6 ms·

I have a few questions about copilot. I haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet. Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the

I have a few questions about copilot. I haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet. Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? Idk why but this was my initial reaction when learning about this. Given the scenario where copilot and its likes becomes used in a widespread manner. Can it be argued that this might improve productivity but stifle innovation? Im pretty early in my career but the rate things are capable of changing soon doesn’t sit too well with me.

api 5y ago
I wouldn't worry about job security. Programming is a story of steady gradual automation and all that's done is increased its reach and multiplied the number of niches where there is demand for software. Future developers might be more like architects guiding AIs and then occasionally jumping in to hand-hold or correct the result.
fungiblecog 5y ago
You should only be worried if you just copy and paste boilerplate between files. If you're actually able to solve problems and design things there's nothing to be worried about
objclxt 5y ago
> Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? In the 50s, we programmed computers with punch cards. Who does now? How many web developers today could tell the difference between `malloc` and `calloc`? Probably not that many. For a lot of developers, programming today bears very little relation to programming decades ago. Copilot is like any other innovation - it obsoletes some skills, and it introduces new ones. I doubt copilot will reduce the need for engineers: but it may change the work they do. But that's no different to any other industry.
- eloisius 5y ago
  I don’t like this narrative. Going from punch cards, to Assembly, to C and to dynamic languages all empowered the programmer with more expressive languages. I don’t believe going from Python to programming via code comments is the same deal. It would be more like we still write asm but we have editors that let you write a little C code and then it spits out a paragraph of ‘reasonable’ asm that still has to be maintained.
  - tikhonj 5y ago
    That's roughly how I've seen experienced people work on high-performance code. I mean, they rarely maintain the generated assembly directly, but they do write code with the assembly it would generate in mind, and keeping the code generating comparable assembly over time is part of maintaining the performance-critical parts of the codebase.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  >I doubt copilot will reduce the need for engineers Every time this happens, everyone just shifts the goal posts and they now want more features, faster. The majority of software out there sucks. If programmers are now 2x faster, users will demand that some random crud app be at Google software quality. And Google's software will be unimaginable by today's standards. All of this will increase the value delivered by software, which will bring in greater revenue, which will be reinvested in more developers.
d13 5y ago
It’s nothing more than an enhanced autocomplete that’s 1 part dangerous and two parts hillarious. You’ll have your job for life.
ericbarrett 5y ago
> Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? Idk why but this was my initial reaction when learning about this. I've been programming since the '80s. It's my opinion that the age of humans writing code is coming to a close. Perhaps another 20 years or so, with the peak in ~10; but I'm less certain about the timeline than the destination. There will still be a long tail, but most of the human work will shift to design and wrangling algorithms. The remnant will be hobbyist, such as Commodore 64 programmers today.
- rtsil 5y ago
  Why do you expect machines to not enter the domain of design and algorithms as well? Is there something specifically human about them? I expect most human intellectual activities of today (from coding to scriptwriting to medicine) can be performed by machines if the current trend continues.
abecedarius 5y ago
It's reasonable to worry. - Copilot is qualitatively different from the kinds of automation of programming we've seen before. - It's barely version 1.0 of this kind of thing. Deep learning has been advancing incredibly for a decade and doesn't seem to be slowing down. Researchers also work on things like mathematical problem-solving, which would tie in to "real work" and not just the boilerplate. - In past examples of AI going from subhuman to superhuman, e.g. chess and go, the practitioners did not expect to be overtaken just a few years after it had not even felt like real competition. You'd read quotes from them about the ineffability of human thought. What to do personally, I don't know. Stay flexible?
- knowledge-clay 5y ago
  There is a world of difference between what Copilot does and what an engineer does. Imagine reading a design document for a feature and implementing that on a large, years-old codebase, ie, what many engineers do on a daily basis. Copilot isn't even 1 millionth of the way to even beginning to solve that problem, it would require human-level AGI with the capability of understanding human cultural and institutional context: something categorically different than anything happening in deep learning.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    I'm not so confident this is really different from how a pro Go player would react 10 years ago to the analogous question. Put it this way: in 5 years will there be an AI that's better than 90% of unassisted working programmers at solving new leetcode-type coding interview questions posed in natural language? Arranging an actual bet is too annoying, but that development in that timeframe doesn't seem unlikely. It might take more than a scaled-up GPT, but as I said, people are working on those other directions too. In that future, already, the skills you get hired for are different from now (and not just in the COBOL-versus-C sense). Maybe different people with a quite different mix of talents are the ones doing well.
    - knowledge-clay 5y ago
anigbrowl 5y ago
I don't think you should worry too much. While it will certainly make it easy for less experienced programmers to catch up with you, it'll probably free you up from a variety of simple but tedious housekeeping tasks and let you concentrate more on designing your program, while also reducing your time to ramp up on stuff that isn't familiar to you.
zoomablemind 5y ago
>...Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? Noone knows what future holds, so some anxiety is just a fuel for adaptation. For example, should Copilot take a widespread use, the number and scale of projects that will have to be maintained expands too. Moreover, making sense of the quilt patchwork of bits and pieces of code, I'd guess, written in many iterations/versions of Copilot's prowess is a very much a secure, if soul-killing, job for many. Not much different from what maintenance jobs are now. You're lucky when a project retains some clear overspanning architecture/style. Anybody remembers the joys of GUI wizards, with tons of auto-generated code that "just works, just now"? Remember that desire to suggest a healthy rewrite? Well, now you could probably also promise that it would be an even quicker rewrite too! But even then, the final responsibility for the code is on the programmer. One maybe could forge the code quicker, but code review is still supposed to be a human's job. Hopefully.

api 5y ago

I wouldn't worry about job security. Programming is a story of steady gradual automation and all that's done is increased its reach and multiplied the number of niches where there is demand for software. Future developers might be more like architects guiding AIs and then occasionally jumping in to hand-hold or correct the result.

fungiblecog 5y ago

You should only be worried if you just copy and paste boilerplate between files. If you're actually able to solve problems and design things there's nothing to be worried about

objclxt 5y ago

> Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? In the 50s, we programmed computers with punch cards. Who does now? How many web developers today could tell the difference between `malloc` and `calloc`? Probably not that many. For a lot of developers, programming today bears very little relation to programming decades ago. Copilot is like any other innovation - it obsoletes some skills, and it introduces new ones. I doubt copilot will reduce the need for engineers: but it may change the work they do. But that's no different to any other industry.

eloisius 5y ago
I don’t like this narrative. Going from punch cards, to Assembly, to C and to dynamic languages all empowered the programmer with more expressive languages. I don’t believe going from Python to programming via code comments is the same deal. It would be more like we still write asm but we have editors that let you write a little C code and then it spits out a paragraph of ‘reasonable’ asm that still has to be maintained.
- tikhonj 5y ago
  That's roughly how I've seen experienced people work on high-performance code. I mean, they rarely maintain the generated assembly directly, but they do write code with the assembly it would generate in mind, and keeping the code generating comparable assembly over time is part of maintaining the performance-critical parts of the codebase.
Gigachad 5y ago
>I doubt copilot will reduce the need for engineers Every time this happens, everyone just shifts the goal posts and they now want more features, faster. The majority of software out there sucks. If programmers are now 2x faster, users will demand that some random crud app be at Google software quality. And Google's software will be unimaginable by today's standards. All of this will increase the value delivered by software, which will bring in greater revenue, which will be reinvested in more developers.

d13 5y ago

It’s nothing more than an enhanced autocomplete that’s 1 part dangerous and two parts hillarious. You’ll have your job for life.

ericbarrett 5y ago

> Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? Idk why but this was my initial reaction when learning about this. I've been programming since the '80s. It's my opinion that the age of humans writing code is coming to a close. Perhaps another 20 years or so, with the peak in ~10; but I'm less certain about the timeline than the destination. There will still be a long tail, but most of the human work will shift to design and wrangling algorithms. The remnant will be hobbyist, such as Commodore 64 programmers today.

rtsil 5y ago
Why do you expect machines to not enter the domain of design and algorithms as well? Is there something specifically human about them? I expect most human intellectual activities of today (from coding to scriptwriting to medicine) can be performed by machines if the current trend continues.

abecedarius 5y ago

It's reasonable to worry. - Copilot is qualitatively different from the kinds of automation of programming we've seen before. - It's barely version 1.0 of this kind of thing. Deep learning has been advancing incredibly for a decade and doesn't seem to be slowing down. Researchers also work on things like mathematical problem-solving, which would tie in to "real work" and not just the boilerplate. - In past examples of AI going from subhuman to superhuman, e.g. chess and go, the practitioners did not expect to be overtaken just a few years after it had not even felt like real competition. You'd read quotes from them about the ineffability of human thought. What to do personally, I don't know. Stay flexible?

knowledge-clay 5y ago
There is a world of difference between what Copilot does and what an engineer does. Imagine reading a design document for a feature and implementing that on a large, years-old codebase, ie, what many engineers do on a daily basis. Copilot isn't even 1 millionth of the way to even beginning to solve that problem, it would require human-level AGI with the capability of understanding human cultural and institutional context: something categorically different than anything happening in deep learning.
- abecedarius 5y ago
  I'm not so confident this is really different from how a pro Go player would react 10 years ago to the analogous question. Put it this way: in 5 years will there be an AI that's better than 90% of unassisted working programmers at solving new leetcode-type coding interview questions posed in natural language? Arranging an actual bet is too annoying, but that development in that timeframe doesn't seem unlikely. It might take more than a scaled-up GPT, but as I said, people are working on those other directions too. In that future, already, the skills you get hired for are different from now (and not just in the COBOL-versus-C sense). Maybe different people with a quite different mix of talents are the ones doing well.
  - knowledge-clay 5y ago

anigbrowl 5y ago

I don't think you should worry too much. While it will certainly make it easy for less experienced programmers to catch up with you, it'll probably free you up from a variety of simple but tedious housekeeping tasks and let you concentrate more on designing your program, while also reducing your time to ramp up on stuff that isn't familiar to you.

zoomablemind 5y ago

>...Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm? Noone knows what future holds, so some anxiety is just a fuel for adaptation. For example, should Copilot take a widespread use, the number and scale of projects that will have to be maintained expands too. Moreover, making sense of the quilt patchwork of bits and pieces of code, I'd guess, written in many iterations/versions of Copilot's prowess is a very much a secure, if soul-killing, job for many. Not much different from what maintenance jobs are now. You're lucky when a project retains some clear overspanning architecture/style. Anybody remembers the joys of GUI wizards, with tons of auto-generated code that "just works, just now"? Remember that desire to suggest a healthy rewrite? Well, now you could probably also promise that it would be an even quicker rewrite too! But even then, the final responsibility for the code is on the programmer. One maybe could forge the code quicker, but code review is still supposed to be a human's job. Hopefully.