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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

Your head is in the sand. Some time soon, they can and will actually do the whole job.

Human beings struggle to communicate system requirements to other human beings. We're supposed to be "smart", communication is supposed to be something we're good at.

Getting requirements to an AI is going to be grotesquely challenging, and even when we're able to get that far, testing the work is going to be an ever greater challenge.

"Exactly what I asked for, but not what I wanted" is going to rise to an entirely new level.

But if you can try asking for different things and it takes 10s to create, it might be easier to just iterate like that than ask a developer to spend a day on it.

Nah, never the whole job. Software engineering isn't 100% writing code, so even if an AI could write 100% of the code, there's still all of the other things around it that need to get done.

I am actually super excited for better AI tools to help write so much of the boilerplate crap I have to write. I'm here because I want to solve problems, not write code, and writing less code makes me happy.

We would have never gotten JSON if AI was around to write XML for us.

Terrifying

In the book zero to one thiel makes the case that the next boom is not in replacing humans, it’s in assisting humans. IMO he was right a long time ago (not sure when this book was written) and continues to be right to this day. I’m not saying AGI is not coming, but this isn’t it just yet.

as someone who has used copilot/chatgpt since they became available, I must say we are still a ways off.

Mainly, as others have pointed out, only a small % of coding is typing out code.

It looks like it will be able to do every non-programming office job first.

I agree completely. People are forgetting that programming is a difficult technical and creative task. If an AI can master that, it should be able to master many tasks which are far less technical and/or far less creative.

I'm looking forward to seeing how AI manages accounting, that's a field that requires even more creativity than programming.

Why do you believe accounting requires more creativity than software development?

When the domain of possible software projects is infinite, I find this really hard to imagine.

It's a "creative accounting" pun. Think of filing dinners at nice restaurants as business expenses, but cranked up to 11.

Which is what we call "hallucinations" in ChatGPT, it is really good at that. It works really well for creative accounting, similarly creative programming just crashes your app.

And that is the whole reason ChatGPT will replace accounting and such jobs before programming, because those jobs are much more tolerant of inaccurate statements than programming is.

This claim has been made many times before.

Makes you wonder who's head is really in the sand.

By then they should also be able to do or make redundant 90% of jobs in general.

If the AI can make the entire product then it can probably market the product, provision resources, handle accounting, user support, etc.

At that point we’ve cracked capitalism and our ability to create has far surpassed our ability to consume.

I'm not sure I believe that and It's never going to be that magical.

If you're an accountant, Excel will likely continue to improve to ingest financial data and help you generate reports faster than before. They are usually overworked anyway, so they will welcome improvements there.

My partner writes education grant proposals, and having contextualized search like ChatGPT makes writing those grants more persuasive. Since they could have access to more statistics and data. HOWEVER, note, the data in ChatGPT is already stale and getting new data in there is complex and will require someone to do the actual research.

All kinds of examples of things that I see where it doesn't replace the job, but improves its velocity.

But that isn't what this thread is about. The thread is about AI having perfect domain knowledge about every single topic and being able to write any software with that or else you are sticking your head in the sand.

They will allow people to increase efficiency and thereby lowering the amount of time and cost for a developer. Soon complex web platform development will be like building a wordpress website, you’ll have 10 concurrent clients or projects rather than just one.

Your head is in the sand.

You know what "whole job" means, right?

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