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Comment by DethNinja | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.

If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days.

Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It will be harder for large companies/large teams to extract value from this compared to small companies/small teams.

It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.

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>If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this...

>It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.

"Solo founders" is what? 1/10,000 of working programmers? And they're absolutely not the ones people worry about regarding GPT replacements...

> This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely)

I think I disagree. If software then becomes 10x cheaper, a lot of use cases that used to be too expensive to build now becomes affordable. At my own job, I think we could easily do 10x the business, because our customers need tons of tooling (for example for energy transition) but we don't have the people (among other problems).

What if those use-cases disappear also because they were made for humans? Will there really be a need for spreadsheets and spreadsheet plugins when all that works is done by an AI with a little help of some headless tool or scripting language?

if we look at the last 30 years: yes. The IT industry doesn't seem to be developing towards anything that resembles efficiency or minimization of work. For every useless technology, a caste of users and a caste of experts are created in order to be able to absorb the information that can be generated.

The information society is a machine maximizing information exchange, something that only incidentally implies increasing profit or increasing productivity.

The world have moved beyond zero sum economy a long time ago.

You'd be surprised...

I really don’t want my productivity to increase.

Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do.

Alternative scenario is that individual developers get somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I want that? That doesn’t give me more free time - that just means I’ll be expected to do more work. Non-technical management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now I’ll have to deal with them asking “why can’t you have the whole project done by tomorrow? Why can’t you just have the robot do it?”

It’s a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.

Alternatively, there's more developer output, the unit price of an application gets cheaper, and this stimulates demand for more developers. CPUs getting cheaper and faster didn't decrease demand for CPUs.

This is the assumption that there is end-user demand for the software developers would write. I think we can assume that end users will be using traditional software less as ChatGPT functionality increases.

I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for those who refuse to adapt and resist change.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet. It's likely that when we reach that stage, the world will change dramatically and we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction :)

> we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction

Third option, the workers no longer control the means of production, and we see levels of inequality that make the railroad barons look like they were middle class.

I doubt this third option exists. If the AI(s) lack empathy for us and we are useless to them, they will either exterminate us directly, or indirectly by denying us resources. If they have empathy for us, they will probably let us live good lives. I doubt we will be useful to them, so I doubt there is a scenario where we live miserable lives working for the AI(s).

It’s happening now with closed AI models. The era of open computing may be ending. The models are essentially a new type of computer and they will remain fundamentally closed, accessible only through an API.

It’s not the AIs who are in charge, it’s rich humans.

By super intelligent, I meant AIs that have a will of their own. In the meantime, AIs are just a tool at our disposition. And I don't see why those tools would just be in the hands of the rich, anymore than electricity, the Internet, the personal computer or the smartphone is.

Yes, but there aren't many secretaries working these days, and certainly the skill set has changed (though I'll never forget the company owner who was surprised when he was called out on promises made to women running a local college and couldn't understand how they could repeat his statements back to him verbatim along w/ the time/date of the phone call in question --- had to explain that they'd all come up through the secretarial pool, and so knew shorthand).

The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done, and render some folks unemployable --- how does society cope with that? Universal Basic Income is the only reasonable suggestion I've yet seen, but doesn't address the age-old problem of socialism --- it only works until one runs out of other people's money.

Back when computers were first announced, taxing CPUs so as to cover benefits for newly unemployed folks was suggested --- can we put that back on the table?

For a fictional take on this see:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

> The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done

Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces the cost of labor then people will find new uses for automation, and this seems to be the historical trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do (this could be better or worse given your philosophical premises).

> and render some folks unemployable

If automation truly causes more actually productive work to be done, then as a first-order effect there should be a surplus available to support these people without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as you observe the higher-order consequences of this are very much an open issue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yes, but how much more head room do we have for that sort of thing?

the current climate crisis suggests that we are running out:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

> It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet.

But we are there. This is a reality we live in for a lot of people. That's why the existential crisis in the OP.

Most of our ancestors actually had less stressful jobs and worked less than we do today. The average agricultural worker 100 years ago was not even doing a part-time in terms of time spent doing actual work. More like 2h/day on average.

You could still live like that today. But most people chose not to.

Or, with software so much easier to create, so much more software is created, and demand for SW engineers increases.

pretty incoherent. A better tool is bad because someone else might demonstrate that you're lazy?

I think the rapid rate of change in modern software libraries has left me underwhelmed with ChatGPT when it comes to new libraries, C++, or niche APIs (financial, etc).

If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites (per demos).

Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I fully understand at least one reason why (libraries and language features not being in the training data from 2021) but that makes me feel that perhaps software engineering at the cutting edge or niche is safe and still requires human reasoning. Not to mention things like properly understanding when and why to use certain data structures, real-world impact of coding choices, pricing, esoteric speed/efficiency improvements, etc.

I think there's still a broad general area where good, great, and amazing+ developers can operate without much threat and in fact using their knowledge and experience to leverage GPT-4 (or others) as a force multiplier.

But with the plugins they announced yesterday this should no longer be an issue. You'll be able to easily connect other APIs or data sources to OpenAI so that your model will write the code exactly the way you want.

Are niche libs safe or software platform will concentrate on the most popular with the most examples and better LLM completion/generation leading to ossification ?

Your tool just needs examples of the more recent library calls.

With 32k tokens coming that's like 90kb total chars which 80kb could library or API docs.

Also it can easily be connected to things like pip or GitHub or Google to check documentation. And many tools are coming over the next few months that will put it in a debugging loop.

So maybe it's "safe" in the very near term but that issue of out of date training in no way prevents it from taking software engineering jobs.

I am working hard to build an AI system that can replace me before someone else does.

>I really don’t want my productivity to increase.

>...and I find myself out of a job.

Tell me you are the problem in the industry without telling me you are the problem in the industry.

Nope, just a human being who wants to be a human being.

And to you core part of being human is being inefficient?

Think about the hunter gatherer who was given a bow, but stuck with throwing rocks because he didn't want to get too efficient.

Fletching, creating an arrowhead (that needs to be small and perfect) goes through way more material than a hand held obsidian blade, you are not necessarily saving on labour switching to arrows, especially as you now have introduced multiple specialized skills that require hundreds of hours of practice across multiple tribal members (the opposite of this, where you go down to a few babysitters to finesse the final code).

But more relevantly the instant bows were invented you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up to that maximum possible number + 1 (because sales guys). It stayed at 1 per week or whatever. It's not efficiency, it's management's unrealistics expectations of productive output that I hear being complained about.

>you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up

Expect with more efficient hunting methods you could kill more than you did before per day, which meant less hunting days, which meant more time with the wife which in turn meant bigger tribe, which in turn meant you actually had to increase your quota.

Just because you are more efficient doesnt mean your manager becomes an idiot and starts to demand unreasonable output (and if you have an idiotic manager already then you already have the problem).

I have no fucking clue what you are even arguing for.

Sounds like it's an argument not to maximize output at every possible opportunity, just because it's possible?

More, more, more, always more, the ideology of infinite growth belongs to a cancer. Quite literally a self-defeating, pathological mindset. More brought us here, to the present day, and it will probably bring us over a Seneca cliff too.

That's the thing about ambition. It means you will never be content.

I can't see the first case ever happening. You'd need a whooooole lot of trust in AI systems to have it write all the code.

As for the latter...I'd say GPT has increased my productivity and therefore allowed me to focus on the more interesting aspects of my work, rather than writing annoying boilerplate code and doing boring tasks where I don't learn anything. I almost never write my own boilerplate anymore.

More productivity doesn't necesarily mean more work. It does mean more focus on interesting work.

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or increase our productivity.

This way of living feels threatened now.

I mean this in the least snarky, most sympathetic way possible: it's time to level up. Countless roles have had to do this, it's now our turn.

This is easy to say, but I would argue that it's impossible to know what to level up in; the field is just moving too quickly now.

At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?

I agree, it is disorienting.

I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work, acquaint themselves with real implementations of it (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these techniques into their companies.

Or that could be a way to end up in the woods. What if you made a bet like this on metaverse being the future? You'd be wishing you hadn't now.

Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills. There's your set of skills the market currently is in demand of.

Some of those skills that you see in those job postings today are devaluing due to tools like ChatGPT. Not all those skills and certainly not fundamental ones like communication and leadership. But if you see something like "writing CRUD endpoints for a Rails stack" everywhere, having that skill is no longer a differentiatior.

Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at what they're poor at.

>Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills

While I agree with the sentiment, there is way too much noise in that channel. Job listings written by non-technical people just throwing key words together, recruiters detached from specific roles and companies trying signalling growth to mention just a few sources of confusion...

I've been leveling up since I started as a helpdesk rep at 18, becoming a Windows sysadmin, then a junior dev, and now a senior dev. College was not an option for me for reasons totally outside of my control, as my parents decided to not do their taxes for a number of years and I was unable to get any financial aid (grants or loans) whatsoever.

I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing the kind of math required there, it would require many years of learning.

GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come out over the next 2-5 years.

A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start. What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent earning potential?

If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code to implement various features, communicate with stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too.

Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs will be that far behind on being automated either. We already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes. It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements and factory build outs that would be needed.

No jobs will be safe. In the very, very near future.

GPT-4 is a very capable systems architect and can also implement the code. There are a few tools available to put it in a debug loop. Writing documents is a walk in the park for GPT-4. Emails or Discord chats or even perfectly realistic voice conversations are completely doable (I have that on my website).

At this point it's about connecting things together and looping them properly to automate a very high portion of jobs.

I think the answer is not employment but rather production. Think of something you can leverage these AIs that would be interesting or useful to someone else or some business.

Beyond that things like UBI and generally better integration of technology into government is going to be critical for our survival. Especially decentralized technologies and real-world resource data.

If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming.

I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.

> I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.

Maybe we shouldn't be, but it's still a problem that regularly needs to be solved.

...because of the limitless customization that sneaks into every growing software project. This limitless customization is also my last hope, maybe GPT-n won't be able to solve it as good as I do.

Which industry would you recommend? I hate studying and I especially hate everything software development related with a passion.

In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL, HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud, docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced might have been "Java application server management" since that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at the moment. I have worked for the government and met PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java and still got paid generously for their long term expertise.

I seriously doubt you’re writing the same kind of webapps you were a decade ago, if so you’re a minority. Regardless a decade doesn’t “refute” that the web itself is a total disruption of the way people wrote code prior. This industry is always changing paradigms and were constantly exposing more high level ways to instruct the processor.

> simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems

I can see how you might think that... until you start actually talking in depth with enough actual users and executives and trying to get them to agree on how all that stuff should work and what it should be capable of.

Most of the development process is about trying to wrangle abstract ideas about how business logic should be implemented/improved from flawed humans who aren't great at communicating those ideas. Your 'simple' CRUD app still often has to be highly customized by someone willing to do the difficult work of dealing with people. And that's before you even start getting into working with more regulated businesses.

Code monkeys/plumbers using 'outdated' tech who can deliver something that makes a workplace more efficient in the long run will continue to be in demand. There was enough functionality in software by the 1970s to handle the vast majority of business needs. Someone still has to understand those business needs (which ultimately have little to nothing to do with software) well enough to translate them into something that works. Whether it works for those who are using it is all that really matters.

> We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work.

Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.

Maybe not, but they do get to eat, see a doctor, and enjoy some vacation time every now and then.

If I could make money doing something I found a lot of meaning in I'd be doing that instead. Thing is, we usually don't have that option.

Yikes. Your full potential isn't your work. We are all creative beings with deep emotional lives and connections to everything around us. And there are a ton of jobs in programming that pay well enough that you can live relatively well in a capitalist society. Some people find fulfillment in their families, neighbours, art, and dreams.

How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I would say. Why should people measure their happiness and self worth from these?

I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or passions. The key is to find a balance between work and other aspects of life.

> Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness.

I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.

Indeed it is given the preponderance of bullshit jobs.

Capitalism maximizes profits, not happiness. The market for software development jobs is much bigger for people who know popular frameworks and are content with validating forms, querying databases, aligning buttons, sending reports, etc. It's a lot easier (and rewarding) to find fulfillment elsewhere.

> also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness

For all but a select few this is an unrealistic fairy tail. Most of us just want to make money to better enjoy our lives. We were given or acquired certain skills to make money, out of juvenile interests or opportunities we used. That doesn't mean we enjoy using those skills. It would be very hard to find any other job without taking a massive pay cut, investing huge amounts of money, time and effort only to have a high chance you won't like your new job as well.

I see no job or career I am interested in: I hate everything the moment it becomes work. And I am no unique snow flake. I am part of the majority with that.

https://www.wellable.co/blog/employee-engagement-statistics-....

> A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.

Things I enjoy don't pay enough to live a comfortable life. Tech does. So I do well enough at my job to pay for the things I enjoy, and hope I find enough edge cases at work to avoid burnout.

In a true post-scarcity society, where everyone has the freedom to choose a career based purely on fulfillment, your argument is excellent. Until then, however, it's not.

Hell there are things I’d probably take a big pay cut to do, but it would take years of my life and large amounts of money just to retrain.

Personally I'm excited whenever an opportunity to wholesale replace a part of my job comes up. I got in to technology because I wanted to make people's lives better, and in theory removing demands on their time does that.

The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates perverse incentives against people welcoming their redundancy.

Hard agree.

Like sibling commenters, I love the idea of building something new with greater leverage. On an individual level, I'm looking forward to leveling up and finding new ways to be effective in my work.

Unlike sibling commenters, I don't think that should be our only option in life. It saddens me greatly that, given a new option to increase the effective output of a unit of time, we repeatedly choose as a society to profit monetarily (and with vast disparity in who benefits) rather than to give people more options in life than drilling on their jobs.

The industrial revolution promised people lives of relative leisure by replacing the need for much physical labor, but instead we concentrated the benefit to the few—and we keep making that same choice over and over.

As a "software engineer", it's frustrating to work with the people you describe: people who "don't care too much". I'm looking forward to the purge.

> In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days.

You mean the same YouTube that routinely ruins people's livelihoods when it closes their accounts with no recourse? Because I'm totally looking forward to the day when that happens to my development tools.

"We detected that you are using our code to kill vulnerable children (aka orphans). This is against our TOS and we have permanently disabled your account. If you believe this was in error please log into your account and talk to our ChatGPT-powered tech support".

Code stays with you. Im more concerned with prompts like “please produce code to copy product X with the following changes”.

Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now.

Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits.

I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.

Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket.

10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95% off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why? Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht?

Edit:---------

I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are right, there are a lot of people who do not have food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will totally change your view of the world and probably make you much happier.

>Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket.

Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that.

We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray!

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-b...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...

> Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency

This has been debunked many times. The source is misleading to the point of being deceptive, it is pushing a narrative. Per the US government, the median household has $1000 per month leftover after all ordinary expenses. A very detailed breakdown of this for each income decile is available from the BLS.

You can’t square “most Americans can’t afford a $1000 emergency expense” with “median Americans can afford to light $1000 on fire each month without impacting their standard of living”.

It's the debunkings that are pushing a narrative (and reading the BLS numbers in whatever way fits it).

And it would be news to million struggling to pay the bills and rent (and not because they buy expensive lattes or new iPhones) that then can "afford to light $1000 every month without impacting their standard of living".

Especially for people whose standard of living is already working their ass off, perhaps in two jobs, and still scrapping to make it and not even thinking of affording to sent their kids to school, or can't even dream of ever being able to survive a need to stay off work for a month for medical reasons...

What are the figures by year? Is 2021 an outlier?

> Yes, but we are in a world of abundance.

We have an abundance of inessentials. Housing is still scarce and food is volatile. Health care and education are expensive. Many people are sleeping on the streets or falling into lifestyles of despair.

Progress has been applied unevenly and most critically not to the factors of life that form the base of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Housing isn't scarce, it's not evenly allocated.

Lots of properties being kept vacant so as to drive up rents/prop up property values, and it's difficult to get low-income housing built because of NIMBY.

“Cornering the market” results in real scarcity and the housing market has been permanently cornered.

The problem is, even with automation we are still burning up to 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy.

We are going through 2.5 earth's worth of non-renewable resources each year in order to maintain our current lifestyles --- this simply isn't sustainable.

Let's turn things around:

- under what circumstances should a person be allowed to use more than 1/7 billionth of the solar energy which the earth receives each day?

- under what circumstances is at acceptable for a person to create more heat than 1/7 billionth of what the planet is able to radiate out into space on a daily basis?

I fear you haven't spent much time in the places in this "world of abundance" where people live in abject misery. I'm currently in Brazil, where some 20% of the population lives on less than $5.50 per day and 30% of families don't have enough food. And it's not for want of agricultural production.

I hear ya bud, and I think you have the right take. This will ultimately vastly improve the lives of quite a lot more people than if it never happened. If we survive the coming years of turmoil and AIs or social unrest dont destroy the world, we are looking at post-scarcity future of so much plenty that the powers that be would have to do something particularly obviously evil and nefarious to keep that wealth from spreading to everyone. As the cost of mass production of basic needs, housing, etc etc all drastically lower, the excuse for why they're not being spread gets more and more ridiculous - even as people's individual power lowers as they become redundant. (Though reminder: the current chess champion is a human with AI assistance, not a pure AI. Humans copilots may still be semi-relevant a while longer!) Wealth Inequality might very-well still skyrocket, but overall this should still uplift everyone's quality of life and effectively allow for mass retirement - even in the third world, eventually.

IF we make it through...

What good is abundance if we haven't used it to minimize suffering? It's a good laugh whenever people think AI will democratize things. Summer children and their little daydreams.

The 100 million people in India who are no longer in poverty do not matter?

Obviously the target number of starving children is zero. But the reality is that we are not going to get that number to zero overnight. It takes incremental steps.

I do not think we live in a world of abundance. In the US there are more vacant housing units than there are homeless people but we can't home them. We throw away food in dumpsters and toss chemicals on it rather than feed someone. More people would likely garden or raise chickens if HOAs didn't have such an iron fist as to decide what color of paint is allowed on your house. Those are problems we could solve but choose not to. And then there are the resources that we do not have in abundance because we fight wars over them, or will.

New creators have success all the time, as will new software engineers.

But you’re right, the more level the playing field, the greater the competition.

> while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits

In my niche(s), I still see new Youtubers pop up all the time that gain large followings and turn Youtube into a full-time job. Sure, they don't all become rich, but many have started earning enough to drive Teslas, so it's definitely not pennies.

Entertainment has winner-take-all / power-law dynamics due to cultural cohesion and limits on human attention (I want to watch what other people, and my time is limited), which is why a relatively small number of them make a good living.

Software development, as an employment opportunity, does not have these same dynamics.

I think the Youtube comparison is a good one up to a point. It's a niche product. Everyone wants to be part of it, competing for a very very limited resource which is our attention. While with technologies like GPT or whatever comes next we empower anyone to excel in any area and create whatever (for now non-material things).

From your comment:

> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.

From the second line of your comment:

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs

Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.

Now junior devs don't have to build the product of someone else's dreams; they can build the product of their own dreams.

Not everyone wants to do that though. There is a lot of extra crap that being a business owner entails. Some people just want to put in their work time and focus on other things. This basically forces everybody devote their lives to entrepreneurship.

We don't need everyone to, though. If AI increases dev productivity X-fold, and this leads to an X-fold increase in entrepreneurship, then the junior devs who want to build someone else's dream will have more opportunities to do so.

... and starve? You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams? Artists. And the stereotype isn't "well-fed artists" for a good reason.

> You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams?

Every entrepreneur that ever existed.

Yeah and 90% of startups fail. Again, for a good reason.

I simply don't understand why people are upset the ladder is being pulled up after me!?

It's democratizing for those with an idea but without the skill to convince investors to hire the juniors to implement it. It's a problem for employment numbers and macro-scale ratios of working to non-working adults.

What happens when no junior devs are hired for 5 years? Who works their way up to replace the seniors who are leaving?

Gpt’s and the various apps that apply them

There’s always a cost to beeing more greedy than you can handle

Please elaborate

Stupid greed is taking so much as to starve your supply. Smart greed is sustainable greed. Smartest greed is one that feeds back into the supply, making it grow exponentially.

But isn't this just hindsight tautology? How would you know ahead of time how much greed is too much?

For example, I've been predicting the financial demise of Facebook for over a decade now (amongst other things for being too greedy), but Zuck's still doing well enough. Even if Meta is declining now, it still might have been rational for him to be so greedy over the past decade.

And what do you think capitalism is all about?

By the late 2020s, it's entirely possible that a "weaker" AGI will emerge. Consequently, there may be much less need for senior developers as well. However, that could be among the least of our concerns if we cannot reliably align AI with human interests by then.

Date Weakly General AI is Publicly Known https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general...

Date of Artificial General Intelligence https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

The latter includes this criterion: "Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al."

The APPS benchmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938

Note that the predicted date of "stronger" AGI has moved quite a lot since GPT-4 is revealed, from late 2030s to 2033 at this moment.

   > By the late 2020s, it's entirely possible that a "weaker" AGI will emerge.

We will surely have self-driving cars by then? Right? Right?

Has anyone tested GPT-4 on APPS? And if it can get 90% (which it probably can) does that mean people will admit it's an AGI? Or more likely they just keep moving the goalposts.

Is there a scenario where just the people that REALLY love programming start in the field? Could this be a situation where you reduce the field of programmers to only those that are truly passionate about programming, thus making the people left in the field the cream of the crop? We have all worked with individuals that are clearly in the field because they think they can make a lot of money and don’t give a crap about doing a good job. Can we envision a world where these people go on to another field instead of clogging up this one?

I started as a programmer right during the dotcom crash - it sure felt like that.

If there is a way to produce senior software engineers without years of work experience, why aren't we doing it now?

There is no way. What I am alluding to is that, the only people who will go down the path of being a junior to senior dev are those that truly love the field. It will purge those that only go down the path because they think it will make them a lot of money. Is this good or bad? Only you can decide.

What I didn’t say but should be a given is that these AI tools won’t be able to completely eliminate the need for any human touch, it will just reduce the need to the point where there won’t be the current huge demand for developers, and thus, the only people that travel down that path will be the ones that are truly passionate about development.

In order to be able to make use of the code produced by AI - be it review, validate, fix, integrate or iterate - operator needs to ultimately be better than AI at making software. (Unless we abandon the idea of understanding what exactly software we are running does)

The question then is how exactly does one become better than AI at making software if no one is going to pay you to make software until you are better than AI?

The same issue with art - we need a sea of mediocre artists and a market for their work for great artists to emerge. AI takes over mediocre art market - all commercially driven art disappears.

this is my thinking too. Who's going to learn coding if all basic needs are served buy the chatbot? What would be the incentive to put in the work?

I feel the same about future artists, sadly. If a computer can paint, then maybe no one is going to bother to learn how to paint.

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

And so-called "senior engineer" salaries will now be brought down and deflated since they were inflated and unjustifiably high in the first place and are the main reason why these tech startups run themselves into the ground with little to no path to profitability.

I guarantee you that so far, the only winner in this is OpenAI. Not the 'senior engineers' building on top of someone else's AI API.

In fact, why hire 3 over-priced seniors when one junior with ChatGPT is significantly much cheaper? I quite find it funny that somehow, all hope is instantly lost because of a "AI" spitting out code will replace them. It just shows that the majority of these tech startups were just good at losing money and being solely dependent on VC cash.

I think if we have the "final software" there won't be a need for a website to sell you products or another for renting a place for your vacation or the one that processes your payments. All is done in one software with one interface. I don't see a need for most of the current founders, especially for solo ones. Also consolidating this capability in a few big tech companies means whatever happened to other industries after industrial age, will happend to ours. Compare the current software industry to other industries with big players (chemical, aviation, power, etc.) where the barrier to entry is higher. Sure there are startups, but not as many as in software scene and even then, many of the are digitalizing those industries.

If you are a manager, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire senior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

If you are a CTO, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire managers and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

If you are a VC, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire anyone and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce?

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832

> Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce?

I don't know. But I don't see why you might not be able to ask GPT-6 or GPT-7 to enumerate (and patent and implement) all of them for you. Why do you think "founders" or "creatives" are special?

In the end, something like that is "amazing" only for the person who owns the most GPUs or manages to figure out the first effective meta-prompt.

First they came for the junior devs, and I did not speak out because I was not a junior dev... :P

> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.

> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be unemployed.*

Do you get it now?

* Until you can climb up the ladder where each rung is now 20 feet apart.

What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product?

> What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product?

Are you seriously asking that question? What are the barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are 20 feet apart?

Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at the top.

Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution.

If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.

> Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution.

Seriously, think about it a bit, without being sanguine.

The junior dev is inexperienced, in everything, and now has no path to build up that experience. No one's going to want their 18/22 year old amateur-hour "chatgpt make me a cloud app" (which is in competition against millions of others). So unless they're extremely lucky, they goto fail.

Maybe after 10 years of those failures they could build up enough experience through trial-and-error to maybe see a little success with a "chatgpt make me a cloud app," but how are they going to feed themselves the meantime? Maybe that will work if they have rich parents, but otherwise they're probably going to have to use up their energy to scrape by. So another goto fail.

Competition from non-junior devs, who can do all the same things the junior+GPT can do and also the tricky parts which "GPTs" can't yet do; and also have the benefit of domain-specific expertise about some area of business and/or better connections for investors, marketing, B2B connections.

This hypothetical scenario is literally like "pull up the ladder behind you", as all this experience and connections is something that a senior person has gotten while being handsomely paid for their time, but a future junior person may have to get on their own time and dime.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything, and there's no reason to assume that random unemployed inexperienced people will be superior at execution.

So who will hire the junior software devs?

And how can somebody become a senior dev unless they first worked as a junior

Perhaps some juniors will take it head on solo but will repeat the same mistakes seniors made when they were juniors but will survive nonetheless

You become a 'senior dev" by running a company / startup yourself, since it is clear that after the tech layoffs, almost no-one has the money or profits to hire any new developers - junior and senior, which is why I say they are both affected.

But even then, self-proclaimed seniors are too scared to start their own startup(s) now because of (1) Unfavourable market conditions (2) VCs hesitant to raise money (3) ChatGPT will extinguish their startup; even if it uses "AI".

I guess this was the result of a decades long quantitive easing, near zero interest rate bubble of cheap money that had to collapse.

I don't think starting a company will be that successful if you lack enough experience to be hired at any existing companies. The survivorship bias in tech is huge. Most things fail.

They got to this level of progress with maybe a million users input and feed back. Now they will have 1000s of plugins feeding them with high quality structured data and 100s of millions of users feeding it. They are also going multi modal and have billions in capital to expand the size and scale of the network. The probability that this is peak gpt seems very unlikely. I expect they will have a post grad level of intelligence gpt across the board in less than 5 years.

No white collar job will be valued the same since GPT will basically be doing most of the work and we will maybe review it and steer it. We will just keep feeding it and it will know everything at the cutting edge of all fields.

> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years.

Is this really true? I may be missing something (I probably am), but I didn't find much use for AI tools in my itsec/programming work. It's a nice tool to have, but I don't write that much boilerplate. I've tried to use it as a better Google, but it kept replying with made up nonsense (things I have problem with are usually niche technologies OpenAI is not good at - I expect it will get better in the future). So I find it dubious it will "10x my productivity" in the "upcoming years". Decades, maybe.

But maybe the future really is now, and I'm just being an old-timer who can't adapt.

There is already software to basically run unit tests on LLM output and re-run the prompt until it passes. As the models get better and the tooling improves, a lot of programming will become specifying constraints on the program you want, and letting the AI explore the latent space until it finds a solution, which you then evaluate before providing more detailed constraints until it does everything you want.

Where do you get those unit tests though?

You get it to write them. Maybe in cucumber so you can check them / edit them by reading the English. Maybe you use a competitors model to write the tests as then less likely to make same error in code and tests, or write them twice and get best of three to spot errors.

A lot of people are messing around with React and web-dev in general where you can fuzz component logic until it kind of looks OK. I can see that working out.

If you want to do anything new or - god forbid - know of a better way to do things than what 90% of the population is doing (htmx?). Good luck.

What exactly are you working on and which "AI tool" did you try? I will bet you $20 that GPT-4 (which can take 80kb of API docs or examples in the 32k model and is a very good programmer) if given reference info in your domain and a good prompt to think through the problem and solution step-by-step will be able to do very well.

So the future is anyone with that model access (the 8k tokens could have 20kb of docs which is still useful) who wants to really try.

Not everyone is adept at becoming a solo founder

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