Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

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> the productivity boost seems to be eaten up by unrealistic project plans and expanding scope

This is what happens with every improvement in software, doesn't matter if its better hardware, improved tooling, increased libraries or simple more programmers. The increased expectations always create more, not less demand for programming. The only thing that a change in tooling does is a change in skills that are in demand and features that are demanded.

The juniors probably are most helped by these tools. I find the benefits a mixed bag. Even as a better autocomplete it (github copilot) frequently makes the most trivial grammatical errors such as unmatched parenthesis, which a 'dumb' autocomplete would never produce. And sometimes the code looks so good, it is easy to overlook that one insidious semantic error and is now costing you debugging time.

I won't be replaced by AI, but I might be replaced by a younger dev who is able to get more value out of these newfangled tools than me.

Not a dev per se, but what I see in the data analytics/web analytics space is, that the results from an "analysis" by an AI is oftentimes significantly better than what a junior, sometimes even an intermediate person produces. But - more often than not, there are subtle errors/slip ups in there, as the AI is not reasoning at all, nor understanding.

On the other hand - those (or similar errors) can be found in the work of more junior people as well. So the amount of editorial work - as I like to call it - is the same.

The difference? The AI does this in a fraction of the time, it takes a junior to do that. So from a purely economic business standpoint, it is way cheaper to have me perform this crap (as I know how to prompt the right things) instead of a junior analyst.

The downside is, that juniors are loosing the opportunity to learn. They don't develop the skills you only develop by fucking up as often as possible in many different ways and learning the business the hard way - because that is what enables you to spot fuck ups later in your carreer more easily and quickly.

Sure, a lot of tasks won't exist anymore. I've seen many rote administrative tasks coded out of existence by very simple glue code as well, and some people may lose a job if they can't adapt.

But the same could be said for many things. I've done manual memory management at the start of my career, working on plain applications. At this point it is coming back a bit due to popularity of Rust, but you'd mostly need to have an interest in systems or game programming in order to learn how to do it properly.

The average web or application programmer really doesn't have to learn how to allocate memory and debug leaks, and may be in a lesser position to recognize and trace leaks in their buggy python or ruby code for it. But overall, it doesn't matter too much.

Yep, this is called Jevons paradox. When technology increases the efficiency with which a resource (be it energy, computational power, or programmer's time) is used, the demand increases too.

we expand a highway to allow more cars -- so the highway gets used more and is still heavily congested.

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