The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
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The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
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Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#2> It just needs to be able to deliver 80% of your output at 20% of your cost
What tho is the actual cost? Are AI tools still loss leaders? What will happen if the AI bubble bursts and there is a severe shortage of software engineers? It is this uncertainty that people are having to deal with now.
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#3> It just needs to be able to deliver 80% of your output at 20% of your cost What tho is the actual cost? Are AI tools still loss leaders? What will happen if the AI bubble bursts and there is a severe shortage of software engineers? It is this uncertainty that people are having to deal with now.
This is a good question. The other question that I haven't yet seen the answer for is how anyone will make money off of an AGI, if such a thing is actually feasible in the near term. As it is the business model for just LLMs and generative models in general seems flimsy.
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#4The article is right: the low-tier tech jobs will likely not exist in a few years. These jobs mostly involve gluing APIs together.
However, I think the assumed usefulness of humans can be slashed even further. Right now, LLMs interface with languages and systems that were abstracted to a human level of understanding. There's an empty spot for new languages and frameworks with thousands of primitive "patterns", all represented by unique symbols, that could be put together much quicker by a LLM than by a human.
LLMs have monstrously high associative horizons -- this means the way they segment info requires many more "boxes" / classifications / names, while humans top out at some arbitrary low value but are able to generate more / new categories on-demand.
Instead of faffing about with a thousand examples to get some certain indentation right, it could be something akin to a spoken language but way more logical (or perhaps like a language with incredibly long compound words).
Removing all computer programmers would require a bottom-up unity of the hardware stack with software, and that's an almost impossible ask by today's standards. Would need to start over and get rid of old systems in many areas.
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#5> It just needs to be able to deliver 80% of your output at 20% of your cost What tho is the actual cost? Are AI tools still loss leaders? What will happen if the AI bubble bursts and there is a severe shortage of software engineers? It is this uncertainty that people are having to deal with now.
The actual cost is fucking your customers up by cutting costs after being sold the ideology not the tool (the tool is irrelevant). That hasn’t changed and this is just another hammer to make it worse. Customers and businesses will tire and revenue will not make ends meet (hint: it doesn’t now).
This hammer is however one which becomes stale very quickly unless you keep throwing megawatts and billions of dollars at it constantly. Thus when the bubble bursts it will break all growth predictions instantly and cause a major collapse.
It’s going to be a meaty train wreck and a huge opportunity and I can’t wait. Reckon I’ll retire in 5 years.
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#6[deleted]
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#7> It just needs to be able to deliver 80% of your output at 20% of your cost What tho is the actual cost? Are AI tools still loss leaders? What will happen if the AI bubble bursts and there is a severe shortage of software engineers? It is this uncertainty that people are having to deal with now.
Are u talking about incurring technical debt from the generated AI code that vastly out prices the original low cost of using AI. I cannot answer ur question on how big is one compared to the other but I have an idea that can sideline them. I don't think it will matter, AI is so exceptionally good at generating just good enough spam, so exceptionally good at delivering a shitty minimally viable product that it might warp the expectations and needs of consumers. Where the new shittyness becomes the new norm because it drowns out everything else around it with shear volume. People around me prefer to generate their Dungeons and Dragons characters and cities with AI because it good enough even though it looks painfully bad and often doesn't completely fit their vision. Music songs are being composed for small communities almost constantly at the moment because people do not want to bother to go out of their way to find a real human composer.
It's easy, it's fast and it gets the point across. Quality is only encouraged socially, people don't really care that much about quality. Rather people have 100 things they care about in their lives - an app for their groceries, a small game of their own idea to show to friends and play, a piece of music about that one time their group of friends got drunk and went into the mountains to fight a bear that in the end turned out to be some old granpa's cow. And only one or two which are important enough to spend the effort to find a quality product.
For software - the places where hard identifiable metric matter... Sensors, weapons, performance, networking, etc. They won't be replaced by AI's any time soon but so many other types of product imo will be assimilated by the machine. All desktop apps for regular people, all websites for blogs, posting, sharing. Probably most IoT related things in your own home
It is hilarious that the machines will first devour the industries that need more feelings and ideas rather then raw precision.
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#8> It will become a role with a large pool of low-skilled coders who move forward with AI and a few specialists that will unblock those coders when stuck as well as address performance bottlenecks for production-scale.
You see this already in medicine. Anesthesiologist can oversee up to 6 concurrent cases, with NP’s or CRNA’s doing the actual work.
This only works for straightforward, not medically complicated cases. The more complicated cases (pregnancy, cancer, obesity, etc) are still typically fully managed by an MD /DO.
The results are controversial. Healthcare systems can save cost, but patient care is hit or miss.
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#9The cleanup on aisle 9 when this whole thing is over is going to be biblical.
Re: The Death of Software Engineering by a Thousand Prompts
#10This post is spot on. It will be incredibly lucrative to be one of the "ones who knows" in the relatively near future.
What's scary is what happens when those types cease to exist (due to retirement or age) and all you're left with is the semi-coders described here. There's a similar problem with outdated technologies that few-to-no developers understand anymore.