Comment by DonThomasitos
7 hours ago
One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
I look at it like this: Yes, AI can write code. It can write it much faster than I can. Sometimes it can also write it better than I can.
But: programming languages, libraries, and abstractions are not going away. It is still possible (and might always be possible) to get deep into the weeds of Python or Rust or whatever to understand how those work and really harness them to their full potential, or develop them further. It just won't be _compulsary_ (in most industries) if your only goal is to trade lines of code for dollars in your bank account.
I mostly share your perspective, but I don't know if I would share your emphasis.
Lines of code for dollars used to be a trade businesses made with developers out of necessity, but soon it will only be economically viable to make that trade with AI providers. So not only will going deep in the weeds not be compulsory, understanding anything about any programming concept will become economically void (though not void of educational value, or enjoyment).
On the other hand, what that code does depends entirely on a particular understanding of the real world, which is indescribably complex (i.e. combinatorially explosive). This is what I truly care about, and the possibilities for the application and customization of software are infinite. The interface between the world and software will always involve a value decision that AI cannot have a monopoly over (it would be economically infeasible, no matter how cheap inference becomes). This means that as long as my passion is not within the machine, but is instead centered on the relationship between the machine and the world, I will never be out of a job.
And part of me thinks, "good riddance!". For all the good we created, developers have also generated so much bullshit, it's honestly insane that any software companies were ever successful in spite of it. The human-politicking is probably the worst of it - think of the countless years of human life wasted in scrum ceremonies - but also so much of the software we've created sucks, and users hate it!
We used to be a proud culture of hackers, building miracles with miniscule resources, or at least that's what the greybeards here on HN like to whine about. They're right, we've squandered limitless cycles, uncountable exabytes of useless data. If there was a God of hackerdom, we are living in his Gomorrah, and he will strike us down with AI as punishment for these sins.