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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Wake me up when AI will join the customer call, negotiate features with product managers, and figure out exactly what needs to get built.

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In a post-dall-e post-stable-diffusion world I’ve completely 180’d on this argument as defending your job worth.

I used to think you’d struggle to replace an actual illustrator/artist because clients always want something specific. But really it isn’t about you giving them what they want it’s about them having to deal with you at all.

Why would I message the illustrator, negotiate rate, have a meeting then have back and forths trying to get what I want when AI can be running from the first moment without interacting with anyone else and it can be spitting out versions of the thing before you have the actual person in a video call.

It can do this all day and all night then someone just had to choose what version of the thing they want or nudge it closer.

It happened to art and I don’t see why devs think they’re immune.

On a long enough timeline, there may only be unfortunately project managers.

(Still think building great and opinionated work has value. But low level generic work is on the chopping block as far as I can see today)

Re: Art, it'll be interesting what all this brings to the table. On one hand, tools for artists, on other replacement for artists. Turns out, we might be getting into polemics of what art is and it'll turn out that skills (as in trade) are part of it, but not the most important - it's artist's taste that sets them apart and drives them above. Now, everyone will face the same since skills barrier will be brought down.

>It happened to art and I don’t see why devs think they’re immune.

Probably because it's a different problem domain that actually requires precision and the requirements often are unexpressable in natural language.

Also, it has not happened in art. You can say it has happened in art when 50% of currently salaried graphic artists are unemployed.

>actually requires precision and the requirements often are unexpressable in natural language

Same sentence could describe art.

The first part couldn't and the second doesn't apply to the current (and I suspect any future) mechanism AI models use to generate...anything.

> Also, it has not happened in art. You can say it has happened in art when 50% of currently salaried graphic artists are unemployed.

It’s barely happened to anyone. There isn’t a general pattern of automation replacing jobs, so it’s not a reasonable thing to assume will happen.

Automation replaces tasks and makes things cheaper, both of which make jobs more productive and more worth keeping.

> "On a long enough timeline, there may only be unfortunately project managers."

You won't need those either. AI will be able to just use your neuralink implant to build a complete product based on some vague ideas, in minutes. Goodbye daily scrum meetings and quarterly planning.

In all seriousness now - who is going to be building this "AI"? What about the platforms it has to run on (both software and hardware)? The tools that team has to use?

Will AI find new ways to implement AI? Will AI research and implement ways to optimize itself across the whole stack?

Are you just going to let AI spin VMs for you in your multi-cloud Azure subscription with uncapped spend, if that's what it takes to build your product? Maybe AI will also investigate customer escalations and bug reports? Or memory corruption issues?

Look, I get it. You're excited about a computer computing. And maybe you've gotten used to the idea that engineering ends with being a code-monkey stitching together CRUD APIs in Python.

Nothing wrong with being excited. But please, have a bit of respect for the craft.

> In all seriousness now - who is going to be building this "AI"? What about the platforms it has to run on (both software and hardware)? The tools that team has to use?

as I said "low level generic work is on the chopping block"

I think the hard part is where the customer doesn't really know everything about their business process: it's extremely common to have a partial view of a complex system. The process of requirements discovery involves asking questions, pointing out inconsistencies, and setting priorities. Only at that point do you sort of have an agreement about the desired work and even then there are gaps that need iteration.

I already use gpt3 in my daily life to refine details for things I'm building for work, and to advance personal goals. If you give AI all the pertinent requirements, it's great at coming up with solutions. That's despite the fact these early language models are optimized for coherency and not correctness. So I wouldn't think we're too far off from waking you up.

Do you have any examples you can share?

I've used a predecessor of gpt3 quite successfully for decades:

https://www.amazon.com/Mattel-Games-Magic-Ball-Retro/dp/B014...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL

Wait until AI also becomes product manager and the client.

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