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I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues t

I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well. At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues that my part of the world (Canada and to a lesser extent, America) has been faced with is inequality. I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people. Are there downsides to that? Probably but I think granting power evenly is probably a better path to utopia than misguided elitism. The latter sounds like the path to despotism.

stcroixx 3y ago
If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.
- acscott 3y ago
  If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck. How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?
  - hackertyper69 3y ago
    too many cooks in the kitchen
  - znpy 3y ago
    > How is adding more developers going to reduce the output? time spent coordinating, time spent arguing, time spent reaching consensus (dumb example: function signatures / architecture / api contracts), time spent comparing approaches.
- rsanek 3y ago
  This is a zero-sum way of thinking about the world.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    It’s true though. If anyone with a high school education can be a successful “programmer”, most programming jobs will be filled by the cheapest labor. Why would any company pay more than they need to to keep their company functioning?
    - zerbinxx 3y ago
      It’s already currently true that many mid-tier shops employ an army of low-knowledge practitioners who will always “solve” whatever problem you give them in record time by abusing the tools you give them, reinventing wheels, punching semi-truck-sized holes in otherwise functional abstractions, barely testing anything. All is well until scaling problems or distributing desyncronization bugs or severe data-loss/replication happens in production. Once you’ve seen this happen, and especially when you see it cause outages that costs thousands of dollars, you understand why it’s worth it to “pay more than you need”. When the rubber hits the road, having an army of automata who “get things done” is functionally not the same as having skilled developers who own their craft in the long term. If I were starting a company today I’d probably be fine taking on some tech debt to get v1 out the door and then worry about investing in a dev team who can scale/rewrite it into the version that can scale to whatever level I need. But in no way would I want to ever again watch a junior dev who doesn’t understand how to read logs trying to implement a caching + crontask solution to reduce app load times from 30s to 15s on a backend query against a table that holds 10k records, because their code retries 500 times because they don’t understand timeouts, indices, or ORM induced n+1 issues. In the long term, automaton armies will always curse you to the problems of local min/maxima problems unless they are backed up by someone with enough global vision to get them out of that hole.
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    Life is zero sum. Space I exist in is space someone else literally can’t exist in. Anyone telling you something else is lying to you and doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
jpatt 3y ago
I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy. Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a shrinking piece of the unautomated pie.
- Affric 3y ago
  The comment you’re replying to is making that point: that people who earn a decent wage from the knowledge economy are threatened by AI and oppose it because of their interest in the current system’s inequality. It follows that if it is unjust for those who are knowledge workers then it is unjust for those who are service workers (unless you can morally differentiate them). Perhaps if inequality is wrong then it’s the system that creates inequality that should be looked at rather than preserving rent seeking by knowledge workers refusing to compete with AI while perpetuating inequality on those who aren’t powerful in the current economy? Food for thought.
  - jpatt 3y ago
    I think you're reading a lot more into my comment than is there, tbh. The comment I'm replying to said something to the effect of: "this may be a good thing because by democratizing highly paid professions, lower income workers will be lifted." My comment said something to the effect of: "I disagree, I think capital owners will simply get more rich and the middle class will collapse further without raising anyone." Of course our society doesn't give service workers a fair shake. My partner worked in a grocery store for a large chunk of our relationship. The schedule inconsistency, the sleep deprivation, the lack of healthcare, no vacation, no real sick leave, and on. Much of my family works in blue collar oil positions. There you're paid a bit better, but you throw away your body to make a dime. I know. I'm just not convinced the default outcome of automating some knowledge workers is that magically somehow that makes everyone's lives better. I think legislative change of some kind would have to happen if that's the outcome we want.
zetsurin 3y ago
> I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people. I think the fear of software developers is that they will join the low pay crowd.

stcroixx 3y ago

If software dev is simplified to the point people working jobs like you describe are able to do it, wages will also plummet, so it’s not like their situation is going to improve.

acscott 3y ago
If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck. How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?
- hackertyper69 3y ago
  too many cooks in the kitchen
- znpy 3y ago
  > How is adding more developers going to reduce the output? time spent coordinating, time spent arguing, time spent reaching consensus (dumb example: function signatures / architecture / api contracts), time spent comparing approaches.
rsanek 3y ago
This is a zero-sum way of thinking about the world.
- brewdad 3y ago
  It’s true though. If anyone with a high school education can be a successful “programmer”, most programming jobs will be filled by the cheapest labor. Why would any company pay more than they need to to keep their company functioning?
  - zerbinxx 3y ago
    It’s already currently true that many mid-tier shops employ an army of low-knowledge practitioners who will always “solve” whatever problem you give them in record time by abusing the tools you give them, reinventing wheels, punching semi-truck-sized holes in otherwise functional abstractions, barely testing anything. All is well until scaling problems or distributing desyncronization bugs or severe data-loss/replication happens in production. Once you’ve seen this happen, and especially when you see it cause outages that costs thousands of dollars, you understand why it’s worth it to “pay more than you need”. When the rubber hits the road, having an army of automata who “get things done” is functionally not the same as having skilled developers who own their craft in the long term. If I were starting a company today I’d probably be fine taking on some tech debt to get v1 out the door and then worry about investing in a dev team who can scale/rewrite it into the version that can scale to whatever level I need. But in no way would I want to ever again watch a junior dev who doesn’t understand how to read logs trying to implement a caching + crontask solution to reduce app load times from 30s to 15s on a backend query against a table that holds 10k records, because their code retries 500 times because they don’t understand timeouts, indices, or ORM induced n+1 issues. In the long term, automaton armies will always curse you to the problems of local min/maxima problems unless they are backed up by someone with enough global vision to get them out of that hole.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  Life is zero sum. Space I exist in is space someone else literally can’t exist in. Anyone telling you something else is lying to you and doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

jpatt 3y ago

I don't really think law, medicine, and software engineering are the main drivers of wage inequality, though. If the lowest wage was minimum wage and the highest wage was a programmer salary, the Americas would be a very equitable economy. Automating America's remaining paths to the middle class will only serve to widen the gap between capital owners who will own infrastructure for automation and those shoved into a shrinking piece of the unautomated pie.

Affric 3y ago
The comment you’re replying to is making that point: that people who earn a decent wage from the knowledge economy are threatened by AI and oppose it because of their interest in the current system’s inequality. It follows that if it is unjust for those who are knowledge workers then it is unjust for those who are service workers (unless you can morally differentiate them). Perhaps if inequality is wrong then it’s the system that creates inequality that should be looked at rather than preserving rent seeking by knowledge workers refusing to compete with AI while perpetuating inequality on those who aren’t powerful in the current economy? Food for thought.
- jpatt 3y ago
  I think you're reading a lot more into my comment than is there, tbh. The comment I'm replying to said something to the effect of: "this may be a good thing because by democratizing highly paid professions, lower income workers will be lifted." My comment said something to the effect of: "I disagree, I think capital owners will simply get more rich and the middle class will collapse further without raising anyone." Of course our society doesn't give service workers a fair shake. My partner worked in a grocery store for a large chunk of our relationship. The schedule inconsistency, the sleep deprivation, the lack of healthcare, no vacation, no real sick leave, and on. Much of my family works in blue collar oil positions. There you're paid a bit better, but you throw away your body to make a dime. I know. I'm just not convinced the default outcome of automating some knowledge workers is that magically somehow that makes everyone's lives better. I think legislative change of some kind would have to happen if that's the outcome we want.

zetsurin 3y ago

> I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people. I think the fear of software developers is that they will join the low pay crowd.