This is the question! Your narrative is definitely plausible, and I won't be shocked if it turns out this way. But it still isn't my expectation. It wasn't when people were saying this in 2023 or in 2024, and I haven't been wrong yet. It does seem more likely to me now than it did a couple years ago, but still not the likeliest outcome in the next few years.

But nobody knows for sure!

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whynotminot 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I might be early to this. And certainly, I still read a lot of code in my day to day right now.

But I sure write a lot less of it, and the percentage I write continues to go down with every new model release. And if I'm no longer writing it, and the person who works on it after me isn't writing it either, it changes the whole art of software engineering.

I used to spend a great deal of time with already working code that I had written thinking about how to rewrite it better, so that the person after me would have a good clean idea of what is going on.

But humans aren't working in the repos as much now. I think it's just a matter of time before the models are writing code essentially for their eyes, their affordances -- not ours.

	▲	sanderjd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah we're not too far from agreement here. Something I think though (which, again, I could very well be wrong about; uncertainty is the only certainly right now) is that "so the person after me would have a good clean idea of what is going on" is also going to continue mattering even when that "person" is often an AI. It might be different, clarity might mean something totally different for AIs than for humans, but right now I think a good expectation is that clarity to humans is also useful to AIs. So at the moment I still spend time coaxing the AI to write things clearly. That could turn out to be wasted time, but who knows. I also think if it as a hedge against the risk that we hit some point where the AIs turn out to be bad at maintaining their own crap, at which point it would be good for me to be able to understand and work with what has been written!