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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

There is one important thing Copilot doesn't do yet, and that's to say: "I can implement that, but is there a chance you wanted to solve a different problem here, which might be Y?"

One of the criteria I have for a professional is to understand how their work fits into the wider context, and be able to juggle multiple vantage points. Most developers now are amateurs that just stitch together code from npm, Stack Overflow and random github repos to create unmaintainable messes. Their work might be made redundant, or even sadder it might be that quality will become even more irrelevant, and all that matters is how well developers can sell themselves.

Whatever might happen, solid fundamentals and knowing how to best abstract the real world with minimal complexity will still be useful in the next 10-20 years.

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As many alluded in the comments , here is what I envision 10 years from now.

best programmers will be in still in demand in 10 years.

Best programmers (who understand requirements well and write concise code, etc..) are only less than 1/3 of total programmer population as of TODAY. What 2/3 of the total programmers doing today can be done by 20% of this current 2/3 group at similar ( or better) quality with the help of COPILOT like tools.

This tedious task of finding answers will be the job of GPT Codex/Copilot in near future

Future of Coding is AI pair programming

Between 2025 -2030 GPT-8 Codex/Copilot kind of tools enable developers write "better" code, regardless of their SKILL LEVEL ( this is with the 2/3 programmer population as of TODAY).

Even in 2030 we still need best programmers, whose programming patterns will be still be input to GPT-10 kind of tools.

Like "Peak oil" , "Peak automobiles" ( we are almost there), we will be reaching "Peak programmers" in few short years, then decline from there onwards.

Copilot ( and others in it's class) is a paradigm shift:

What is software development: let AI generate most code then REVIEW code for accuracy, completion, security etc.. and test it

What is NOT software development : "solving age old problems" via Stackoverflow

By 2030 tools like Copilot create 'two-tier programmers'

-Tier 1 (squeeze 10x from Copilot) : writes 'prompts' and 'function signatures' for AI tools likes of CoPilot as part of technical design, from which Copilot will generate 80% of the code

-Tier 2: will check completeness & execute generated test suite

software development will be devalued and turned into low-pay undesirable work

the only currency in this world is ownership and job-takers take no ownership in their work because they choose to trade their finite time and valuable IP for peanut butter

> the only currency in this world is ownership and job-takers take no ownership in their work because they choose to trade their finite time and valuable IP for peanut butter

What's the alternative?

global level:

- unionizing

- union vote against signing IP assignment

- royalty agreement (like in music business)

- state legislation to make IP transfers between individual and corporation illegal

on individual level:

- refusing to sign IP assignment

- if possible, founding your own company with money extracted from labour and keeping the IP for yourself

> - if possible, founding your own company with money extracted from labour and keeping the IP for yourself

In other words: You should not allow others to get rich on your labour. Instead make a company and get rich on other people's labour?

within that system everyone keeps their IP and receives royalties

I fail to understand how this would result in any meaningful differences from the current reality.

The work of some is worth, at least fiscally, more than others. I’m not justifying that or defending it. I’m just saying that my work is not as financially valuable as Tim Cook’s (for example), which is easily demonstrated.

The same would occur under this reality. Let’s say I create this awesome new Widget and I retain the rights. The Widget goes on to make my employer billions and I get millions in royalties. That’s effectively our current system.

And what about issues like confidentiality and conflict of interest? If I own my work and my agency decides to do business with, say, Vivendi, then what prevents me from screwing over my agency and giving the same or extremely similar content to, say, Disney?

I’m not asking to rhetorically write off what you say or refute it. These are the questions my mind went to as someone who owns his own small business where creating and manipulating IP for clients is a nontrivial part of our output.

all moot when no one needs your skills anymore. I'm always for founding a company, but that's the only way to stay one step ahead of the machine and it's always a long bet.

I don't know if you're familiar with this American folk legend.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

That IP can be owned is only due to laws that say it can be, or it is kept a secret. What happens when the effort to make software to solve a specific problem becomes trivial, and the model of ownership is based on made up agreements? Do the ones who hold all the data to train the algorithms, who have access to large scale computing resources hold all the value?

the IP itself isn’t a problem

the problem is that you are forced to sign off your work to corporations else you can’t feed your family, because they’ll find somebody else who is desperate enough and will sign it

the only solution is unionizing and voting against IP transfer between individual and corporation

that’s why people need a CS degree

to understand what they are actually doing

but companies don’t care, all they want is that lemon juice extracted by cheap labour

Having a degree and „understanding what you are actually doing” might be correlated, but that doesn’t imply causation. At least my small sample size of experiences would suggest otherwise.

Why it has to be a CS degree? It is about requirements management and many non CS degree use this skill (typical in engineering)

> that’s why people need a CS degree

That's the wrong takeaway. Plenty of people know how to build "what's needed" instead of "what's requested", CS degree or not.

I'm not super confident it correlates at all, but if I were to make a guess, I'd say that people with CS degrees are more likely to focus on the wrong things (eg: take requirements as they are without thinking about the why and optimize the requirements given to them) compared to people who got into tech other ways. But that's just based on anecdotal data, won't apply everywhere and so on.

is obedience bad though?

companies love obedience!

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