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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I've had the same idea, but instead it could "decompile" spaghetti code with horrible variable names into something readable.

It seems like a reasonable (almost believable even) first stage to software finally coming to eat the jobs of its creators.

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Our jobs will just move an abstraction level higher. We used to have to worry about registers and stuff, then we automated that. We used to worry about memory, then we automated that. We used to worry about CPU stuff, then we automated that for most applocations.

Eventually we're going to become technical PMs. As long as there will be fuzzy unclear problem descriptions, there will be jobs for people who can codify and standardize processes.

"First they came for the assembly programmers..."

"And then they ate the universe, and there was no-one left to care."

Plenty of paperclips, though.

> Our jobs will just move an abstraction level higher.

This seems a little optimistic in terms of the average software developer's ability to think at higher and higher levels of abstraction.

It's not an easy skill, and not that many people are very strong in it.

Just look at how programmers today react to mathematical paradigms and explanations (category theory, anyone) in any practical setting.

You say that, but I've written software unrolled loops in assembler on ARM because that's what we needed.

I'd really appreciate something that takes my hacked-together code and cleans it up and makes it presentable. That's usually the second phase of the job anyway, which could be automated.

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