Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> I just really worry the degree will mostly be worthless by the time I graduate considering the rate at which AI is advancing... The degree would mostly be for personal knowledge/fulfillment, but I don’t want to bother with it if we’re all going to be unemployable in a few years anyways.

I went to university from 2005-2008. Back then, with dot-com scars still fresh in everyone's mind, an extremely common piece of "advice" I received was: Don't bother going into programming; software development is going to all be outsourced to offshore developers. You'll never make more than $50k/year in your career as a developer, the competition from India and Bangladesh will be too high.

As much as futurists hate to admit it, coding AI is still way worse at many things than even the now-near-universally-loathed "outsourced dev" boogeyman. Your job as a software developer isn't to write functions that reverse a binary tree or solve the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. I haven't seen any evidence that AI can evaluate a legacy codebase and determine what the best integration path forward is. I haven't seen any evidence that an AI can figure out how to put together a backwards-compatible API. I haven't seen any evidence that an API can put together a build pipeline.

Your question is based on an assumption that because ChatGPT can spit out some pretty impressive stuff that an entire career path isn't going to be viable. I will tell you emphatically that assumption is wrong. Spend a few years in the industry and you'll understand that ChatGPT is impressive, but only touches about 5-10% of what a software developer really needs to do.

It will be an important tool for developers going forward, and maybe reduce the overall number of devs needed in the world due to increased efficiency, but no, it's not going to replace software developers. Not even juniors.

This! Tech influencers on YouTube are using these bad examples, to scare people into believing that ChatGPT will take over programming jobs.

The day when AI technology can fix bugs in a multi-million line codebase, make improvements to it; that's the day when I will start worrying. That day is far, far away.

And if it’s not far away, we’ll have many other things to worry about! For me, accepting my total helplessness on world-altering events like this makes the anxiety go away. There could be a zombie apocalypse tomorrow, or a giant meteor could be headed right toward earth, or I could be diagnosed with terminal cancer. I’ll either survive or I won’t.

Couldn't that mean they're at least partially right?

For instance, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the low-hanging fruit of developer AI will be combing AI with no-code so that a small to medium business owner can build their own website or apps using the English language, assuming their needs are pretty typical. This is more or less already possible with sites like Wix, just without the AI part; AI would add some flexibility that Wix and Squarespace lack. A business owner would then be able to say "put a widget on my homepage that shows the latest video from my youtube channel" and AI would probably able to do it when an existing component either wouldn't exist or not be as straight forward.

So what ends up happening is human software development more or less becomes an exercise in shoveling dung rather than building new things from scratch, which I think we're already seeing more or less regardless of AI.

Yeah. The skill floor and skill ceiling keeps continually rising as tools get better. AI is just another tool in the toolbox.

As an example, even as late as the 00s, you could still get a job as a "web developer" where you only made static sites with HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript. First tools like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, and now sites like Wix, made that kind of position obsolete. However, a "web developer" is now called "front-end developer" and is still very much alive, just focusing on different things.

Or another example, there is this nearly extinct breed of people known as "database administrators." You used to be able to get a job as a DBA by just knowing how to set up backup scripts, optimize indexes and set up disk space monitoring. (If you could set up a read replica, you were top-tier!) Now cloud tooling has made all of those things trivial. Yet those same people are now very likely "DevOps Engineers" or "Cloud Engineers" which, again, are in extremely high demand.

You should only feel threatened by advances in tech if your life plan was to learn how to do one thing, then never develop any skills. In the tech industry, that's been a path to failure since the beginning. For most of us, AI will, in the best case, be another tool and allow developers a whole to move onto the next big thing.

I'm pretty sure there's still reason to feel threatened even if one's life plan isn't to learn just one thing. Being willing to continually learn doesn't mean there's an infinite capacity for how many skills a person can learn frequently or simultaneously. Being "willing to learn" sounds cool when you're in your 20's, but eventually the constant (and 99.9% needless) churn is going to become tiring and even insulting to one's intelligence. I feel sorry for anyone still in the constantly-learning mode in their 30s or greater, or the time in their life when they should be doing other things besides hustling.

It's not that I don't agree with you up to a point, but I wonder just how sustainable this trajectory really is. AI hasn't really been a "thing" in everyday life until relatively recently.

I am working on a natural language programming tool using the OpenAI APIs. I have a version that I started which I believe can do your task if there is a file in the directory named "latest_youtube" or something and if the home page is less than 12kb. I believe text-davinci-003 knows how to embed a YouTube video and knows how to select files to look in, and will be able to find the latest in the JSON file.

I think it's quite possible that "code monkey" type jobs will shrink in number as automation of boilerplate tasks accelerates. I think a lot of "full stack developer" jobs are in large part full of these types of tasks: know how to wire up the framework and shuttle data from point A to point B in the canonical fashion. That work will still exist, but it will be primarily supervisory. I hope.

I think there will still need to be highly qualified people 'directing' the tools, teaching, and determining architecture.

I suspect there'll be less of us, and the job will change, but the market need will still be there. I think in this context a masters will indeed be quite useful.

(Saying all of this as a person who has gone their whole career without a degree.)

I remember in 2008ish my older brother wrinkled his nose when I mentioned I wanted to learn programming. He said something about programmers just did what they were told and it wasn't a good career choice. Sure glad I didn't listen

I think the right question isn't whether or not AI such as ChatGPT will replace developers. The right question is how much more efficient it can make a developer, especially when AI tools are purpose built for developers, and those developers are good at using such tools.

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