241–250 of 386 posts
That being said, so far no AI model is producing shippable code well enough to go either unprompted OR unreviewed at a meticulous level so... I'm not sure this will happen so soon.
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AI is unlikely to ever create great works of art because art is not, and has never been just about technical excellence; it is fundamentally a human thing: one human communicating to another. Just even knowing that some art was AI produced is enough to not see it as great: there is no human story or experience behind it, no human context, etc. You can definitely appreciate it in the category of AI work, however. AI s…
So what you're saying is it will never be about the art itself, it's entirely about selling you on its origin story? Yeah, that sounds about right. So once it can create human-level art, it just needs to spew human-level BS script along with it for the artist to act out, got it. Reverse centaur indeed.
Only someone with little appreciation of music will describe the difference between an actual performance and an AI generated one as "human-level BS". It makes a large difference in my enjoyment of the music.
Have you listened to a MIDI file before? And have you listened to (or attended, preferably in person) a piano concert before? You can't compare them, AI changes nothing at all about this.
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> at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things. But that puts 90% of developers out of a job. And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.
It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.
...or if there's an increase of demand for software, but mostly of the kind that can be completely automated by AI, no need for developers.
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I agree with a lot that you say and notice similar trends in our work. I am a little skeptical about this one though: "You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else." One of the reasons for devs to work in company is not that they can't deliver the work themselves. It's that they don't have the connections to…
Not only that, but do you really want to be handling the contract negotiations, sales, business taxes, insurance, and everything else? Being a sole-proprietorship means doing things you aren't skilled in and, most likely, not interested in doing. When I did it, I had a horrid work-life balance and I would not recommend it.
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curious as to why most top swe comp comes from equity in the company, which benefits from productivity not only that but the leveraged nature of swe means top performers are in perpetual shortage and low performers contribute negative productivity anecdotally weve seen comp rise as the best candidates have multiple competing offers as well as the freedom to start their own business
Because companies can hire one great Dev for $300k instead of 5 mediocre ones for $150k each and get better results.
Top devs make more than before
Anyone who claims AI could never replace some certain job implicitly doesn’t believe in AI ever reaching parity with humans in general reasoning. All these semantic arguments and redefining what the role of a software engineer is, etc is just pointless dancing around the core issue: will AI, as scaling and development continue on frontier models, reach human level reasoning in every domain? If it can, then it’s easy…
If this happens then LLMs will fix every human problems. It will have cured cancers, solved the pollution and global warming problem, solved wars, and it no one will ever have to work again.
Who cares if anyone has a job in that world?
It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…
Same way 3D printing replaced all common goods, can be done by anyone. Why not just print it yourself?
I don't think the analogy works.
3D printers are still fiddly, require a lot of know-how, take up space at home, resin printers often use toxic materials, and are generally something for which you need specialized equipment, supplies, and knowledge.
Comparatively, the latest LLM models are much easier to use without specialized knowledge, take up no space in your house, and give decent/good results. Again, not entirely there yet, but this is moving faster than 3D printing tech.
We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…
>e.g. front-end web development It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want. I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more ge…
We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…
Not all software but how many movies you can watch, books read? Similarly how many games you can play? How many ads you can watch during a day?
Eventually projects will have to be profitable. And even if everybody will make a great game most of them won’t be profitable because you competing for limited eyeballs time
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I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious. The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized soft…
I feel the same way about bespoke software as I do about 3D printing. For a small subset of people who like to tinker it is amazing, but there is a pretty big market for paying other people to please to 3D print for you. For technical people who are developers or in other technical roles, sure. For everyone else, no way. The hard part isn't the code, for most problems it never was. The hard part is being able to thin…
(Actually I would argue every business past a tiny size should have access to a 3D printer, it can save a lot of money in subtle ways, though its rarely business-critical)