alt Hacker NewsRight, but this is the most hopeful imaginable prediction: AI accelerates everything, but everything good is still mediated through taste and expertise, so being a (say) skilled systems engineer is important and rewarding, just with all the tedium distilled out of it.
There's a less hopeful outcome, where no skill is needed at all, because every conceivable thing is one-shot-able from a SOTA model. But then, at that point, you're saying something pretty profound about computer science (roughly: that there was no meaningfully more sophisticated and complex place to go from where we are today).
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That’s something that I have been thinking about for a while now. Even prior to LLMs, many large companies have essentially been iterating on the same half a dozen ideas over and over again and there doesn’t seem to be much new coming out even post LLMs.
The most recent new things that LLMs have unlocked (regarding software dev) for us is reverse engineering and combining old games, unearthing decade old vulnerabilities, and helping root and debloat consumer hardware. Which are all cool and useful, but none of it being a “next great thing”.
Perhaps LLMs are really doing is highlighting how the software industry was already nearing its economic maturity and this just shifted the timeline from 2040 back to 2027-2030.
> but everything good is still mediated through taste and expertise
I'm reminded of https://archive.ph/a9Cli (ns;nt)
My wife is not a developer at all but is highly analytical. I find her a better software architect than most developers I met.
I suspect there are a lot of people really good at “systems” - there are a lot of really clever folks out there - that did not go through the proper CS rituals and are thus shunned but in fact can take over your job in no time especially with AI.
My wife regularly gets pushed away by “IT” at her work and unlike others she pushes back, but they don’t like her. They start talking about db clustering details etc as if that has any bearing on anything. I am a dev, I know she doesn’t know what logical replication is, but I do know she can replace their team. She just needs one technical person to keep an eye on things.
I suspect we will end up with just a handful of building blocks like “this is how data is siloed, secured etc”, “this is how dashboards are made here”, “this is how email is handled”, etc and employees with AI just develop their own stuff on top of these. The “devs” just oversee the building blocks and the overall soundness of the flow. Don’t know how many you need once that is standardized..