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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

> my programming skills will likely be massively devalued

I see this in the context of the drawing vs. art analogy. Yes, your typing and maybe syntax skills will be devalued, but your higher level, creative programming skills are probably safe for a good long time yet.

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Depends what you mean by 'good long time'. I think at this point it's worth acting under the assumption that programming will not be a well compensated career in 5-10 years, and either be prepared to switch to something else or try to make a lot of money in the near term.

Also, if I'm wrong then I get to be pleasantly surprised.

AI has yet to completely replace people in any industry. I fail to see how it would replace an industry that creates massive, complicated code bases in 10 years. Let alone 5. All roads seem to point to AI assisted work. Programmers will move “higher level”. That doesn’t mean they become poorly compensated.

Probably what the artists used to say.

The ones who said that, are fine. The skill ceiling for AI generation increases by the day, and having previous experience with art is a massive force multiplier.

Artists are still as well-compensated as they ever have been.

I take this as tongue in cheek because the great majority of artists are not making a good living just from selling their art.

>Programmers will move “higher level”. That doesn’t mean they become poorly compensated.

No, but it means there will probably be less of them, which in turn means most will either be fired or accept a pay cut.

It could also mean more software with the same amount of programmers. We are already talent constrained in the industry, so it’s clear we have some slack for extra productivity before people start losing their jobs, although who knows how an actual disruption would end.

I'm sure there will be some overlap, but prompting is sufficiently different from programming that I think a lot of skills will not translate.

They will, because you need to know to prompt for (as an example) "a real-time data-tracking and reporting application backed by a column database with logical replication fed by a task queue, having an isomorphic client cached across multiple regions via a CDN."

Without the engineering know-how, your "write me an app that displays data from this source in a dashboard" prompt might work, but it won't be robust and when it doesn't work you won't be able to figure out why.

Yeah, forget responding to prompts, I want to see A”I” respond to pages to troubleshoot its prompt-generated software.

“The machine stops” will seem optimistic in hindsight!

For those who haven't read E. M. Forster's fantastic short story, it's here: https://archive.org/details/e.-m.-forster-the-machine-stops_...

Especially combined with deep knowledge of the business domain you work in.

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