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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

I see these posts left and right but no one mentions the _actual_ thing developers are hired for, responsibility. You could use whatever tools to aid coding already, even copy paste from StackOverflow or take whole boilerplate projects from Github already. No AI will take responsibility for code or fix a burning issue that arises because of it. The amount of "responsibility takers" also increases linearly with the size of the codebase / amount of projects.

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That's quickly becoming the most important part of our jobs - we're the ones with agency and the ability to take responsibility for the work we are producing.

I'm fine with contributed AI-generated code if someone who's skills I respect is willing to stake their reputation on that code being good.

We still do that, it's just that realtime code review basically becomes the default mode. That's not to say it's not obvious there will not be a lot less of us in future. I vibed about 80% of a SaaS at the weekend with a very novel piece of hand-written code at the centre of it, just didn't want to bother with the rest. I think that ratio is about on target for now. If the models continue to improve (although that seems relatively unlikely with current architectures and input data sets), I expect that could easily keep climbing.

I just cutpasted a technical spec I wrote 22 years ago I spent months on for a language I never got around to building out, Opus zero-shotted a parser, complete with tests and examples in 3 minutes. I cutpasted the parser into a new session and asked it to write concept documentation and a language reference, and it did. The best part is after asking it to produce uses of the language, it's clear the aesthetics are total garbage in practice.

Told friends for years long in advance that we were coal miners, and I'll tell you the same thing. Embrace it and adapt

>the _actual_ thing developers are hired for, responsibility.

It is a well known fact that people advance their tech careers by building something new and leaving maintenance to others. Google is usually mentioned.

By which I mean, our industry does a piss poor job of rewarding responsibility and care.

Which is why I'm more comfortable using AI as an editor/reviewer than as a writer.

I'll write the code, it can help me explore options, find potential problems and suggest tests, but I'll write the code.

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