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Comment by abecedarius | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so confident this is really different from how a pro Go player would react 10 years ago to the analogous question.

Put it this way: in 5 years will there be an AI that's better than 90% of unassisted working programmers at solving new leetcode-type coding interview questions posed in natural language? Arranging an actual bet is too annoying, but that development in that timeframe doesn't seem unlikely. It might take more than a scaled-up GPT, but as I said, people are working on those other directions too.

In that future, already, the skills you get hired for are different from now (and not just in the COBOL-versus-C sense). Maybe different people with a quite different mix of talents are the ones doing well.

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> I'm not so confident this is really different from how a pro Go player would react 10 years ago to the analogous question.

Yes, and there were people in the 1960s who thought computers of the time were only a decade away from being smarter than humans. The question is one of category -- Go is something that a computer could conceivably be better than a human being at. There were certainly Go programs better than some human beings at that time. "Reading a human language document, communicating with stakeholders to understand the requirements in human language, understanding the business requirements of a large codebase, and writing human-readable code" is so categorically different than what Copilot does that, and something that no computer is currently capable of. If such a thing is even possible, we haven't even begun to tackle it.

> in 5 years will there be an AI that's better than 90% of unassisted working programmers at solving new leetcode-type coding interview questions posed in natural language?

I think that's highly unlikely, but it is within the bounds of possibility given what we know about AI currently (and probably, like GPT, it will only work under specific constraints). But the gap between that and what an engineer does on a daily basis is enormous.

You may be right.

A programmer's job bridges the informal and the formal. Previous automation practically always was about helping you work with the formal end. A tool that can bridge the informal and the formal on its own is new. That was my first point and most basically why I'm suspicious of dismissals. These developments don't have to 100% substitute for a current human programmer to change the economics of what talents are rewarded.

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