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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> The rest of us aren't going to care that much.

If you don't adapt, you'll be out of a job in ten years. Maybe sooner.

Or maybe your salary will drop to $50k/yr because anyone will be able to glue together engineering modules.

I say this as an engineer that solved "hard problems" like building distributed, high throughput, active/active systems; bespoke consensus protocols; real time optics and photogrammetry; etc.

The economy will learn to leverage cheaper systems to build the business solutions it needs.

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> If you don't adapt, you'll be out of a job in ten years. Maybe sooner. Or maybe your salary will drop to $50k/yr because anyone will be able to glue together engineering modules. [...] The economy will learn to leverage cheaper systems to build the business solutions it needs.

I heard this in ~2005 too, when everyone said that programming was a dead end career path because it'd get outsourced to people in southeast Asia who would work for $1000/month.

You really think in <10 years AI will be able to take a loose problem like: "our file uploader is slow" and write code that fixes the issue in a way that doesn't compromise maintainability? And be trustworthy enough to do it 100% of the time?

My point exactly.

If I interpret OP's statement correctly, that chatGPT can build complex systems from scratch in 10 years. Then according to that statement, the only adaptation is to choose a new career because it has made almost all SWE jobs go the way of the dinosaurs.

Humans cannot do this 100% of the time. The question is will AI models take the diagnosis time for these issues from hours/days to minutes/hours giving a massive boost in productivity?

If the answer is yes, it will increase productivity greatly then there is the question they we'll only be able to answer in hindsight. And that is "Will productivity exceed demand?" We cannot possibly answer that question because of Jevons Paradox.

Think banking Cobol and FORTRAN.

Non-AI code will be a liability in a world where more code will be generated by computers (or with computer assistance) per year than all human engineered code in the last century.

We'll develop architectures and languages that are more machine friendly. ASTs and data stores that are first class primitives for AI.

> You really think in <10 years

We have no idea how AI models will be in 10 years. At the speed the industry is moving is true AGI possible in 10 years? I think it would be beyond arrogant to rule out that possibility.

I would think that it's at least likely that AI models become better at Devops, monitoring and deployment than any human being.

According to my calculations it’ll be more 9 years at the latest. You just need to build Cicero for code. Planning is the main feature missing from LLMs.

I really think in <10 years it will be trivially easy for a single programmer to ask the AI for that code and move on to the next ticket after 10 minutes while earning $30/h accounting for inflation because productivity gains will have eliminated not only most programming jobs, but also the corresponding high wages.

We cannot be too sure about the hard problems, but it's certain we are screwed either way. The bulk stuff that is being done is problems that have been already solved. It's just sufficient that AI can thrive building boring CRUD apps (and aren't we at that point already?), just give it time to be integrated into existing business workflows and the number of available positions will shrink by an order of magnitude and the salaries will be nothing special compared to other white collar work. You will be impacted by supply and demand, no matter what your skills are.

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