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Comment by sohzm | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'll bring the perspective of a recent college graduate from India.

Most students who started jobs in software aren't writing software for aeroplanes. They're writing crud apps, doing third-party API integrations or doing basic debugging.

I worry that although not some specialized software devs but a lot will still have problems due to stuff like this.

I'm not talking today, but say 2-3 years down the line, who will have an intern when you can get an AI intern that can perform as the top percentile and comes at $20 per month subscription?

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Certainly some software jobs are easier than others, and anything that is more just coding (e.g. crud apps) than designing would be easier to automate. It's interesting though why this hasn't been done a long time ago? I remember a piece of software called "The Last One" from the 1980's that was meant to automate creation of simple business apps like these, and here we are 40 years later with people still creating "no/low code" solutions, and people still manually writing crud apps! Why?

I don't think AI will replace jobs until it can do the entire job (full lifecycle from requirements to bug fixes, etc) and be interacted with in the same way a boss or team lead could interact with a developer. If you still need a person in the loop then it's not a person replacement - it's a productivity tool.

Imagine in 2-3 years time how much more crud software will be built and will be there to support. I'd say at least an order of magnitude more.

Even if I would have an AI assistant if I work on something I still have to understand that piece of work, I have to understand the requirements to give correct orders to the AI. I might become more efficient but I don't see an order of magnitude speed up where now I work on 5-8 projects which are in one ecosystem and I don't see suddenly switching to working on 50-80 projects where each 10 of them are different ecosystem that I also have to understand to make valid decisions - even if these are crud apps.

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