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B. Yes. A. No. Good developers can run up the abstraction chain to keep providing value at a higher level. Most good devs fundamental value prop isn’t “I can m

B. Yes. A. No. Good developers can run up the abstraction chain to keep providing value at a higher level. Most good devs fundamental value prop isn’t “I can make something in HTML”. If anything, this will mean that more people can do the redundant stuff faster. As a frontend guy, I can’t wait for the day that a tool can generate presentational stuff.

macintux 9y ago
I agree with your response to A in the short term. In the long term, however, much like a mountain in a flood people can only scramble so high before they run out of oxygen, or run out of room.
- iambateman 9y ago
  To take your metaphor a bit too far, it’s fortunate that we have more than one mountain. ;) Sure, the days in which the web guy was viewed as a special guru won’t last forever. But even with auto-generated mockups, we’re still a long way from computers taking over everything.
- msla 9y ago
  As the baseline of tooling gets raised, the baseline of expectation gets raised. Programmers will use these tools the way we always have: To automate the simple work on the way to building a finished product that's more complex, and done more quickly, than would have been possible previously. Some markets die, yes. It's no longer possible to make a business out of selling Unix clones for commodity hardware, like you still could in the 1980s. It's no longer possible to make a living just making static HTML websites, like you could in the 1990s. Ultimately, what programmers trade in is a specific kind of problem-solving design sense. Not just solving this single problem as fast as we can, but creating a more general solution, which composes well and can be understood and changed later on. Once programs can do that... well, we'd better be willing to offer them citizenship and recognize their civil rights as thinking beings.
- mr_toad 9y ago
  The top of this metaphorical mountain involves learning new APIs, frameworks, languages and programming paradigms. An AI that can do that will be a threat to everyone.
wwweston 9y ago
> As a frontend guy, I can’t wait for the day that a tool can generate presentational stuff. Qualified agreement from this sometimes front-end guy, but that's assuming the generated presentational stuff is of equal or higher quality as that of the other front-end devs. Being the front-end guy who has to debug the auto-generated code that doesn't quite work in a corner case or two sounds potentially worse than the status quo.
- iambateman 9y ago
  For sure. I'm sure that autogen won't be on par with a human, just faster. Squarespace is simultaneously worse than what _any-decent-designer_ would put together AND better than an average marketing website.
nicolashahn 9y ago
I'd argue in part you're both right about A. Good devs (those can keep running up the abstraction chain) will always be useful. But the bar for what a "good dev" is keeps getting higher as we introduce more and more abstraction. The sheer amount of knowledge and understanding that the average dev needs in order to be productive AND understand what's going on enough under the hood (to the point where they're not doing stupid things constantly) keeps getting larger. Think back to CS in the 70s - AFAIK, the majority of the field that was understood is now covered before an undergraduate gets to their upper division classes. We're now expected to understand things at a much higher level of abstraction, but we ALSO need to know how logic gates and machine code works in order to fully understand what we're doing. The 'incubation period' to produce a good dev is going to keep growing. The ones that make it to full dev maturity are going to be more productive than ever before, but fewer people will make it there.
- iambateman 9y ago
  Sure, there is a divergence of skill sets...We're going to have "doctor" developers – people who carry an incredible breadth of knowledge and are paid accordingly. Beside them will be "nurse" developers – people who are just as professional, but less learned in the full range of computer science ideas.
  - nicolashahn 9y ago
    What will the "nurse" developers do such that the "doctor" developers don't just write something to abstract away the nurses?
    - mcknz 9y ago
      Everyone knows the doctor developers rarely show up, and the nurse developers end up doing all the work. Doctor is a long-running process that requires a callback from nurse.
    - jdminhbg 9y ago
      Until we have AGI that replaces all developers, someone will have to do the work of converting business requirements into LOB apps.

macintux 9y ago

I agree with your response to A in the short term. In the long term, however, much like a mountain in a flood people can only scramble so high before they run out of oxygen, or run out of room.

iambateman 9y ago
To take your metaphor a bit too far, it’s fortunate that we have more than one mountain. ;) Sure, the days in which the web guy was viewed as a special guru won’t last forever. But even with auto-generated mockups, we’re still a long way from computers taking over everything.
msla 9y ago
As the baseline of tooling gets raised, the baseline of expectation gets raised. Programmers will use these tools the way we always have: To automate the simple work on the way to building a finished product that's more complex, and done more quickly, than would have been possible previously. Some markets die, yes. It's no longer possible to make a business out of selling Unix clones for commodity hardware, like you still could in the 1980s. It's no longer possible to make a living just making static HTML websites, like you could in the 1990s. Ultimately, what programmers trade in is a specific kind of problem-solving design sense. Not just solving this single problem as fast as we can, but creating a more general solution, which composes well and can be understood and changed later on. Once programs can do that... well, we'd better be willing to offer them citizenship and recognize their civil rights as thinking beings.
mr_toad 9y ago
The top of this metaphorical mountain involves learning new APIs, frameworks, languages and programming paradigms. An AI that can do that will be a threat to everyone.

wwweston 9y ago

> As a frontend guy, I can’t wait for the day that a tool can generate presentational stuff. Qualified agreement from this sometimes front-end guy, but that's assuming the generated presentational stuff is of equal or higher quality as that of the other front-end devs. Being the front-end guy who has to debug the auto-generated code that doesn't quite work in a corner case or two sounds potentially worse than the status quo.

iambateman 9y ago
For sure. I'm sure that autogen won't be on par with a human, just faster. Squarespace is simultaneously worse than what _any-decent-designer_ would put together AND better than an average marketing website.

nicolashahn 9y ago

I'd argue in part you're both right about A. Good devs (those can keep running up the abstraction chain) will always be useful. But the bar for what a "good dev" is keeps getting higher as we introduce more and more abstraction. The sheer amount of knowledge and understanding that the average dev needs in order to be productive AND understand what's going on enough under the hood (to the point where they're not doing stupid things constantly) keeps getting larger. Think back to CS in the 70s - AFAIK, the majority of the field that was understood is now covered before an undergraduate gets to their upper division classes. We're now expected to understand things at a much higher level of abstraction, but we ALSO need to know how logic gates and machine code works in order to fully understand what we're doing. The 'incubation period' to produce a good dev is going to keep growing. The ones that make it to full dev maturity are going to be more productive than ever before, but fewer people will make it there.

iambateman 9y ago
Sure, there is a divergence of skill sets...We're going to have "doctor" developers – people who carry an incredible breadth of knowledge and are paid accordingly. Beside them will be "nurse" developers – people who are just as professional, but less learned in the full range of computer science ideas.
- nicolashahn 9y ago
  What will the "nurse" developers do such that the "doctor" developers don't just write something to abstract away the nurses?
  - mcknz 9y ago
    Everyone knows the doctor developers rarely show up, and the nurse developers end up doing all the work. Doctor is a long-running process that requires a callback from nurse.
  - jdminhbg 9y ago
    Until we have AGI that replaces all developers, someone will have to do the work of converting business requirements into LOB apps.