Haven't most productivity improvements led to more rather than less programmers? Why would this one be any different?

I was thinking today that with respect to programming, LLMs are a bit like spreadsheets. They make "programming" accessible to more people. I can use vim and bash and script my way to do changes in a file with millions of line. Most non-programmers couldn't, but now they can use an LLM-based solution instead, they can program in English. So what used to be a back-and-forth between e.g. a secretary and an understaffed IT department can be done by the secretary alone, while IT can look at longer-term goals.

New lines of C/C++ are still written everyday in spite of all higher-level languages. Add LLMs to this pile of higher-level languages. You'll still need Java programmers in the future, even if they interact with an LLM on a daily basis. But maybe you won't need them to write a script for which there's an equivalent prompt that anybody can come up with and which can be fed into an LLM.

> When we built the first airplane it could barely carry a single person and didn't go far... We are just barely touching digital general intelligence, and we're not even using API enabled versions that use tooling.

Big assumption that we're not just going to slam into a wall of capabilities and end up just with some really good autocomplete machines.

(I am bullish on generative AI as a whole, but come on, you have no clue about what's coming next just like me)

> Oh, I'm glad you popped out of the womb fully trained. As for the rest of us we have to go through a learning curve of gaining experience that takes years.

You did pop out of the womb fully trained to use ChatGPT. Now you're left with the task of using it correctly and spotting its mistakes, which is a subject that by definition can only be done by humans.

Right now ChatGPT is as much as its training data and it doesn't understand what it's not trained to understand. A lot of real-world experience remain in human brains and not recorded in any digital form.

If you could do me a favor and get GPT to upgrade my RocketRaid card's Linux (open source) driver available on their website for kernel 3.x to 6.x I'd be grateful and impressed. If you could turn it into an automated job that runs on every kernel update you will have done a great service to the world.

> If AI replaces that level of employee and leaves the seniors, where are the new developers coming from?

Why are you assuming this? Juniors with GPT-4 punch above their weight, too.

> When we built the first airplane it could barely carry a single person and didn't go far

Yet here we are still flying in more or less the same.hsit we flew in 70 years ago (Boeing 707)

No space plane, no faster than sound travel, &c.