> Which, to me, it’s Doubly sad: for the reason that, at the beginning of computers (less than a century ago), the dream was Already to reach full automation. A

> Which, to me, it’s Doubly sad: for the reason that, at the beginning of computers (less than a century ago), the dream was Already to reach full automation. AI was Always the plan. What happened to that? The goal of out right automation has been consistently taken backseat to the advances of augmentation - tracing back to Englebart's lab at Stanford vs. SAIL and all of the other AI research labs. One laid the foundation of personal computing, the other, umm, surely some important things, but nothing nearly as radical. It's a subtle difference between automation and augmentation. Both are rooted in eliminating labor, but that does not necessarily mean replacing people. Despite tools like compilers, databases, and frameworks having eliminated plenty of programmer labor, there are more programmers than ever. Very few need to write machine code or implement a b-tree though. Copilot and AlphaCode can easily be viewed as extension of that. Much like an IDE can fill in the blanks while refactoring, copilot can go and fetch a method implementation from the hive mind that's been written a thousand times before. Like you said, the end goal is automation, not writing software. Writing software isn't a goal in and of itself. Of course you could say these tools will reduce demand for software developers but you could have said that for just about any other advancement in our tooling. You could have called the top of the market for software and developers in the past several decades and you would have been wrong every single time. As our tools solve our existing problems, we focus on solving new ones, and as long as we have problems we'll need problem solvers.