| > If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero I think, then that the value of all knowledge work will have dropped to zero. Software engineering is, to my mind, “intelligence complete.” If you can do it with knowledge work, you can have software do it. |
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| ▲ | skydhash 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep. Most knowledge work is about coordination between people and transporting the right information to the people that are thinking and the people that are doing (not always separate groups, but can be one group switching mode). You need people because there's a lot of shared context between individuals in society that is not encoded anywhere. | | |
| ▲ | dd8601fn 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn’t write functional code. A few months ago people started saying they need to be operated by people who could otherwise write the code. It sounds like we’re headed towards… the guy in Office Space who took specifications from the customer via a secretary and gave those to the engineers (and we know what happened to him). But I’m not sure that’s a thing, at least for long, either. The original super power of these things wasn’t that they could write code. It was that they could very competently extract meaning from natural language, debug what you were saying from the terrible way you expressed it, and still formulate competent answers. That doesn’t sound like a comfortable place for former devs to sit for the next few years. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | > A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn’t write functional code Even ChatGPT could write code when it came out. > It was that they could very competently extract meaning from natural language, debug what you were saying from the terrible way you expressed it, and still formulate competent answers “Competent” is doing a lot of work here. If it were so, AI woul take change requests directly from the business side and put the implementation immediately in production. But instead, all you see are FOMO propaganda to get devs to adopt the tool with no asking if it actually helps the devs do their job. | | |
| ▲ | carlmr 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | >But instead, all you see are FOMO propaganda to get devs to adopt the tool with no asking if it actually helps the devs do their job. If (big if) LLMs/AI take over all of knowledge work the first thing you'll notice is that the first company getting to the point of automating all knowledge work will close off their models to the public, not advertise it, and take over every business on the planet. You wouldn't waste a dime on advertising, influencers, or convincing people to use your product. Taking over every business in the world seems more lucrative than selling $20 subscriptions to people. | | |
| ▲ | ytoawwhra92 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's not going to be a single point at which that happens. More likely what we will see (if this happens) is AI companies entering close partnerships with other businesses, building up their models ability to do that sort of work, then either acquiring their partner or directly competing with them. Similar to how Apple monitors developers having success on their platform and then launches a first-party offering. | | |
| ▲ | carlmr 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This might be happening, too, however B2C advertising and heavy astroturfing is a sure sign that they don't even think they're close to this goal. The average consumer pays the least for subscriptions and asks most uninteresting questions to the AI in terms of gaining insight. The only goal here can be upholding the narrative that everything will be AI soon™. |
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| ▲ | satisfice 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Exactly right. I have an idea for an “evidence editor.” Claude is waiting for me to tell it exactly what I want this thing to be. But I don’t know. I haven’t figured out how to square the various circles, even in my fantasies. Until I do, Claude sits and waits. And waits… |
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