Comment by ilaksh

Sure, and not many people are seriously trying to suggest that one should hire an AI instead of a software engineer _at this point_, assuming you have a real budget.

But, especially with GPT-4, it is entirely feasible to create a convenient and relatively fast user experience for building a specific type of application that doesn't stray too far from the norm. AI can call the boilerplate generator and even add some custom code using a particular API that you feed it.

So many people are trying to build that type of thing (including me). As more of these become available, many people who don't have thousands of dollars to pay a programmer will hire an AI for a few tens or hundreds of dollars instead.

The other point is that this is the current state of generative AI at the present moment. It gets better every few months.

Project the current rate of progress forward by 5-10 years. One can imagine that if we are selling something at that point, it's not our own labour. Maybe it would be an AI that we have tuned with skills, knowledge, face, voice, and personality that we think will be saleable. Possibly using some of our own knowledge and skills to improve that recipe. Although there will likely be marketplaces where you can easily select the abilities or characteristics you want.