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Maybe but only if you're imagining completely new and inexperienced people who wouldn't be able to get anything done without AI entering the field - I can see h

by jstx1 3y ago

Maybe but only if you're imagining completely new and inexperienced people who wouldn't be able to get anything done without AI entering the field - I can see how that can cause an emotional reaction. But if you compare two experienced developers - one of them uses AI, the other doesn't - I don't see what's there to be reviled, one of them just found a tool that makes them more productive.

adventured 3y ago
The reviled part of it is going to come from the bottom 2/3 of people writing code today getting brutalized economically (permanent job destruction and the lowering of income for those in that segment that manage to find jobs writing code and or managing AI that writes the code). The median software developer in the US is solidly earning six figures. That's going away, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to be angry about it. Their previously solid path up and out of the middle class is about to vanish. They were betting on that. A large number of people are in school today thinking that median software developer job, writing code, paying $110k per year + great benefits, is still going to be there in 2033.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  Developers who'll use AI as a crutch will be no different to entry-level, PHP-only developers of yore who relied on StackOverflow and will be reviled for the same reason: their code will be buggy & inconsistent. I was an experienced polyglot developer and I occasionally used PHP for rapid prototyping, but the hate knew no nuance on HN and elsewhere.
  - adventured 3y ago
    It's not going to be a crutch. It's going to be a large segment of lower paid grunts, doing work that will be less difficult and more mind numbing. The requirements will still be modestly high, you'll need a degree, and you'll get paid less than today's software developers (in some cases far less). A software developer in the future will be someone who only interfaces with AI centric tools, with the AI writing essentially all the code. It'll be rare to directly tweak code for the typical software developer. It will no longer mean someone who writes code to develop software, it will mean someone who uses AI tools to develop software. What you think of as a software developer today, isn't what people will know them as in another 15 years. It'll happen fast. The code is going to get abstracted away. An 18 year old in 2040 that is looking to become a software developer will go to school for how to build software, which will mean using AI tools to do it; they won't go to school to learn how to program. In fact they won't know much about writing code at all. In several decades it will be a far more rare skill, that will be viewed as a bit archaic, to still directly write software code. Stories will abound about the old times when millions of people used to directly write code, and they got paid ridiculously well to do it. That problem got solved. One of the great benefits of AI will be abstracting away complexity (complexity as far as the human mind is concerned), and writing software code is a big juicy target that won't be difficult to abstract away (for something like GPT version 13).
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      We're talking about different time-frames. PHP is now a respectable language because the language and the ecosystem evolved to be much more capable, this somewhat raided the bar from earlier when new, self-taught developers could get by with copy-pasting functions from the internet. AI tools assistance tools currently help with code-writing at function-level, which is analogous to copy-pasting PHP functions from SO. There are a lot of opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot with both. Without an understanding of the larger (sub)system, AI-generated code will have integration bugs and superfluous code. A good/experienced developer can use the same tooling and emd up with excellent code, but that won't stop the ecosystem from being tainted as awful. With the growth in token sizes, AIs will be able to ingest/understand larger codebases and generate more consistent code, but that will happen over time, just as PHP got Laravel as well as base-language improvements.

by jstx1 3y ago

adventured 3y ago

The reviled part of it is going to come from the bottom 2/3 of people writing code today getting brutalized economically (permanent job destruction and the lowering of income for those in that segment that manage to find jobs writing code and or managing AI that writes the code). The median software developer in the US is solidly earning six figures. That's going away, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to be angry about it. Their previously solid path up and out of the middle class is about to vanish. They were betting on that. A large number of people are in school today thinking that median software developer job, writing code, paying $110k per year + great benefits, is still going to be there in 2033.

sangnoir 3y ago
Developers who'll use AI as a crutch will be no different to entry-level, PHP-only developers of yore who relied on StackOverflow and will be reviled for the same reason: their code will be buggy & inconsistent. I was an experienced polyglot developer and I occasionally used PHP for rapid prototyping, but the hate knew no nuance on HN and elsewhere.
- adventured 3y ago
  It's not going to be a crutch. It's going to be a large segment of lower paid grunts, doing work that will be less difficult and more mind numbing. The requirements will still be modestly high, you'll need a degree, and you'll get paid less than today's software developers (in some cases far less). A software developer in the future will be someone who only interfaces with AI centric tools, with the AI writing essentially all the code. It'll be rare to directly tweak code for the typical software developer. It will no longer mean someone who writes code to develop software, it will mean someone who uses AI tools to develop software. What you think of as a software developer today, isn't what people will know them as in another 15 years. It'll happen fast. The code is going to get abstracted away. An 18 year old in 2040 that is looking to become a software developer will go to school for how to build software, which will mean using AI tools to do it; they won't go to school to learn how to program. In fact they won't know much about writing code at all. In several decades it will be a far more rare skill, that will be viewed as a bit archaic, to still directly write software code. Stories will abound about the old times when millions of people used to directly write code, and they got paid ridiculously well to do it. That problem got solved. One of the great benefits of AI will be abstracting away complexity (complexity as far as the human mind is concerned), and writing software code is a big juicy target that won't be difficult to abstract away (for something like GPT version 13).
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    We're talking about different time-frames. PHP is now a respectable language because the language and the ecosystem evolved to be much more capable, this somewhat raided the bar from earlier when new, self-taught developers could get by with copy-pasting functions from the internet. AI tools assistance tools currently help with code-writing at function-level, which is analogous to copy-pasting PHP functions from SO. There are a lot of opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot with both. Without an understanding of the larger (sub)system, AI-generated code will have integration bugs and superfluous code. A good/experienced developer can use the same tooling and emd up with excellent code, but that won't stop the ecosystem from being tainted as awful. With the growth in token sizes, AIs will be able to ingest/understand larger codebases and generate more consistent code, but that will happen over time, just as PHP got Laravel as well as base-language improvements.