Comment by frankie_t
5 hours ago
Just like the pro-AI articles, it reads to me like a sales pitch. And the ending only adds to it: the author invites to hire companies to contract him for training.
I would only be happy if in the end the author turns out to be right.
But as the things stand right now, I can see a significant boost to my own productivity, which leads me to believe that fewer people are going to be needed.
When coal powered engines became more efficient, demand for coal went UP. It went up because vastly more things could now be cost effectively be coal-powered.
I can see a future where software development goes the same way. My wife works in science and I see all kinds of things in a casual observation of her work that could be made more efficient with good software support. But not by enough to pay six-figures per year for multiple devs to create it. So it doesn’t get done and her work and the work of tens of thousands like her around the world is less efficient as a result.
In a world where development is even half as expensive, many such tasks become approachable. If it becomes a third or quarter as expensive, even more applications are now profitable.
I think far more people will be doing something that creates the outcomes that are today created by SWEs manually coding. I doubt it will be quite as lucrative for the median person doing it, but I think it will still be well above the median wage and there will be a lot of it.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Many HN users may point to Jevons paradox, I would like to point out that it may very well work up until the point that it doesn't. After all a chicken has always seen the farmer as benevolent provider of food, shelter and safety, that is until of course THAT day when he decides he doesn't.
It is certainly possible that AI is the one great disruptor that we can’t adapt to. History over millenia has me taking the other side of that bet, seeing the disruptions and adaptations from factory farming, internal combustion engines, moving assembly lines, electrification, the transistor, ICs, wired then wireless telecommunications, the internet, personal computing, and countless other major disruptions.
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I agree with you on this feeling like a sales pitch, probably because ultimately it is. I've done a software training course led by this guy. It was fine, and his style and his lessons are all pretty decent and I found/find myself agreeing with his "takes". But it's nothing ground breaking, and he's not really adding anything to the debate that I've not read before. I don't know how active he is as a developer, I assumed that he was more of a teacher of established practices than being on the cutting edge of development. That's not an insult, but it stands out to me in this article.
Ironically, like an LLM, this article feels like more like an amalgamation of plenty of other opinions on the growth of AI in the workplace rather than any original thoughts. There's not really anything "new" here, just putting together a load of existing opinions.
(I am not suggesting that Jason got an AI to write this article, though that would be funny).