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0 pointsnoitpmeder3y ago0 comments

Personally I think it's 99% hype. The current iteration and architecture of these systems means they will never be at the level where they can actually replace a programmer. The best they will ever get is barfing up snippets for a programmer (who still needs the industry-specific knowledge to VERIFY the snippets).

Additionally, "the rate of increase in capabilities" is very much a false flag. Past performance (especially for second-order things like 'rate of improvement') is an absolute batshit insane metric for predicting future success.

https://russellinvestments.com/us/blog/past-performance-no-g...

The advancements have eaten low hanging fruit. Once all the low hanging fruit is gone, we'll all realize GPT will never be tall enough to reach the good stuff.

0 comments

malborodog3y ago

But obviously increasing avg and sr programmer productivity by many x implies many fewer jobs for programmers. That’s the point we’re interested in.

brookst3y ago

You seem to be saying that there is fixed demand for programmers and oversupply means less hiring.

But the history of technology says that demand is recursive; the more tech produced, the more demand there is for producers.

There may be a time when we hit the old “the whole world only needs 5 computers”[0] limit, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close. AI is providing leverage to create net more programming; it is not replacing programmers in a zero sum game.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/computing...

flippinburgers3y ago

Sounds a bit too much like a perpetual motion machine to me.

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mattnewport3y ago

Is that obvious? The history of programming has been full of things that have at least claimed to increase programmer productivity, everything from high level languages to smart refactoring IDEs, debuggers, PaaS, etc and in all that time the trend has been towards more jobs for programmers not fewer.

redox993y ago

Productivity with modern tools (SPAs, microservices) is often a lot lower than oldschool stuff (django/rails, maybe even Visual Basic, Delphi)

thingification3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

> In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a fixed amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.

dw_arthur3y ago

The lump of labor fallacy says nothing about a particular type of job. A category of jobs can become non-productive versus a technology and the workers within those jobs should get reallocated to more productive jobs.

woeirua3y ago

The fact that we’re even having this conversation should concern you. Move the goalposts if you want, but the rate of progress should concern you.

jacobedawson3y ago

That's why I said it was unpredictable, in both directions.

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