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Comment by kaesar14 | Hacker News Reader

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kaesar14

This is pretty alarming tbh. Anyone already making a pivot out of SWE?

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I am a SWE currently making a pivot into business owner.

The future I see is that everyone is about to become a CEO with a personal assistant that can run a business.

So I'm going to start building something of my own starting now.

I find it very hard to imagine a world in which software development is fully automated but business owners still have value to bring to the table.

Absolutely fantastic point. If AIs make all useful software, why does anyone get to benefit from that as an owner? NOBODY is doing the work.

In a sense, Yes - to scoring function engineer.

But in seriousness - language models may be scaling in sophistication exponentially with time, but software engineering problems scale in complexity (on average) exponentially with lines of code. The base of this exponential function isn't large, but it's more than 1.

In the end there's a need for someone who understands what they're doing.

Personally, I use ChatGPT to discover libraries that solve my problems and the ~70% success ratio that I'm seeing with this is enough for me for now.

It's hard to not think that scaling and complexity problems will be solved very shortly with new models. Already when i run into my 25 per 3hr limit with GPT-4, my productivity goes from extremely productive to "may as well just do it myself" when i switch back to GPT-3.5.

So today’s hard problems are becoming easy problems, but this produces a new set of harder problems for tomorrow. Ad infinitum.

I could be wrong, but I can't imagine those hard problems will require nearly as many people to solve.

Article is about prompt engineers (3 month old job type), not swes.

I assume his concern is that a proposed solution to avoid losing your job as a SWE is to essentially become a prompt engineer.

More or less, but I guess this was to be expected. Why would making prompts be difficult when LLMs are already capable of fairly difficult programming?

Yes, need to pivot promptly!

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