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Comment by lkramer | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, this is kinda where I fear ending up: a glorified editor of crummy AI generated code for a pittance. At that point I'll probably check out of the industry.

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Keep in mind that companies do not necessarily aim to increase efficiency but to de-professionalize. It will be easier to find these "glorified editors" that require minimal education, than current software developers. Consequently, this will make them more replaceable and hence they will have a worse negotiation position when it comes to working conditions etc.

It is an old pattern, see for instance: https://www.versobooks.com/products/688-breaking-things-at-w...

I think it's harder to verify obscure code than to write it in the first place.

I've seen perfectly legit looking code generated by chatgpt, except that the value of the constants were wrong.

When you have to verify every single little thing, it's easier to just do it. And certainly doesn't take any less skill.

Companies always want to commodify their complements, right? I wonder if there's a framing where the employees are one of the complements.

True. Some people argue that we are quickly moving from a creator economy to a verifier economy. AI generates a bunch of crap and knowledge workers have to verify and edit (https://www.lycee.ai/blog/the-rise-of-the-verifier-economy)

> Some people argue that we are quickly moving from a creator economy to a verifier economy.

I wonder if this is a natural development of economic optimization.

Computability theory taught us that it is in general easier to verify that an answer is correct (P) than to come up with the answer in the first place (NP).

This ! And I really like your analogy to computability theory. I wonder if it applies to all economic activities. My experience so far is that verification is nice for simple knowledge tasks. But for the complex ones, doing it from scratch is often better. But I guess this may change as AI systems become better and better.

Of course, brute forcing a solution by verifying a massive amount of garbage is much less efficient than doing it from scratch.

Verification becomes more productive than sythesis only when the probability of generated content being correct is significantly high. So I suppose, as AI gets more accurate, verification will become more productive.

I'm in a peculiar position with Bing AI. My work provided me an enterprise account, so I can use it for work-related tasks. Often I find myself asking it to write a program for something I don't wanna do myself from scratch, then I just analyze it, see why it doesn't work and fix it. It has got to a point where it's much faster for me to do that, than to read the relevant documentation and figure out how to do it from scratch.

I get that. And this coding use case becomes even more interesting with o1

This is not much different than being the senior developer managing an outsourced team of developers.

That's the interesting thought though - what happens to the industry (and all the other creative industries affected) after everyone like you checks out?

Performance death by over-performance of code-generators? After that? Rejuvenation of dying systems by constantly generated new systems. Also selling retro software in containers cause it "works"..

As in code grows organically- and thus becomes ever more capable but also ever more buggy. Then it needs to die, reasons about the produced horror, promises never again and does it again, forever and ever.

Thus the state of the art was produced by the art.

If companies are releasing shit products then you pick up a laptop and compete with them. That's always how things have gone in the tech industry.

I guess it's a lemon market problem - if other sellers are selling crap for cheap, and there's no way for buyers to verify quality before buying, then you can't make money selling quality stuff for more. Hmm, maybe "certified non-AI data" is a business idea.

that's touched on in the article. It may be possible as a niche, but there is a whole cottage industry working to bypass the AI detectors.

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