Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

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Even prompt engineering is just a short term problem, that'll get solved and largely disappear within a couple of years, if not months. Making sense of natural language is after all what LLM are already really good at, they just haven't made their way into image generators yet.

Another big issue that gets overlooked is that a lot of the problems that programming is used to solve today will disappear and no longer be considered problems to begin with. A whole lot of data conversion is no longer necessary when you have an AI that can directly interface with the raw data and manipulate it in whatever format you like.

People today are thinking of ChatGPT as making it easier to build websites, software and such, but real the power of AI is that it makes all of that obsolete. Why bother browsing the Web when ChatGPT can just give you what you are looking for in whatever format you desire, without ever touching a website?

AI is not just going to write software, AI is going to be the only software you'll ever need. BingChat today is already Photoshop, Shell and Webbrowser all in one. Won't be long until it learns to do most of the rest as well.

The interesting question is: What will be left after all this? If we automate away all the boring parts, what are going to be the bits that provide value? How will the Website of the future look like when AI will be the only one reading them? What's the value of a classic book when AI can write new books in real time? Will anybody bother with video games when they have a Holodeck at home?

> People today are thinking of ChatGPT as making it easier to build websites, software and such, but real the power of AI is that it makes all of that obsolete. Why bother browsing the Web when ChatGPT can just give you what you are looking for in whatever format you desire, without ever touching a website?

I don‘t think it will play out like this. Companies currently build systems to make the data robust/structured, to enforce a business process etc. Since they do not believe in answers any individual would give out of the unstructured data, they would also not trust an AI, and rightfully so. ChatGPT is not trustworthy at all and there is currently no path to make it so.

I found that companies are less interested in quality data than one might expect.

I worked in ontologies, focusing on making rigorous schemas for better data quality and easier integration. Our lunch was eaten by schemaless databases and big data. We protested that they wouldn't like what happened years down the line, but it was cheaper to start.

I don't mean to shake my tiny fist or overgeneralize my experience. But I think if AI gives good enough answers enough of the time, with a tiny fraction of the effort, people might just adapt around that model. People would rather have good now than great later. Or even mediocre now.

There is nothing stopping companies from offering AI oriented apis. If they no longer have to develop a frontend but just have a "here is our logo" etc endpoint, then... goodbye react! Goodbye FE developers! And at that point AI will probably be developing the very endpoints that it consumes.

Honestly it doesn't sound crazy to me.

For frontend - yeah, maybe. Or maybe the frontend becomes much more fancy. I‘ve built complex frontends that took a year or two but could imagine it all in weeks. I would also like to be able to build it in weeks.

I think that’s a simplistic view. Sure thing AI will make a bunch of problems disappear… but do you really think that with all the power of AI, we are going to keep publishing react apps? Golang web servers? Rest APIs? No. We’ll be publishing more sophisticated stuff. And no, AI simply cannot magically do everything (AI today is not the AI we will have in 100 years… unless you think the AI of today is the most we can get from AI)… so in between we (humans) will be working to use AI tooling to fulfill user requirements.

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