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The models are improving. The software that harnesses them is also improving. It wasn't that long ago that the models were quite bad at a lot of the tasks tha

The models are improving. The software that harnesses them is also improving. It wasn't that long ago that the models were quite bad at a lot of the tasks that they are excelling at today. I do agree there's probably a ceiling to what we can get out of these, but I also don't think we have quite hit that point yet.

jdw64 5mo ago
I agree with what you said. And perhaps my belief that “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. If AI replaces everything, then I become unnecessary. So maybe I am simply trying to convince myself that developers like me are still needed. That said, realistically, I still think there are limits unless the essence of architecture itself changes. I also acknowledge part of your perspective. Those of us who are not in the AI field tend to experience AI progress not as a linear or continuous process, but as a series of discrete events, such as major model releases. Because of that, there is inevitably a gap in perspective. People inside the industry, at least those who are not just promoting hype, often seem to feel that technological progress is exponential. But since we are not part of that industry, we experience it more episodically, as separate events. At the same time, capital has a self-fulfilling quality. If enough capital concentrates in one direction, what looked like linear progress may suddenly accelerate in an almost exponential way. However, even that kind of model can eventually hit a specific limit. I do not know when that limit will arrive, because I am not an AI industry insider. More precisely, I am closer to someone who uses Hugging Face models, builds around them, and serves them, rather than someone working on AI R&D itself.
- tharkun__ 5mo ago
  “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. No, no it's not. I've seen what "PM armed with an LLM" will do. Trust me, if you're a decent enough Full Stack software engineer that can take an idea and run with it to implement it, you'll have a leg up over the PM with the idea that has no idea how to "do computers". Most of what these PMs can produce nowadays turns boardroom heads, sure. But it's just that: visuals and just enough prototype functionality that it fools the people you're demoing to. Seen enough of these in the recent past. Will there be some PMs that can become "software developers" while armed with an LLM? Sure! But that's not the majority. On the other hand, yes there are going to be "software developers" that will be out of a job because of LLMs, because the devs that were FS and could take an idea from 0-1 with very little overhead even in the past can now do so much faster and further without handing off to the intermediates and juniors. They mentor their LLM intern rather than their intermediates and juniors. The perpetual intermediate devs with 20 years of experience are the ones that are gonna have a larger and larger problem I'd say. The Staff engineer that was able to run circles around others all along? They'll teach their LLM intern into an intermediate rather than having to "10 times" a bunch of perpetual intermediates with 20 years of experience.
  - dasil003 5mo ago
    I agree with you, so far what I see is that AI amplifies an individuals output in many domains, but the value of that is 100% contingent on their judgment. It changes the economics of many tasks, but fundamentally it can't really help you if you don't actually know what you want—which is sort of a shocking number of people in the corporate world where most people are there for a paycheck, and perhaps to pursue some social marker of "success". I'm under no illusions about the goals of AI company execs to justify their valuations (and expenses!) by capturing a huge chunk of global employment value, and the CEOs of many big companies whose financials are getting squeezed for all sorts of reasons and are all too happy to jump on the efficiency narrative of AI to justify layoffs that would have been necessary anyway. Also, AI will keep getting better and it could certainly will move up the food chain—it's already replaced a lot of what I did and I assume capabilities will continue improving for a while even after model capabilities plateau as we improve harnessing, tooling and practice. So yeah, it can replace a lot of what we do, but I'm not running scared because every step of the way I've seen software people are the ones who actually get the most out of LLMs. Sure it can write all the code so the job changes, but even our workflows completely change, it's giving us more of an edge (if we're open to it) than it does to anyone non-technical. At this stage it still feels empowering on an individual level. Now I do worry about the consolidation of power and wealth in a tech oligarchy, but that's an issue we need to deal with at a societal and government policy level. Essentially, I can see AI as having radically different outcome potential based on how it's governed. In one way it can be very empowering to small teams, and reduce coordination costs, and increase competition by allowing smaller groups of people to make more scalable companies. But it could also lead to unprecedented concentration of wealth and power if a small set of AI companies are allowed to capture all the economic gains. I don't think there are any easy answers, but I do feel hopeful that we can figure something out as a society—it certainly seems to be creating some unified sentiment across political lines that have been so polarized and divisive over the last decade.
    - cushycush 5mo ago
      It amplifies by 1000x is the problem for our jobs. However, I do agree that developers with experience are needed to actually harness these tools. I’ve been able to do wonders with them, but I can’t see a junior dev doing 10% of the work that I can with them.
- riffraff 5mo ago
  I'm with you at the "bargaining" phase of AI grief (sure AI is useful but it won't replace me!). I think my reasoning is you still need a tech person to translate from feature to architecture. AI can do both but not everyone knows they need the latter.
  - cushycush 5mo ago
    Of course but unfortunately it reduces the amount of jobs 100x or more. You don’t need 30 software developers at a startup anymore. You just need one.
    - slopinthebag 5mo ago
      That just means you can have 30x more startups!
    - PsylentKnight 5mo ago
      This sounds like the lump of labor fallacy It seems almost certain to me that AI is going to increase the surface area of what it’s possible for programs to do and therefore massively induce demand for more programs I think the part that remains to be seen is whether a sufficient percent of that new work will be done by humans such that overall demand for the humans doesn’t collapse Personally I think us humans will be ok for at least a few more years
      - tavavex 5mo ago
        > It seems almost certain to me that AI is going to increase the surface area of what it’s possible for programs to do and therefore massively induce demand for more programs Have we seen any of that yet? If anything, the most popular modern projects out there are all AI tooling, basically recursive software to help with using AI. Have you seen any truly novel software that solves new problems? Even before AI, I've been worried that most of the problems that were possible and viable to solve have run dry, leading to tech chasing hype and the next big thing over practical issues that have already been scooped up by someone else. What new problems have been added?
    - 5mo ago
- wombat-man 5mo ago
  I have a more optimistic take. Those of us who have done it by hand for a while are armed with that experience. Yes you can just use an LLM to do everything now, but I think it's tough to supervise it on tasks that you've never actually had to do. Maybe that won't be as important as I think, but I think that I'd have learned a lot less in school if I just used an LLM to code everything. Day to day, the resolution of our work is probably different. We're zooming out and spending more time strategizing and managing the AI tooling. This might mean less jobs. It might also mean we just get more done. I don't work on AI directly either, but I'm finding a lot of value in learning the new tooling. I think being able to competently leverage these tools is going to be a key skill from now on.
ares623 5mo ago
At $800B collective spend, you would hope these things are improving. The point is that have the improvements been worth $800B and counting.
- vasco 5mo ago
  Yes for sure, even if we stopped today the amount of almost free software that can be produced with current models will improve the world by a lot as the knowledge of how to use it propagates over more people.
  - ares623 5mo ago
    Can't wait to eat software for dinner
  - ygrr 5mo ago
    The problem with this argument is that it shouldn’t take years for these developments to come about anymore. The world is incredibly interconnected via the web - it also explains ChatGPT’s explosive growth. To claim people aren’t trying would be comical - where there’s an opportunity to generate economic profits competition for it will be intense. The best we have external to model producers is cursor and openclaw lmao. The gap between hype and reality is disgustingly large.
    - vasco 5mo ago
      I don't think you're correct. Just think of things like using any computer system in your business, like a spreadsheet to keep track of inventory. From the moment software for spreadsheets became available to most businesses using them, how many years went by? I knew businesses that should have computerized processes that didn't in like 2010. So if you just apply this knowledge that even basic good things take a long time to truly spread and permeate, even if the tech stopped advancing today, the current benefits will take years to fully materialize. There's many "little software tools for X" that now any business owner with a few hours can create. I know many people improving their small businesses for free like this and helped a few friends making their lives easier with "small software" assisted by AI. People that would never afford 20 SaaS products for this and that, and would never go through the hassle of hiring someone to do it custom. And they will be able to do this even if the bubble pops and all the labs go bankrupt by just setting up a little gpu with a local model. I dunno about hype, I just know I have several friends running self made custom software "in production" for small things and almost no help for their classic "offline" businesses.
ponector 5mo ago
If everything is improving why the quality of the released software is going down?

jdw64 5mo ago

I agree with what you said. And perhaps my belief that “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. If AI replaces everything, then I become unnecessary. So maybe I am simply trying to convince myself that developers like me are still needed. That said, realistically, I still think there are limits unless the essence of architecture itself changes. I also acknowledge part of your perspective. Those of us who are not in the AI field tend to experience AI progress not as a linear or continuous process, but as a series of discrete events, such as major model releases. Because of that, there is inevitably a gap in perspective. People inside the industry, at least those who are not just promoting hype, often seem to feel that technological progress is exponential. But since we are not part of that industry, we experience it more episodically, as separate events. At the same time, capital has a self-fulfilling quality. If enough capital concentrates in one direction, what looked like linear progress may suddenly accelerate in an almost exponential way. However, even that kind of model can eventually hit a specific limit. I do not know when that limit will arrive, because I am not an AI industry insider. More precisely, I am closer to someone who uses Hugging Face models, builds around them, and serves them, rather than someone working on AI R&D itself.

tharkun__ 5mo ago
“people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. No, no it's not. I've seen what "PM armed with an LLM" will do. Trust me, if you're a decent enough Full Stack software engineer that can take an idea and run with it to implement it, you'll have a leg up over the PM with the idea that has no idea how to "do computers". Most of what these PMs can produce nowadays turns boardroom heads, sure. But it's just that: visuals and just enough prototype functionality that it fools the people you're demoing to. Seen enough of these in the recent past. Will there be some PMs that can become "software developers" while armed with an LLM? Sure! But that's not the majority. On the other hand, yes there are going to be "software developers" that will be out of a job because of LLMs, because the devs that were FS and could take an idea from 0-1 with very little overhead even in the past can now do so much faster and further without handing off to the intermediates and juniors. They mentor their LLM intern rather than their intermediates and juniors. The perpetual intermediate devs with 20 years of experience are the ones that are gonna have a larger and larger problem I'd say. The Staff engineer that was able to run circles around others all along? They'll teach their LLM intern into an intermediate rather than having to "10 times" a bunch of perpetual intermediates with 20 years of experience.
- dasil003 5mo ago
  I agree with you, so far what I see is that AI amplifies an individuals output in many domains, but the value of that is 100% contingent on their judgment. It changes the economics of many tasks, but fundamentally it can't really help you if you don't actually know what you want—which is sort of a shocking number of people in the corporate world where most people are there for a paycheck, and perhaps to pursue some social marker of "success". I'm under no illusions about the goals of AI company execs to justify their valuations (and expenses!) by capturing a huge chunk of global employment value, and the CEOs of many big companies whose financials are getting squeezed for all sorts of reasons and are all too happy to jump on the efficiency narrative of AI to justify layoffs that would have been necessary anyway. Also, AI will keep getting better and it could certainly will move up the food chain—it's already replaced a lot of what I did and I assume capabilities will continue improving for a while even after model capabilities plateau as we improve harnessing, tooling and practice. So yeah, it can replace a lot of what we do, but I'm not running scared because every step of the way I've seen software people are the ones who actually get the most out of LLMs. Sure it can write all the code so the job changes, but even our workflows completely change, it's giving us more of an edge (if we're open to it) than it does to anyone non-technical. At this stage it still feels empowering on an individual level. Now I do worry about the consolidation of power and wealth in a tech oligarchy, but that's an issue we need to deal with at a societal and government policy level. Essentially, I can see AI as having radically different outcome potential based on how it's governed. In one way it can be very empowering to small teams, and reduce coordination costs, and increase competition by allowing smaller groups of people to make more scalable companies. But it could also lead to unprecedented concentration of wealth and power if a small set of AI companies are allowed to capture all the economic gains. I don't think there are any easy answers, but I do feel hopeful that we can figure something out as a society—it certainly seems to be creating some unified sentiment across political lines that have been so polarized and divisive over the last decade.
  - cushycush 5mo ago
    It amplifies by 1000x is the problem for our jobs. However, I do agree that developers with experience are needed to actually harness these tools. I’ve been able to do wonders with them, but I can’t see a junior dev doing 10% of the work that I can with them.
riffraff 5mo ago
I'm with you at the "bargaining" phase of AI grief (sure AI is useful but it won't replace me!). I think my reasoning is you still need a tech person to translate from feature to architecture. AI can do both but not everyone knows they need the latter.
- cushycush 5mo ago
  Of course but unfortunately it reduces the amount of jobs 100x or more. You don’t need 30 software developers at a startup anymore. You just need one.
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    That just means you can have 30x more startups!
  - PsylentKnight 5mo ago
    This sounds like the lump of labor fallacy It seems almost certain to me that AI is going to increase the surface area of what it’s possible for programs to do and therefore massively induce demand for more programs I think the part that remains to be seen is whether a sufficient percent of that new work will be done by humans such that overall demand for the humans doesn’t collapse Personally I think us humans will be ok for at least a few more years
    - tavavex 5mo ago
      > It seems almost certain to me that AI is going to increase the surface area of what it’s possible for programs to do and therefore massively induce demand for more programs Have we seen any of that yet? If anything, the most popular modern projects out there are all AI tooling, basically recursive software to help with using AI. Have you seen any truly novel software that solves new problems? Even before AI, I've been worried that most of the problems that were possible and viable to solve have run dry, leading to tech chasing hype and the next big thing over practical issues that have already been scooped up by someone else. What new problems have been added?
  - 5mo ago
wombat-man 5mo ago
I have a more optimistic take. Those of us who have done it by hand for a while are armed with that experience. Yes you can just use an LLM to do everything now, but I think it's tough to supervise it on tasks that you've never actually had to do. Maybe that won't be as important as I think, but I think that I'd have learned a lot less in school if I just used an LLM to code everything. Day to day, the resolution of our work is probably different. We're zooming out and spending more time strategizing and managing the AI tooling. This might mean less jobs. It might also mean we just get more done. I don't work on AI directly either, but I'm finding a lot of value in learning the new tooling. I think being able to competently leverage these tools is going to be a key skill from now on.

ares623 5mo ago

At $800B collective spend, you would hope these things are improving. The point is that have the improvements been worth $800B and counting.

vasco 5mo ago
Yes for sure, even if we stopped today the amount of almost free software that can be produced with current models will improve the world by a lot as the knowledge of how to use it propagates over more people.
- ares623 5mo ago
  Can't wait to eat software for dinner
- ygrr 5mo ago
  The problem with this argument is that it shouldn’t take years for these developments to come about anymore. The world is incredibly interconnected via the web - it also explains ChatGPT’s explosive growth. To claim people aren’t trying would be comical - where there’s an opportunity to generate economic profits competition for it will be intense. The best we have external to model producers is cursor and openclaw lmao. The gap between hype and reality is disgustingly large.
  - vasco 5mo ago
    I don't think you're correct. Just think of things like using any computer system in your business, like a spreadsheet to keep track of inventory. From the moment software for spreadsheets became available to most businesses using them, how many years went by? I knew businesses that should have computerized processes that didn't in like 2010. So if you just apply this knowledge that even basic good things take a long time to truly spread and permeate, even if the tech stopped advancing today, the current benefits will take years to fully materialize. There's many "little software tools for X" that now any business owner with a few hours can create. I know many people improving their small businesses for free like this and helped a few friends making their lives easier with "small software" assisted by AI. People that would never afford 20 SaaS products for this and that, and would never go through the hassle of hiring someone to do it custom. And they will be able to do this even if the bubble pops and all the labs go bankrupt by just setting up a little gpu with a local model. I dunno about hype, I just know I have several friends running self made custom software "in production" for small things and almost no help for their classic "offline" businesses.

ponector 5mo ago

If everything is improving why the quality of the released software is going down?