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In this thread: many engineers nervously sweating. The moats are drying up and the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle. This tech is the first prod

In this thread: many engineers nervously sweating. The moats are drying up and the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle. This tech is the first product in a long line of products that will massively lower the barrier to entry. It has been a good run, but it was never going to last forever. We are not part of the capitalist class and were never going to be.

LordDragonfang 4y ago
Copilot replaces code monkeys, not engineers. Ultimately it's just faster stack overflow, proper software engineers and system architects are going to be just as in demand as they are right now for the foreseeable future. At the point at which that stops being the case, we'll have much bigger societal and existential problems (because it implies the singularity is nigh) (You're correct on not being part of the capitalist class, though)
- dougmwne 4y ago
  There are a lot of code monkeys out there and I might be one of them. That island of job security seems like it will be shrinking.
  - account42 4y ago
    I don't agree that we are that close to that (or that Copilot is a significant contribution to bringing it closer) but ultimately eliminating mindless jobs is a good thing. The problem only comes from the expectation built into our current society that people need a job in order to be allowed to survive. Or to put it another way, the profit from automating away jobs en masse should be shared with the whole of society, not privatized.
ThalesX 4y ago
The world might change, but software engineers have been working with and within change their entire careers presumably. I think we'll be OK, as people, no matter what happens. I was sweating nervously before I started using Copilot awhile ago but I've stopped since because A - it really doesn't replace me, tried really hard; B - I don't sweat nervously for IntelliSense either. There's also C, where being of an entrepreneurial mindset, I'd love the opportunity to hand over the software to an AI dev and just direct the implementation to my desire until I have a working product. I bet I could secure a higher room in the castle if instead of coding for 8 hours per day I could work on n products with capable AI Software Engineers. We're not there yet though.
imtringued 4y ago
Is this supposed to be a joke? You're arguing that software developers are being replaced by themselves because ML just takes in training data and is entirely dependent on real humans to provide that data. If anything, this will simply result in another productivity explosion where software developers will get paid even more.
notacoward 4y ago
> the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle You have completely misunderstood who the moat-building wizards are. That's proprietary software. Heard of it? I ask because a lot of young people nowadays don't seem to understand how dominant it used to be and the threat that it represented. (Plus a few older folks who never knew, forgot, or deny reality for other reasons.) We've been trying to throw the wizards out for decades, by making code available to everyone and making sure it stays that way via licensing. Code without a license is subject to re-enclosure as important enhancements - even necessary ones, such as security - are made behind locked doors. The open version becomes out of date, the proprietary one wins, we're back to wizards and moats. What Microsoft is doing is the same thing for code that was supposed to have legal protection so it could remain open and avoid that fate. It's taking magic back from the people and making it exclusive to the "capitalist class" (eye roll) again.

LordDragonfang 4y ago

Copilot replaces code monkeys, not engineers. Ultimately it's just faster stack overflow, proper software engineers and system architects are going to be just as in demand as they are right now for the foreseeable future. At the point at which that stops being the case, we'll have much bigger societal and existential problems (because it implies the singularity is nigh) (You're correct on not being part of the capitalist class, though)

dougmwne 4y ago
There are a lot of code monkeys out there and I might be one of them. That island of job security seems like it will be shrinking.
- account42 4y ago
  I don't agree that we are that close to that (or that Copilot is a significant contribution to bringing it closer) but ultimately eliminating mindless jobs is a good thing. The problem only comes from the expectation built into our current society that people need a job in order to be allowed to survive. Or to put it another way, the profit from automating away jobs en masse should be shared with the whole of society, not privatized.

ThalesX 4y ago

The world might change, but software engineers have been working with and within change their entire careers presumably. I think we'll be OK, as people, no matter what happens. I was sweating nervously before I started using Copilot awhile ago but I've stopped since because A - it really doesn't replace me, tried really hard; B - I don't sweat nervously for IntelliSense either. There's also C, where being of an entrepreneurial mindset, I'd love the opportunity to hand over the software to an AI dev and just direct the implementation to my desire until I have a working product. I bet I could secure a higher room in the castle if instead of coding for 8 hours per day I could work on n products with capable AI Software Engineers. We're not there yet though.

imtringued 4y ago

Is this supposed to be a joke? You're arguing that software developers are being replaced by themselves because ML just takes in training data and is entirely dependent on real humans to provide that data. If anything, this will simply result in another productivity explosion where software developers will get paid even more.

notacoward 4y ago

> the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle You have completely misunderstood who the moat-building wizards are. That's proprietary software. Heard of it? I ask because a lot of young people nowadays don't seem to understand how dominant it used to be and the threat that it represented. (Plus a few older folks who never knew, forgot, or deny reality for other reasons.) We've been trying to throw the wizards out for decades, by making code available to everyone and making sure it stays that way via licensing. Code without a license is subject to re-enclosure as important enhancements - even necessary ones, such as security - are made behind locked doors. The open version becomes out of date, the proprietary one wins, we're back to wizards and moats. What Microsoft is doing is the same thing for code that was supposed to have legal protection so it could remain open and avoid that fate. It's taking magic back from the people and making it exclusive to the "capitalist class" (eye roll) again.