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Comment by daydream | Hacker News Reader

Flash isn’t a good analogy to the current situation with AI tools. But it’s worthwhile to understand regardless.

I think that AI tooling will cause demand for developers to actually go up instead of down. At least in the medium term say the next 3 to 5 years. There’s tons of businesses and nonprofits that could benefit from custom software development, where the cost has so far been prohibitively high. As the cost drops dramatically I expect demand to increase significantly.

What does that cost/demand curve look like? I don’t know. But we are going to find out.

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While there's an inherent conflict between copyright warrior corporations disrespecting the licenses of FOSS work, AI tooling will be an unprecedented boon for FOSS productivity. It's like giving every lonely cowboy developer a bunch of very skilled interns.

That’s a very interesting point I had not thought about. Let’s say AI tooling results in an across-the-board 2x multiplier for FOSS. Like there is twice as much FOSS. Plus the FOSS that exists today has twice the features plus overall quality. What happens then?

Maybe long-term the main skill in software development is less about writing new code and more about architecting systems. And also using AI to glue components together and debug. Main difference if there’s way more FOSS there’s less need to write new greenfield modules.

I don’t know. I’m spitballing here. It’s fascinating to think about.

it is a problem that whether AI generate a code under copyright. but FOSS developer don't need to worry about this.

GPT-4 can reverse engineer binary assembly code. Everything that runs locally will soon be de facto OSS.

You said in another thread it's in "the Microsoft paper" -- could you point me at which one you were referring to? I didn't see it in https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf , but it's possible that I missed it.

That’s awesome. Have you seen this demonstrated?

I suspect companies will fight this with a kind of runtime encryption.

There's also "integration". Outside of the big tech companies are lots of stodgy old companies that will need to connect their legacy stuff to anything new.

I agree. Large projects become small projects. Bringing custom development to the masses.

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