6 ms·

It's coming for us, too. It won't be long before most software engineer positions are eliminated while some are replaced by software "technicians" with enough

It's coming for us, too. It won't be long before most software engineer positions are eliminated while some are replaced by software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code. Perhaps the technicians will be tasked with building tests and some automation, but even that stuff can be delegated to AI to an extent. This may seem far off because the present economy is accustomed to paying engineers large sums of money to write apps. Even with the retractions we've been seeing in hiring and venture capital, there's just enough easy money still there and the capabilities of code-writing AIs isn't quite there yet. All we need is a significant market correction and the next generation of AI to wipe out a large swath of tech jobs. The next step regardless is applying technologies like DALL-E to web design, and for said technology to be widely used, open and affordable. We won't need web designers or even UXD. Then we won't need as many engineers when AI can solve a lot of common problems in building software. AI can do it better because it won't spend inordinate amounts of time dillydallying over next-gen frameworks, toolchains, and preprocessors. AI won't even have to worry about writing "clean" and maintainable code because those things will no longer matter.

Dylan16807 4y ago
> software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code People keep trying to make simplified programming environments for significantly less-trained people and they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it easier to get a result that has no crippling bugs?
- numpad0 4y ago
  And how is it going to increase information in the output by having AI involved, if these AIs aren’t actually thinking and pouring out of their own entropy source into outputs?
- lmm 4y ago
  No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software businesses from shipping it anyway?
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> People keep trying to make simplified programming environments for significantly less-trained people and they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it easier to get a result that has no crippling bugs? Yeah. I've even worked in one of those environments for a year (not my choice). I'm of the opinion those kind of environments won't ever work. They'll either be: 1. Extremely cookie-cutter (e.g. make a clone of our "standard app" with a insignificant little tweaks). 2. Require software engineers to get anything useful out of them, and those engineers will feel like they're working with one hand tied behind their backs (or banging their heads against a wall). IMHO, one of the main skills of a software engineer is translating user requirements into technical requirements that work and understanding when they work. I don't think skill is automatable without a fairy-tale AGI. > No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software businesses from shipping it anyway? A lot? Depends on your definition of "crippling." A software engineer will gripe and say, "I don't want to use this;" something that's awkward but the people who use it can still get their work done; or the system literally incapable of performing its function?
sjducb 4y ago
I think when AI can do the full job of a programmer we'll have reached the singularity. Programmer will be the last job to go.
sbmassey 4y ago
Judging by the current state of DALL-E, the generated software will look good at first impression, but have lots of weird bugs when examined closely. So yeah, not much different to current software dev.
bearjaws 4y ago
Time for me to open up my "AI Code Refurbishing" shop and specialize in fixing all the disasters these "AI technicians" make.
substation13 4y ago
Programming requires far more breadth and precision than 2D art. I think that in the very long run programming work will be automated, but by that stage we will either be post-scarcity or reconstituted in computation substrate.
- echelon 4y ago
  You say that with such confidence. I'm looking for ways to hedge my reliance on my skills.
  - substation13 4y ago
    I'm confident that society would be so radically different that trying to predict and prepare is a fools game.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    >This time will be different. The 20th time you hear that is when you stop caring.
xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE 4y ago
Imma be honest, working as an artist who has to come up with Dall-E prompts and as a programmer who has to maintain a codebase slapped together from GPT-5 output sounds equally horrifying. I think I'll stick to my grug brain engineering.
ceeplusplus 4y ago
The problem with that theory is that writing code is easier than reading code. This is generally not the case in other professions. It is definitely not the case for an artist. You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the code the AI wrote.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > The problem with that theory is that writing code is easier than reading code. This is generally not the case in other professions. It is definitely not the case for an artist. > You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the code the AI wrote. This might have been your point, but chances are the "code the AI wrote" will be an unmaintainable mess, so "fixing it" means throwing it away and re-doing it.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  The question is how many developers will fix code after AI and how many developers will grow potatoes.
thrown_22 4y ago
AI has been over promising and under delivering for 50 years. There's a reason why the general models aren't being released. The second you look under the hood and start poking the unhappy paths you see that it doesn't understand anything and you're talking to something dumber than a hamster.
- andybak 4y ago
  There's a weird tension between people who say saying "AI is overblown" and people who say "this is the most magical thing I've seen in my lifetime". I lean towards the latter but with a healthy dose of "it's deeply weird and hard to get anything useful from". But that doesn't make it any less magical. And no - it's not "intelligent" in any human sense. But I can't relate to people who pooh-pooh it as if there's nothing exciting happening. Either they are deliberately cultivating a dismissive air, or they are deeply jaded and weary. EDIT - There's a 3rd option. People are making a rhetorical point because they perceive a need to correct an imbalance in the general mood. This is actually the most likely explanation and is often under-appreciated as motivator in public statements. I've noticed it in myself frequently.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    AI can be overblown and it can also be magical. This was true for state of the art in 2010: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ today you have a free phone app that does both. Of course it also classifies a spoon as a large breasted robin which is why you need a human in the loop. It's even truer in programming.
    - andybak 4y ago
      That xkcd actually claims the opposite: "some things that many people assume to be trivial CS problems actually require advancements in AI"
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        That's what I said. The converse is that despite the huge advance the model is still incredibly fragile and quite useless outside the niche for which it was trained for.
xwdv 4y ago
It will never come for us. You think it will, but that’s because you don’t understand software. Pick any random Jira ticket for a large software project. Could an AI understand and implement that feature into a larger project? Can it correctly deploy it without interruptions to production jobs? Will it correctly implement tests and decent code coverage? If there are regressions will it know how to go in and fix them? If there are bugs reported by users will it be able to investigate and accurately fix them? What about when multiple branches of feature development have to be merged, will it know how to do it correctly? Will it know how to write high performance software or just use shitty random algorithms? If it can’t do these things AI is basically useless. Because this is basically 90% of software development.
- silvestrov 4y ago
  Writing software is like writing novels: putting words together to make sentences is easy. Making the story make sense is difficult. One could think that much of art is just pretty form without sense and that is why DALL-E works.
  - the_af 4y ago
    I don't think that assessment of art is accurate. Most art is not "pretty form without sense". It actually has sense and meaning more often than not, so we can debate what a particular piece "means". The difference with engineering is that art's meaning is way more subjective, and that if I "miss the point" or simply disagree with the consensus on its meaning, this doesn't make an airplane go down or a nuclear reactor to melt down.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I guess the difference is, with the art the human can immediately reject/accept and iterate. And a bad image can be crappy, it doesn't break anything. With software it might take days of testing to verify the result, and then repeat that for every iteration. Would be cheaper to build the thing! Where AI might work is in some restricted subset of software, like a web CRUD app where you say "I want an app that stores a TODO list with dates". With the constraints of it being crud, it just needs to AI the database and arrangement of fields and so on. The AI is not programming so much as it is choosing which "rails-like scaffolds" to initiate.
losteric 4y ago
"Physical" engineering fields will probably come first... think AI-generated architecture, with AI-generated structural engineering, plumbing, electrical wiring, etc... with human-guidance of the generative process, and human-review/accountability of final output. Amplification of humans, not obsolescence. In software, yeah boiler-plate and function-level code-generation... I could also see generating trivial UIs for CRUD apps, or no-code data-pipelines for small businesses... maybe even generating high-level architectures for new services... but we're far off from AI auto-generating code for enterprise applications or foundational services. The differentiation being making changes within an existing complex domain/code-base, in contrast with generating new assets from nothing.
- joenot443 4y ago
  Most of the math for structural engineering is already done through software, we just don't call it AI. The difficult part and valuable part of being a good structural engineer is translating requirements and dealing with clients. The actual math and engineering work is often not much more difficult than what's done taught in their undergrad, and much of it is offloaded to designers anyway. Source: My family owns one of the largest civil engineering firms in my home province.
kache_ 4y ago
programming is going to get automated with language models in <5 years however, I find that my job (SWE) is about 1% programming and 99% strategizing, designing & communicating.
- trention 4y ago
  Really? How much money are you willing to put on the claim "LLMs are going to produce >80% of newly written production code in 5 years"? If it's less than your yearly salary, then even you don't believe your own assertion.
  - kache_ 4y ago
    For github & google, I'd put my own money on it being >80% in 5 years. Maybe not a whole year's salary though, I'm a big baller
    - trention 4y ago
      Well, you will lose but I basically don't believe your claim is anything more than hyperbolic bullshit as no one who is working as a SWE is actually spending only 1% of their time programming as per your initial comment.
      - kache_ 4y ago
        some software engineers spend most of their time designing, communicating with other teams, and managing operations. It becomes the case as you get more experienced, depending on your staff engineer path.
        trention 4y ago
        This is a truism that every senior engineer understands. There is no way to get below 10% coding unless you move into people management/product. At this point, you are no longer a SWE (except by title, maybe).
pphysch 4y ago
AI is great for recommendation systems and art because they are fuzzy. "Good enough" results are relatively easy to achieve. There is lots of tolerance for errors, because human preferences are flexible and fuzzy themselves. Engineering is a different ballgame... If anything, all the code monkeys will simply become QA monkeys/test-engineers, because you need to be really sure that your black box algorithm is actually doing what you think it should be doing.
ipaddr 4y ago
Wouldn't millions of unemployed developers start creating software that would compete/overthrow existing software companies?
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> "This may seem far off..." After experimenting with GitHub Co-Pilot I can see that day being 50% - perhaps even just 25% - as far as it used to feel.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
amildie 4y ago
I don't think we'll see this in our lifetimes. For that scenario to be possible, general AI needs to be developed first. A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know. Dealing with ambiguos jira tickets, poorly reported bugs, non-existent requirements, missing or outdated documentation; these are the "common problems" in building software. Current AI technology isn't even close to being able to sort these types of problems today, and it won't be until a monumental breakthrough in the field is achieved. Generating art is "easy" in the sense that art can't be wrong or right, it just is. Generating the backend of a streaming platform? I'd like to live long enough to see it.
- amelius 4y ago
  > A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know. Yeah, but that part can be learned by anyone without a CS degree. Perhaps not everything in software can be automated, but I could see a team of 10 programmers be replaced by 1 person (programmer or not) skillful enough to control a bunch of AI software tools.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    A tool that 10xs programmer productivity will if anything lead to higher demand for programmers, because we're nowhere close to developing 1/10 of the total software the world demands.
    - amelius 4y ago
      Perhaps, but that would be an indirect consequence.
- fragmede 4y ago
  The backend of a streaming platform is trivially summoned by logging into Twitch. GPT3 has already demonstrated its "understanding" between a problem statement, a variable, and it's value (and if you haven't, it's worth finding the tweet/gif). Bridging the gap between the words "streaming platform backend" and an ffmpeg command line may involve a bunch more details, but the gap between the two is only going to shrink.
skunkworker 4y ago
I am personally bearish on this assumption unless a few hurdles are reached. Being a software engineer involves a lot of translation of intent from a required feature into an efficient and maintainable implementation. In a good number of cases it is more difficult to communicate what needs to be built rather than actually building the end product. The recent work with DALL-E 2 echos a similar problem, coming up with a descriptive prompt can be difficult to do and needs fine tuning to be done. Not unlike trying to communicate with a graphic designer your expected intentions and giving similar works to draw from.
samatman 4y ago
I don't think it will be like that, for two reasons. One, coming up with a correct description of a program is what computer programming actually is. Implementation is something we're always looking to do faster, so we can describe more behaviors to the computer. Two, we're nowhere near the scale of software production which would clear market demand. If everyone who writes code for a living woke up and was ten times as productive, there would be more churn than usual while the talent finds its level, but the result would be ten times as much code per year, not five times and 50% unemployment. Today I wrote a little bit of code to generate a prefix trie and write it out in a particular format, with some extra attention to getting the formatting 'nice'. This took me about three hours. It won't be long before something in the nature of Copilot could have gotten this down to, maybe, a half hour for results of the same (minimal, acceptable) quality. Wonderful! Can't wait, I'll be six times as productive at this kind of task. This might make it hard, on the margin, for some of the more junior and glue-oriented developers to find work, but I think the main result will be more software gets written, the same way using a structured programming language got people further in a day than writing in assembler did.
donkarma 4y ago
AI still can't translate lol
atleta 4y ago
I agree. Most people fail to see it, because they see all the effort they need to put into producing good results (regardless of their actual job, BTW). Programmers keep thinking their job is secure, because, after wall, we are the ones, who write the software. Even if it's a ML system. (But ML systems don't necessarily need much coding.) However, software development is probably the most thoroughly documented job, the job with the most information online how to do it right, the job with the best available training set. There is a lot of quality code (yes, bad code too), a lot of questions and answers with sample code (stackoverflow...) available. Maybe we've even already written most the software needed in the near future, it's just not available to everyone who needs it (because no one knows all the things out there and also these might be in several pieces in several repos). Now the one critical thing I think is still needed, based on how actually we create software is an agent that has reasonable memory, that can handle back references (to what it has been told earlier), i.e. one that can handle an iterative conversation instead of a static, one time prompt. This might be a big leap from where we are now or it may seem like one but AI/ML keeps surprising us for the past decade or so with these leaps. Another thing that may be needed is for it to be able to ask clarification questions (again, as a part of an iterative conversation). I'm not sure about this latter one, but this is definitely how we do the work.
antioppressor 4y ago
Oh people don't realize that all those movies/series about dystopian societies were blueprints for the elite.

Dylan16807 4y ago

> software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code People keep trying to make simplified programming environments for significantly less-trained people and they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it easier to get a result that has no crippling bugs?

numpad0 4y ago
And how is it going to increase information in the output by having AI involved, if these AIs aren’t actually thinking and pouring out of their own entropy source into outputs?
lmm 4y ago
No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software businesses from shipping it anyway?
- tablespoon 4y ago
  >> People keep trying to make simplified programming environments for significantly less-trained people and they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it easier to get a result that has no crippling bugs? Yeah. I've even worked in one of those environments for a year (not my choice). I'm of the opinion those kind of environments won't ever work. They'll either be: 1. Extremely cookie-cutter (e.g. make a clone of our "standard app" with a insignificant little tweaks). 2. Require software engineers to get anything useful out of them, and those engineers will feel like they're working with one hand tied behind their backs (or banging their heads against a wall). IMHO, one of the main skills of a software engineer is translating user requirements into technical requirements that work and understanding when they work. I don't think skill is automatable without a fairy-tale AGI. > No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software businesses from shipping it anyway? A lot? Depends on your definition of "crippling." A software engineer will gripe and say, "I don't want to use this;" something that's awkward but the people who use it can still get their work done; or the system literally incapable of performing its function?

sjducb 4y ago

I think when AI can do the full job of a programmer we'll have reached the singularity. Programmer will be the last job to go.

sbmassey 4y ago

Judging by the current state of DALL-E, the generated software will look good at first impression, but have lots of weird bugs when examined closely. So yeah, not much different to current software dev.

bearjaws 4y ago

Time for me to open up my "AI Code Refurbishing" shop and specialize in fixing all the disasters these "AI technicians" make.

substation13 4y ago

Programming requires far more breadth and precision than 2D art. I think that in the very long run programming work will be automated, but by that stage we will either be post-scarcity or reconstituted in computation substrate.

echelon 4y ago
You say that with such confidence. I'm looking for ways to hedge my reliance on my skills.
- substation13 4y ago
  I'm confident that society would be so radically different that trying to predict and prepare is a fools game.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >This time will be different. The 20th time you hear that is when you stop caring.

xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE 4y ago

Imma be honest, working as an artist who has to come up with Dall-E prompts and as a programmer who has to maintain a codebase slapped together from GPT-5 output sounds equally horrifying. I think I'll stick to my grug brain engineering.

ceeplusplus 4y ago

The problem with that theory is that writing code is easier than reading code. This is generally not the case in other professions. It is definitely not the case for an artist. You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the code the AI wrote.

tablespoon 4y ago
> The problem with that theory is that writing code is easier than reading code. This is generally not the case in other professions. It is definitely not the case for an artist. > You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the code the AI wrote. This might have been your point, but chances are the "code the AI wrote" will be an unmaintainable mess, so "fixing it" means throwing it away and re-doing it.
vbezhenar 4y ago
The question is how many developers will fix code after AI and how many developers will grow potatoes.

thrown_22 4y ago

AI has been over promising and under delivering for 50 years. There's a reason why the general models aren't being released. The second you look under the hood and start poking the unhappy paths you see that it doesn't understand anything and you're talking to something dumber than a hamster.

andybak 4y ago
There's a weird tension between people who say saying "AI is overblown" and people who say "this is the most magical thing I've seen in my lifetime". I lean towards the latter but with a healthy dose of "it's deeply weird and hard to get anything useful from". But that doesn't make it any less magical. And no - it's not "intelligent" in any human sense. But I can't relate to people who pooh-pooh it as if there's nothing exciting happening. Either they are deliberately cultivating a dismissive air, or they are deeply jaded and weary. EDIT - There's a 3rd option. People are making a rhetorical point because they perceive a need to correct an imbalance in the general mood. This is actually the most likely explanation and is often under-appreciated as motivator in public statements. I've noticed it in myself frequently.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  AI can be overblown and it can also be magical. This was true for state of the art in 2010: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ today you have a free phone app that does both. Of course it also classifies a spoon as a large breasted robin which is why you need a human in the loop. It's even truer in programming.
  - andybak 4y ago
    That xkcd actually claims the opposite: "some things that many people assume to be trivial CS problems actually require advancements in AI"
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      That's what I said. The converse is that despite the huge advance the model is still incredibly fragile and quite useless outside the niche for which it was trained for.

xwdv 4y ago

It will never come for us. You think it will, but that’s because you don’t understand software. Pick any random Jira ticket for a large software project. Could an AI understand and implement that feature into a larger project? Can it correctly deploy it without interruptions to production jobs? Will it correctly implement tests and decent code coverage? If there are regressions will it know how to go in and fix them? If there are bugs reported by users will it be able to investigate and accurately fix them? What about when multiple branches of feature development have to be merged, will it know how to do it correctly? Will it know how to write high performance software or just use shitty random algorithms? If it can’t do these things AI is basically useless. Because this is basically 90% of software development.

silvestrov 4y ago
Writing software is like writing novels: putting words together to make sentences is easy. Making the story make sense is difficult. One could think that much of art is just pretty form without sense and that is why DALL-E works.
- the_af 4y ago
  I don't think that assessment of art is accurate. Most art is not "pretty form without sense". It actually has sense and meaning more often than not, so we can debate what a particular piece "means". The difference with engineering is that art's meaning is way more subjective, and that if I "miss the point" or simply disagree with the consensus on its meaning, this doesn't make an airplane go down or a nuclear reactor to melt down.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I guess the difference is, with the art the human can immediately reject/accept and iterate. And a bad image can be crappy, it doesn't break anything. With software it might take days of testing to verify the result, and then repeat that for every iteration. Would be cheaper to build the thing! Where AI might work is in some restricted subset of software, like a web CRUD app where you say "I want an app that stores a TODO list with dates". With the constraints of it being crud, it just needs to AI the database and arrangement of fields and so on. The AI is not programming so much as it is choosing which "rails-like scaffolds" to initiate.

losteric 4y ago

"Physical" engineering fields will probably come first... think AI-generated architecture, with AI-generated structural engineering, plumbing, electrical wiring, etc... with human-guidance of the generative process, and human-review/accountability of final output. Amplification of humans, not obsolescence. In software, yeah boiler-plate and function-level code-generation... I could also see generating trivial UIs for CRUD apps, or no-code data-pipelines for small businesses... maybe even generating high-level architectures for new services... but we're far off from AI auto-generating code for enterprise applications or foundational services. The differentiation being making changes within an existing complex domain/code-base, in contrast with generating new assets from nothing.

joenot443 4y ago
Most of the math for structural engineering is already done through software, we just don't call it AI. The difficult part and valuable part of being a good structural engineer is translating requirements and dealing with clients. The actual math and engineering work is often not much more difficult than what's done taught in their undergrad, and much of it is offloaded to designers anyway. Source: My family owns one of the largest civil engineering firms in my home province.

kache_ 4y ago

programming is going to get automated with language models in <5 years however, I find that my job (SWE) is about 1% programming and 99% strategizing, designing & communicating.

trention 4y ago
Really? How much money are you willing to put on the claim "LLMs are going to produce >80% of newly written production code in 5 years"? If it's less than your yearly salary, then even you don't believe your own assertion.
- kache_ 4y ago
  For github & google, I'd put my own money on it being >80% in 5 years. Maybe not a whole year's salary though, I'm a big baller
  - trention 4y ago
    Well, you will lose but I basically don't believe your claim is anything more than hyperbolic bullshit as no one who is working as a SWE is actually spending only 1% of their time programming as per your initial comment.
    - kache_ 4y ago
      some software engineers spend most of their time designing, communicating with other teams, and managing operations. It becomes the case as you get more experienced, depending on your staff engineer path.
      - trention 4y ago
        This is a truism that every senior engineer understands. There is no way to get below 10% coding unless you move into people management/product. At this point, you are no longer a SWE (except by title, maybe).

pphysch 4y ago

AI is great for recommendation systems and art because they are fuzzy. "Good enough" results are relatively easy to achieve. There is lots of tolerance for errors, because human preferences are flexible and fuzzy themselves. Engineering is a different ballgame... If anything, all the code monkeys will simply become QA monkeys/test-engineers, because you need to be really sure that your black box algorithm is actually doing what you think it should be doing.

ipaddr 4y ago

Wouldn't millions of unemployed developers start creating software that would compete/overthrow existing software companies?

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> "This may seem far off..." After experimenting with GitHub Co-Pilot I can see that day being 50% - perhaps even just 25% - as far as it used to feel.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

amildie 4y ago

I don't think we'll see this in our lifetimes. For that scenario to be possible, general AI needs to be developed first. A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know. Dealing with ambiguos jira tickets, poorly reported bugs, non-existent requirements, missing or outdated documentation; these are the "common problems" in building software. Current AI technology isn't even close to being able to sort these types of problems today, and it won't be until a monumental breakthrough in the field is achieved. Generating art is "easy" in the sense that art can't be wrong or right, it just is. Generating the backend of a streaming platform? I'd like to live long enough to see it.

amelius 4y ago
> A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know. Yeah, but that part can be learned by anyone without a CS degree. Perhaps not everything in software can be automated, but I could see a team of 10 programmers be replaced by 1 person (programmer or not) skillful enough to control a bunch of AI software tools.
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  A tool that 10xs programmer productivity will if anything lead to higher demand for programmers, because we're nowhere close to developing 1/10 of the total software the world demands.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Perhaps, but that would be an indirect consequence.
fragmede 4y ago
The backend of a streaming platform is trivially summoned by logging into Twitch. GPT3 has already demonstrated its "understanding" between a problem statement, a variable, and it's value (and if you haven't, it's worth finding the tweet/gif). Bridging the gap between the words "streaming platform backend" and an ffmpeg command line may involve a bunch more details, but the gap between the two is only going to shrink.

skunkworker 4y ago

I am personally bearish on this assumption unless a few hurdles are reached. Being a software engineer involves a lot of translation of intent from a required feature into an efficient and maintainable implementation. In a good number of cases it is more difficult to communicate what needs to be built rather than actually building the end product. The recent work with DALL-E 2 echos a similar problem, coming up with a descriptive prompt can be difficult to do and needs fine tuning to be done. Not unlike trying to communicate with a graphic designer your expected intentions and giving similar works to draw from.

samatman 4y ago

I don't think it will be like that, for two reasons. One, coming up with a correct description of a program is what computer programming actually is. Implementation is something we're always looking to do faster, so we can describe more behaviors to the computer. Two, we're nowhere near the scale of software production which would clear market demand. If everyone who writes code for a living woke up and was ten times as productive, there would be more churn than usual while the talent finds its level, but the result would be ten times as much code per year, not five times and 50% unemployment. Today I wrote a little bit of code to generate a prefix trie and write it out in a particular format, with some extra attention to getting the formatting 'nice'. This took me about three hours. It won't be long before something in the nature of Copilot could have gotten this down to, maybe, a half hour for results of the same (minimal, acceptable) quality. Wonderful! Can't wait, I'll be six times as productive at this kind of task. This might make it hard, on the margin, for some of the more junior and glue-oriented developers to find work, but I think the main result will be more software gets written, the same way using a structured programming language got people further in a day than writing in assembler did.

donkarma 4y ago

AI still can't translate lol

atleta 4y ago

I agree. Most people fail to see it, because they see all the effort they need to put into producing good results (regardless of their actual job, BTW). Programmers keep thinking their job is secure, because, after wall, we are the ones, who write the software. Even if it's a ML system. (But ML systems don't necessarily need much coding.) However, software development is probably the most thoroughly documented job, the job with the most information online how to do it right, the job with the best available training set. There is a lot of quality code (yes, bad code too), a lot of questions and answers with sample code (stackoverflow...) available. Maybe we've even already written most the software needed in the near future, it's just not available to everyone who needs it (because no one knows all the things out there and also these might be in several pieces in several repos). Now the one critical thing I think is still needed, based on how actually we create software is an agent that has reasonable memory, that can handle back references (to what it has been told earlier), i.e. one that can handle an iterative conversation instead of a static, one time prompt. This might be a big leap from where we are now or it may seem like one but AI/ML keeps surprising us for the past decade or so with these leaps. Another thing that may be needed is for it to be able to ask clarification questions (again, as a part of an iterative conversation). I'm not sure about this latter one, but this is definitely how we do the work.

antioppressor 4y ago

Oh people don't realize that all those movies/series about dystopian societies were blueprints for the elite.