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Comment by dude250711 | Hacker News Reader

> I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter.

This phase will last like 2 years max I am guessing. What is it with all the linear extrapolation of AI progress these days?

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While "for everything there is a season" is my preferred approach to tech hype cycles this one does _feel_ different. While you could broadly ignore say blockchain and the crypto hype and not really miss much of value; I do think there's a fundamental shift happening as of this year.

If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?

As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.

You think software engineers will go back to writing everything by hand?

The engineers probably still are. The vocational programmers, well, they'll probably end up toiling away in the fields.

unless the CFOs can figure out the cost benefit of humans vs robots it might happen.. They might start to question the value of Steve’s $50k/month Claude spend.

Nah, we won't be engineers in 2 years, we'll be product steward/solution architects/etc, and our job will be to be liability lightning rods and customer/c-suite facing puppets for agents, while trying to add a small amount of taste/style into the outputs.

You don't have to extrapolate, even if practices stop evolving they have already radically changed.

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