So it largely sounds like many more people will be able to write software - and will use AI to do it. Existing software engineers will continue to automate their tasks away like they always did, but perhaps at a faster rate.

The impact of AI in other fields seems to be muted.

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simonw 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it is applicable to a much wider range of knowledge work, but it's also harder to apply there.

Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't.

Spotting errors in a research report or legal brief is a whole lot harder!

But... non-software professionals spend a huge amount of their time on tasks that can be safely automated - reformatting documents, extracting numbers from PDFs, all kinds of flavor of data entry.

Learning how to use a tool like Claude Cowork can take a big dent out of those.

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slopinthebag 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't.

Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore? Honest question, not a gotcha, it's just previously getting software to pass all the tests was a small part of what we would consider "working" or perhaps "good" software. Maybe that's different now with LLMs, idk. Maybe we need automated checks for these things as well, like not compiling until the code quality is good enough to let the agent finish it's loop.

	▲	simonw 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore? Yes, we should care. I've been writing a whole book about that: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

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pianopatrick 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the AI can write code for robots the impact in other fields may be pretty large. Seems to me a lot of jobs can be automated with software and robots combined. The limit in the past was writing the software to get the robots to work. But if AI can remove that limit...