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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

I think my barber and my plumber have safer jobs from automation than average coders.

I think we'll all get more productive is all. There's a lot of projects that just weren't economical but now may become so.

The bigger disruption will occur when Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc become useless from all the AI spam that's sure to overwhelm it all.

But here's the question. If these tools make existing devs 10x more productive, why bother hiring new people in the field?

The new people will still work for a little less.

My guess is that the goals for existing software projects have always been limited by how much talent could be purchased, not by vision. So unless we run out of vision, nobody is actually going to be put out of a job by this technology. We'll just shoot for bigger goals.

The tools of today, even fucking Eclipse and gah Xcode from the early 2000s make programmers far far more than 10x more productive than machine code on punch cards. By your implied logic there should be a tiny fraction of the programmers there were in the 60s.

Anyway I think this 10x more productive claim is still a bunch of BS with the current crop of AI demos.

This will create more demand for our field, not less. Increasing the power of programmers unlocks so much more potential.

Why hire new people, because companies want to do things they couldn't do before. This has been happening for decades already as tooling has evolved. It used to be very hard for average companies to write cross-platform commerce software, now it's a standard thing in the form of a website + payment processor.

There might be some companies or departments that don't need to evolve anymore, and they cut people. That happens already; the product gets finished, so they lay people off. But those people find new jobs.

Companies always have ideas on the backlog. I myself have a huge backlog of dream projects that I don't have time to implement, and I'm just one person.

Tech like this helps us make a bigger impact faster.

Let’s play this out. A company fires all the SE’s and GPT-4 takes over their place.

Who will be there to ask the right questions? Middle management?

Who can validate it spit out what you actually want? Project managers?

Who will determine what questions to ask GPT-4? Product owners?

Who will decide what type of tech (language etc…) to ask GPT-4 to write? College grads turned into corporate GPT-4 pushers?

Who will be able to determine business logic based on prior experience? GPT-4?

IMHO, a lot of the hard work for an SE is not the actual coding.

You don't need to fire all software engineers. You could let's say replace 75% of them with GPT.

Those software engineers are going to be very overloaded.

Will they be troubleshooting 100% of the code with only 25% of the staff?

GPT might become a tool in our arsenal but not a replacement. It needs to be able to say I don’t know before it spits out nonsense.

It takes fewer people to maintain a system than it does to build it. You do not need a team of 7 engineers to stick around to read logs and code, you need exactly one, and in all likelihood he's going to spend most of his time watching YouTube because he's so out of practice that if anything was wrong the AI would most likely find it before him, and when he does find something he's going to just ask the AI to fix it instead of exerting the mental effort to do it himself.

I’ll take the Pepsi Challenge on GPT-4 replacing SEs. It’s the same take I’ve had on self-driving. Outside of very niche situations it’s never going mainstream.

The only people in the short term who are going to greatly benefit from GPT coding are people selling tutorials for using GPT to code.

You could replace 75% of them with a rubber duck. Soon you might replace 22.5% of them with GPT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

If you want to do a $100 bet I’ll bet you in 5 years that won’t happen. I’ll even take it further, I’ll bet you $100 a year for the next five years it won’t make a huge difference. I’ll pay you in full early if it happens and you can wait to pay me in full after 5 years.

I dislike betting money at all and I think $100 is fair.

The problem is and always been how do you describe what you want the computer to do to the computer. This is where this will see some traction as a tool that helps developers do this faster, but my bet is that these sorts of systems will still work a lot better using an artificial language to state the requirements and these advances will be integrated into our languages and compilers.

> I think my barber and my plumber have safer jobs from automation than average coders.

Possible, but their 'advantage' is unlikely to last more than a few years.

So far, I haven't seen GPT being used as a tool for programming by non-programmers.

only until the barber and plumber market is swamped with retrained former average coders ...

Sigh. Time to bust out my old will code for food cardboard sign.

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