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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, unless we develop AGI, not at all... And if we did develop AGI, then data scientists would find themselves out of a job too.

I think you'd be very hard pressed to automate systems programming, and most forms of programming for that matter. So, as long as we develop new hardware, new products, new platforms, new programming languages, then there will be lots of programming work to be done.

The jobs that machine learning is replacing right now (if any?) are fairly repetitive jobs that don't really require any reasoning. Maybe machine learning is also helping automate phishing schemes, but, is there any programming job out there that's really repetitive and thoughtless, where the work is predictable and akin to factory work? Do you think a transformer model is going to be able to handle debugging?

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You obviously have more knowledge than me on this subject, so take what I say with that in mind. But I look at the march of progress and can't help but draw parallels.

Websites used to be made by hand. Then came frameworks and then came code-free e-commerce sites like Shopify. Github is testing the Copilot AI. How much longer before some architect tells an AI to stitch together code that fits some sort of functional spec. REST API's are already defined by their model and have code generated to match it. Is it that much a stretch to say that in the near future (15-25 years), AI might take over a significant part of software engineering?

However, despite the existence of products like Shopify and Wordpress, web developers have no trouble finding jobs, as far as I know.

> How much longer before some architect tells an AI to stitch together code that fits some sort of functional spec.

Would that person not be, essentially, a programmer? And what would they do if they needed to interface with external hardware that's not yet supported, or some network protocol or piece of software that's not built into AI-code-generator-3000?

> Is it that much a stretch to say that in the near future (15-25 years), AI might take over a significant part of software engineering?

In my opinion, people who probably think little of software developers, keep imagining that software engineering is this primitive, simple, reducible thing, and they are simply wrong.

Can there be a use for AI-generated code, and can that take over things like generating user-facing forms and website? Sure. However, what I think is likely to happen is that in 15-25 years, the world will be changing just as fast as it is now, and the software engineering discipline will just expand. Companies that hire "architects" who only know how to use AI-code-generator-3000 will be at a disadvantage compared to companies that hire more fully fledged software engineers.

Imagine you run a business and you only have architects who know how to use some code generator code that runs on the Google cloud. You pay some monthly bill to Google and hefty fees to use that tool. You're locked-in to that ecosystem. If you need a new feature or access to a new API, you may need to wait for Google to add support. In contrast, your competitors who hired pesky software engineers are paying higher salaries but save on Google cloud fees, and they don't have to wait for Google to fix problems to implement new features.

> Can there be a use for AI-generated code, and can that take over things like generating user-facing forms and website?

Sure, but...I'm not convinced there's any advantage over writing deterministic generators for things like that.

On one hand, you have something that produces a predictable output for a given input (modulo bugs in the generator, which can be corrected over time).

On the other hand, you have a black box that could misinterpret some non-obvious aspect of its input and produce completely unexpected output. Its training data will need to be carefully curated and maintained over time, similar to how a deterministic generator would need to be maintained, but, again, without the same degree of certainty as to what it's going to produce.

Honestly, the black box approach just seems like a nightmare to me.

Progress != destruction of jobs.

Farming, auto, journalism, and marketing fits your model. But medicine, finance, and tech would suggest otherwise. I've been getting advice about how there is no money in software and I should study hardware since 90s.

Yes, maybe this is a freefall and we haven't made impact yet. But drawing parallel without further evidence seems to be too simple of a analysis.

What cause the jobs in Detroit to be outsourced? What skills was replaced? How easy was it to train those skills? What was the potential pool of workers? What was the demand of workers?

All I'm saying is that this question is a lot more nuanced. I'm a software engineer, so I'm biased. But I'm guessing that you might be biased in some ways too. The real answer, perhaps boring, is that we really don't know. Even if you're right - you could easily be off by 200 years.

yeah, a lot of people are grasping at patterns they see in their understanding of the past and treating them like rules that will determine the future.

>What cause the jobs in Detroit to be outsourced?

Higher profit margins at the cost of lower quality and enabled with NAFTA. In the 90s until the mid 2000s, US cars were mostly top notch, now they're not that great.

You can read what the market thinks of the quality of a vehicle by its resale price relative to its new price. Used Honda and Toyotas are pretty close to a new price. Chryslers, not so much. This isn't exclusively a US problem though. You can get a used BMW or Mercedes for cheap, but you probably shouldn't if you want to keep it for a while and not spend a lot of money. Back in the 90s, you could expect to get 10 years out of a vehicle relatively hassle free, now it's about 3. YMMV.

These are the same arguments that people have made about outsourcing for thirty years, and we've only got more programmers who are paid vastly more money because of it.

because of it?

To some extent, yes. There's an awful lot of work that comes back to be done correctly.

It's how I got my job originally.

> Is it that much a stretch to say that in the near future (15-25 years), AI might take over a significant part of software engineering?

Not much of a stretch at all. But we've seen this sort of transition before: lower-level languages (microcode, assembly) are now largely generated by other software yet the amount of software development work needing to be done by humans has only expanded, and I don't expect there to be much more than a bump in the road in terms of demand for software developers this time around either.

Though I will say that the bump will be larger than the non-event that 4GLs turned out to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

The most disruptive scenario I can imagine will result in a slew of businesses hit with absolutely massive cloud computing bills (due to naive generated code that works, but very inefficiently, or perhaps just code running for naively specified tasks that HAVE no efficient solution as stated), leading to a standard requirement of having an expensive human software developer sign off on it before deployment like architects signing off on blueprints (which might be the thin edge of the wedge for professional licensing, but that's a different conversation).

As a secondary effect, there might also be a proliferation of new (or newly popular) languages (for which insufficient public code exists for ML systems to learn from), as developers focus on domain+skill+technology combinations that haven't been automated YET.

i think you're focusing too much on how many programmers will be needed in the future without considering what kind of pay they'll be able to get.

I get that we're basically arguing over the Christensen Innovator's Dilemma, and I acknowledge that at some point ML-driven solutions will cross the 'good enough' threshold that eliminates certain swaths of work wholesale, but I don't think that an increase in the demand for software development and automating away most of today's software development related tasks spells a decrease in software development pay, any more than desktop publishing was a harbinger for fewer graphic designers or lower pay for graphic design work.

>Github is testing the Copilot AI. How much longer before some architect tells an AI to stitch together code that fits some sort of functional spec.

You should register for the Copilot beta. It's pretty eye opening.

Basically it generates bog standard terrible code, because thats the majority of code. It can "Hello, world!" in most languages. Maybe it's useful for particularly boilerplate heavy languages or librairies, but for the most part it's more like StackOverflow copy-pasting except the code is worse.

So quite a long way to go.

Pretty much what should be expected by applying GPT-3 to code or whatever.

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