Comment by WhyOhWhyQ
2 days ago
I'm disappointed that my human life has no value in a world of AI. You can retort with "ah but you'll be entertained and on super-drugs so you won't care!", but I would further retort that I'd rather live in a universe where I can contribute something, no matter how small.
The current generation of AI tools augment humans, they don't replace them.
One of the most under-rated harms of AI at the moment is this sense of despair it causes in people who take the AI vendors at their word ("AGI! Outperform humans at most economically valuable work!")
If all AI progress stops soon, then I think you're right. However I think automating almost all software development is not far off from being an engineering problem if one is willing to burn enough tokens. I can imagine it being done right now. Just run 100-1000 claude instances and give them different roles. Some of them take screenshots (probably include better OCR/Screenshot analysis models than whatever Anthropic is running) and act as debuggers / user testers. Some of them do planning. Some of them are managers. Some of them are coders. Etc... I'd bet 100k that I could make Halo 1 in a month or two with this setup (minus the beautiful music, compelling story, quality voice acting, art -- though trashy replacements could be made).
The more time I spend working with LLMs and coding agents to help me build software the less scared I am for my future career.
They let me work so much faster, but that's because they are amplifying my existing skills and experience.
I'm confident I will be able to run rings around non-software-engineers who have access to the same tools for may years to come.
There is so much more to building software than knowing how to write code.
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