3 ms·

That's the bane of all productivity increasing tools, any time you free up immediately gets consumed by more work. People keep on making the same naive assumpt

That's the bane of all productivity increasing tools, any time you free up immediately gets consumed by more work. People keep on making the same naive assumption that the total amount of work is a constant when you mess with the cost of that work. The reality is that if you make something cheaper, people will want more of it. And it adds up to way more than what was asked before. That's why I'm not worried about losing my job. The whole notion is based on a closed world assumption, which is always a bad assumption. If you look at the history of computers and software engineering including compilers, ci/cd, frameworks/modules/etc. functional and OO programming paradigms, type inference, etc. There's something new every few years. Every time we make something easier and cheaper, demand goes up and the amount of programmers increases. And every time you have people being afraid to lose their jobs. Sometimes jobs indeed disappear because that particular job ceases to exist because technique X got replaced with technique Y. But mostly people just keep their jobs and learn the new thing on the job. Or they change jobs and skill up as they go. People generally only lose their jobs when companies fail or start shrinking. It's more tied to economical cycles than to technology. And some companies just fail to adapt. AI is going to be similar. Lots of companies are flirting with it but aren't taking it seriously yet. Adoption cycles are always longer than people seem to think. AI prompting is just a form of higher level programming and being able to program is a non optional skill to be able to prompt effectively. I'd use the word meta programming but of course that's one of those improvements we already had.

FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
> That's why I'm not worried about losing my job. The whole notion is based on a closed world assumption, which is always a bad assumption. You might be right, but some of us haven't quite warmed to the idea that our new job description will be something like "high-level planner and bot-wrangler," with nary a line of code in sight.
- jillesvangurp 9mo ago
  Change can be upsetting. Compilation used to be done by people. People used to write assembler for a living. Entire languages like Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk came and went. You might still find paid (well paid even) work doing these things of course but it's a bit niche at this point. Things like Cobol are not likely to be picked for new projects. And unless you work in a museum, anything involving punch cards is probably not a thing anymore. There are a lot of professions that were common fifty years ago that no longer aren't. I get that people are emotional about change impacting them; and maybe still a bit in denial even. But regardless how people feel, it's probably not going to majorly change the outcome. What I sketched in my earlier comment is that it is maybe not as black and white as jobs disappearing and everybody being out of work. AI tools require people with programming skills to be most effective. That points to a change of the type of work. Some might resent that and give up or maybe try to stick to their current gigs for as long as they last. I don't think this is all changing overnight. But on a scale of a few years, it's going to impact the job market quite a bit.
  - xhevahir 9mo ago
    Your attitude is Panglossian, and even your concession that these changes are "going to impact the job market quite a bit" massively underestimates the danger we could be facing. As opposed to what happened in any previous era, we're talking about the replacement of workers across practically all white-collar career fields, all happening over the course of a few years. There will be nowhere for these workers to go but down, into low-paid and precarious service work—assuming they can still find work even in these industries, which will have become more crowded with workers of all sorts; the skilled trades are likely to face a frightful race to the bottom as well. How many years of such creative destruction do you think our economic and political systems can weather before something truly disastrous happens?
lelanthran 9mo ago
> That's why I'm not worried about losing my job. Right. Because the demand for hand-written code will be high enough that you will keep your job? Or did you mean that you expect to lose the current job (writing software) and have a new job (directing an agent to write software)? You really expect to get paid the same doing a low-skill job (directing an agent) as you did the high-paid one (writing software)? After all, your examples > If you look at the history of computers and software engineering including compilers, ci/cd, frameworks/modules/etc. functional and OO programming paradigms, type inference, etc. There's something new every few years. Every time we make something easier and cheaper, demand goes up and the amount of programmers increases. Were all, with the exception of the invention of high-level languages, an increase in skill requirements from the practitioners, not a decrease in skill requirements.
veunes 9mo ago
The problem isn't the abstraction level, it's the loss of the incubation period. Moving from Assembly to C didn't remove the need to think through data structures. Prompt engineering, however, triggers skipping the reflection stage entirely. Constantly managing bots leaves zero bandwidth for the "are we building garbage?" question. AI scales typing speed, not the speed of architectural decision-making

FeteCommuniste 9mo ago

> That's why I'm not worried about losing my job. The whole notion is based on a closed world assumption, which is always a bad assumption. You might be right, but some of us haven't quite warmed to the idea that our new job description will be something like "high-level planner and bot-wrangler," with nary a line of code in sight.

jillesvangurp 9mo ago
Change can be upsetting. Compilation used to be done by people. People used to write assembler for a living. Entire languages like Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk came and went. You might still find paid (well paid even) work doing these things of course but it's a bit niche at this point. Things like Cobol are not likely to be picked for new projects. And unless you work in a museum, anything involving punch cards is probably not a thing anymore. There are a lot of professions that were common fifty years ago that no longer aren't. I get that people are emotional about change impacting them; and maybe still a bit in denial even. But regardless how people feel, it's probably not going to majorly change the outcome. What I sketched in my earlier comment is that it is maybe not as black and white as jobs disappearing and everybody being out of work. AI tools require people with programming skills to be most effective. That points to a change of the type of work. Some might resent that and give up or maybe try to stick to their current gigs for as long as they last. I don't think this is all changing overnight. But on a scale of a few years, it's going to impact the job market quite a bit.
- xhevahir 9mo ago
  Your attitude is Panglossian, and even your concession that these changes are "going to impact the job market quite a bit" massively underestimates the danger we could be facing. As opposed to what happened in any previous era, we're talking about the replacement of workers across practically all white-collar career fields, all happening over the course of a few years. There will be nowhere for these workers to go but down, into low-paid and precarious service work—assuming they can still find work even in these industries, which will have become more crowded with workers of all sorts; the skilled trades are likely to face a frightful race to the bottom as well. How many years of such creative destruction do you think our economic and political systems can weather before something truly disastrous happens?

lelanthran 9mo ago

> That's why I'm not worried about losing my job. Right. Because the demand for hand-written code will be high enough that you will keep your job? Or did you mean that you expect to lose the current job (writing software) and have a new job (directing an agent to write software)? You really expect to get paid the same doing a low-skill job (directing an agent) as you did the high-paid one (writing software)? After all, your examples > If you look at the history of computers and software engineering including compilers, ci/cd, frameworks/modules/etc. functional and OO programming paradigms, type inference, etc. There's something new every few years. Every time we make something easier and cheaper, demand goes up and the amount of programmers increases. Were all, with the exception of the invention of high-level languages, an increase in skill requirements from the practitioners, not a decrease in skill requirements.

veunes 9mo ago

The problem isn't the abstraction level, it's the loss of the incubation period. Moving from Assembly to C didn't remove the need to think through data structures. Prompt engineering, however, triggers skipping the reflection stage entirely. Constantly managing bots leaves zero bandwidth for the "are we building garbage?" question. AI scales typing speed, not the speed of architectural decision-making