If nothing else, my workflows as a software developer have changed significantly in these past two years with just what's available today, and there is so much work going into making that workflow far more productive.
If nothing else, my workflows as a software developer have changed significantly in these past two years with just what's available today, and there is so much work going into making that workflow far more productive.
And I’d argue it took decades to actually achieve some of the things we were promised in the early days of the internet. Some have still not come to fruition (the tech behind end to end encrypted emails was developed decades ago, yet email as most people use it is still ridiculously primitive and janky)
I have very little idea of the second - it's totally possible OpenAI is a bad investment. I think this article is massively wrong about the first part though - this is an incredible technology, and this should be evident to everyone (I'm a little shocked we're still having an argument of the form "I'm a world-class developer and this increases my productivity" vs. "no, you're wrong!" on the other).
Then came DSL, then came cable, then came fiber. Countless billions of dollars invested into all these different systems.
This AI stuff is something else. Lots of hardware investment, sure, but also lots of software investment. It is becoming so good and so cheap its showing up on every single search engine result.
Anyway, my point is, while there may have been aspects of the early internet being a bubble, there were real dollars chasing real utility, and I think AI is quite similar in that regard.
Nobody will deny the importance of railways to the Industrial Revolution, but they also lost a lot of people a lot of money: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-envi...
this is exactly the problem
The more productivity AI brings to workers, the fewer employees employers need to hire, the less salary employers need to pay, and the less money workers have for consumption.
capitalist mode of production
Did all of that free code reduce demand for developers? If not, why not?
the anwser is yes, while in the meantime, the expansion of the industry offset the surplus of developers.
More effective developers results in more demand for custom software, resulting in more jobs for developers.
My hope is that AI-assisted programming will have similar results.
I don't really know myself, but I think there's a decent change that most developer jobs will actually disappear. Your argument isn't wrong, but when we're nearing (though still far from) the state where all productive tech work can be handled by LLMs. Once it can effectively and correctly fix bugs and add new well-defined features to a real codebase, things start to look very different for most developers.
for humanity, the increase in productivity is progress
i'm not saying it's bad, i'm saying it has consequences