10 ms·

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon

by hu3 4y ago

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And coding is just one of the many applications where AI can replace brains. Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income? It's amazing and terrifying at the same time. Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we created ourselves.

cidergal 4y ago
There is something to say about how we will not push UBI until automation comes for our job.
fn-mote 4y ago
> For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites, and not getting what we consider quality. Now maybe you're going to see a larger and larger gap between F500 companies and the rest (surely you do already), but playing out the consequences is a long and interesting story. > coding without AI will feel as antiquated and inefficient [...]. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. Fortunately, the "punishment" by the market will just be reduced salaries. Move out of the Bay Area now. :) > And coding is just one of the many applications where AI an replace brains. And writing about those is interesting. With the development of DALL-E (etc), I would say coding isn't even the primary interesting application. (If "it's not AI", whatever... that's not the point.) Or not yet.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  Nah, I’ll leave the bay once salaries drop. Not years before.
  - sharemywin 4y ago
    I wouldn't own housing there.
    - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
      I don’t!
- golergka 4y ago
  > Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites They used to, 10 to 15 years ago. Now they just hire a SMM specialist to set up their Instagram account. Why would they bother with a website?
  - waboremo 4y ago
    Even those places that do have their own website (as opposed to just relying on Facebook Pages and Google's information sidebar), they just use Squarespace or Shopify. Shopify in particular has also been incorporating a lot of AI into their tooling as well, reducing the need to hire copywriters, translators, etc.
- tauntz 4y ago
  > My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. That might be true for you and me but imagine somebody fresh out from university - the job market for junior devs will totally collapse in the near-near future. And then what? Where do the mid-level engineers come from if there are no* junior roles? Where will the future senior level engineers come from? We're certainly living in interesting times.. *: There will be some artisanal companies who will pride themselves in having hand-written, AI-free code. These companies will be a minority and 90% of junior level software development jobs will disappear in no time.
sharemywin 4y ago
I call it Universal Pet Income. Because at that point won't we just be AI's pets? Not that I'm against it. just call it for what it is.
- RivieraKid 4y ago
  No, the AI will work for us, it's our pet.
  - mkaic 4y ago
    Why would something smarter than us be our pet?
    - RivieraKid 4y ago
      Because we will have full control over it. It will do what we ask. The AI has no motivation or personality, it's just a tool used by humans.
      - pferde 4y ago
        Maybe it's time to start differentiating between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness? Surely I can't be the first one to think of this...
        mkaic 4y ago
        I agree with the sentiment, but I also don't think such differentiation is possible, because we have no testable definition of consciousness. I genuinely look forward to the day we discover/understand the physical processes underlying our own consciousness, and how to detect/disprove it in machines, but until then... it's unfortunately unfalsifiable.
        pferde 4y ago
        Sure, but for now, we can have a crude differentiation between an AI - a tool which has to be given an objective to work towards, and an "AC" - an entity (an intentionally vague noun) which can devise its own objectives and motivations and work toward them.
RivieraKid 4y ago
> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income? Inferior to machines at almost everything? Most jobs are safe, look at the 25 most common jobs in the US - cashier, food preparation worker, stocking associate, laborer, janitor, construction worker, bookkeeper, server, medical assistant, bartender, administrative assistant, marketing specialist, police officer, electrician, mechanic, etc. In theory, if all developers are replaced, they should be able to find a different job. The problem is that the different job may have lower pay and status. There's really no need for UBI.
- waboremo 4y ago
  Do you genuinely believe machines can't handle most of those jobs with ease? The only reason why they haven't already been replaced is because humans can be exceptionally cheap. Much easier to hire somebody to sit at a desk for $10/hour doing repetitive tasks than spend millions implementing systems across the board to do what they do (for now).
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    While we have seem some huge leaps in AI, robotics is still far behind human capability. Things like food preparation are not anywhere close to being feasible right now. So perhaps in the medium future humans will be "stuck" doing only physical tasks, while AIs take over everything that can be done virtually.
    - czbond 4y ago
      There is a display at Meow Wolf (absurdist immersive art experience) which paraphrased is "Thinking is for machines, labor is for humans". May turn to be true...
      - intelVISA 4y ago
        I'll reply to this once GPT4 provides a thought for me to borrow.
airstrike 4y ago
> Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we created ourselves. Man, that is some food for thought. Beautifully put.
pastor_bob 4y ago
>We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. We've always progressed to needing fewer developers to do what we currently do. Companies like Squarespace, Shopify, AWS, etc have allowed people to do more with less. Long gone are the days an artist would hire a developer to build them a website they could host a portfolio on. But growth has filled in the voids with more ambitious work. It's daunting, but you can also look at this from the opposite perspective. Why work for someone on a 5 person team, when you can try and run the same business with 1 person (i.e. you). The people who should be afraid are actually those that run companies like Meta and Twitter. Better developer productivity means competitors can chomp at their heels with much smaller teams.
nivenkos 4y ago
UBI is a half-measure, we need democratic, communal control of industry.
- czbond 4y ago
  Treasury just needs to "print those dollas" and make Musk even more so richest person in the world. I'm being serious. Retaining the profits and placing them back as UBI could work.... although if we do that, the politicians will just find a tax or another project that needs the money before giving it to people.
- what-no-tests 4y ago
  Agreed - we don't control our destiny as a people by buying what they're selling with free money we get as a door prize for existing.
- skybrian 4y ago
  We do have that for many government projects and they often don’t go well, so I’m not sure what improvements you’re expecting?
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  >we need democratic, communal control of industry That is called socialism. I don't mind socialism and state owned enterprises as long as the force of market competition is still at play. That is the reason state owned enterprises don't suck in China. They have multiple SOEs within the same fields like car manufacturing and telecommunication competing against each other.
  - pleb_nz 4y ago
    The state doesn't own SOE in pure socialism, society and the workers do. This is the idea behind socialism and I don't think anywhere on the planet practises true socialism and instead it's morphed or combined where it is said to be used.
agentultra 4y ago
It feels absurd. A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate writing tests! Yay! Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense and specify the correct properties? Can Chat-GPT discover properties and prove theorems? We used to do this in code review where humans could explain their reasoning. Now we have Chat-GPT4 which will give you a plausible-sounding answer that is completely wrong and makes no sense. We have to read every line it generates and make sure it contains no errors, is properly specified, makes sense, etc... something we're extremely ill-equipped to do. The problem of programming, for me, hasn't been about how much code I write or how quickly I write it. It has always been about solving the right problems with elegant solutions. The code itself is an artifact of the real work. CoPilot just doesn't really help here. It doesn't understand specifications and doesn't do any reasoning. It can't take a specification, generate a program, discover new abstractions that make the solution more elegant, and explain its reasoning. It can generate a heck of a lot of code though! Wow! Is it the right code? Maybe! But that's what we get with humans, right? No! Humans can explain their reasoning.
- deeviant 4y ago
  Based on your statement, I feel you haven't used GPT based code much. The code it generates is generally beautifully organized and commented. Sure, it can be flat out wrong, but it is always eminently readable. Self-documentating code with clean comments, far above the standard I see on average human code. That's about as good as "explaining it's reasoning" as you get. Also, you can literally ask chatGPT to explain the code, line by the line, and it will. So there's that. Is it ready now? Certainly not if it will be expected to the do the entire job of a SWE. But it is already extremely useful, especially to less experienced devs as both a production for specific tasks and as learning tool. And it will only get better.
- waboremo 4y ago
  I'm not sure this works out in the long run. We're currently using extremely generalized tools here, it's difficult for it to establish any "reasoning" when it does not have a "history" to rely on so to speak. Which is where our reasoning stems from, history. We opt for Solution B because we previously tested Solution A in another similar project. I just don't see this as being a barrier for too long. Not when more companies opt into training data internally.
soiler 4y ago
> We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. When my team gets crunched, it's not usually because we can't write the code fast enough. It's because of product requirements (changing, needing to be fleshed out, being unrealistic, being understood properly by QA, being adapted to the realities of reasonable code, not existing, etc.). On top of that, needing fewer workers to do X work !== getting X work done cheaper. Quite often, it means getting 2X, 3X, 10X work done. As an overall trend, modern society has increased worker productivity dramatically over the last few decades, yet many work as many or more hours than they used to. We could get the same results with fewer workers, or we could make them work more. We know what 99% of CEOs will choose. Of course, maybe it will reduce developer jobs. I'm not ruling that out entirely. But when (not if) we create an alien intelligence that can wipe out our industry, we may have bigger concerns than steady employment.
goldfeld 4y ago
Almost a decade ago I jumped ship as a programmer for several reasons, and since '18 I am definitely not coding at all. Friends and family have wondered much at my path and letting go of what has become the one promised career for ever larger parts of the population, and making my inroads into the arts and literature, finally settling a bit with the profession of writing on many capacities. Now I look back more gadly than before, as I hadn't really imagined that coders would be on the very frontline of impacted jobs. I think the 10x will become a sad concrete thing, with salaries crunching and a team lead expected to take up the work of teams being fired, resorting to AI minions. It's a crazy tables have turned situation. So that really I'm writing with and about AI[0] to get the best of my technical and literary backgrounds, and to reach good audiences. Meanwhile writing is safer because contrary to code, a personality and a personal life will ever be valued in flesh and blood writers. And how could an AI, ever write love poems with a soul if it has not opportunities for falling desperately in love, suffering, changing wholesale because of an experience like that? It could emulate it. But readers want to read real sufferers, mortals who get old and lose their looks and so forth, not little gods of sillicon. [0]: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-review-1 https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-revie...
- causi 4y ago
  I think the 10x will become a sad concrete things, with salaries crunching and a team lead expected to take up the work of teams being fired, resorting to AI minions. It's a crazy tables have turned situation. I don't really see that it's sad. Imagine truly democratized programming. Not like how the refrigerator did the ice man, but in how Youtube and smartphone cameras did video production. A rising tide that lifts all boats and can give absolutely anyone a taste of what they could achieve with a little effort.
- naillo 4y ago
  HNs version of ads
  - goldfeld 4y ago
    Point taken, though I have long thought the ads were officially the hiring and also the Launch HNs that are now popping left and right from YC W23, and every single one naturally abou ML.
Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
People said the same thing about Excel in the 80s and 90s. There are more accountants now than then. There might be more programmers out of this developments than before. It just will lower the barrier of entry, and increase productivity. Like most tools
- devrob 4y ago
  This would be the contrarian perspective, and it's an interesting thought to consider. If memory serves, I think Marc A points out in an old Youtube conference video how most new technologies follow the Promethean myth in their relationship to society. Funny enough your observation of > "There are more accountants now than then." could be extrapolated from in two ways The optimistic perspective might suppose technological development gives rise to new marketplace adaptations and creation of new and tangential jobs. For example, Facebook / Social Networks / Search creating new roles like: Influencers, Social Media Managers, Search Engine Optimization, et cetera. For the pessimist perspective, I think you could suppose the "end state" of all technological progress in human societies is, eventually, an oligopoly of two industries: bureaucracy (legal) and politics (marketing).
- pleb_nz 4y ago
  Companies are there to make money. If the same job currently dinner by 5 people can now be done by 3, and it means more profit for shareholders, what do you think shareholder will want? While profit is the main driver, it'll mean smaller teams Not today, not with current tech, maybe in the near future though
  - istjohn 4y ago
    But just like building more roads induces more demand by making driving more attractive, this will lower the cost of custom software development and create new demand. Perhaps one day soon it will be affordable for every company of every size to have a fully custom ERP solution instead of shoehorning their business processes into Salesforce or the like. Perhaps every family will have a custom app managing their household's smart home appliances, childrens' allowances, autonomous vehicles, home maintenance, bill payment, child homework tracking, etc. in an integrated system.
nemo44x 4y ago
> We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. I don't think that's right. Farms may have less manual labor but there's man, many times more people building farming tools, software, tech, etc. What will happen is you will be able to do more with your time. We are limited by how many people we can actually hire and the output of those people. Now each person can output more and more. So much that we want to build but we don't is because we are limited by output. We need to prioritize certain things for everything has an opportunity cost. Now we will be able to burn down more things more quickly. Also the math. Imagine developers just became about 30% more efficient. I want MORE of them now as my money is better spent! If my competitor downsizes to remain at their current capacity then I will crush them because I want 30% MORE developers that are coding 30% more efficiently allowing me to release 40% more things for the same money! I crush my competition then and they know this so they have to keep up as it's an arms race.
gjulianm 4y ago
Honestly, this just seems like another tool. An amazing one, yes, but a tool nevertheless. > Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. The same way coding without Internet feels antiquated, or coding without autocomplete, or coding without fast compilation times... If anything, progression of tools has shown several things: - That the more tools we have, the faster we can work and iterate, the more value we can deliver in less time. - That IT work doesn't ever end. Tons of IT jobs exist only to support IT itself. The arrival of AWS made sysadmins "obsolete" but on the other hand created the need for SRE and DevOps engineers. - The existence of tools that let "laypeople" do IT work do not really delete those jobs. Tons of "nocode" tools exist so that people can build their own websites, applications, etc. But designers, coders still exist. - People still stay behind. Tons of companies still run on a crappy NFS that's hosted in the IT guy closet. Others don't have a webpage and use an @hotmail.com address for email (if they even have email!). The market punishes, yeah, but not that hard.
- CalinR2 4y ago
  Screenshooting both comments for a guaranteed agedlikemilk
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    Thank you for your insightful comment.
- nodogoto 4y ago
  [dead]
bwanab 4y ago
Historically, this response doesn't make a lot of sense. Yes, farm labor became redundant, but it became redundant because of machines that had to be built, maintained and repaired. People who would have been on the farm their whole lives moved to the city and got jobs that paid well and lived possibly better lives as a result.
nbar1 4y ago
> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income? Try mass culling
globular-toast 4y ago
Good. I'd rather not have to work forever. The whole point of this job is that I'm lazy. I don't want to do any work so I make machines do it for me. Why are people so attached to having to work?
- hatefulmoron 4y ago
  I'm in my 20s, I'm a bit sad to think of the possibility that I've missed the boat of human ingenuity. It's not like if AI puts me out of work I'll be free to create works of art -- GPT-12 will do that much better than me, too. Maybe this sounds naive to you, but if I'm not good for anything, what am I supposed to be doing? How should I see myself?
- eggsmediumrare 4y ago
  I'm not attached to having to work, I'm attached to paying my mortgage and buying groceries.
visarga 4y ago
> We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. There will be more developing than ever, but humans will sit on a different place in the stack. We'll be more like team managers. Stable Diffusion can make pretty pictures by itself, but only when a human directs it then it can have value.
- pleb_nz 4y ago
  The point is you'll need less humans to do the same work. Possible far less, maybe it'll be a smaller ratio to start with but eventually that ratio will grow. Most organizations are there to make profit for shareholders, if more profit can be obtained through less hires while still meeting money making goals the you can bet your bottom dollar they will hire less people where possible. People early in their careers should be ready for this as one day there may be far less times available to them in this field.
  - wilsonnb3 4y ago
    Literally every programming advancement from punch cards to now has made you need less people to do the same amount of work but we have more programmers working today than ever before. Your outlook sounds plausible in a vacuum but doesn’t match reality.
    - pleb_nz 4y ago
      Happy if it is it different for sure. And It's not quite there yet, but if it keeps going the way it is this will be the first time a tool will have significant impact and a single person can do the work of 5 in a lot of industries and domains, not just software. This might be a bigger evolution in the coming iterations and might be the biggest thing since electricity and the internet. Pretty exciting, but I would also have options or be deep in the thick of it if I were younger.
brachika 4y ago
I remember reading Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity is Near' (a book with bold predictions about human development and future) and thinking this guy is nuts, we are decades if not centuries away from these predictions. Well, now I don't feel so comfortable.
- substation13 4y ago
  The book was way over optimistic but many of his predictions are coming true, a few decades late. I might have to revisit it!
mrinterweb 4y ago
I use copilot, and I feel that it is useful about 40% of the time. Most of the time the suggestions are not what I'm going for, sometime the suggestions are close or help me think through the solution easier, and occasionally spot on and I can tab complete the code. I've noticed that the suggestion quality/usefulness varies considerably between projects and programming languages. For a self-contained bash script, it is incredibly useful. For a rails application, less so.
- mrinterweb 4y ago
  Still most of the time, the suggestions are not helpful, and it takes time to look at the suggestion and dismiss it. So I'm usually torn between is this useful or distracting. Curiosity keeps it around, but I keep getting closer to dropping it as the novelty wears.
idkwhoiam 4y ago
Translating ideas into code has never been the bottle neck in software development. Well, not in web dev anyways. Developers spend very little time writing code compared to reading. You still need all your expertise to guide copilot & evaluate its suggestions. I see copilot as just another productivity tool. Combined with ChatGPT it may save a few roundtrips to Stack Overflow too.
danwee 4y ago
I have the opposite feeling by watching their mini video demos. All I see is: engineers blindly commiting and pushing what copilots spits at them. Not only that, also the PRs descriptions/comments will all be one TAB+enter away. That means many things will go wrong and more engineering time will be spent reviewing nice-looking code good that only does what it's supposed to do in 80% of the cases. Meaning, it's gonna be hard to debug those 20% remaining cases. Besides, coding is probably the least of my problems. Dealing with people is harder. AI can help there as well, but ultimately people like to interact with people (see the whole trend about RTO)... we cannot stand each other faces via Zoom => we are not gonna stand talking to an AI.
snickerbockers 4y ago
>Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. I'm extremely skeptical about this happening. I haven't seen any evidence that GPT is capable of creating something new or even thinking logically. What's going to happen if you ask it to create something that isn't like anything in its training set? My experience is that GPT just makes shit up that looks plausible at a glance when it doesn't have an answer instead of just admitting that it doesn't know; this is obviously very dangerous when it's supposed to be writing computer programs. That OpenAI hasn't made any progress towards fixing this makes me wonder if it's even possible for the GPT to understand that sometimes it doesn't understand. At the very least it must be a non-trivial problem.
- ctoth 4y ago
  Counterpoint: how often do you as a developer create something totally novel that has never been built before?
  - snickerbockers 4y ago
    I have to make new things pretty often. If you step outside of the high-level cloud/webdev stuff that most people seem to be obsessed with these days, there are a lot of non-trivial problems being solved in lower-level software such as device drivers, kernels, and compilers. EDIT: i misinterpreted what you were saying, initially i thought you were asking how i make new things, not how often i make new things. my original reply is below. weelll, i think about it real hard and do research? Not sure what your point is, but I definitely don't solve these problems by trying to find somebody else's solution to copy, or just dumping a bunch of C code that doesn't do anything and calling it a day like GPT would.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - runald 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by novel, but every development project will always have requirements that are unique to solve their own respective business/domain problems. These unique, specialized requirements are further compounded by cultural and personal quirks that human stakeholders demand, making developments project essentially "novel". Current language models fail even with simple minor variations on existing problems that it hasn't seen before, so until then, current AI's won't be replacing any humans when it comes to actual problem solving. Also, it was recently proven by experts that aliens are living on the earth's core, they breed spherical cows and flying pigs.
SergeAx 4y ago
We already had several tectonic shifts in software engineering in the last ~50 years, and there was never a consequential redice if engineering workforce, only otherwise.
layer8 4y ago
Maybe you need to get yourself into an application domain with more bespoke protocols and tooling, and domain-specific expertise, that aren’t public on the internet and that AI therefore doesn’t have much of an idea of. At least at this point, AI is only of little help in my daily work, unfortunately, because I’d have to first explain it orders of magnitude more context than fits into its token buffer.
- kiviuq 4y ago
  Porn? (scnr)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
ChancyChance 4y ago
Here's a simple way to tell if your expertise is at risk: - If you can get more done by working more hours, your job is at risk. When I was a programmer for most of past life, this was this case. Now I've got multiple decades under my belt and am a h/w and system architect. I can't get more done by grinding. My job depends on sharing information with other people, that have their own schedules, resource dependencies, supply chains, and pricing, and arriving at best fit solutions to move complex projects forward. I think if you want to protect yourself from being replaced by AI, you need to be part of a larger network where the challenges are more about synthesizing information than grinding. My $0.02.
lugu 4y ago
I feel you, in the same time we have been through so many changes. Some people still prefer Vim (at least i do) over full fledge IDE with refactoring helpers. Think of stack overflow, not a habit for everyone. Using macros/snippet to generate code, not that popular. Iterative development in a debugger (think Smalltalk), didn't make printf obsolete. The bottom line is: all software is legacy. Deleting code is the preferred way to debug. Finding the correct abstraction or most simple way to get what you need takes more than the ability to dump code into a computer. Free software didn't ruin the profession, quite the opposite.
randomdata 4y ago
> Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. Back of the napkin suggests we have approximately the same amount of manual labor in farms today. The difference is that the same amount of labor today is able to feed a much larger population. This may simply mean much more software written, not fewer developers.
ra1231963 4y ago
At one time, people programmed without google or search engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read through them and then type out what they saw in the book. Today, that sounds absurd. Then came stack overflow and google. We search, pray we get a good result or someone else took the time to ask the question, then read (and sometimes copy+paste). Then AI assistants. I'm not exactly sure what's next, but I do think coding without some type of AI assistant will be extremely antiquated very soon. I already use it all the time. I never want to go back. The next generation will look at finding answers via SO, google, and random forums just as we look at people use used books -- as an absurdly inefficient way to do a job
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  > At one time, people programmed without google or search engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read through them and then type out what they saw in the book. Today, that sounds absurd. Even if it's absurd I still like to buy physical books. The information is better structured and I like holding a book and turning pages.
randomdata 4y ago
> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income? Why would the machines want to pay us once we can no longer provide them value? Maybe they'll keep a few of us as pets and for sport, but the rest will be sent to the human equivalent of Bovine University.
prewett 4y ago
I think you're doing that thing that makes software developers' estimates chronically low: we find a pathway to the solution and think, great, that's basically 80% done, and we don't think about everything else. Let's take a login screen for iPads, should be easy, right? ---- MagicAI, write me a login screen for iPads. The project should be configured to be iPad only. I want a logo in the center and under it the login and password entry textboxes. The password entry should not be in plaintext. Put a login button underneath the password entry. Actually, the logo + textboxes + login button should be centered as a group. The logo should be centered horizontally within the group as well. Make the login button right-aligned. The login button should be right aligned within the group, but the text of the button should be centered within the button. Put "Username" and "Password" labels to the left of the appriopriate text fields Make sure that the labels are the same width, so that the left edges of the text fields are aligned. Put a half em margin in-between the labels and text fields. Actually, make the vertical margin between elements in the group a half em, too. By "margin" previously, I meant "spacing", my mistake. Please fix. Does the German translation of "username" or "password" cause the text field to be too short, especially on an iPad Mini in portrait mode? Fix the alignment to work correctly in both portrait and landscape mode. The group should have a 10% left and right margin in both modes. The keypad enter button should say "Login" when entering text for the password field, but should remain "Done" for the username field. Great, now add a waiting indicator while waiting for verification from the server. Actually, put the indicator to the right of the login button, but do not make it part of the group for alignment purposes; it should be in the margin. And turn the indicator off if the server times out. Oh, add some error text for the error. I said error text, not error dialog. Never give me a disruptive dialog if there is a way to obviously display the error text. Make this a permanent setting on my account. Also, make this a permanent setting on all my colleagues' accounts, and especially the accounts of the low-cost outsourcing companies that make the apps I use. File bug report to MagicAI HQ that there is no way to make some directions permanent. Include in the report that there should be a way to look at the set of permanent instructions, and automatic reporting if new instructions contradict old instructions. Disable the login button if there is no text in the username or password field, or if the password is too short. Whoah, make sure that the text field scrolls so that it is visible above the keyboard, especially on an iPad mini in landscape mode. It should scroll back down to its original position when the keyboard disappears. ---- I guess I'm not seeing how this is too much different from what I actually did in creating the login page in the first place. That's even without the dialogue where you try to figure out why the alignment isn't doing what you told it. You might also want to keep your instructions in a text file some place, in case you need to change them and regenerate the code. Maybe there should be a preprocessor of sorts, so that you can add comments to the file explaining your reasoning for certain instructions, or to not include some instructions on certain environments. You might also want some way to refer to a set of previous instructions, so you could say "do these things what we did over here". We could call this a "function" since "procedure" sounds too much like ancient Pascal, and math is cool.
sumitkumar 4y ago
Any new technology will create new work of its own. AI will automate the repeated loops in the previous workflows and free up workforce but create much more new work than it will be automating.

by hu3 4y ago

cidergal 4y ago

There is something to say about how we will not push UBI until automation comes for our job.

fn-mote 4y ago

> For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites, and not getting what we consider quality. Now maybe you're going to see a larger and larger gap between F500 companies and the rest (surely you do already), but playing out the consequences is a long and interesting story. > coding without AI will feel as antiquated and inefficient [...]. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. Fortunately, the "punishment" by the market will just be reduced salaries. Move out of the Bay Area now. :) > And coding is just one of the many applications where AI an replace brains. And writing about those is interesting. With the development of DALL-E (etc), I would say coding isn't even the primary interesting application. (If "it's not AI", whatever... that's not the point.) Or not yet.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Nah, I’ll leave the bay once salaries drop. Not years before.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  I wouldn't own housing there.
  - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
    I don’t!
golergka 4y ago
> Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites They used to, 10 to 15 years ago. Now they just hire a SMM specialist to set up their Instagram account. Why would they bother with a website?
- waboremo 4y ago
  Even those places that do have their own website (as opposed to just relying on Facebook Pages and Google's information sidebar), they just use Squarespace or Shopify. Shopify in particular has also been incorporating a lot of AI into their tooling as well, reducing the need to hire copywriters, translators, etc.
tauntz 4y ago
> My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. That might be true for you and me but imagine somebody fresh out from university - the job market for junior devs will totally collapse in the near-near future. And then what? Where do the mid-level engineers come from if there are no* junior roles? Where will the future senior level engineers come from? We're certainly living in interesting times.. *: There will be some artisanal companies who will pride themselves in having hand-written, AI-free code. These companies will be a minority and 90% of junior level software development jobs will disappear in no time.

sharemywin 4y ago

I call it Universal Pet Income. Because at that point won't we just be AI's pets? Not that I'm against it. just call it for what it is.

RivieraKid 4y ago
No, the AI will work for us, it's our pet.
- mkaic 4y ago
  Why would something smarter than us be our pet?
  - RivieraKid 4y ago
    Because we will have full control over it. It will do what we ask. The AI has no motivation or personality, it's just a tool used by humans.
    - pferde 4y ago
      Maybe it's time to start differentiating between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness? Surely I can't be the first one to think of this...
      - mkaic 4y ago
        I agree with the sentiment, but I also don't think such differentiation is possible, because we have no testable definition of consciousness. I genuinely look forward to the day we discover/understand the physical processes underlying our own consciousness, and how to detect/disprove it in machines, but until then... it's unfortunately unfalsifiable.
        pferde 4y ago
        Sure, but for now, we can have a crude differentiation between an AI - a tool which has to be given an objective to work towards, and an "AC" - an entity (an intentionally vague noun) which can devise its own objectives and motivations and work toward them.

RivieraKid 4y ago

> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income? Inferior to machines at almost everything? Most jobs are safe, look at the 25 most common jobs in the US - cashier, food preparation worker, stocking associate, laborer, janitor, construction worker, bookkeeper, server, medical assistant, bartender, administrative assistant, marketing specialist, police officer, electrician, mechanic, etc. In theory, if all developers are replaced, they should be able to find a different job. The problem is that the different job may have lower pay and status. There's really no need for UBI.

waboremo 4y ago
Do you genuinely believe machines can't handle most of those jobs with ease? The only reason why they haven't already been replaced is because humans can be exceptionally cheap. Much easier to hire somebody to sit at a desk for $10/hour doing repetitive tasks than spend millions implementing systems across the board to do what they do (for now).
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  While we have seem some huge leaps in AI, robotics is still far behind human capability. Things like food preparation are not anywhere close to being feasible right now. So perhaps in the medium future humans will be "stuck" doing only physical tasks, while AIs take over everything that can be done virtually.
  - czbond 4y ago
    There is a display at Meow Wolf (absurdist immersive art experience) which paraphrased is "Thinking is for machines, labor is for humans". May turn to be true...
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      I'll reply to this once GPT4 provides a thought for me to borrow.

airstrike 4y ago

> Perhaps our first contact with an alien will be with one we created ourselves. Man, that is some food for thought. Beautifully put.

pastor_bob 4y ago

>We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. We've always progressed to needing fewer developers to do what we currently do. Companies like Squarespace, Shopify, AWS, etc have allowed people to do more with less. Long gone are the days an artist would hire a developer to build them a website they could host a portfolio on. But growth has filled in the voids with more ambitious work. It's daunting, but you can also look at this from the opposite perspective. Why work for someone on a 5 person team, when you can try and run the same business with 1 person (i.e. you). The people who should be afraid are actually those that run companies like Meta and Twitter. Better developer productivity means competitors can chomp at their heels with much smaller teams.

nivenkos 4y ago

UBI is a half-measure, we need democratic, communal control of industry.

czbond 4y ago
Treasury just needs to "print those dollas" and make Musk even more so richest person in the world. I'm being serious. Retaining the profits and placing them back as UBI could work.... although if we do that, the politicians will just find a tax or another project that needs the money before giving it to people.
what-no-tests 4y ago
Agreed - we don't control our destiny as a people by buying what they're selling with free money we get as a door prize for existing.
skybrian 4y ago
We do have that for many government projects and they often don’t go well, so I’m not sure what improvements you’re expecting?
0xDEF 4y ago
>we need democratic, communal control of industry That is called socialism. I don't mind socialism and state owned enterprises as long as the force of market competition is still at play. That is the reason state owned enterprises don't suck in China. They have multiple SOEs within the same fields like car manufacturing and telecommunication competing against each other.
- pleb_nz 4y ago
  The state doesn't own SOE in pure socialism, society and the workers do. This is the idea behind socialism and I don't think anywhere on the planet practises true socialism and instead it's morphed or combined where it is said to be used.

agentultra 4y ago

It feels absurd. A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate writing tests! Yay! Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense and specify the correct properties? Can Chat-GPT discover properties and prove theorems? We used to do this in code review where humans could explain their reasoning. Now we have Chat-GPT4 which will give you a plausible-sounding answer that is completely wrong and makes no sense. We have to read every line it generates and make sure it contains no errors, is properly specified, makes sense, etc... something we're extremely ill-equipped to do. The problem of programming, for me, hasn't been about how much code I write or how quickly I write it. It has always been about solving the right problems with elegant solutions. The code itself is an artifact of the real work. CoPilot just doesn't really help here. It doesn't understand specifications and doesn't do any reasoning. It can't take a specification, generate a program, discover new abstractions that make the solution more elegant, and explain its reasoning. It can generate a heck of a lot of code though! Wow! Is it the right code? Maybe! But that's what we get with humans, right? No! Humans can explain their reasoning.

deeviant 4y ago
Based on your statement, I feel you haven't used GPT based code much. The code it generates is generally beautifully organized and commented. Sure, it can be flat out wrong, but it is always eminently readable. Self-documentating code with clean comments, far above the standard I see on average human code. That's about as good as "explaining it's reasoning" as you get. Also, you can literally ask chatGPT to explain the code, line by the line, and it will. So there's that. Is it ready now? Certainly not if it will be expected to the do the entire job of a SWE. But it is already extremely useful, especially to less experienced devs as both a production for specific tasks and as learning tool. And it will only get better.
waboremo 4y ago
I'm not sure this works out in the long run. We're currently using extremely generalized tools here, it's difficult for it to establish any "reasoning" when it does not have a "history" to rely on so to speak. Which is where our reasoning stems from, history. We opt for Solution B because we previously tested Solution A in another similar project. I just don't see this as being a barrier for too long. Not when more companies opt into training data internally.

soiler 4y ago

> We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. When my team gets crunched, it's not usually because we can't write the code fast enough. It's because of product requirements (changing, needing to be fleshed out, being unrealistic, being understood properly by QA, being adapted to the realities of reasonable code, not existing, etc.). On top of that, needing fewer workers to do X work !== getting X work done cheaper. Quite often, it means getting 2X, 3X, 10X work done. As an overall trend, modern society has increased worker productivity dramatically over the last few decades, yet many work as many or more hours than they used to. We could get the same results with fewer workers, or we could make them work more. We know what 99% of CEOs will choose. Of course, maybe it will reduce developer jobs. I'm not ruling that out entirely. But when (not if) we create an alien intelligence that can wipe out our industry, we may have bigger concerns than steady employment.

goldfeld 4y ago

Almost a decade ago I jumped ship as a programmer for several reasons, and since '18 I am definitely not coding at all. Friends and family have wondered much at my path and letting go of what has become the one promised career for ever larger parts of the population, and making my inroads into the arts and literature, finally settling a bit with the profession of writing on many capacities. Now I look back more gadly than before, as I hadn't really imagined that coders would be on the very frontline of impacted jobs. I think the 10x will become a sad concrete thing, with salaries crunching and a team lead expected to take up the work of teams being fired, resorting to AI minions. It's a crazy tables have turned situation. So that really I'm writing with and about AI[0] to get the best of my technical and literary backgrounds, and to reach good audiences. Meanwhile writing is safer because contrary to code, a personality and a personal life will ever be valued in flesh and blood writers. And how could an AI, ever write love poems with a soul if it has not opportunities for falling desperately in love, suffering, changing wholesale because of an experience like that? It could emulate it. But readers want to read real sufferers, mortals who get old and lose their looks and so forth, not little gods of sillicon. [0]: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-review-1 https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-revie...

causi 4y ago
I think the 10x will become a sad concrete things, with salaries crunching and a team lead expected to take up the work of teams being fired, resorting to AI minions. It's a crazy tables have turned situation. I don't really see that it's sad. Imagine truly democratized programming. Not like how the refrigerator did the ice man, but in how Youtube and smartphone cameras did video production. A rising tide that lifts all boats and can give absolutely anyone a taste of what they could achieve with a little effort.
naillo 4y ago
HNs version of ads
- goldfeld 4y ago
  Point taken, though I have long thought the ads were officially the hiring and also the Launch HNs that are now popping left and right from YC W23, and every single one naturally abou ML.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago

People said the same thing about Excel in the 80s and 90s. There are more accountants now than then. There might be more programmers out of this developments than before. It just will lower the barrier of entry, and increase productivity. Like most tools

devrob 4y ago
This would be the contrarian perspective, and it's an interesting thought to consider. If memory serves, I think Marc A points out in an old Youtube conference video how most new technologies follow the Promethean myth in their relationship to society. Funny enough your observation of > "There are more accountants now than then." could be extrapolated from in two ways The optimistic perspective might suppose technological development gives rise to new marketplace adaptations and creation of new and tangential jobs. For example, Facebook / Social Networks / Search creating new roles like: Influencers, Social Media Managers, Search Engine Optimization, et cetera. For the pessimist perspective, I think you could suppose the "end state" of all technological progress in human societies is, eventually, an oligopoly of two industries: bureaucracy (legal) and politics (marketing).
pleb_nz 4y ago
Companies are there to make money. If the same job currently dinner by 5 people can now be done by 3, and it means more profit for shareholders, what do you think shareholder will want? While profit is the main driver, it'll mean smaller teams Not today, not with current tech, maybe in the near future though
- istjohn 4y ago
  But just like building more roads induces more demand by making driving more attractive, this will lower the cost of custom software development and create new demand. Perhaps one day soon it will be affordable for every company of every size to have a fully custom ERP solution instead of shoehorning their business processes into Salesforce or the like. Perhaps every family will have a custom app managing their household's smart home appliances, childrens' allowances, autonomous vehicles, home maintenance, bill payment, child homework tracking, etc. in an integrated system.

nemo44x 4y ago

> We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. I don't think that's right. Farms may have less manual labor but there's man, many times more people building farming tools, software, tech, etc. What will happen is you will be able to do more with your time. We are limited by how many people we can actually hire and the output of those people. Now each person can output more and more. So much that we want to build but we don't is because we are limited by output. We need to prioritize certain things for everything has an opportunity cost. Now we will be able to burn down more things more quickly. Also the math. Imagine developers just became about 30% more efficient. I want MORE of them now as my money is better spent! If my competitor downsizes to remain at their current capacity then I will crush them because I want 30% MORE developers that are coding 30% more efficiently allowing me to release 40% more things for the same money! I crush my competition then and they know this so they have to keep up as it's an arms race.

gjulianm 4y ago

Honestly, this just seems like another tool. An amazing one, yes, but a tool nevertheless. > Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. The same way coding without Internet feels antiquated, or coding without autocomplete, or coding without fast compilation times... If anything, progression of tools has shown several things: - That the more tools we have, the faster we can work and iterate, the more value we can deliver in less time. - That IT work doesn't ever end. Tons of IT jobs exist only to support IT itself. The arrival of AWS made sysadmins "obsolete" but on the other hand created the need for SRE and DevOps engineers. - The existence of tools that let "laypeople" do IT work do not really delete those jobs. Tons of "nocode" tools exist so that people can build their own websites, applications, etc. But designers, coders still exist. - People still stay behind. Tons of companies still run on a crappy NFS that's hosted in the IT guy closet. Others don't have a webpage and use an @hotmail.com address for email (if they even have email!). The market punishes, yeah, but not that hard.

CalinR2 4y ago
Screenshooting both comments for a guaranteed agedlikemilk
- gjulianm 4y ago
  Thank you for your insightful comment.
nodogoto 4y ago
[dead]

bwanab 4y ago

Historically, this response doesn't make a lot of sense. Yes, farm labor became redundant, but it became redundant because of machines that had to be built, maintained and repaired. People who would have been on the farm their whole lives moved to the city and got jobs that paid well and lived possibly better lives as a result.

nbar1 4y ago

> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income? Try mass culling

globular-toast 4y ago

Good. I'd rather not have to work forever. The whole point of this job is that I'm lazy. I don't want to do any work so I make machines do it for me. Why are people so attached to having to work?

hatefulmoron 4y ago
I'm in my 20s, I'm a bit sad to think of the possibility that I've missed the boat of human ingenuity. It's not like if AI puts me out of work I'll be free to create works of art -- GPT-12 will do that much better than me, too. Maybe this sounds naive to you, but if I'm not good for anything, what am I supposed to be doing? How should I see myself?
eggsmediumrare 4y ago
I'm not attached to having to work, I'm attached to paying my mortgage and buying groceries.

visarga 4y ago

> We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. There will be more developing than ever, but humans will sit on a different place in the stack. We'll be more like team managers. Stable Diffusion can make pretty pictures by itself, but only when a human directs it then it can have value.

pleb_nz 4y ago
The point is you'll need less humans to do the same work. Possible far less, maybe it'll be a smaller ratio to start with but eventually that ratio will grow. Most organizations are there to make profit for shareholders, if more profit can be obtained through less hires while still meeting money making goals the you can bet your bottom dollar they will hire less people where possible. People early in their careers should be ready for this as one day there may be far less times available to them in this field.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  Literally every programming advancement from punch cards to now has made you need less people to do the same amount of work but we have more programmers working today than ever before. Your outlook sounds plausible in a vacuum but doesn’t match reality.
  - pleb_nz 4y ago
    Happy if it is it different for sure. And It's not quite there yet, but if it keeps going the way it is this will be the first time a tool will have significant impact and a single person can do the work of 5 in a lot of industries and domains, not just software. This might be a bigger evolution in the coming iterations and might be the biggest thing since electricity and the internet. Pretty exciting, but I would also have options or be deep in the thick of it if I were younger.

brachika 4y ago

I remember reading Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity is Near' (a book with bold predictions about human development and future) and thinking this guy is nuts, we are decades if not centuries away from these predictions. Well, now I don't feel so comfortable.

substation13 4y ago
The book was way over optimistic but many of his predictions are coming true, a few decades late. I might have to revisit it!

mrinterweb 4y ago

I use copilot, and I feel that it is useful about 40% of the time. Most of the time the suggestions are not what I'm going for, sometime the suggestions are close or help me think through the solution easier, and occasionally spot on and I can tab complete the code. I've noticed that the suggestion quality/usefulness varies considerably between projects and programming languages. For a self-contained bash script, it is incredibly useful. For a rails application, less so.

mrinterweb 4y ago
Still most of the time, the suggestions are not helpful, and it takes time to look at the suggestion and dismiss it. So I'm usually torn between is this useful or distracting. Curiosity keeps it around, but I keep getting closer to dropping it as the novelty wears.

idkwhoiam 4y ago

Translating ideas into code has never been the bottle neck in software development. Well, not in web dev anyways. Developers spend very little time writing code compared to reading. You still need all your expertise to guide copilot & evaluate its suggestions. I see copilot as just another productivity tool. Combined with ChatGPT it may save a few roundtrips to Stack Overflow too.

danwee 4y ago

I have the opposite feeling by watching their mini video demos. All I see is: engineers blindly commiting and pushing what copilots spits at them. Not only that, also the PRs descriptions/comments will all be one TAB+enter away. That means many things will go wrong and more engineering time will be spent reviewing nice-looking code good that only does what it's supposed to do in 80% of the cases. Meaning, it's gonna be hard to debug those 20% remaining cases. Besides, coding is probably the least of my problems. Dealing with people is harder. AI can help there as well, but ultimately people like to interact with people (see the whole trend about RTO)... we cannot stand each other faces via Zoom => we are not gonna stand talking to an AI.

snickerbockers 4y ago

>Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. I'm extremely skeptical about this happening. I haven't seen any evidence that GPT is capable of creating something new or even thinking logically. What's going to happen if you ask it to create something that isn't like anything in its training set? My experience is that GPT just makes shit up that looks plausible at a glance when it doesn't have an answer instead of just admitting that it doesn't know; this is obviously very dangerous when it's supposed to be writing computer programs. That OpenAI hasn't made any progress towards fixing this makes me wonder if it's even possible for the GPT to understand that sometimes it doesn't understand. At the very least it must be a non-trivial problem.

ctoth 4y ago
Counterpoint: how often do you as a developer create something totally novel that has never been built before?
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  I have to make new things pretty often. If you step outside of the high-level cloud/webdev stuff that most people seem to be obsessed with these days, there are a lot of non-trivial problems being solved in lower-level software such as device drivers, kernels, and compilers. EDIT: i misinterpreted what you were saying, initially i thought you were asking how i make new things, not how often i make new things. my original reply is below. weelll, i think about it real hard and do research? Not sure what your point is, but I definitely don't solve these problems by trying to find somebody else's solution to copy, or just dumping a bunch of C code that doesn't do anything and calling it a day like GPT would.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- runald 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by novel, but every development project will always have requirements that are unique to solve their own respective business/domain problems. These unique, specialized requirements are further compounded by cultural and personal quirks that human stakeholders demand, making developments project essentially "novel". Current language models fail even with simple minor variations on existing problems that it hasn't seen before, so until then, current AI's won't be replacing any humans when it comes to actual problem solving. Also, it was recently proven by experts that aliens are living on the earth's core, they breed spherical cows and flying pigs.

SergeAx 4y ago

We already had several tectonic shifts in software engineering in the last ~50 years, and there was never a consequential redice if engineering workforce, only otherwise.

layer8 4y ago

Maybe you need to get yourself into an application domain with more bespoke protocols and tooling, and domain-specific expertise, that aren’t public on the internet and that AI therefore doesn’t have much of an idea of. At least at this point, AI is only of little help in my daily work, unfortunately, because I’d have to first explain it orders of magnitude more context than fits into its token buffer.

kiviuq 4y ago
Porn? (scnr)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ChancyChance 4y ago

Here's a simple way to tell if your expertise is at risk: - If you can get more done by working more hours, your job is at risk. When I was a programmer for most of past life, this was this case. Now I've got multiple decades under my belt and am a h/w and system architect. I can't get more done by grinding. My job depends on sharing information with other people, that have their own schedules, resource dependencies, supply chains, and pricing, and arriving at best fit solutions to move complex projects forward. I think if you want to protect yourself from being replaced by AI, you need to be part of a larger network where the challenges are more about synthesizing information than grinding. My $0.02.

lugu 4y ago

I feel you, in the same time we have been through so many changes. Some people still prefer Vim (at least i do) over full fledge IDE with refactoring helpers. Think of stack overflow, not a habit for everyone. Using macros/snippet to generate code, not that popular. Iterative development in a debugger (think Smalltalk), didn't make printf obsolete. The bottom line is: all software is legacy. Deleting code is the preferred way to debug. Finding the correct abstraction or most simple way to get what you need takes more than the ability to dump code into a computer. Free software didn't ruin the profession, quite the opposite.

randomdata 4y ago

> Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. Back of the napkin suggests we have approximately the same amount of manual labor in farms today. The difference is that the same amount of labor today is able to feed a much larger population. This may simply mean much more software written, not fewer developers.

ra1231963 4y ago

At one time, people programmed without google or search engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read through them and then type out what they saw in the book. Today, that sounds absurd. Then came stack overflow and google. We search, pray we get a good result or someone else took the time to ask the question, then read (and sometimes copy+paste). Then AI assistants. I'm not exactly sure what's next, but I do think coding without some type of AI assistant will be extremely antiquated very soon. I already use it all the time. I never want to go back. The next generation will look at finding answers via SO, google, and random forums just as we look at people use used books -- as an absurdly inefficient way to do a job

DeathArrow 4y ago
> At one time, people programmed without google or search engines. They literally used thick ass books, and had to read through them and then type out what they saw in the book. Today, that sounds absurd. Even if it's absurd I still like to buy physical books. The information is better structured and I like holding a book and turning pages.

randomdata 4y ago

> Governments will have to ponder about what to do with a world of people who became inferior to machines at almost everything. Universal Basic Income? Why would the machines want to pay us once we can no longer provide them value? Maybe they'll keep a few of us as pets and for sport, but the rest will be sent to the human equivalent of Bovine University.

prewett 4y ago

I think you're doing that thing that makes software developers' estimates chronically low: we find a pathway to the solution and think, great, that's basically 80% done, and we don't think about everything else. Let's take a login screen for iPads, should be easy, right? ---- MagicAI, write me a login screen for iPads. The project should be configured to be iPad only. I want a logo in the center and under it the login and password entry textboxes. The password entry should not be in plaintext. Put a login button underneath the password entry. Actually, the logo + textboxes + login button should be centered as a group. The logo should be centered horizontally within the group as well. Make the login button right-aligned. The login button should be right aligned within the group, but the text of the button should be centered within the button. Put "Username" and "Password" labels to the left of the appriopriate text fields Make sure that the labels are the same width, so that the left edges of the text fields are aligned. Put a half em margin in-between the labels and text fields. Actually, make the vertical margin between elements in the group a half em, too. By "margin" previously, I meant "spacing", my mistake. Please fix. Does the German translation of "username" or "password" cause the text field to be too short, especially on an iPad Mini in portrait mode? Fix the alignment to work correctly in both portrait and landscape mode. The group should have a 10% left and right margin in both modes. The keypad enter button should say "Login" when entering text for the password field, but should remain "Done" for the username field. Great, now add a waiting indicator while waiting for verification from the server. Actually, put the indicator to the right of the login button, but do not make it part of the group for alignment purposes; it should be in the margin. And turn the indicator off if the server times out. Oh, add some error text for the error. I said error text, not error dialog. Never give me a disruptive dialog if there is a way to obviously display the error text. Make this a permanent setting on my account. Also, make this a permanent setting on all my colleagues' accounts, and especially the accounts of the low-cost outsourcing companies that make the apps I use. File bug report to MagicAI HQ that there is no way to make some directions permanent. Include in the report that there should be a way to look at the set of permanent instructions, and automatic reporting if new instructions contradict old instructions. Disable the login button if there is no text in the username or password field, or if the password is too short. Whoah, make sure that the text field scrolls so that it is visible above the keyboard, especially on an iPad mini in landscape mode. It should scroll back down to its original position when the keyboard disappears. ---- I guess I'm not seeing how this is too much different from what I actually did in creating the login page in the first place. That's even without the dialogue where you try to figure out why the alignment isn't doing what you told it. You might also want to keep your instructions in a text file some place, in case you need to change them and regenerate the code. Maybe there should be a preprocessor of sorts, so that you can add comments to the file explaining your reasoning for certain instructions, or to not include some instructions on certain environments. You might also want some way to refer to a set of previous instructions, so you could say "do these things what we did over here". We could call this a "function" since "procedure" sounds too much like ancient Pascal, and math is cool.

sumitkumar 4y ago

Any new technology will create new work of its own. AI will automate the repeated loops in the previous workflows and free up workforce but create much more new work than it will be automating.