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Comment by wayn3 | Hacker News Reader

"web dev" is going to go down. "engineering" is not. learn real skills.

if your skillset is "i can write crud apps", india is not your competition. AI is.

Maybe, someday. Quickbase, DabbleDB, and others made valiant attempts to allow regular people to construct crud apps. I'm not sure what AI adds that's missing in those two attempts. Both have had some success, but not to the point of displacing some significant percentage of "devs writing CRUD apps". MS Excel has arguably the largest marketshare in "displacing developers".

It is highly unlikely AI will ever be able to build CRUD apps. The whole reason they're not just auto-generated (without AI) is that you need to figure out the actual business requirements. Which lots of programmers can't do (https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/12/20/the-best-technology/), let alone an AI.

I bet on the opposite. We will rapidly see hand-crafted UI disappear. This is a next Google/Facebook opportunity. This will take place within 5 years.

I also think UI will be one of the first areas to be partially automated, or web based at least, partly because there is so much public data to consume and it all fits common patterns which is just what AI is good at.

The actual businesses though are all different so there is no stack of data that can describe how to architect those systems.

Can you elaborate on "real skills"?

Not OP, but I think what he's saying it to learn more CS fundamentals.

Algorithms, Data Modeling, Patterns and more can be carried across domains from "web dev", to mobile, to embedded systems, etc.

about 95% of all "engineers" think that math skills are not necessary and anything that requires actual original thought has no place in their workday. you can apply this to web dev the same way you can apply it to AI. Tensorflow is already here. in order to run a somewhat working "machine learning" thing, all you have to do is grab a model of the shelf and shove your data through it. web dev isnt really the problem.

lets say you work in web dev, though: can you implement an http server from scratch? can you write an application without relying on a web framework? I'm not saying that that makes sense from a business point of view, but unless you can actually do these things - at least in principle - you dont really understand your job.

same thing with AI. of course you dont need even undergrad math to run a model. nobody has to. but do you really understand whats going on unless you can speak confidently on measures, confidence intervals, model building, tradeoffs between models, running scientific experiments, linear algebra etc.? i dont think so. you may be able to hang on. but you dont really know what youre doing. not really.

very coincidentally, the people who always say you dont need actual skills are the same people who are running around scared to death by the next impending wave of layoffs.

if you have real skills, you wont ever be laid off. not going to happen.

i dont really care whether ai solves crud jobs or not. why would i? i think its likely. maybe its not. time will tell.

but its a bit cute for 5 million ios app developers to tell themselves that they will find the same job creating the same single page "uberified" interface over and over and over again. i dont know whether its ignorance or arrogance and i certainly dont care. but if i was them, id be at least aware of the possibility that it could happen.

What's "engineering" other than being smart?

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