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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

And this was written before GPT-3 etc. started producing… well, it's not amazing code, but I've certainly seen worse from professionals.

I was expecting programming (from natural language instructions) to be the last job that gets automated. Some of us and our jobs may yet survive to the final stage of automation, but I think the minimum bar for skill is rising, even if the market hasn't priced that in yet.

For those of us that remain in the sector, things could go either way; but for new grads? I remember a few years ago a story about software solutions in law that were automating the jobs that taught fresh law graduates how to be good at law, and I think even the current state of generative language models is sufficient to replace many fresh graduates in software.

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This is what scares me. I predict that instead of developers salaries going down, there will instead be fewer low-hanging jobs for developers to pluck. We have an increasing workforce of web-stack developers (front-end JS, back-end JS, full-stack JS) that, as far as I can tell, do a LOT of the same stuff in the same language (JS) over and over again. I don't know when, but I am very confident that that skillset will be replaced by AI Software 2.0 in the relatively near future. That will lead to a massive reduction of jobs and a massive influx of SaaS type web-stack software. Obviously that means an increase in demand for AI developers (but only until that cycle repeats on them) and "prompt engineers" and project managers.

I've put time into learning a skillset that I genuinely think will be unnecessary in the near future and the solution is to prepare for a skillset that has almost zero fiscal value in the short term. That's a tiring thought, haha.

I could totally be wrong, but that's a future that I think is highly likely and people who think they can't be replaced are kidding themselves. I need to learn lower level programming ASAP.

Who tells GPT what to write? Who verifies what is written?

As long as you need a human in the loop, that human is the programmer. Programming will never go away, the job just changes.

Right now? In the context of me saying it's a substitute for a fresh graduate?

> Who tells GPT what to write? Who verifies what is written?

Are the people who would previously be doing the same to the fresh graduate.

How far we are from a project manager being able to do the same to a whole team, or a CEO being able to do away with a PM, I don't know, but I did explicitly suggest it may still be the last thing to ever get automated.

This is true, a dev will always be needed in some way, but these are early days for AI code generators, and they will probably get continue to get better and better. The result of this is hard to say, but in the least it will increase productivity of each developer. Yeah, if a couple of developers can do the job of what used to take a 3 or 4, then that will greatly decrease demand for SWE's...

... although, on the flip side, this could be another case of more powerful tools allowing is to build even more incredible software systems, creating new classes of products for consumers to use (for example, cloud providers like AWS have decreased the need for a business to have a large sys admin team. This seems like it would reduce the need for system admins, but an argument could be made that cloud providers have allowed many small & medium-sized businesses to create web/phone apps that wouldn't have in the past, and increasing the needs for developers and admins).

It has been the latter for the lifetime of computers' existence. Personally, I see no reason for that to change in the near future. AGI will happen, but we will still want human's directing it's efforts.

"Near" meaning what?

My prediction horizon for this stuff doesn't go past about 2030; not because it's definitely happening by then, but because by then too much will have changed one way or another.

"Directing" meaning what?

A director isn't the same job as a programmer. A natural language interface isn't the same thing as a programming language. "Computer" used to be a profession, a person who computes, a programmer is an interface (for now human) between a computer and a business goal.

Copilot hardly replaces a human. It might replace making a Github search manually.

in 2015, Deep Dream hardly replaced artists.

Five years later, and Imagen/Dall-E/SD are on the cusp of blowing up the entire field.

Sure, the celebrity artists will be fine, but the twenty-somethings who took out 90K of debt to attend SAIC are in for a miserable five decades.

Coding, like illustration, will evolve, or die, or both.

In 2015, fully autonomous driving was a year away. We will see. Though I don't mind copilot automating simpler plumbing tasks personally. To replace human programmers, it'd have to replace mathematicians first.

Perhaps (though I'm not as certain as you about sequencing) but my original claim was about junior devs, not all devs. How do fully autonomous driving AI compare to the motor vehicle accident rate of teenagers with less than 6 months experience?

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