Comment by adriand
3 days ago
> If anything this example shows that these cli tools give regular devs much higher leverage.
This is also my take. When the printing press came out, I bet there were scribes who thought, "holy shit, there goes my job!" But I bet there were other scribes who thought, "holy shit, I don't have to do this by hand any more?!"
It's one thing when something like weaving or farming gets automated. We have a finite need for clothes and food. Our desire for software is essentially infinite, or at least, it's not clear we have anywhere close to enough of it. The constraint has always been time and budget. Those constraints are loosening now. And you can't tell me that when I am able to wield a tool that makes me 10X more productive that that somehow diminishes my value.
The mechanization and scaling up of farming caused a tectonic shift from rural residents moving to cities to take on factory jobs as well as office and retail jobs. We saw this in China until very recently, since they had a bit of a slow start causing delayed full-scale industrialisation.
So a lot of people will end up doing something different. Some of it will be menial and be shit, and some of it will be high level. New hierarchies and industries will form. Hard to predict the details, but history gives us good parallels.
What diminishes your value is that suddenly everybody can (in theory anyway) do this work. There’s a push at my company to start letting designers do their own llm-assisted merge requests to front end projects. So now CEOs are greedily rubbing their hands together thinking maybe everybody but the plumber can be a “developer” now. I think it remains to be seen whether that’s true, but in the meantime it’s going to make getting and keeping a well-paying developer gig difficult.
There was a previous edit that made reference to the water usage of AI datacenter that I'm responding to.
If AI datacenters' hungry need for energy gets us to nuclear power, which gets us the energy to run desalination plants as the lakes dry up because the Earth is warming, hopefully we won't die of thirst.
> When the printing press came out, I bet there were scribes who thought, "holy shit, there goes my job!" But I bet there were other scribes who thought, "holy shit, I don't have to do this by hand any more?!"
I don't understand this argument. Surely the skill set involved in being a scribe isn't the same as being a printer, and possibly the the personality that makes a good scribe doesn't translate to being a good printer.
So I imagine many of the scribes lost their income, and other people made money on printing. Good for the folks who make it in the new profession, sucks for those who got shafted. How many scribes transitioned successfully to printers?
Genuinely asking, I don't know.