15 ms·

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the u

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It will be harder for large companies/large teams to extract value from this compared to small companies/small teams. It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or increase our productivity. This way of living feels threatened now.
- dopeboy 4y ago
  I mean this in the least snarky, most sympathetic way possible: it's time to level up. Countless roles have had to do this, it's now our turn.
  - thrown123098 4y ago
    [dead]
  - falcor84 4y ago
    This is easy to say, but I would argue that it's impossible to know what to level up in; the field is just moving too quickly now. At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?
    - dopeboy 4y ago
      I agree, it is disorienting. I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work, acquaint themselves with real implementations of it (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these techniques into their companies.
      - asdff 4y ago
        Or that could be a way to end up in the woods. What if you made a bet like this on metaverse being the future? You'd be wishing you hadn't now. Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills. There's your set of skills the market currently is in demand of.
        dopeboy 4y ago
        Some of those skills that you see in those job postings today are devaluing due to tools like ChatGPT. Not all those skills and certainly not fundamental ones like communication and leadership. But if you see something like "writing CRUD endpoints for a Rails stack" everywhere, having that skill is no longer a differentiatior. Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at what they're poor at.
        namaria 4y ago
        >Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills While I agree with the sentiment, there is way too much noise in that channel. Job listings written by non-technical people just throwing key words together, recruiters detached from specific roles and companies trying signalling growth to mention just a few sources of confusion...
  - godtoldmetodoit 4y ago
    I've been leveling up since I started as a helpdesk rep at 18, becoming a Windows sysadmin, then a junior dev, and now a senior dev. College was not an option for me for reasons totally outside of my control, as my parents decided to not do their taxes for a number of years and I was unable to get any financial aid (grants or loans) whatsoever. I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing the kind of math required there, it would require many years of learning. GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come out over the next 2-5 years. A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start. What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent earning potential? If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code to implement various features, communicate with stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too. Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs will be that far behind on being automated either. We already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes. It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements and factory build outs that would be needed.
    - ilaksh 4y ago
      No jobs will be safe. In the very, very near future. GPT-4 is a very capable systems architect and can also implement the code. There are a few tools available to put it in a debug loop. Writing documents is a walk in the park for GPT-4. Emails or Discord chats or even perfectly realistic voice conversations are completely doable (I have that on my website). At this point it's about connecting things together and looping them properly to automate a very high portion of jobs. I think the answer is not employment but rather production. Think of something you can leverage these AIs that would be interesting or useful to someone else or some business. Beyond that things like UBI and generally better integration of technology into government is going to be critical for our survival. Especially decentralized technologies and real-world resource data.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming. I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.
  - michaelmior 4y ago
    > I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with. Maybe we shouldn't be, but it's still a problem that regularly needs to be solved.
    - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
      ...because of the limitless customization that sneaks into every growing software project. This limitless customization is also my last hope, maybe GPT-n won't be able to solve it as good as I do.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    Which industry would you recommend? I hate studying and I especially hate everything software development related with a passion. In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL, HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud, docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced might have been "Java application server management" since that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at the moment. I have worked for the government and met PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java and still got paid generously for their long term expertise.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      I seriously doubt you’re writing the same kind of webapps you were a decade ago, if so you’re a minority. Regardless a decade doesn’t “refute” that the web itself is a total disruption of the way people wrote code prior. This industry is always changing paradigms and were constantly exposing more high level ways to instruct the processor.
- muffles 4y ago
  > We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Maybe not, but they do get to eat, see a doctor, and enjoy some vacation time every now and then. If I could make money doing something I found a lot of meaning in I'd be doing that instead. Thing is, we usually don't have that option.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    Yikes. Your full potential isn't your work. We are all creative beings with deep emotional lives and connections to everything around us. And there are a ton of jobs in programming that pay well enough that you can live relatively well in a capitalist society. Some people find fulfillment in their families, neighbours, art, and dreams. How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I would say. Why should people measure their happiness and self worth from these?
    - muffles 4y ago
      I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or passions. The key is to find a balance between work and other aspects of life.
      - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
        > Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Personally I'm excited whenever an opportunity to wholesale replace a part of my job comes up. I got in to technology because I wanted to make people's lives better, and in theory removing demands on their time does that. The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates perverse incentives against people welcoming their redundancy.
- Arubis 4y ago
  Hard agree. Like sibling commenters, I love the idea of building something new with greater leverage. On an individual level, I'm looking forward to leveling up and finding new ways to be effective in my work. Unlike sibling commenters, I don't think that should be our only option in life. It saddens me greatly that, given a new option to increase the effective output of a unit of time, we repeatedly choose as a society to profit monetarily (and with vast disparity in who benefits) rather than to give people more options in life than drilling on their jobs. The industrial revolution promised people lives of relative leisure by replacing the need for much physical labor, but instead we concentrated the benefit to the few—and we keep making that same choice over and over.
- programmarchy 4y ago
  As a "software engineer", it's frustrating to work with the people you describe: people who "don't care too much". I'm looking forward to the purge.
OccamsMirror 4y ago
So who will hire the junior software devs?
- ape4 4y ago
  And how can somebody become a senior dev unless they first worked as a junior
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Perhaps some juniors will take it head on solo but will repeat the same mistakes seniors made when they were juniors but will survive nonetheless
  - rvz 4y ago
    You become a 'senior dev" by running a company / startup yourself, since it is clear that after the tech layoffs, almost no-one has the money or profits to hire any new developers - junior and senior, which is why I say they are both affected. But even then, self-proclaimed seniors are too scared to start their own startup(s) now because of (1) Unfavourable market conditions (2) VCs hesitant to raise money (3) ChatGPT will extinguish their startup; even if it uses "AI". I guess this was the result of a decades long quantitive easing, near zero interest rate bubble of cheap money that had to collapse.
    - asdff 4y ago
      I don't think starting a company will be that successful if you lack enough experience to be hired at any existing companies. The survivorship bias in tech is huge. Most things fail.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwawayai2 4y ago
What happens when no junior devs are hired for 5 years? Who works their way up to replace the seniors who are leaving?
- dmn322 4y ago
  Gpt’s and the various apps that apply them
- grugagag 4y ago
  There’s always a cost to beeing more greedy than you can handle
  - falcor84 4y ago
    Please elaborate
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Stupid greed is taking so much as to starve your supply. Smart greed is sustainable greed. Smartest greed is one that feeds back into the supply, making it grow exponentially.
      - falcor84 4y ago
        But isn't this just hindsight tautology? How would you know ahead of time how much greed is too much? For example, I've been predicting the financial demise of Facebook for over a decade now (amongst other things for being too greedy), but Zuck's still doing well enough. Even if Meta is declining now, it still might have been rational for him to be so greedy over the past decade.
  - anon7725 4y ago
    And what do you think capitalism is all about?
- nopinsight 4y ago
  By the late 2020s, it's entirely possible that a "weaker" AGI will emerge. Consequently, there may be much less need for senior developers as well. However, that could be among the least of our concerns if we cannot reliably align AI with human interests by then. Date Weakly General AI is Publicly Known https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-is-publicly-known/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general... Date of Artificial General Intelligence https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... The latter includes this criterion: "Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al." The APPS benchmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938 Note that the predicted date of "stronger" AGI has moved quite a lot since GPT-4 is revealed, from late 2030s to 2033 at this moment.
probably_wrong 4y ago
> In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. You mean the same YouTube that routinely ruins people's livelihoods when it closes their accounts with no recourse? Because I'm totally looking forward to the day when that happens to my development tools. "We detected that you are using our code to kill vulnerable children (aka orphans). This is against our TOS and we have permanently disabled your account. If you believe this was in error please log into your account and talk to our ChatGPT-powered tech support".
- grugagag 4y ago
  Code stays with you. Im more concerned with prompts like “please produce code to copy product X with the following changes”.
Jevon23 4y ago
I really don’t want my productivity to increase. Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do. Alternative scenario is that individual developers get somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I want that? That doesn’t give me more free time - that just means I’ll be expected to do more work. Non-technical management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now I’ll have to deal with them asking “why can’t you have the whole project done by tomorrow? Why can’t you just have the robot do it?” It’s a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.
- piyh 4y ago
  Alternatively, there's more developer output, the unit price of an application gets cheaper, and this stimulates demand for more developers. CPUs getting cheaper and faster didn't decrease demand for CPUs.
  - 93po 4y ago
    This is the assumption that there is end-user demand for the software developers would write. I think we can assume that end users will be using traditional software less as ChatGPT functionality increases.
- olalonde 4y ago
  I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for those who refuse to adapt and resist change. It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet. It's likely that when we reach that stage, the world will change dramatically and we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction :)
rvz 4y ago
> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. And so-called "senior engineer" salaries will now be brought down and deflated since they were inflated and unjustifiably high in the first place and are the main reason why these tech startups run themselves into the ground with little to no path to profitability. I guarantee you that so far, the only winner in this is OpenAI. Not the 'senior engineers' building on top of someone else's AI API. In fact, why hire 3 over-priced seniors when one junior with ChatGPT is significantly much cheaper? I quite find it funny that somehow, all hope is instantly lost because of a "AI" spitting out code will replace them. It just shows that the majority of these tech startups were just good at losing money and being solely dependent on VC cash.
geraneum 4y ago
I think if we have the "final software" there won't be a need for a website to sell you products or another for renting a place for your vacation or the one that processes your payments. All is done in one software with one interface. I don't see a need for most of the current founders, especially for solo ones. Also consolidating this capability in a few big tech companies means whatever happened to other industries after industrial age, will happend to ours. Compare the current software industry to other industries with big players (chemical, aviation, power, etc.) where the barrier to entry is higher. Sure there are startups, but not as many as in software scene and even then, many of the are digitalizing those industries.
msm_ 4y ago
> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Is this really true? I may be missing something (I probably am), but I didn't find much use for AI tools in my itsec/programming work. It's a nice tool to have, but I don't write that much boilerplate. I've tried to use it as a better Google, but it kept replying with made up nonsense (things I have problem with are usually niche technologies OpenAI is not good at - I expect it will get better in the future). So I find it dubious it will "10x my productivity" in the "upcoming years". Decades, maybe. But maybe the future really is now, and I'm just being an old-timer who can't adapt.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  There is already software to basically run unit tests on LLM output and re-run the prompt until it passes. As the models get better and the tooling improves, a lot of programming will become specifying constraints on the program you want, and letting the AI explore the latent space until it finds a solution, which you then evaluate before providing more detailed constraints until it does everything you want.
  - rimliu 4y ago
    Where do you get those unit tests though?
    - frabcus 4y ago
      You get it to write them. Maybe in cucumber so you can check them / edit them by reading the English. Maybe you use a competitors model to write the tests as then less likely to make same error in code and tests, or write them twice and get best of three to spot errors.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  A lot of people are messing around with React and web-dev in general where you can fuzz component logic until it kind of looks OK. I can see that working out. If you want to do anything new or - god forbid - know of a better way to do things than what 90% of the population is doing (htmx?). Good luck.
nunez 4y ago
Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now. Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits. I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket. 10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95% off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why? Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht? Edit:--------- I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are right, there are a lot of people who do not have food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will totally change your view of the world and probably make you much happier.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket. Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that. We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray! https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-buy-now-pay-later-services-to-pay-for-groceries-2f583d1c https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-b... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-cover-a-1000-emergency-expense-with-savings.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
coldtea 4y ago
>If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this... >It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders. "Solo founders" is what? 1/10,000 of working programmers? And they're absolutely not the ones people worry about regarding GPT replacements...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) I think I disagree. If software then becomes 10x cheaper, a lot of use cases that used to be too expensive to build now becomes affordable. At my own job, I think we could easily do 10x the business, because our customers need tons of tooling (for example for energy transition) but we don't have the people (among other problems).
  - margorczynski 4y ago
    What if those use-cases disappear also because they were made for humans? Will there really be a need for spreadsheets and spreadsheet plugins when all that works is done by an AI with a little help of some headless tool or scripting language?
    - chobeat 4y ago
      if we look at the last 30 years: yes. The IT industry doesn't seem to be developing towards anything that resembles efficiency or minimization of work. For every useless technology, a caste of users and a caste of experts are created in order to be able to absorb the information that can be generated. The information society is a machine maximizing information exchange, something that only incidentally implies increasing profit or increasing productivity.
maxilevi 4y ago
Not everyone is adept at becoming a solo founder
btbuildem 4y ago
From your comment: > I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. From the second line of your comment: > Now you don’t need to hire junior devs Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.
- raldi 4y ago
  Now junior devs don't have to build the product of someone else's dreams; they can build the product of their own dreams.
  - yoyohello13 4y ago
    Not everyone wants to do that though. There is a lot of extra crap that being a business owner entails. Some people just want to put in their work time and focus on other things. This basically forces everybody devote their lives to entrepreneurship.
    - raldi 4y ago
      We don't need everyone to, though. If AI increases dev productivity X-fold, and this leads to an X-fold increase in entrepreneurship, then the junior devs who want to build someone else's dream will have more opportunities to do so.
  - raincole 4y ago
    ... and starve? You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams? Artists. And the stereotype isn't "well-fed artists" for a good reason.
    - raldi 4y ago
      > You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams? Every entrepreneur that ever existed.
      - 4y ago
tablespoon 4y ago
> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. > If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be unemployed.* Do you get it now? * Until you can climb up the ladder where each rung is now 20 feet apart.
- raldi 4y ago
  What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product?
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product? Are you seriously asking that question? What are the barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are 20 feet apart? Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at the top.
    - raldi 4y ago
      Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution. If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution. Seriously, think about it a bit, without being sanguine. The junior dev is inexperienced, in everything, and now has no path to build up that experience. No one's going to want their 18/22 year old amateur-hour "chatgpt make me a cloud app" (which is in competition against millions of others). So unless they're extremely lucky, they goto fail. Maybe after 10 years of those failures they could build up enough experience through trial-and-error to maybe see a little success with a "chatgpt make me a cloud app," but how are they going to feed themselves the meantime? Maybe that will work if they have rich parents, but otherwise they're probably going to have to use up their energy to scrape by. So another goto fail.
turkeygizzard 4y ago
If you are a manager, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire senior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. If you are a CTO, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire managers and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. If you are a VC, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire anyone and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832
- Hizonner 4y ago
  > Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce? I don't know. But I don't see why you might not be able to ask GPT-6 or GPT-7 to enumerate (and patent and implement) all of them for you. Why do you think "founders" or "creatives" are special? In the end, something like that is "amazing" only for the person who owns the most GPUs or manages to figure out the first effective meta-prompt.
booleandilemma 4y ago
First they came for the junior devs, and I did not speak out because I was not a junior dev... :P
race2tb 4y ago
They got to this level of progress with maybe a million users input and feed back. Now they will have 1000s of plugins feeding them with high quality structured data and 100s of millions of users feeding it. They are also going multi modal and have billions in capital to expand the size and scale of the network. The probability that this is peak gpt seems very unlikely. I expect they will have a post grad level of intelligence gpt across the board in less than 5 years. No white collar job will be valued the same since GPT will basically be doing most of the work and we will maybe review it and steer it. We will just keep feeding it and it will know everything at the cutting edge of all fields.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or increase our productivity. This way of living feels threatened now.

dopeboy 4y ago
I mean this in the least snarky, most sympathetic way possible: it's time to level up. Countless roles have had to do this, it's now our turn.
- thrown123098 4y ago
  [dead]
- falcor84 4y ago
  This is easy to say, but I would argue that it's impossible to know what to level up in; the field is just moving too quickly now. At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?
  - dopeboy 4y ago
    I agree, it is disorienting. I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work, acquaint themselves with real implementations of it (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these techniques into their companies.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Or that could be a way to end up in the woods. What if you made a bet like this on metaverse being the future? You'd be wishing you hadn't now. Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills. There's your set of skills the market currently is in demand of.
      - dopeboy 4y ago
        Some of those skills that you see in those job postings today are devaluing due to tools like ChatGPT. Not all those skills and certainly not fundamental ones like communication and leadership. But if you see something like "writing CRUD endpoints for a Rails stack" everywhere, having that skill is no longer a differentiatior. Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at what they're poor at.
      - namaria 4y ago
        >Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills While I agree with the sentiment, there is way too much noise in that channel. Job listings written by non-technical people just throwing key words together, recruiters detached from specific roles and companies trying signalling growth to mention just a few sources of confusion...
- godtoldmetodoit 4y ago
  I've been leveling up since I started as a helpdesk rep at 18, becoming a Windows sysadmin, then a junior dev, and now a senior dev. College was not an option for me for reasons totally outside of my control, as my parents decided to not do their taxes for a number of years and I was unable to get any financial aid (grants or loans) whatsoever. I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing the kind of math required there, it would require many years of learning. GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come out over the next 2-5 years. A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start. What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent earning potential? If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code to implement various features, communicate with stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too. Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs will be that far behind on being automated either. We already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes. It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements and factory build outs that would be needed.
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    No jobs will be safe. In the very, very near future. GPT-4 is a very capable systems architect and can also implement the code. There are a few tools available to put it in a debug loop. Writing documents is a walk in the park for GPT-4. Emails or Discord chats or even perfectly realistic voice conversations are completely doable (I have that on my website). At this point it's about connecting things together and looping them properly to automate a very high portion of jobs. I think the answer is not employment but rather production. Think of something you can leverage these AIs that would be interesting or useful to someone else or some business. Beyond that things like UBI and generally better integration of technology into government is going to be critical for our survival. Especially decentralized technologies and real-world resource data.
edgyquant 4y ago
If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming. I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.
- michaelmior 4y ago
  > I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with. Maybe we shouldn't be, but it's still a problem that regularly needs to be solved.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    ...because of the limitless customization that sneaks into every growing software project. This limitless customization is also my last hope, maybe GPT-n won't be able to solve it as good as I do.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Which industry would you recommend? I hate studying and I especially hate everything software development related with a passion. In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL, HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud, docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced might have been "Java application server management" since that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at the moment. I have worked for the government and met PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java and still got paid generously for their long term expertise.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    I seriously doubt you’re writing the same kind of webapps you were a decade ago, if so you’re a minority. Regardless a decade doesn’t “refute” that the web itself is a total disruption of the way people wrote code prior. This industry is always changing paradigms and were constantly exposing more high level ways to instruct the processor.
muffles 4y ago
> We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Maybe not, but they do get to eat, see a doctor, and enjoy some vacation time every now and then. If I could make money doing something I found a lot of meaning in I'd be doing that instead. Thing is, we usually don't have that option.
- agentultra 4y ago
  Yikes. Your full potential isn't your work. We are all creative beings with deep emotional lives and connections to everything around us. And there are a ton of jobs in programming that pay well enough that you can live relatively well in a capitalist society. Some people find fulfillment in their families, neighbours, art, and dreams. How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I would say. Why should people measure their happiness and self worth from these?
  - muffles 4y ago
    I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or passions. The key is to find a balance between work and other aspects of life.
    - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
      > Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Personally I'm excited whenever an opportunity to wholesale replace a part of my job comes up. I got in to technology because I wanted to make people's lives better, and in theory removing demands on their time does that. The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates perverse incentives against people welcoming their redundancy.
Arubis 4y ago
Hard agree. Like sibling commenters, I love the idea of building something new with greater leverage. On an individual level, I'm looking forward to leveling up and finding new ways to be effective in my work. Unlike sibling commenters, I don't think that should be our only option in life. It saddens me greatly that, given a new option to increase the effective output of a unit of time, we repeatedly choose as a society to profit monetarily (and with vast disparity in who benefits) rather than to give people more options in life than drilling on their jobs. The industrial revolution promised people lives of relative leisure by replacing the need for much physical labor, but instead we concentrated the benefit to the few—and we keep making that same choice over and over.
programmarchy 4y ago
As a "software engineer", it's frustrating to work with the people you describe: people who "don't care too much". I'm looking forward to the purge.

OccamsMirror 4y ago

So who will hire the junior software devs?

ape4 4y ago
And how can somebody become a senior dev unless they first worked as a junior
- grugagag 4y ago
  Perhaps some juniors will take it head on solo but will repeat the same mistakes seniors made when they were juniors but will survive nonetheless
- rvz 4y ago
  You become a 'senior dev" by running a company / startup yourself, since it is clear that after the tech layoffs, almost no-one has the money or profits to hire any new developers - junior and senior, which is why I say they are both affected. But even then, self-proclaimed seniors are too scared to start their own startup(s) now because of (1) Unfavourable market conditions (2) VCs hesitant to raise money (3) ChatGPT will extinguish their startup; even if it uses "AI". I guess this was the result of a decades long quantitive easing, near zero interest rate bubble of cheap money that had to collapse.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I don't think starting a company will be that successful if you lack enough experience to be hired at any existing companies. The survivorship bias in tech is huge. Most things fail.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

throwawayai2 4y ago

What happens when no junior devs are hired for 5 years? Who works their way up to replace the seniors who are leaving?

dmn322 4y ago
Gpt’s and the various apps that apply them
grugagag 4y ago
There’s always a cost to beeing more greedy than you can handle
- falcor84 4y ago
  Please elaborate
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Stupid greed is taking so much as to starve your supply. Smart greed is sustainable greed. Smartest greed is one that feeds back into the supply, making it grow exponentially.
    - falcor84 4y ago
      But isn't this just hindsight tautology? How would you know ahead of time how much greed is too much? For example, I've been predicting the financial demise of Facebook for over a decade now (amongst other things for being too greedy), but Zuck's still doing well enough. Even if Meta is declining now, it still might have been rational for him to be so greedy over the past decade.
- anon7725 4y ago
  And what do you think capitalism is all about?
nopinsight 4y ago
By the late 2020s, it's entirely possible that a "weaker" AGI will emerge. Consequently, there may be much less need for senior developers as well. However, that could be among the least of our concerns if we cannot reliably align AI with human interests by then. Date Weakly General AI is Publicly Known https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-is-publicly-known/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general... Date of Artificial General Intelligence https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... The latter includes this criterion: "Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al." The APPS benchmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938 Note that the predicted date of "stronger" AGI has moved quite a lot since GPT-4 is revealed, from late 2030s to 2033 at this moment.

probably_wrong 4y ago

> In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. You mean the same YouTube that routinely ruins people's livelihoods when it closes their accounts with no recourse? Because I'm totally looking forward to the day when that happens to my development tools. "We detected that you are using our code to kill vulnerable children (aka orphans). This is against our TOS and we have permanently disabled your account. If you believe this was in error please log into your account and talk to our ChatGPT-powered tech support".

grugagag 4y ago
Code stays with you. Im more concerned with prompts like “please produce code to copy product X with the following changes”.

Jevon23 4y ago

I really don’t want my productivity to increase. Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do. Alternative scenario is that individual developers get somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I want that? That doesn’t give me more free time - that just means I’ll be expected to do more work. Non-technical management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now I’ll have to deal with them asking “why can’t you have the whole project done by tomorrow? Why can’t you just have the robot do it?” It’s a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.

piyh 4y ago
Alternatively, there's more developer output, the unit price of an application gets cheaper, and this stimulates demand for more developers. CPUs getting cheaper and faster didn't decrease demand for CPUs.
- 93po 4y ago
  This is the assumption that there is end-user demand for the software developers would write. I think we can assume that end users will be using traditional software less as ChatGPT functionality increases.
olalonde 4y ago
I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for those who refuse to adapt and resist change. It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet. It's likely that when we reach that stage, the world will change dramatically and we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction :)

rvz 4y ago

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. And so-called "senior engineer" salaries will now be brought down and deflated since they were inflated and unjustifiably high in the first place and are the main reason why these tech startups run themselves into the ground with little to no path to profitability. I guarantee you that so far, the only winner in this is OpenAI. Not the 'senior engineers' building on top of someone else's AI API. In fact, why hire 3 over-priced seniors when one junior with ChatGPT is significantly much cheaper? I quite find it funny that somehow, all hope is instantly lost because of a "AI" spitting out code will replace them. It just shows that the majority of these tech startups were just good at losing money and being solely dependent on VC cash.

geraneum 4y ago

I think if we have the "final software" there won't be a need for a website to sell you products or another for renting a place for your vacation or the one that processes your payments. All is done in one software with one interface. I don't see a need for most of the current founders, especially for solo ones. Also consolidating this capability in a few big tech companies means whatever happened to other industries after industrial age, will happend to ours. Compare the current software industry to other industries with big players (chemical, aviation, power, etc.) where the barrier to entry is higher. Sure there are startups, but not as many as in software scene and even then, many of the are digitalizing those industries.

msm_ 4y ago

> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Is this really true? I may be missing something (I probably am), but I didn't find much use for AI tools in my itsec/programming work. It's a nice tool to have, but I don't write that much boilerplate. I've tried to use it as a better Google, but it kept replying with made up nonsense (things I have problem with are usually niche technologies OpenAI is not good at - I expect it will get better in the future). So I find it dubious it will "10x my productivity" in the "upcoming years". Decades, maybe. But maybe the future really is now, and I'm just being an old-timer who can't adapt.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
There is already software to basically run unit tests on LLM output and re-run the prompt until it passes. As the models get better and the tooling improves, a lot of programming will become specifying constraints on the program you want, and letting the AI explore the latent space until it finds a solution, which you then evaluate before providing more detailed constraints until it does everything you want.
- rimliu 4y ago
  Where do you get those unit tests though?
  - frabcus 4y ago
    You get it to write them. Maybe in cucumber so you can check them / edit them by reading the English. Maybe you use a competitors model to write the tests as then less likely to make same error in code and tests, or write them twice and get best of three to spot errors.
SanderNL 4y ago
A lot of people are messing around with React and web-dev in general where you can fuzz component logic until it kind of looks OK. I can see that working out. If you want to do anything new or - god forbid - know of a better way to do things than what 90% of the population is doing (htmx?). Good luck.

nunez 4y ago

Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now. Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits. I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.

gitfan86 4y ago
Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket. 10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95% off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why? Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht? Edit:--------- I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are right, there are a lot of people who do not have food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will totally change your view of the world and probably make you much happier.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket. Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that. We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray! https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-buy-now-pay-later-services-to-pay-for-groceries-2f583d1c https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-b... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-cover-a-1000-emergency-expense-with-savings.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...

coldtea 4y ago

>If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this... >It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders. "Solo founders" is what? 1/10,000 of working programmers? And they're absolutely not the ones people worry about regarding GPT replacements...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
donkeyd 4y ago
> This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) I think I disagree. If software then becomes 10x cheaper, a lot of use cases that used to be too expensive to build now becomes affordable. At my own job, I think we could easily do 10x the business, because our customers need tons of tooling (for example for energy transition) but we don't have the people (among other problems).
- margorczynski 4y ago
  What if those use-cases disappear also because they were made for humans? Will there really be a need for spreadsheets and spreadsheet plugins when all that works is done by an AI with a little help of some headless tool or scripting language?
  - chobeat 4y ago
    if we look at the last 30 years: yes. The IT industry doesn't seem to be developing towards anything that resembles efficiency or minimization of work. For every useless technology, a caste of users and a caste of experts are created in order to be able to absorb the information that can be generated. The information society is a machine maximizing information exchange, something that only incidentally implies increasing profit or increasing productivity.

maxilevi 4y ago

Not everyone is adept at becoming a solo founder

btbuildem 4y ago

From your comment: > I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. From the second line of your comment: > Now you don’t need to hire junior devs Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.

raldi 4y ago
Now junior devs don't have to build the product of someone else's dreams; they can build the product of their own dreams.
- yoyohello13 4y ago
  Not everyone wants to do that though. There is a lot of extra crap that being a business owner entails. Some people just want to put in their work time and focus on other things. This basically forces everybody devote their lives to entrepreneurship.
  - raldi 4y ago
    We don't need everyone to, though. If AI increases dev productivity X-fold, and this leads to an X-fold increase in entrepreneurship, then the junior devs who want to build someone else's dream will have more opportunities to do so.
- raincole 4y ago
  ... and starve? You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams? Artists. And the stereotype isn't "well-fed artists" for a good reason.
  - raldi 4y ago
    > You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams? Every entrepreneur that ever existed.
    - 4y ago

tablespoon 4y ago

> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. > If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be unemployed.* Do you get it now? * Until you can climb up the ladder where each rung is now 20 feet apart.

raldi 4y ago
What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product?
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product? Are you seriously asking that question? What are the barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are 20 feet apart? Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at the top.
  - raldi 4y ago
    Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution. If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution. Seriously, think about it a bit, without being sanguine. The junior dev is inexperienced, in everything, and now has no path to build up that experience. No one's going to want their 18/22 year old amateur-hour "chatgpt make me a cloud app" (which is in competition against millions of others). So unless they're extremely lucky, they goto fail. Maybe after 10 years of those failures they could build up enough experience through trial-and-error to maybe see a little success with a "chatgpt make me a cloud app," but how are they going to feed themselves the meantime? Maybe that will work if they have rich parents, but otherwise they're probably going to have to use up their energy to scrape by. So another goto fail.

turkeygizzard 4y ago

If you are a manager, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire senior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. If you are a CTO, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire managers and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. If you are a VC, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire anyone and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832

Hizonner 4y ago
> Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce? I don't know. But I don't see why you might not be able to ask GPT-6 or GPT-7 to enumerate (and patent and implement) all of them for you. Why do you think "founders" or "creatives" are special? In the end, something like that is "amazing" only for the person who owns the most GPUs or manages to figure out the first effective meta-prompt.

booleandilemma 4y ago

First they came for the junior devs, and I did not speak out because I was not a junior dev... :P

race2tb 4y ago

They got to this level of progress with maybe a million users input and feed back. Now they will have 1000s of plugins feeding them with high quality structured data and 100s of millions of users feeding it. They are also going multi modal and have billions in capital to expand the size and scale of the network. The probability that this is peak gpt seems very unlikely. I expect they will have a post grad level of intelligence gpt across the board in less than 5 years. No white collar job will be valued the same since GPT will basically be doing most of the work and we will maybe review it and steer it. We will just keep feeding it and it will know everything at the cutting edge of all fields.