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Comment by sweezyjeezy | Hacker News Reader

That's the kind of take that I was referring to. Yes, if GPT could replace you now, your job is not very skilled. But if investors see a signal that software might be automatable, they are going to throw mountains of cash at that and they'll be gunning for your job as much as anyone else's.

I've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs are good at writing snippets, but could never write or maintain large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" - but are you SURE about that 'never' given the current generation is already doing things people suspected they could never do? "But they'll never be able to manage / interpret stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have to adapt to fit stakeholders, and not the other way round? I don't know for sure, and even if this is coming, I've no idea on the timelines. But I'm not completely writing it off as a possibility anymore either.

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> I've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs are good at writing snippets, but could never write or maintain large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" - but are you SURE about that 'never' given the current generation is already doing things people suspected they could never do? "But they'll never be able to manage / interpret stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have to adapt to fit stakeholders, and not the other way round?

That sounds a lot like the self driving cheerleaders five or ten years ago. That work so far has resulted in some awesome features like adaptive cruise control and parking assist but it fell far short of what the hype was promising to deliver by now.

Five or ten years later Mercedes is the only company getting ready to ship level three self driving. Level four and five are still a pipe dream, practically restricted to a few companies like Waymo in a few controlled environments like Phoenix and San Francisco.

GPT4 is great and I can't wait to see what 32K or even 100K/1M token models can do, but I fear we're about to hit the point where progress grinds to a halt because going further requires something closer to AGI than what we have now.

As I say, I'm not sure about anything here, I just think it's risky to write the idea off right now just because it requires progress we can't forsee.

I also don't think the comparison quite works, because no one is saying that we need to get down to zero humans for this to to be profoundly disruptive, just enough humans to code review and make relatively small changes, I wouldn't be amazed if that's what software engineering becomes in the coming decades.

I think there's a good chance that the next version of GPT will be better at writing code than a junior level dev. I don't think this is going to result in a net loss of jobs. As software development becomes less expensive per unit volume I think demand will increase so much that both the total number of jobs and average salaries are going to increase.

Yes, because our entitlement expands even faster than GPT's capabilities.

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