End of the engineer. Rise of the architect.
What’s preventing AI from taking on the role of an architect?
AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#12AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.
There's no reason to believe that's the case.
LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cognitively demanding engineering tasks like design, planning, or creative problem solving. We will need a different architecture for that, transformers don't look like they get smarter in that way even with scale.
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#13AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. There's no reason to believe that's the case. LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cogn…
> AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task
Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?"
>unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case.
How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#14End of the engineer. Rise of the architect.
What’s preventing AI from taking on the role of an architect?
Nothing. Most software "architecture" is simply repeating the same patterns, just like writing code, just at a slightly higher level of abstraction. There's a slight moat if you are good at the business domain, and can serve as a bridge, but honestly, AI is getting pretty good at that as well.
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#15AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. There's no reason to believe that's the case. LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cogn…
> AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?" >unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case. How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
> Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?"
And also at what cost and at what scale?
Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby.
But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#16It reduces the amount of engineers needed. I'd say by half and web, graphic designers and front end developers coding the designs are really no longer needed. I was just laid off from my job of 8 years in which I was the UX Researcher, Designer, Front-End Dev and Customer UX Support. In a week I have sold my house and am downsizing significantly and in two years or less will be working as an RN(nurse). I will try to…
Voice is going to become more important, but I doubt it's going to be that much of a threat to websites. I can already ask Gemini in my last generation smart watch for latest news, but I much prefer reading them myself. IMO AI will be simply integrated to smart watches and phones. Maybe you'll also have more devices like Amazon Alexa at home, but I see no demand for an entirely new kind of a device/user interface.
That said, I don't have much faith in the future of my programming career either. Unless robotics gets exponentially better, registered nurses are going to be way safer from automation (at least the ones doing physical treatment).
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#17It reduces the amount of engineers needed. I'd say by half and web, graphic designers and front end developers coding the designs are really no longer needed. I was just laid off from my job of 8 years in which I was the UX Researcher, Designer, Front-End Dev and Customer UX Support. In a week I have sold my house and am downsizing significantly and in two years or less will be working as an RN(nurse). I will try to…
Sorry to hear your situation. As a full stack Dev, I miss the days of having a UX expert on the team. Now we are just expected to create something good enough. Also your question of will there be interfaces like today makes me more nervous than anything else.
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#18Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#19The tractor analogy keeps coming up in these threads, and I think it's actually more pessimistic than people realize.
Tractors didn't just change farming. They emptied entire regions.
What saved the people (not the communities) was that other industries absorbed them. Factory work, services, construction. The question for software isn't whether AI creates efficiency. It's whether there's somewhere else for displaced engineers to go.
I've been writing code professionally for 16 years. The honest answer is I don't know. The optimistic scenario is that AI makes software so cheap that we build things we never would have attempted. The pessimistic one is that most of what needed building gets built, and the remaining work fits in fewer hands.
Both seem plausible. I'd bet on somewhere in between, but I'm not confident enough to tell anyone starting out that they should ignore the risk entirely.
Re: AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)
#20"Will AI replace software engineers?" is not the right question and stems from a misunderstanding of how tech affects humans and how they work. Tech is a tool. It will take away some jobs, and then create new ones. Think of a combine tractor -- it took away crop picking jobs, but created a new job of combine tractor driver. It bumps productivity. The correct frame is "how can software engineers (or anyone, for that m…
Combine tractors deleted jobs. You can't say there are as many combine tractor drivers as there were crop pickers. Anyway they don't need drivers now as they're fully robotic.
The only reason society didn't collapse: there were enough other jobs to absorb those displaced workers. Will there always be?