Comment by Akranazon

> But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt.

It's not just likely, but it's guaranteed to happen if you're not keeping an eye on it. So much so, that it's really reinforced my existing prejudice towards typed and compiled languages to reduce some of the checking you need to do.

Using an agent with a dynamic language feels very YOLO to me. I guess you can somewhat compensate with reams of tests though. (which begs the question, is the dynamic language still saving you time?)

I can provide evidence for your claim. The technical debt can easily snowball if the review process is not stringent enough to keep out unnecessary functions.

Somehow I appreciate this type of attitude more than the one which reflects total denial of the current trajectory. Fervent denial and AI trash-talking being maybe the single most dominant sentiment on HN over the last year, by all means interspersed with a fair amount of amazement at our new toys.

But it is sad if good programmers should loose sight of the opportunities the future will bring (future as in the next few decades). If anything, software expertise is likely to be one of the most sought-after skills - only a slightly different kind of skill than churning out LOCs on a keyboard faster than the next person: People who can harness the LLMs, design prompts at the right abstraction level, verify the code produced, understand when someone has injected malware, etc. These skills will be extremely valuable in the short to medium term AFAICS.

But ultimately we will obviously become obsolete if nothing (really) catastrophic happens, but when that happens then likely all human labor will be obsolete too, and society will need to be organized differently than exchanging labor for money for means of sustenance.

The future is either a language model trained on AI code bloats and the ways to optimize the bloat away

OR,

something like Mercor, currently getting paid really well by Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini to pay very smart humans really well to proof language model outputs.

Yep, its a rather depressing realization isnt it. Oh well, life moves on i suppose.

I think we realistically have a few years of runway left though. Adoption is always slow outside of the far right of the bell curve.

I feel the same. And I expect even a lot of the early adopters and AI enthusiasts are going to find themselves as the short end of the stick sooner than later.

"Oops I automated myself out a job".

Yup. The majority of this website is going to find out they were grossly overpaid for a long time.

Imagine everyone who is in less technical or skilled domains.

I can't help but resist this line of thinking as a result. If the end is nigh for us, it's nigh for everyone else too. Imagine the droves of less technical workers in the workforce who will be unseated before software engineers. I don't think it is tenable for every worker in the first world to become replaced by a computer. If an attempt at this were to occur, those smart unemployed people would be a real pain in the ass for the oligarchs.

I feel the same.

Frankly, I am not sure there is a place in the world at all for me in ten years.

I think the future might just be a big enough garden to keep me fed while I wait for lack of healthcare access to put me out of my misery.

I am glad I am not younger.

So why havent you been fired already?

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