Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer (opens in new tab)

You're already "inside". The danger with automation is that it can pull up the ladder of developing junior talent on nuts-and-bolts, especially if these platforms aren't accessible to students and small-time developers.

How many architecture does a company need? Realistically if they succeed you'll be unemployed.

Even without any AI, every senior I know( 10+ years of experience) is pretty much trying to shift to architect or similar position and sees day to day programming almost on the same level as sweeping floors. I appreciate this may not be the case in shops doing something truly unique,but in an average CRED app world, this will happen much sooner than a lot of people might think.

It looks like with ai tools there will be less demand for engineers. For example, instead of keeping 300k people around, Google will replace 200k of them with ai-engineer ai-coder ai-tester.

Can you imagine how depressing it will be to your market salary?

In reality you'll be the one figuring out the boring stuff that the AI can't do.

I don‘t quite see why the high level architecture couldn‘t be done by AI either, once it get‘s good enough to build the low level one (which is what software development really is). Half of architecture is best practices anyway, which are explicitly in the training data, and the other half can be inferred from implicit principles in existing systems that are also in the training data.

As a software engineer, no, there's no reason to be worried. But what if you were a wordpress developer where a big chunk of your work can be automated?

If anything you should want the opposite. Most companies are fundamentally solving problems within a finite set of domains which could be represented with a finite set of "good" architectures.

The opinionated thing is how to implement these within the boundaries of the existing codebase, skills, etc.

You shouldn't feel anymore threatened by this than by interchangeable parts. People upskill and society ends up as a massive net beneficiary.

Until we have ASI (imho we're not remotely close) then there is plenty of work to be done. It will just involve fewer menial tasks.

The journalists, artists, and film people felt this way too.

These tools will be incredible and change how we do work forever.

I've done the kind of heavy hitting active-active, five nines engineering you'd think would be safe. I'm not so sure that doesn't change eventually.

I wasn't worried until Google showed up with a 1M token context with 99.9% recall...

I am feeling the same. Paying 100EUR/month for a competent AI junior programmer which I could offload simple or repetitive tasks on would be absolute banger. But so far AI is hype and crap code.

Those who do worry do so because they assume (rightly or wrongly) that it will be possible to automate everything you do, including ‘higher-level architecture concerns’.

I don’t think you’re naive.

Providing detailed instructions to computers to accomplish human/business objectives is the hard part about being a programmer.

But the level of abstraction has been increasing. It started as physically flipping switches then machine code then assembly then structured programming then object oriented programming and so on.

I remember during the 1990s with objects and VB custom controls people were talking that businesses would just hire a bunch of high school students to work part time just snapping components together like Legos.

It's easy to imagine because it already happened in the mid-late 00s with the first attempt at software dev cost reduction when companies tried outsourcing to cheap, underqualified labor in India, Bangladesh, etc.

Being the person who comes in to salvage a software disaster is a hell of a different career than a greenfield cloud startup dev or FAANG proto-pusher, but it can be extremely profitable. and yes, I suspect the demand for that type of software expert will be on the rise.

I’m not saying they’re not vapour, but the article does mention a series of closed door demos and thousands of GPUs deployed, so it at least appears that someone has seen something.

There's a short demo from June last year https://magic.dev/blog/ltm-1

Yet there were times when demos were attached as CDs to magazines.

> No demo at all

This is how the majority of companies actually build and release products.

You do demos behind closed doors to investors/board before showing the public.

Opting-out isn't an option when capital becomes capable of deploying (robotic or human) cops and soldiers to any point on earth in 30 minutes. At that point, the real power rests with whoever (or whatever) decides how to allocate capital and those who've opted out live and die only at their whim. Note that legal and political frameworks only need to be neutralized, not eliminated, for this to be effective. One can neutralize the legal system by injecting complexity and pricing out ordinary people from using it, and share small amounts of capital with legal leadership. One can neutralize the political framework by spending considerable capital on manufacturing consent, and improving return on that investment with technology.

Of course, such a solution isn't impossible. It may be that such a village, if left alone by circumstance and/or because it has an insider champion, may create such psychologically healthy and intellectually talented people that they may eventually challenge the greater status quo. Sounds like the premise of a YA mild dystopia novel!

No open source contributors consented to their work being used for this purpose.

Updating dependencies and frameworks is maybe the biggest thing I can't wait for Copilot to do for me.

Just wait until ai invents its own npm that people are no longer able to understand. Good luck with that.

Im still fuzzy on this whole ai thing (as a dev)

Would our industry create a new job role such as "prompt engineer" aka "ai engineer supervisor" ??

Or would this ai developer be able to read jira/kanban tickets, cooperate with other "teammates", deploy fixes, etc with no major oversight?

Generally curious.