So I’m embracing AI-assisted coding with open arms. It’s not that I don’t enjoy coding. it’s that this approach lets me solve problems faster than ever before.
That's the real risk here is that we are getting to the point (probably already there for a lot of stuff) where you can just point it to your already existing codebase and tell it your problem and it can basically do it.. I mean I've tested that in practice, sometimes I'll have a clear direction of where I want to go or what I would do.. but I don't really give it any hints of how to solve the problem, and many times it comes up with a similar result or at least one that also works completely fine.
So I think part of the issue is that people like you and me I feel like are going to be so much less needed because an AI can just do it instantly for basically free.
Anyway, I know this is a slight hyperbole.. but it's also not. It kind of sucks to realize that a simple prompt can replicate your work 95% of the time and do it basically instantly.
Who is deciding the action/s to take in response to the problem? How do you know which is the right action to take?
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
2 years ago AI was a novelty and essentially just "fancy autocomplete". Today a skilled software engineer can use it to mostly one-shot the whole website with a detailed technical prompt and then iterate on it from there.
What happens 2 years from now? If progress continues, I expect we'll start walking up that chain of command. First you eliminate the software engineers and just have the tech leads do the prompting. Then you eliminate the tech leads and have the managers do the prompting. Then you eliminate the managers and designers and eventually you end up with star-trek-esque programming where some C-level person is just telling their computer "I want a website that sells widgets. Good! Now make the navigation bar blue. Could you make the font bigger?"
So what are your plans for when the wealthy no longer need you?
Without the internet these systems can not be maintained, we need all information about them available instantly. We also need people sharing how to solve problems at a global scale which the internet enables.
Personally I think LLMs will just allow even more complexity. This will create more situations that need human intervention to solve problems. And also new problems we have never seen before.
sure there’s things you still need investment and a physical presence for. but i reckon there is money and careers to be made in purely software based businesses still, and i think that value will mostly be captured by individuals and small teams moving forward.
my point was that for anyone who wanted to make software they couldn’t due to lack of free time or funds, they likely can give that a go now.
Those C-level people won't want to do that. Plus in a competitive economy everyone else can do the same so there will be competition to remain relevant.
1 website won't be enough, you'll need 10 and each site needs 10 times the features or your buyers will look elsewhere.
At the end of the day the C-level person delegates to a techy person, it's not the C suites job to care about font sizes or navigation bar colours.
It doesn't always know the right thing to fit the need, so you can now figure out what that looks like and design it appropriately (and try 10 options in production and see which one wins!)
But also you can just do a lot more work. If the prompt can replicate 95% of your work, now you can do keep moving forward faster and do a lot more work.
This does mean, of course, that there will be less of a need for software engineers that are only capable of reasoning about the edges of applications or one narrow part of the whole discipline will get squeezed out. If a computer can do the job, it's now less valuable of a skillset than it used to be in the market, and that hits wages hard if your only contribution to the market was "I know how to create React components when someone tells me what is in them, and how they need to interact with other components"
Happily, despite the amazing productivity of AI, there is still so much absolute CRAP software out there, and so many different places we can apply better options. Bureaucracy and poor management will continue to create new opportunities.
Why have companies with infinite amounts of AI and expertise not deployed comprehensive end to end solutions for business problems?
Every solution they've come up with is "here's a tool. The solution to make money from it is left up to the reader". Why would they leave all that money on the table?