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Comment by natoliniak | Hacker News Reader

automation of software development is inevitable as there is huge financial incentive to do so. Businesses view developers as expensive middle men between them and the product -- much like the assembly line workers in a factory. I am betting that typical crud business apps and majority of web development will be the first fields experience heavy automation, which also happen to be the areas where the vast majority of software jobs exist today. But this won't happen overnight, so lets enjoy the good times while they are rolling :)

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Every time I encounter people in this business with that view, they're way off though.

Most often business' initial expectations are a nice-looking broken pile of shit. They simply haven't conceptualized the product enough and figured out how it needs to work. It's my job to get them there.

Businesses/stakeholders are the expensive middle men between me and the money to build the product. I can do this without you.

Nothing (in the league of things we are discussing) is inevitable, it's a result of choices, sometimes masked with rationalizations of how things are inevitable. For me good times start where there are people with both feet on their own liberate square meter to have fun times with, to the rest I can only say "connect me to whoever told you this".

I don't think businesses are having a great success in automating developers, and it doesn't seem a technology problem, we've got some interesting but relatively unused(and a bit old) technologies(spiralgen, apache-isis/naked-objects) , so it seems more like an organizational issue and those are tough to solve.

I hope we reach that phase, but so far it does not look promising. We'll get there, but I don't think it'll be in my lifetime. I hope we do though, I'm up for a career change.

I'm working on a tool suite at the moment that will automate a lot of the current pain of web development. It's actually quite easy to build once you have the patterns figured out.

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