Comment by asa400
17 days ago
If all you (not you specifically, more of a royal “you” or “we”) are is a collection of skills centered around putting code into an editor and opening pull requests as fast as possible, then sure, you might be cooked.
But if your job depends on taste, design, intuition, sociability, judgement, coaching, inspiring, explaining, or empathy in the context of using technology to solve human problems, you’ll be fine. The premium for these skills is going _way_ up.
The question isn't whether businesses will have 0 human element to them, the question is does AI offer a big enough gap that technical skills are still required such that technical roles are still hired for. Someone in product can have all of those skills without a computer science degree, with no design experience, and AI will do the technical work at the level of design, implementation, and maintenance. What I am seeing with the new models isn't just writing code, it's taking fundamental problems as input and design wholistic software solutions as output - and the quality is there.
I am only seeing that if the person writing the prompts knows what a quality solution looks like at a technical level and is reviewing the output as they go. Otherwise you end up with an absolute mess that may work at least for "happy path" cases but completely breaks down as the product needs change. I've described a case of this in some detail in another comment.
> the person writing the prompts knows what a quality solution looks like at a technical level and is reviewing the output as they go
That is exactly what I recommend, and it works like a charm. The person also has to have realistic expectations for the LLM, and be willing to work with a simulacrum that never learns (as frustrating as it seems at first glance).
It turns out that corporations value these things right up until a cheaper almost as good alternative is available.
The writing is on the wall for all white collar work. Not this year or next, but it's coming.
If all white collar work goes, we’re going to have to completely restructure the economy or collapse completely.
Being a plumber won’t save you when half the work force is unemployed.
Ah the age old 'but humans have heart, and no machine can replicate that' argument. Good luck!
The process of delivering useful, working software for nontrivial problems cannot be reduced to simply emitting machine instructions as text.
Yes, so you need some development and SysOps skills (for now), not all of that other nonsense you mentioned.
When your title is software engineer, good luck convincing the layoff machine about your taste, design, intuition, sociability, judgement, coaching, inspiring, explaining, or empathy in the context of using technology to solve human problems.