I have no idea what that is supposed to mean but I keep hearing the same about art, music and other creative fields and it sure sounds like contempt for creative people.
I personally don't lose any sleep over LLMs being powerful wizards for getting started on new projects.. that's what LLMs are good at.. pulling together bits of things they've seen on the internet. There's a chasm between that and maintaining, iterating on a complex project. Things that require actual intelligence.
Instead of dealing with the costs associated with using, developing and printing from film, as well as the skills associated with knowing what a photo would look like before it was developed, digital cameras allowed new photographers to enter the industry relatively cheaply and shoot off a few thousand photos at a wedding at a relatively negligible cost. Those photographers rapidly developed their skills, and left studios with massive million dollar Kodak digital chemical printers in the dust. I know because I was working at one.
If you remember, this was in the time where the studio owned your negatives ostensibly forever, and you had to pay for reprints or enlargements. What were amateur photographers could enter this high-margin market, produce images of an acceptable quality, charge far less and provide far more.
I'm not able to say whether this will happen to software development, but the democratization of professional photography absolutely shook the somewhat complacent industry to its core.
In that case it had nothing to do with contempt for creative people, it was the opposite, anyone who wanted to be creative now could be.
I can give you the real example of recently needing to translates ancient 90's era manufacturing files into modern ones, while also generating companion automation files from it (which needs to by done manually but with tooling to facilitate the process).
I found a company that sells software capable of doing this. A license is $1000/yr/usr.
The next day I was able to get claude 3.7 to make a program that does all that, translate the files, and then have a GUI that renders them so an engineer can go through and manually demarcate points, which then are used to calculate and output the automation file. This took about 45 minutes and is what the department is using now. We have thousands of these files that will need to get modernized as they get used.
I see this everywhere now, and I have been building bespoke programs left an right. Whether it be an audio spectrum analyzer that allows me to finely tune my stereo equalizer visually based on feedback for any given track, or an app on my phone that instantly calculates futures prices and margin requirements for given position sizes and predicted market movements.
People think LLMs will be a paradigm shift, I can tell you the shift has already happened, it's just a matter of awareness now.
That sounds like something for which one should be spending the money on professionally developed and well-tested software. What's the expression? Penny wise, pound foolish.
It’s taken her a month to get up and running.
Everyone needs to realize this is not a matter of AI stealing dev jobs but the supply of low skilled developers exploding and eating into the market.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I don't doubt that LLMs can make programmers more productive. It's happening today, and I expect it will continue to improve, but it requires knowing what code they should generate, what the actual goals are, and how it should be tested. It can generate standard solutions to standard problems with standard bugs. That's fine they're a tool.
What the inexperienced expect them to do is read their mind, and implement what they want without testing (other than did it crash the first time I used it). Unfortunately, knowing the questions to ask is at least half of the problem, which by definition the inexperienced don't know how to do. You can already see that with vibecoding prompts to "write clear comments", "don't write bugs", and "use best practices".
So why does it lead to the enshitification of the programming experience? Because regular folks will be led to believe (Startrek movie Wargames hacker style) that this is how things are done. The will accept and expect rehashed garbage UI and implementations without security or corner case checking, because that's what they always get when they press a button and wait a minute. Now, why can't YOU stupid programmer, get the same results faster? I told you I wanted a cool game that would make me lots of money fast with no bugs!
I do have hope that some people will learn to be more clear in their descriptions of things, but guess what, english isn't really the language for that.
I'm talking about people talking in english to an AI on one screen, and compiled functioning programs appearing on the other. An "app playground" where you just tell your phone what you need an app to do, and a new bespoke app is now in your app draw.
Forget about UIs too. They won't be that important. You don't need a tree of options and menus, tool bars and buttons. You would just tell the program what you want it to do..."Don't put my signature on this email"..."wrap the text around this image properly"(cough msword cough)..."split these two parts and move the red one to the top layer"...or even "Create a button that does this and place it over there".
I think part of what you want is voice applications, because deleting your signature by hand is probably easier than trying to build a program that does it. Maybe the app could just search help and tell you what feature already does what you're asking for. Certainly, context sensitive voice recognition has gotten a LOT better with the latest LLMs. Not sure I'm looking forward to the guy on the train narrating to his laptop for an excel page, though.
But using AI to generate something in that style doesn't make you an artist. It isn't art, it's just a product.
Celebrating the 'democratization' of these skills is just showing adversity to basic learning and thinking. I'm not gonna celebrate a billion dollar corp trying to replace fundamentals of being human.
This is probably how people felt at the advent of calculators
Our current laws are made to handle AI
The can for sure maintain and iterate on smaller projects -- which millions of people are happily feeding into them as training data.
Going from a project with 1,000 to 1,000,000 lines of code is a tiny leap compared to going from 0 to 1000. Once your argument is based on scale then you pretty much lost to the robots.
I'm not saying they are going to invent some free energy source (other than using humans as batteries) anytime soon but when the argument is "you're going to be blindsided" and the response shows, and I'm not trying to be insulting or anything like that, willful ignorance of the facts on the ground I'm going to say you probably will be blindsided when they take your app writing job or whatever.
I'm not attacking you at all just saying that there's a bunch of people who chose to keep their heads in the sand and hope this all just goes away.
Are you sure the leap is tiny? It's a much easier problem to get only 1,000 lines of code to be correct, because the lines only have to be consistent with each other.
And yet I feel more secure in my job today than I did a year ago because I'm constantly hitting the limits of what a language model can do. I've realized that the decisions I make every day as a senior engineer aren't mostly about what lines of code usually come after each other.
