Here are some more hard truths to add to the pile. > this kind of crawling and training is happening, regardless of whether it is ethical or not Glad we've es

Here are some more hard truths to add to the pile. > this kind of crawling and training is happening, regardless of whether it is ethical or not Glad we've established that it's going to change our profession regardless of ethics. > Software engineers are getting closer to finding out if AI really can make them jobless The capital class is definitely interested in this. They would love to pay fewer of us or pay us less and still get the same results. The question in 2025 might be: why would I pay you if you're not using GenAI assistants? Bob over there accepts a lower salary and puts out more code than anyone else on this team!. They may not care what the answer is: profit is all that matters. After all, they clearly don't care about the ethics of training these models, exploiting labor in countries with weak worker protections, soaking up fresh water during local droughts, etc. Why would they care about you and your work? Personally I don't find that generating code is where I do most of my programming work. I spend more of my time thinking and making sure I'm working on the right thing and that I'm building it correctly for the intended purpose. For that I want tools that aid me in my thinking: model checkers, automated theorem provers, and better type systems, etc. I need to talk to people. I don't find reviewing generated code to be especially productive even though it feels like work. I think code synthesis will be more useful. Being able to generate a working implementation from a precise specification in a higher-level language will be highly practical. There won't be a need to review the code generated once we trust the kernel since the code would be correct by construction and it can be proven how the generated code ties to the specification. We can't use GenAI to do the synthesis and replace a kernel as we still haven't solved the "black box" problem of neural nets. The problem I find with GenAI and programming is that human language is sufficiently vague for communicating with folks but too imprecise for programming. I suspect that in a few years there could be a gold mine for consulting: fixing AI-generated "house of cards" code. Hope we're all good with the coming wave of security errors, breaches, and general malfeasance that's coming with the wave of GenAI code. You think software today could be better? The current models have been trained on all the patterns that make it the way it is now. And they will generate more of it. We have to hope that "software engineers" can read enough code, fast enough, and catch those errors before they ship. Should be good times.