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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

I find an engineer's value is in creating things have not been created before. As the author of the article says, there's already lots of great tools for making simple sites. So far, I've found that LLMs are not good at making novel software, it's basically a glorified stackoverflow. But that's still quite useful… for a programmer!

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That's exactly it. Ultimately programming is just telling the computer what you want it to do - something that a LLM is unable to do. There may be a future where an AI is smart enough and demonstrates enough analytical, cognition, and deduction ability that it can take over specifying what a computer should do - but it's not today and it's not immediately at-hand. Nor is anything that can do so likely to emerge from LLMs, as opposed to a fundamentally different architecture of AI.

For most of our industry's history telling a computer what to do involved a lot of very painful and boring things that aren't really related to what you actually want from the computer. Moving registers around. Assigning variables. Managing memory.

But the entire time we've also been converging on doing less and less of this rote busywork. Advances in frameworks and programming languages has, in each iteration, gotten us closer and closer to simply telling the computer what you want, reducing the need for this rote busywork.

So now we have an AI that is quite good (though again: far from good enough to be unsupervised) at this busywork. For people whose jobs are largely consisted of this busywork this may be highly impactful - but your job as a programmer is to minimize this busywork to the maximum extent possible anyway.

> There may be a future where an AI is smart enough and demonstrates enough analytical, cognition, and deduction ability that it can take over specifying what a computer should do

When we reach that point, anyone's job will be at risk. Give that AI an AWS account and a credit card and it'll take over the world, not build websites when someone asks it to.

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