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> where you can just point it to your already existing codebase and tell it your problem and it can basically do it

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."

Currently we have C-level people saying "I want a website that sells widgets". Then product managers make a plan for all the pages/functionality on that site. Designers style the site. Managers divide up the work into smaller tasks. Tech leads steer a group of software engineers, and software engineers do the actual implementation.

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?

Then I will find other problems to solve. Do you think AI will solve every problems for humanity? it has nothing to do with coding as I mentioned earlier.

What kinds of problems do you think someone will pay you to solve after AI advances for another 10 years?

Hah I have no idea. If we reach AGI in 10 years we will still have problems. Otherwise we all would be enlightened by then, right? Until then I think mental health would still be a problem. Maybe I should get a therapy license now.

The internet enabled the massive complex systems we have today (public cloud being the largest in scope probably, but there are sprawling libraries like everything around JavaScript, modern web browsers themselves maybe).

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.

Just because there are open problems AI cannot solve, it does not mean you can make meaningful contributions. AI might become more capable than you in every way. Say AI cannot solve P vs NP. You can dedicate your life to the problem and will not make progress. Similar for more worldly problems like new treatments. Or societal problems. You are the cow.

I look at this and I feel the reverse: what do the wealthy bring to the table now? previously we had to work for them cause anything worth doing that could become a business needed a bigger team. now, a developer doesn’t need anybody above him to make stuff, and can potentially work on doing things they find valuable which imo something we always strived to but couldn’t afford to. in my mind, it’s really about ideas and execution now. and execution i bet a developer who wants to make something can do better than anybody higher up the chain for the forseeable future.

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.

The wealthy bring the capital required. The problem is fundamentally the commoditization of intellectual labor. It will simply be a game of whoever spends the most wins.

even in software historically, larger teams/more money have never produced better software. sure, not disagreeing that may be they’ll have all the best LLMs and the hardware to use them for a while. But I don’t foresee open source weights to the public to lag that far behind, and hardware that can run them to become more affordable.

you know who _own_ the means of production more than ever? the rich. they control your labour environment. they control politics. so you're the opposite of independent from them.

i could setup a local llm that’s nearly frontier level if i wanted to. i doubt i’ll ever need to though since tokens are becoming so cheap. although i am well off, i am not wealthy. and i only foresee this becoming more affordable in the future. may be i am wrong but imo an era when capital is less important is already here for the purposes of what i described.

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.

> 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?"

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.

> Ok but you do realize that AI can also solve problems?

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?

What you said is valid but I think you are still constrained in thinking that the code is the solution, though. I wish I could word it a better way. Maybe we need a word calculator /s

It's not right a lot of the time (yes, even the latest models) based on the problem you're trying to solve for your users. (That's one thing we can keep doing).

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.