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Comment by ausbah | Hacker News Reader

it’s really hard to be consistently “excited” about this space when half of the AI companies are proudly proclaiming their commitment to try and automate your job (doubtful but the mantra is suffocating) and the other half are just about increasing your productivity (you get more done at the same pay). i guess some boilerplate is truly automated which is a mild qol improvement

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Often in the past I have felt that software engineering contains a lot of reinventing the wheel again and again in slightly different ways. In an organisation that wants to achieve anything you're often stuck collectively fantasising about all the things you could do "if only" A, B, C and D were solved problems within the internal IT landscape. My hope is that the increased productivity can eventually translate into actually doing those things.

We fret about AI adding a bunch of bad code but I see that there are clear methods for avoiding/mitigating this. (Just make sure to test and otherwise verify that the code does the right thing. Make it transparent and easy to replace etc etc.)

Sure it can be used to add a bunch of technical debt but wielded right it can just add well be used to cut down the debt.

It's definitely easy to get caught up in that and I think for a while I was probably in that headspace, but where the excitement started to set in was the realization that it could be leveraged to reduce the less "fun" parts of my day so I could focus on what I enjoy most. It's not purely a "AI writes code for me" kind of hype (although that's a nice benefit). I spend a lot less time debugging tiny issues hidden in legacy code or sifting through poorly written docs for libs that the codebase depends on, for example. That's a huge win and it lets me focus my time on producing quality work.

Yeah, this is why I don't give them any money. I use their models locally. I use ChatGPT without an account.

I don't remember the WSIWYG editor companies bragging about eliminating jobs by making web development more accessible.

I don't remember No-Code platforms bragging about eliminating jobs by making it easier to build your own website for your business.

I don't remember Arduino bragging about eliminating jobs by making embedded programming more accessible.

I'm not worried too much about my "job" being eliminated, I just have a really hard time giving people money who want me to end up underneath an Oakland overpass in a tent.

I find it helpful to ignore the hype and the pitches, and instead focus on how AI tools are enabling better software to be made. I may personally prefer old workflows, but if they are inefficient and I cling to them, then my value as a software professional will trend to zero over time. On the other hand, the volume of software and it's importance is still continuing to increase—AI is only accelerating this trend. So understanding how software works and what AI can and can't do with it has never been of higher value.

Sure investors and CEOs want to reduce software engineering costs, but at the end of the day software is built to serve human needs, and only humans can reason and make a judgement call about whether software systems are working well or not, and because software is so precise and deterministic, there will always need to be someone who thinks like a programmer to tell the AI what to do with sufficient precision to be useful. Sure I can imagine AGI could at some point invalidate that thinking, but I believe we are very far from that point if its even possible, and even if we do reach that point we'll need massive social change or the pitchforks will be coming out from many directions.

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