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Comment by xienze

3 hours ago

> And that feels about right to me. I can plumb my house if I watch enough YouTube videos on plumbing. I would rather hire a plumber.

I don't buy this argument at all. I think if we could pay $20/month to a service that would send over a junior plumber/carpenter/electrician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft, did the right thing the majority of the time, and we could observe and direct them, we'd all sign up for that in a heartbeat. Worst case, you have to hire an experienced, expensive person to fix the mess. Yes, I can hear everyone now, "worst case is they burn your house down." Sure, but as we're reminded _constantly_ when we read stories about AI agent catastrophes -- a human could wipe your prod database too. wHy ArE yOu HoLdInG iT tO a DiFfErEnT sTaNdArD???

The business side of the house is getting to live that scenario out right now as far as software goes. Sure you've got years of expertise that an LLM doesn't have _yet_. What makes you think it can't replace that part of your job as well?

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xienze

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techblueberry  2 hours ago

> I think if we could pay $20/month to a service that would send over a junior plumber/carpenter/electrician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft, did the right thing the majority of the time, and we could observe and direct them, we'd all sign up for that in a heartbeat.

I don’t think this comparison quite works (or maybe I think it works and is wrong) and I think it has something to do with creativity or the initial ideation.

I would do this, but I’m a jack of all trades. I built my own diner booth in my kitchen recently. But my wife, who loves the diner booth, just doesn’t really want to get over the hump of figuring out what she might want. I think most people want to offload the mental load of figuring out where to start.

Most people aren’t just bored by coding, they’re bored or overwhelmed by the idea of thinking about software in the first place. Same with plumbing or construction, most people aren’t hiring someone to direct, they’re hiring a director.

Even I have this about some things, sometimes I choose to outsource the full stack of something to give me more space to do creativity elsewhere.

wavemode  3 hours ago

You're comparing paying $20 for an AI plumber to paying hundreds/thousands for a traditional plumber.

But that's not what the author is talking about in that passage you quoted. What he's saying is that, if you can pay $20 for an AI plumber, then it stands to reason that eventually you will be able to pay $30 to a company that manages AI plumbers for you, so that you don't even have to go to the trouble of supervising the plumber. Most people will choose the $30.

  • xienze  3 hours ago

    It's in a section called "Why I’m still not afraid for my career."

    The implication here is software engineer jobs are still safe despite basically free labor/material being available to do said jobs because he thinks other people would prefer to pay experienced professionals to do it right at a significantly higher cost. My point is, I think most people will take the low-stakes gamble of having the cheap AI agent do it with self-supervision[0]. He's naive in thinking people are really going to care about artisanal software built by experienced professionals in the future.

    0: Even if you subscribe to the "your job will be to supervise the agents" train of thought, you're kinda glossing over the fact that it's probably gonna involve a pretty significant pay cut and the looming problem of "how do new experienced professionals get created if they don't have to/don't need to get their hands dirty"?