Hacker News Reader

>10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case.

How is this not a risky prediction?

1. Are you talking about AI (i.e. AGI) or LLMs? If you think we will have AGI in 10 - 15 years maybe you are right, but AGI is always just around the corner.

2. LLMs don't seem to be the magic multiplying force people are insinuating. GPT-3 has been around for almost 3 years, and while great (I was an early adopter) it's just another tool for me.

Over the past 10 - 15 years software has gotten easier to develop. And make software easier to develop has just gone to serving greater and greater demand. The invention of C didn't reduce the number of engineers because it was simpler than ASM. The invention of Python didn't reduce the number of Java engineers. Every year CPUs get faster and faster (at an exponential rate almost), and yet software somehow manages to get slower and slower. No other tool in the short history of software development ever did anything close to "wipe out at least half of all software developers" despite newer tools because easier and easier.

Absolutely not AGI.

I'm talking about AI - made up of multiple modules that focus on different aspects - that can comprehensively build software products, with nothing more than human sign-offs to get from start to finish. Nothing even remotely close to the difficulty of building AGI (which I don't think will happen in the next 30 years at least).

In this scenario the AI has human assistants that sign off on decisions before the AI can proceed further, before it can continue writing more code. The human developers that build this system will include a judgment for checkpoints, for the AI to judge when it thinks it's necessary to ask permission from a human to proceed (hey human, do you want me to go this way or that way?). The AI will occasionally present the human prompt clicker to choose from multiple viable development paths (for example overnight it'll build three different approaches to solving a problem after you leave work at 5pm; when you come in in the morning your task will be to pick the one you think is best, and the AI will proceed from there). I think a pattern of: AI development -> checkpoint approval by human -> continued AI development, will be the superior way to utilize AI to build software (rather than letting it get too far down the wrong path by trying to let it build without oversight most or all of the way).

The human decision making process at checkpoints will become by far the slowest part of building software. The AI will spend most of its time waiting for someone to sign off on a path.

> 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet

This reminds me of self driving car predictions. It also ignores that "building" software encompasses many different tasks.

That's actually a great supporting point to why AI will wipe most developers out.

What you're referring to is one of the AI systems that I mention that the top ~25% will still write code for directly. It's a governing AI system.

Most software development doesn't involve tasks that can very easily kill people with N thousand pounds of fast moving metal.

Most software development is trivial by comparison in terms of challenge/complexity. It'll be wiped out accordingly. Why would you need anything more than a human handler to sign off on AI development as it goes down a path? It'll be able to build drastically faster than a median developer can and it can do it without getting tired (its productivity won't implode after 4-6 hours). All you'll need are some human handlers to approve key decisions during the process of development (to ensure you get to the end product that is desired).

We have a lot of stages to go through before we achieve the level of development you're describing, and I don't think you can confidently argue 10-15 years vs 5-10 years vs 20-30 years.

As with most technology job predictions, it won't happen the way most predict. Yes what defines a developer/swe will change, but our history has shown us that we are likely to see an increase of jobs in technology for the long term. I remain optimistic that most people will find new roles as they emerge.

Isn't that the nature of tech? In the past most programmers needed to focus on low level details while today most devs kit together libraries and services and yet there are more then ever and salaries are higher then ever. I think nobody that enters tech expects that in 20 years we "code" as we do today but we will still build stuff and need to solve problems... and there are enough problems to solve.

That's pretty much the case. We keep building layers and abstracting away.

Being a prompt wizard won't pay as well as directly writing code for the AI systems. They're different layers. There won't be more people directly developing software than there are today in the US market, there may be more overall jobs in and around the process however (ie the tech industry will continue to expand to more people in terms of employment; benefits will weaken, median pay will fall).

Most software developers will be prompt wizards, with required degrees that say they know how to be effective prompt wizards. Then there will be a lot of supporting roles, oversight roles.

More jobs in the industry, lower skill levels, less pay.

I think we push complexity forward. I agree in the sense that the pure dev part will require less bandwidth for most but the free bandwidth allows us to push complexity forward into different domains. My father still needed to punch card to code and now we can setup an app with a few clicks world wide that uses NN to solve a task and that all by ourself. So demand will be high for cross domain knowledge like Fullstack/ML + Domain X.

If you're a high skill programmer that has domain knowledge re AI, you'll do very well in the future, whether 5 or 20 years out.

We simultaneously won't need and won't want the majority of software developers that exist today (the sheer number of them), writing code in the future. That would be a bad outcome.

They're going to end up more valuable as prompt wizards and checkpoint decision makers, because the AI will be drastically better at writing code (in all respects) than they could ever be. And they're going to get paid less because more people will be able to do it, software development will become a lot less intimidating as a field. It'll be more mass market as a field, akin to being a nurse (4.2 million registered nurses in the US).

What you describe is true pretty much to all professions, even doctors who don't use their hands. 15 years is a lot in the current pace of things. Also, society will be completely transformed if this transpires, retraining will be completely normal. Not saying it's gonna be easy, I'm just saying this is much bigger than software developers.

> wipe out at least half

I'm not sure if I've ever seen a situation where all the code for a company gets written and then the engineers just pack up and leave. Typically the more code you write the more code you plan to write.

> 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case.

The only prediction I feel is easy to make is that nobody can accurately predict the effects of an emerging technology 10-15 years down the line. That is a long time, and prognosticators almost always get it wrong. Coding will absolutely change, but I'm very skeptical that anyone can predict how with any sort of specificity.