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Comment by LanceH

3 hours ago

It feels like it's all senior developers now and nobody new. At some point they will want someone new and won't be able to find them.

> At some point they will want someone new

If we freeze AI models at their current stage of development, then yes. If not, given the rate at which models are improving (compare Claude today to Claude 1 year ago), in 3 to 5 years software development could be fully automated.

  • Well, if you automate everything, the bad parts will still be there, then you need real engineers to fix them

  • Are you sure that's how this works?

    Let's see, my grandparents were about 160cm when they were 35. My parents were about 170cm when they were 35 and I am about 180cm around 35. You are saying I can expect my grandchildren to be around 200cm at that age and their grandchildren 220cm?

    • Or we could assume since new data is increasingly AI generated then the next generation of models are inherently born out of incestuous relationships so I would imagine Claude's grandson is going to be a dwarf.

      Of course it is possible also that Claude will marry a chinese model (since it's asian odds are it is also smarter) bringing some diversity into the "gene" pool. Or better yet, a Russian supermodel.

    • Are you sure that AI model progression and the height of your family members are 35 is related? It seems unlikely but I guess you'd know better than I.

      3 replies →

    • If we didn't have any humans before your grandparents, and these were the only data points we have to extrapolate from, then, yes, this would be a very reasonable prediction.

Some of that is long pre-existing, where too many companies would go: "Hey, let someone else hire juniors and train them up, we'll them away after that."

Not that the new LLM-as-junior trend doesn't make it worse.