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We've had boilerplate generators for a long time. Sometimes they avoid some mundane work when you're first setting up. That's a good thing. Sometimes you end up

We've had boilerplate generators for a long time. Sometimes they avoid some mundane work when you're first setting up. That's a good thing. Sometimes you end up changing a lot of what they produce because it's not exactly what you need. That's less good. But they can never do anything truly innovative because ultimately they are based on work that was already done before. And those creative steps they can't take are where most value is added. Programmers who can understand a real problem and come up with a good way to solve it using software will still be needed. "Programmers" who are glorified human clipboards just copying and pasting all day will be less needed. But those jobs were already at risk from the next library or scaffolding tool anyway long before the current generation of AI-based tools came along.

TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
> We've had boilerplate generators for a long time. Sometimes they avoid some mundane work when you're first setting up. That's a good thing. Sometimes you end up changing a lot of what they produce because it's not exactly what you need. That's less good. But they can never do anything truly innovative because ultimately they are based on work that was already done before. And those creative steps they can't take are where most value is added. > Programmers who can understand a real problem and come up with a good way to solve it using software will still be needed. This keeps coming up in my own circles, including with non-technical folks. The best way I've heard it put is "you know, these AIs only know what we've already figured out." The newest contingent of AI technologies is impressive for what they are, but what they are is both somewhat inevitable and not truly intelligent in the way most businesses require of their technical people in order to succeed. Of course we can automate away the basics, we've been doing that with successive technologies and challenges for a very long time. Someone up-thread mentioned AI replacing automation folks as an easy example, but I don't see that happening so quickly. I do a lot of automating, and for a start there's so much automation "left to be done in the world" that there are no shortages of hard challenges left that AI couldn't (yet?) crack. There's a huge amount of business<->technology synthesis that has to happen to automate beyond the basics. But more expansively speaking, writing off humans being in the loop is ridiculous on its face. Humans will _always_ be in the loop somewhere, unless of course we take EM Forster's _The Machine Stops_ as an instruction manual rather than the warning it is. I don't mean that in a doom-and-gloom way but rather that I just don't think humans will ever give up enough control to enable something like that. I don't think that's such a bad thing, either. It's as ridiculous to say that human programmers are obsolete as it is to say we're that we're anywhere near computers developing complete, new computers for other humans to use.

TheNewsIsHere 4y ago

> We've had boilerplate generators for a long time. Sometimes they avoid some mundane work when you're first setting up. That's a good thing. Sometimes you end up changing a lot of what they produce because it's not exactly what you need. That's less good. But they can never do anything truly innovative because ultimately they are based on work that was already done before. And those creative steps they can't take are where most value is added. > Programmers who can understand a real problem and come up with a good way to solve it using software will still be needed. This keeps coming up in my own circles, including with non-technical folks. The best way I've heard it put is "you know, these AIs only know what we've already figured out." The newest contingent of AI technologies is impressive for what they are, but what they are is both somewhat inevitable and not truly intelligent in the way most businesses require of their technical people in order to succeed. Of course we can automate away the basics, we've been doing that with successive technologies and challenges for a very long time. Someone up-thread mentioned AI replacing automation folks as an easy example, but I don't see that happening so quickly. I do a lot of automating, and for a start there's so much automation "left to be done in the world" that there are no shortages of hard challenges left that AI couldn't (yet?) crack. There's a huge amount of business<->technology synthesis that has to happen to automate beyond the basics. But more expansively speaking, writing off humans being in the loop is ridiculous on its face. Humans will _always_ be in the loop somewhere, unless of course we take EM Forster's _The Machine Stops_ as an instruction manual rather than the warning it is. I don't mean that in a doom-and-gloom way but rather that I just don't think humans will ever give up enough control to enable something like that. I don't think that's such a bad thing, either. It's as ridiculous to say that human programmers are obsolete as it is to say we're that we're anywhere near computers developing complete, new computers for other humans to use.