The most bizarre thing is that programmers are literally writing code to replace themselves because once this AI started, it was a race to the bottom and nobody wants to be last.
I remember attending a tech fair decades ago, and at one stand they were vending some database products. When I mentioned that I was studying computer science with a focus on software engineering, they sneered that coding will be much less important in the future since powerful databases will minimize the need for a lot of data wrangling in applications with algorithms.
What actually happened is that the demand for programmers increased, and software ate the world. I suspect something similar will happen the current AI hype.
Will it?
It's already hard to get people to use computer as they are right now, where you only need to click on things and no longer have to enter commands. That because most people don't like to engage in formal reasoning. Even with one of the most intuitive computer assisted task (drawing and 3d modeling), there's so much to learn regarding theories that few people bother.
Programming has always been easy to learn, and tools to automate coding have existed for decades now. But how many people you know have had the urge to learn enough to automate their tasks?
Look at video bay editing after the advent of Final Cut. Significant drop in the specialized requirement as a professional field, even while content volume went up dramatically.
If there are jobs paying $150K just to code (someone else tells you what to code, and you just code it up), then please share!
Generalist junior and senior engineers will need to think of a different career path in less than 5 years as more layoffs will reduce the software engineering workforce.
It looks like it may be the way things are if progress in the o1, o3, oN models and other LLMs continues on.
But they won’t. AI will enable building even more complex software which counter intuitively will result in need even more human jobs to deal with this added complexity.
Think about how despite an increasing amount of free open source libraries over time enabling some powerful stuff easily, developer jobs have only increased, not decreased.
What if software demand is largely saturated? It seems the big tech companies have struggled to come up with the next big tech product category, despite lots of talent and capital.
These models are tools to help engineers, not replacements. Models cannot, on their own, build novel new things no matter how much the hype suggests otherwise. What they can do is remove a hell of a lot of accidental complexity.
This I think will happen with programmers. Rote programming will slowly die out, while demand for super high end will go dramatically up in price.
Also unsure what you mean by...'how golfing works'. This is the economics of it, not the game
