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Comment by natfriedman | Hacker News Reader

We think that software development is entering its third wave of productivity change. The first was the creation of tools like compilers, debuggers, garbage collectors, and languages that made developers more productive. The second was open source where a global community of developers came together to build on each other's work. The third revolution will be the use of AI in coding.

The problems we spend our days solving may change. But there will always be problems for humans to solve.

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This innovation does not seem like a natural successor to compilers, debuggers and languages. If today's programming environments still require too much boilerplate and fiddling with tools, it seems like better programming languages, environments that require less setup, etc would be a better use of time. Using GPT to spit out code you may or may not understand seems more like a successor to WSDLs and UML code generators. I really hope we're just in a wild swing of the pendulum towards complex tooling and that we swing back to simplicity before too long.

Edit:

To expand a little and not sounds so completely negative towards AI, seems like there could be value in training models to predict whether a patch will be accepted, or whether it will cause a full build to fail.

If this is the drive behind this project, seems like you are putting too many eggs in one basket. Maybe a good attempt to get rid of the "glue" programming but, I wouldn't pay for this. Its all trivial stuff that I now need to review.

It would be a "cool tool" if it inspected the code statically and dynamically. Testing the code to see if it actually does what the AI thinks it should do. From running small bits of code on unit level to integration and acceptance testing. Suggest corrections or receive them. _That_ will save time and I and companies will pay for.

Also you cannot call this the "third revolution" if it is a paid service.

I appreciate this insight, as a proponent of progress studies. It is indeed a pragmatic view of what the industry will be or should be. I believe the thing that would be also appreciated would be a pair security auditor. Most vulnerabilities in software can be avoided early on in development , I believe this could be a great addition to Github's Security Lab securitylab.github.com/

Do you or 'natfriedman have authored any works in a public repository, so that we can judge the validity of the pragmatic view?

I'm super interested to read more about your theory/analysis. Have you written on it in a blog or anything?

There's a good amount of discussion on this topic in "The Mythical Man-Month". The entire book is discussing the factors that affect development timeframes and it specifically addresses whether AI can speed it up (albeit from 1975, 1986 and 1995 viewpoints, and comparing progress between those points.)

Thanks! That's a great suggestion. I forgot that was in there.

I read Mythical Man Month many years ago and enjoyed it. Time for a re-read. Of course it won't cover the third wave very well though. Would love to see a blog post cover that.

Let's solve the problem of replacing CEOs next. The above paragraph could have been written by GPT-3 already.

I think you’re looking at the problem the wrong way. This provides less strong engineering talent with more leverage. The CEO (which could be you!) gets closer to being a CTO with less experience and context necessary (recall businesses that run on old janky codebases or no code platforms; they don’t have to be elegant, they simply have to work).

It all boils down to who is capturing the value for the effort and time expended. If a mediocre software engineer can compete against senior engineers with such augmentation, that seems like a win. Less time on learning language incantations, more time spent delivering value to those who will pay for it.

That's not really how it's going to go though. Just look at what your average person is able to accomplish with Excel.

Your own example of the CEO becoming a CTO can be used in every level and part of the business.

Now the receptionist is building office automation tools because they can describe what they want in plain English and have this thing spit out code.

> Just look at what your average person is able to accomplish with Excel.

Approximately nothing.

The average knowledge worker somewhat more, but lots of them are at the level of “I can consume a pivot table someone else set up”.

Sure, there are highly-productive, highly-skilled excel users that aren't traditional developers that can build great things, but they aren’t “your average person”.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791017 (HN: Excel warriors who save governments and companies from spreadsheet errors)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26386419 (HN: Excel Never Dies)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20417967 (HN: I was wrong about spreadsheets)

https://mobile.twitter.com/amitranjan/status/113944938807223... (Excel is every #SAAS company's biggest competitor!)

Yes, Excel “runs the world”, and in most organizations, you’ll find a fairly narrow slice of Excel power users that build and maintain the Excel that “runs the world”.

We may not call them developers or programmers (or we might; I’ve been one of them as a fraction of my job at different times, both as a “fiscal analyst” by working title and as a “programmer analyst” by title), but effectively that's what they are, developers using (and possibly exclusively comfortable with) Excel as a platform.

Well, agree to disagree here as I’ve seen it with my own eyes, but it’s kind of besides the point.

Is it a coincidence that the same company that makes Excel is trying to… “democratize” and/or de-specialize programming?

I don’t really think so, but shrug.

LOL. But you actually make a good point here. GPT-3 can replace most comms / PR type jobs since they all sound like Exec-speak.

Usually I agree but I think Nat's comment here makes perfect sense and isn't just some PR buzzword stew. Tools like these are basically a faster version of searching stack overflow. You could have suggested that things like github and stack overflow would replace programmers since you could just copy and paste snipits to write your code.

And sure, we do now have tools like square space which fully automate making a basic business landing page and online store. But the bar has been raised and we now have far more complex websites without developer resources being wasted on making web stores.

I think this is already happening. There's credible evidence that the Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has been essentially replaced by a Siri-driven clone over the last 7 months. They march the real guy out when needed, but if you watch closely when they do, it's obvious he's under duress reading lines prepared by an AI. His testimony in the Epic lawsuit for example. They'll probably cite how seriously he and the company take 'privacy' to help normalize his withdrawal from the public space in the coming years.

This is exactly the kind of fun, kooky conspiracy theory I've missed with all the real conspiracies coming to light over the last decade or so.

Can you cite some of this credible evidence?

natfriedman is a human being like you and me, not an AI; let's treat them with consideration for that.

Perhaps he should go easy on the euphemisms then and show respect for the developers who wrote the corpus of software that this AI is being trained on (perhaps illegally).

OK, then ask him to go easy! Great idea, and it might get a good response.

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