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danhau 3 hours ago

Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the hope that it will fail.

How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a fraction and not a majority. For now, AI is simply most useful when paired with a programmer.

aleph_minus_one an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities.

This is not the case:

- Before the 90s, programming was rather a job for people who were insanely passionate about technology, and working as a programmer was not that well-regarded (so no "growing opportunities").

- After the burst of the first dotcom bubble, a lot of programmers were unemployed.

- Every older programmer can tell you how fast the skills that they have can become and became irrelevant.

Over the last decade, the stability and opportunities for programmers was more like a series of boom-bust cycles.

cafebabbe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI is useful when paired with an experienced programmer.

Experienced through old-school (pre-LLM) practice.

I don't clearly see a good endgame for this.

citrin_ru an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Endgame is to produce AI which will not need any supervision by the time the current generation of experienced developers will retire or even sooner. I don’t know if it will happen but many bet on this and models are still improving, flattening is not yet seen.

ajshahH 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

This implies programming is done and there will be no other advancements.

And flattening is being seen, no? Recent advancements are mostly from RL’ing, which has limitations (and tradeoffs) too. Are there more tricks after that?

duggan 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Motivated novices will just learn differently, and produce different kinds of systems for different audiences with different expectations.

Some will dig into obscurities that LLMs don't or can't touch, others will orchestrate the tools, Gastown-style, into some as-yet-unknown form.

People will vibe themselves into a corner and either start learning or flame out.