I'm still optimistic that the net effect of making existing programmers drastically more productive is that our value goes up , because we can produce more value for other people.
The economy has taught us that when there is an excess of worker productivity, it leads to layoffs. It certainly does not lead to raises.
No software company I have ever worked at had an excess of worker productivity. There were always at least 3-5X as much work needing to be done, bugs needing to be fixed, features that needed to be implemented than engineers to do it. Backlogs just grew and grew until you just gave up and mass-closed issues because they were 10 years old.
If AI coding improves productivity, it might move us closer to having 2X as much work as we can possibly do instead of 3X.
The economy has taught us that when there is an excess of worker productivity, it leads to layoffs. It certainly does not lead to raises.
Do you have a citation for that?
What a strange thing to ask for a citation on when CEO pay, stock buy backs and corporate dividends are at all time highs while worker pay and honestly just affording to live continue to crater.
> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do. Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really go…
It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to provide additional context, ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text.
I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things like “what does X mean in this specific setting?” or “how do I tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?”.
Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions, so that e.g. the LMM knows that text in a particular language should be automatically translated and explained.
> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?
When ordering, "I will have" sounds reasonable.
When asking someone to pass them to you, just imagine them turning to you, looking you in the eye, and asserting "I will have the potatoes" like it's some kind of ultimatum. Yes, that is strange.
Also true! But that world is one where the vast majority of time is spent cleaning up slop code, so if there's a general shift towards that, I think that still changes the job in a significant way. (I don't have extensive history in the industry yet so I may be wrong here)
It's all cleaning up slop code. Always has been. More optimistically, you can think of "user created code" as an attempt at a design document of sorts; they were trying to tell you (and the computer) what they wanted in "your language". And that dialog is the important thing.
Seriously. Unless you're one of the vanishingly rare few working with true Greenfield projects that start with an empty text file, you're basically cleaning up other developer's legacy slop.
> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?
Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence.
I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte today" or more Midwestern (could I get a latte today etc) in singapore because people would just get confused. Same with being too polite when recieving things. There's ways to be polite but it usually involves less words because anything else confuses people.
> At the dinner table a Norwegian is likely to say something like “Jeg vil ha potetene” (literally “I will have the potatoes”, which sounds presumptuous and haughty in English) where a brit might say “Could I please have some potatoes?”. I find “I will have the potatoes” to be perfectly fine English and not haughty in the slightest. Is this a difference between British English and American English?
Americans are extremely polite, and American English is replete with niceties in everyday speech. It's funny, having been a tourist abroad, it's only living in a significantly non American country for a few years that lead me to realise this. I even lived in another country albeit a former US colony for ten years and didn't even notice it there given American influence. I stopped saying, stuff "I would like a latte t…
> could I get a latte today actually
To me (non-American) the above sounds like sarcasm, not politeness. Adding "today" and/or "actually" could mean you've had it with their delays.
I like to joke that Americans always seem to find ways to get offended by innocuous things, but in this case the joke is on me.
I'm still optimistic that the net effect of making existing programmers drastically more productive is that our value goes up , because we can produce more value for other people.
The economy has taught us that when there is an excess of worker productivity, it leads to layoffs. It certainly does not lead to raises.
That sounds like the famous lump of labour fallacy. When something's cheaper people often spend more on it (Jevons paradox).
> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do. Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really go…
It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to provide additional context, ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text. I live in Japan. Almost every day I find myself asking things like “what does X mean in this specific setting?” or “how do I tell Y to that specific person via this specific medium?”. Much of this can be further automated via custom instructions, so that e.g. the LMM knows that t…
> It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to ... ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text.
Great ideas. I'll think about adding those features to the system in my next vibe-coding session.
What I automated in the MVP I vibe-coded yesterday could all be done alone by a human user with access to the LLMs, of course. The point of such an app would be to guide people who are not familiar with the issues and intricacies of translation so that they can get better translations for their purposes.
I have no intention to try to commercialize my app, as there would be no moat. Anyone who wanted to could feed this thread to Claude, ask it to write a starting prompt for Claude Code, and produce a similar system in probably less time than it took me.
What a strange thing to ask for a citation on when CEO pay, stock buy backs and corporate dividends are at all time highs while worker pay and honestly just affording to live continue to crater.
I mean, I hate a lazy "citation needed" FUD attack as much as (really likely way more than) anyone, but with a bit more context I do think a citation is needed, as the correct citation in the other direction is (as someone else noted) Jevon's paradox: when you make it easier to X, you make it so people can use X in ever more contexts, and you make it so that the things which previously needed something way harder than X are suddenly possible, and the result -- as much in software development as any other field: it seems like every year it becomes MUCH easier to do things, due to better tools -- always seems to result in MORE demand, not less... we even see the slow raising of "table stakes" for software, such that a website or app is off-putting and lame to a lot of users if it isn't doing the things that require at least some effort: instead of animated transitions and giant images maybe the next phase of this is that the website has to be an interactive assistant white-glove AI experience--or some crazy AR-capable thing--requiring tons of engineering effort to pull off, but now possible for your average website due to AI coding. Meanwhile, the other effects you are talking about all started before AI coding even sort of worked well, and so have very little to do with AI: they are more related to monetary policy shifts, temporary pandemic demand spikes, and that R&D tax law change.