AI is going to create more work for software developers, in the shorter run. Big efficiency gains motivate the million small steps, planned and muddled throug

AI is going to create more work for software developers, in the shorter run. Big efficiency gains motivate the million small steps, planned and muddled through, that it takes to harness the new efficiencies most effectively at scale. Not just somewhere. But in the long run (where “long” these days can be pretty short) how can generations of improving automated software developers, improving in both quality & capacity, not replace lots of software developers. > There’s no shortage of people saying “this time it’s different”, but those people have been around for every other major technological advance and they have yet to be correct. I wouldn’t bet on the doomers. This is not a valid argument. It is logical gibberish. Let’s prep it for Lean: “many people have been wrong before, let’s call those people “Doomers1”. There are people who disagree with me. Let’s call those people “Doomers2”. Clearly, “Doomers1” = “Doomers2”, proof by similarity of set names. “Doomers1” have been wrong about something before, therefore “Doomers2” will certainly be wrong. Lean crashes… —- Question: “What software development task is intrinsically human?” Thought experiment: Could there be alien non-human programmers? Based on silicon instead of carbon, that could ever be better than us? An argument that software developers cannot be replaced by exponentially scaling and improving learning tech, would have to involve some quite special reasoning. It would have to tie humans to fundamental math and computing in a way that shook our understanding of all three.