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Comment by amildie | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we'll see this in our lifetimes.

For that scenario to be possible, general AI needs to be developed first.

A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know.

Dealing with ambiguos jira tickets, poorly reported bugs, non-existent requirements, missing or outdated documentation; these are the "common problems" in building software. Current AI technology isn't even close to being able to sort these types of problems today, and it won't be until a monumental breakthrough in the field is achieved.

Generating art is "easy" in the sense that art can't be wrong or right, it just is.

Generating the backend of a streaming platform? I'd like to live long enough to see it.

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> A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know.

Ask any creative out there what the hard part of their job is.

> A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know.

Yeah, but that part can be learned by anyone without a CS degree.

Perhaps not everything in software can be automated, but I could see a team of 10 programmers be replaced by 1 person (programmer or not) skillful enough to control a bunch of AI software tools.

A tool that 10xs programmer productivity will if anything lead to higher demand for programmers, because we're nowhere close to developing 1/10 of the total software the world demands.

Perhaps, but that would be an indirect consequence.

>I don't think we'll see this in our lifetimes.

I already see a clear path that'd take about 20 years to execute properly. That's assuming low pressure conditions and a very large amount of funding though, both of which aren't typically present in reality.

The result is essentially what GP describes, with a path to AGI in the form of extremely competent tool AI. We're going to hit self-assembling programs before we hit true AGI.

I can't say I'm particularly excited to see such things become reality. Fortunately, humans usually find a way to fuck things up. Our species' collective incompetence is the largest barrier to AGI currently, which may be a blessing in disguise depending on how you look at it.

The backend of a streaming platform is trivially summoned by logging into Twitch. GPT3 has already demonstrated its "understanding" between a problem statement, a variable, and it's value (and if you haven't, it's worth finding the tweet/gif). Bridging the gap between the words "streaming platform backend" and an ffmpeg command line may involve a bunch more details, but the gap between the two is only going to shrink.

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