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Comment by beeskneecaps | Hacker News Reader

Four years later: your AI replacement? When do you all predict something like this will happen?

Maybe thirty four years later. I don't think there's AI to gather requirements, talk to people, understand a problem and produce code. That's kinda general intelligence level AI. But this thing can possibly make devs work easier and if it's good enough maybe smaller teams can produce more.

This will allow for a D or C level coder to be a B/B- coder which is great, quality goes up. But corps will use this to depress wages and finally be able to create that wonderous unicorn of completely fungible coder.

This kind of tooling is akin to the crossbow.

It will allow for less skilled folks to push out code that is like other code at great speed. A copy pasta accelerator if you will.

Is that a bad thing? sw-developers are grossly overpaid to the point it's damaging

Grossly overpaid for effort/comparison to other wages/industries.

Adequately paid for value captured (hence why companies are willing to pay for them at this rate).

Not a moral statement, but this gives more tools to those in power.

I tend to think like you. Somehow we convinced businesses that a mostly-blue collar job gets paid white collar salary but I've been told that SW-engineers aren't overpaid. Most people are just very underpaid.

What are your thoughts on that? I can lean that way just because I have a genius mechanical engineer friend who only makes 60k in his 30s.

I think it's easier to bring people down to the same level rather then bringing them up to it

Do you think project managers are overpaid too?

If the reduction of developer wages led to the increase of wages for other workers, sure. But of course that won't happen. The reduction of wages for any class of worker will simply lead to further consolidation of wealth.

We each produce 1MM+ in actual revenue per year but paying us 100k+ is too much?

I'm not at all worried about AI taking over software development. In all likelihood, what you'll see instead are AI plugins in IDE editors which just assist in a much more advanced way than the intellisense we have now. Having machines code out the business logic is very much so something that would be less efficient than having a person do it.

Realistically, it just means that, rather than your coworker code-reviewing you and making a handful of comments, you get a machine to do that, and get two or so comments from your coworker about the business logic.

To answer your question: never.

I think programmers will just write model and tests in the end. The rest will be generated.

Unless we achieve AGI this is never going to replace programming because it will instead just make programming a higher level task. And well, if we achieve AGI (which I think could be pretty soon), all jobs will replaced, so it's not something I think anybody should be worried about.

I'd love to live in a world where AGI solves cancer.

I imagine that AI like this will certainly speed up development, but I suspect you will almost always need someone in the middle putting the pieces together.

Nah. Remember that "Google AI signs you up for a hair stylist session" demo? We never got anything out of that.

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