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Here's a different 10-year prediction. AI will become good enough to be useful for programmers but not good enough to run on its own and will remain an assistan

Here's a different 10-year prediction. AI will become good enough to be useful for programmers but not good enough to run on its own and will remain an assistant. Given that there is a shortage of programmers, more software will be written than ever. More software will beget more software engineers. Because the output of software engineers will rise, each individual software engineer will become more valuable to their business and salaries will rise.

deleted 3y ago
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tudorw 3y ago
Having played a bit with coding with AI I like this view, it's powerful, but context will always be an issue, turning real world problems into working code is a skill in it's own right, that will not change, superpowered yes, for me it's all the 'dull' parts of typing stuff out that I look forward to missing, from an early study on impact in the workplace, using a 2 year study of a call centre, the result was large improvement for less skilled staff as knowledge of best practice from those really excelling at customer service was rapidly propagated to juniors, seniors saw a much smaller increase in performance metrics. Now there is no excuse for me not to get AI to write my comments, a bunch of tests and some API's and database interconnects, etc. I've always taken a modular iterative approach, create a working basic model with a good foundation then extend it keeping it working as I build up to the final deliverable. Tempting just to go and sit in a cave for a couple of months and come back when the tools are a little more refined :)
- LamaOfRuin 3y ago
  Jesus, this just triggered another nightmare scenario I should have thought of earlier. People are going to have it write and/or comment a function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward. It will be not or imperfectly checked that the comment actually says what it should and the functionality matches. There will be no indication of what was written by AI, so the only option is to guess that both were written competently/with the same purpose, but when they don't actually match there's no way to know which is wrong except to check all other code that interacts with it and figure out what has been working right/expecting what was originally intended in ways that subtly break/have been working right depending on the incorrect implementation that existed. This is absolutely something that already happens with fully human developers, but it seems likely to be much more frequent and not caught as soon with AI assistance. This also seems like a failure mode that could go pathologically wrong on a regular basis for TDD types.
  - occamrazor 3y ago
    An AI may be more likely to hallucinate the wrong comment, but also much less likely to forget to update the comment when the code changes. The net result could be better comments.
  - rcpt 3y ago
    > will be no indication of what was written by AI I feel like companies will start using watermarking to avoid the AI dumping GPL into their codebase.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward Nah. It will just be tons and tons of trivial, straight forward code, calling other trivial code, that calls more trivial code. Yes, some of it will be created manually, but if you go with "the IA created it" you will get it right 99% of the time. And obviously, the more code, the more it will fail; but people always try to fix this with more code. Remember the times of Enterprise Java?
  - lancesells 3y ago
    And then you'll be paying for the AI assistance to help navigate all the code that it wrote. That's in the Enterprise tier. Set up a sales call to learn more.
adventured 3y ago
10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case. Those people have nowhere to go to match what they're earning now. Maybe support review roles (which won't pay particularly well), where they approve decisions by the AI that are held up for human approval. The bottom half of software developers won't have AI assistants. The AI will have them as human assistants (required by corporations for control/safety/oversight purposes). The ~50%-25% bracket will build software using AI tools and will rarely write the actual code. In the top ~25% bracket (in terms of skill) you'll have software developers that are still paid very well and they'll directly write code, although not always. That group will be the only one remaining that is paid like today's software developers get paid. Software developer in the future will most commonly mean someone who builds software via AI tools (with the AI writing nearly all of the actual code). Human software developers will be glorified prompt wizards (with required degrees; it won't be a great job). For the median software developer, the peak has already been reached (in terms of pay and job security). Emerging market software developers will be hammered before their economies can fully benefit from the relatively high pay of the industry (from off-shoring work from big tech). The golden run is over for the bottom 3/4 of software developers. Prepare for it. Get used to it. In the developed world the ladder up and out of the middle class via software development is going to go away (and quickly). To regularly write code in the future you'll have to be damn good. Good enough, and knowledgeable enough, to be better at what you're doing than an AI with a handler (human assistant). You'll be writing the AI systems that govern everything and it'll be increasingly regulated, with more government licensing (plausibly formal AI engineer licensing and actual accountability, because the risks will go way up).
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet This reminds me of self driving car predictions. It also ignores that "building" software encompasses many different tasks.
  - adventured 3y ago
boringPragma 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tudorw 3y ago

Having played a bit with coding with AI I like this view, it's powerful, but context will always be an issue, turning real world problems into working code is a skill in it's own right, that will not change, superpowered yes, for me it's all the 'dull' parts of typing stuff out that I look forward to missing, from an early study on impact in the workplace, using a 2 year study of a call centre, the result was large improvement for less skilled staff as knowledge of best practice from those really excelling at customer service was rapidly propagated to juniors, seniors saw a much smaller increase in performance metrics. Now there is no excuse for me not to get AI to write my comments, a bunch of tests and some API's and database interconnects, etc. I've always taken a modular iterative approach, create a working basic model with a good foundation then extend it keeping it working as I build up to the final deliverable. Tempting just to go and sit in a cave for a couple of months and come back when the tools are a little more refined :)

LamaOfRuin 3y ago
Jesus, this just triggered another nightmare scenario I should have thought of earlier. People are going to have it write and/or comment a function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward. It will be not or imperfectly checked that the comment actually says what it should and the functionality matches. There will be no indication of what was written by AI, so the only option is to guess that both were written competently/with the same purpose, but when they don't actually match there's no way to know which is wrong except to check all other code that interacts with it and figure out what has been working right/expecting what was originally intended in ways that subtly break/have been working right depending on the incorrect implementation that existed. This is absolutely something that already happens with fully human developers, but it seems likely to be much more frequent and not caught as soon with AI assistance. This also seems like a failure mode that could go pathologically wrong on a regular basis for TDD types.
- occamrazor 3y ago
  An AI may be more likely to hallucinate the wrong comment, but also much less likely to forget to update the comment when the code changes. The net result could be better comments.
- rcpt 3y ago
  > will be no indication of what was written by AI I feel like companies will start using watermarking to avoid the AI dumping GPL into their codebase.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward Nah. It will just be tons and tons of trivial, straight forward code, calling other trivial code, that calls more trivial code. Yes, some of it will be created manually, but if you go with "the IA created it" you will get it right 99% of the time. And obviously, the more code, the more it will fail; but people always try to fix this with more code. Remember the times of Enterprise Java?
- lancesells 3y ago
  And then you'll be paying for the AI assistance to help navigate all the code that it wrote. That's in the Enterprise tier. Set up a sales call to learn more.

adventured 3y ago

10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case. Those people have nowhere to go to match what they're earning now. Maybe support review roles (which won't pay particularly well), where they approve decisions by the AI that are held up for human approval. The bottom half of software developers won't have AI assistants. The AI will have them as human assistants (required by corporations for control/safety/oversight purposes). The ~50%-25% bracket will build software using AI tools and will rarely write the actual code. In the top ~25% bracket (in terms of skill) you'll have software developers that are still paid very well and they'll directly write code, although not always. That group will be the only one remaining that is paid like today's software developers get paid. Software developer in the future will most commonly mean someone who builds software via AI tools (with the AI writing nearly all of the actual code). Human software developers will be glorified prompt wizards (with required degrees; it won't be a great job). For the median software developer, the peak has already been reached (in terms of pay and job security). Emerging market software developers will be hammered before their economies can fully benefit from the relatively high pay of the industry (from off-shoring work from big tech). The golden run is over for the bottom 3/4 of software developers. Prepare for it. Get used to it. In the developed world the ladder up and out of the middle class via software development is going to go away (and quickly). To regularly write code in the future you'll have to be damn good. Good enough, and knowledgeable enough, to be better at what you're doing than an AI with a handler (human assistant). You'll be writing the AI systems that govern everything and it'll be increasingly regulated, with more government licensing (plausibly formal AI engineer licensing and actual accountability, because the risks will go way up).

brigadier132 3y ago
> 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet This reminds me of self driving car predictions. It also ignores that "building" software encompasses many different tasks.
- adventured 3y ago

boringPragma 3y ago

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