But, according to Kelly, a new reservoir would only solve supply requirements for the existing local plan and is “not sufficient if you start to go beyond that” – a point that is conceded in the water scarcity document. "

https://www.building.co.uk/focus/a-vision-for-150000-homes-b...

Perhaps developing a little sense of humor? :-\