Comment by seer

I think the new batch of engineers are going to think faster on their feet, but less precise.

We humans are _amazing_ pattern matching machines and learning “if you do this thing this other thing occurs” is literally what our brains were built for.

It’s just the current few thousand years of technical progress that have been a departure from this reality - we found out about analytical thinking and that by deeply analysing something you can do a shit ton more.

If you look at scientific progress before Industrial Revolution it’s all trial and error between patterns. And I feel like the new crop of devs are silently settling in into this very human and familiar pattern.

On the one hand I think it will probably be good for the “mental health” of people in this profession - you become more like an alchemist acquiring bags of tricks on what works, sharing incantations with others, because sitting down and learning _why_ it works in detail would be a time luxury few would be able to afford.

But that would mean the people under the hood that build the LLMs and who debug the really broken system would be charging the premium.

I honestly don’t think that in and off itself would be such a bad thing.

What I personally am really scared about is the price for labour that is sharply declining. I don’t worry about ASI too much, but when you read history it is absolutely full of stories of great human suffering because “labour was cheap” no need to improve working conditions because there is always someone else willing to take it up.

We had the Industrial Revolution _because_ of the plague making labour expensive and driving the benefit for innovation. Before that nobody really cared. With LLMs doing things becomes vastly cheaper, so the labour itself becomes cheap with it.

Now looking at the state of the engineered world - how absolutely shitty everything is (as opposed to what it technically could be) - there is a shit ton of stuff to be done so the work should be there to fill it. But maybe the capital will move in another direction - nobody can predict the future, I just hope we don’t end up in a dystopian hellscape for the sake of my children.