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Comment by Jolter | Hacker News Reader

Here’s the deal: if you won’t write your replacement, a competitor will do it and outprice your employer. Either way you’re out of a job. May be more prudent to adapt to the new tools and master them rather than be left behind?

Do you want to be a jobless weaver, or an engineer building mechanical looms for a higher pay than the weaver got?

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I want to be neither. I either want to continue being a software engineer who doesn't need a tricycle for the mind, or move to law or medicine; two professions that have successfully defended themselves against extreme versions of the kind of anxiety, obedience and self hate that is so prevalent among software engineers.

Funnily enough, I had a 3 or 4 hour chat with some co workers yesterday about an LLM related project and my feeling about LLM's is that it's actually opening up a lot of fun and interesting software engineering challenges if you want to figure out how to automate the usage of LLM's.

Nobody is preventing people writing in Assembly, even though we have more advanced language.

You could even go back to punch cards if you want to. Literally nobody forcing you to not use it for your own fun.

But LLMs are a multiplier in many mundane tasks (I'd say about 80+% of software development for businesses), so not using them is like fighting against using a computer because you like writing by hand.

That grass is not #00FF00 there. Cory's recent essay on uber for nurses (doctors are next) and law is only second to coding on tbe AI disruptors radar plus both law and medicine have unfriendly hours for the most part.

Happy to hate myself but earn OK money for OK hours.

I think it's the wrong analogy. The prompt engineer who uses the AI to make code maps to the poorly-paid, low-skill power loom machine tender. The "engineer" is the person who created the model. But it's also not totally clear to me that we'll need humans for that either, in the near future.

Not all engineering is creating models though, sometimes there are simpler problems to solve.

At some point, we'll probably have these things write their own prompts, too.

Still, the loom tending engineer got paid better than the weaver. Well, my prejudice says he did, don’t actually have the historical facts.

I would absolutely love to write my own placement. When I can have AI do my job while I go to the beach you better believe I will be at the beach.

You are assuming you'll continue to be paid?

If AI can do your job, you don't have a job.

If AI can do your job, you won't keep that job for a long time.

Compiler is the more apt analogy to a mechanical loom.

An LLM is more like outsourcing to a consultancy. Results may vary.

> Either way you’re out of a job.

Tools and systems which increase productivity famously always put everyone out of a job, which is why after a couple centuries of industrial revolution we're all unemployed.

This is kind of my point; people tend to not be silly enough to stay unemployed and starve. Instead when push comes to shove, sensible folks will adapt to the circumstances.

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