I agree with the take, but it's a temporary one, the sad reality is that we will be literally inferior soon, there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI, we need to remember that we are kinda at the beginning of the AI era, in 5 to 10 years it's very unlikely that a human translator or software engineers will do better than the tooling we will have.

There is already a tipping point now in software engineering where we prefer to ask AI instead of humans because we believe accuracy will be better, see SO death as an example or just see the current state of online dev communities, it's getting deserted and between team members at work, we can also notice that people speak less and less.

Sad but I believe it.

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rootusrootus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> we will be literally inferior soon

This plague of misanthropic doom is itself pretty depressing. Why do so many people think LLMs are in any way on a path to compete with human brains? Why do you think so little of yourself? The brain is magnificent and complex in ways that we are unable to decipher anytime soon, and it does way more than an LLM. Way, way more.

	▲	pixel_popping 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't talk specifically about LLMs but AI in general, it's an important distinction because tooling is currently what make models useful and more performant. When I say we, I mean the general population really. There0-'ll always be the super bright ones, sure, but we gotta be realistic here. Most people already struggle to make any meaningful contribution because it's so hard to compete, and that gap is just gonna get bigger and bigger. I agree the brain is pretty magnificent, but when it comes to stuff like language, figuring out if an idea actually works, building the next LLM, or running business stuff, it's pretty obvious we'll be inferior. AI can already innovate and come up with new things way faster than any human could, so at some point (soon) => the majority of contributions are just gonna come from AI, not from us.

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WillowWithAWand 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thing is that AI is not some inevitable force of nature that must just be contended with and weathered. It is an active choice by our society to develop it and it is a choice by our society how we should use it, if at all.

We would all do well to remember that and remember that each and every advancement and use case regarding AI is the result of choices by people (or the groups of people we call corporations) and are oftentimes motivated by the profit motive, not the best interest of humanity.

We could make different choices up to and including our own Butlerian Jihad where we ban all forms of AI but we could also do everything we can to prevent the worst fallout short of that.

There are only two types of problems in the universe: 1) those posed by the laws of physics 2) those posed by human choices

The problem of AI is one of the latter.

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Johnbot 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is anecdata, but in my experience with myself and my coworkers, it is not that we believe the AI will be more accurate in software engineering, but that the answer will come faster and be more tailored to our exact problems. If I have to search SO, I have to find the answer and then tweak it to fit my codebase, but with AI tooling, the AI is already basing its answer around my code.

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pixel_popping 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think we actually do believe it, do you believe Fable 5+GPT-5.5(+ the whole model zoo) in loop with adversarial (no budget limit) or a 10-year experienced SWE?

We are talking about "codebases" but realistically we won't even be checking the filetree of them soon, it will be all blind, containerized and verified with pseudo guarantees which are good enough to build serious things. We don't even write documentation for humans anymore, we need to look at the trends and the reality within companies, most developers became "callcenter agents" in a matter of only 2 years and literally most of them are not even using proper automated tooling yet as we can see the "vibe coding" trend with Claude Code which is weak, by far most work done daily by developers is already automatable entirely, but with exceptions, sure, but in a few years those exceptions will become rare.

There will be niche problems about legacy products, sure, but legacy products will all be replaced over time, if we think in depth, why do we even need that many languages, that many tools? Tomorrow AI will write 99% if not all code existing ("code" doesn't even matter anyway), so it's much better if it's specific to AI and not playing this dance where we think we are doing a meaningful human contribution on an "AI-made codebase".

For context, I have 2 decades of software dev behind me.

	▲	Ancapistani 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is the direction I'm going. For personal projects that I don't plan to share widely, I'm making it a point to not look at the code at all. So far - and to my surprise - I've not only found that this has result in no more bugs than before, but it seems to result in fewer bugs over time. Every time I find a bug or a regression, I add it to the specification. My SDLC requires that every specification have at least one associated test. Not every function, or every line, or anything like that - every specified feature. The end result has been that my projects have matured over time much faster than if I'd been more closely involved. I've already toyed with writing some projects in Nim and Haskell for token efficiency. At some point I plan to put together a simple test project, then do a comparison of token efficiency with every language I can think of to find the one that I'm able to generate most quickly, correctly, and cheaply.

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bigstrat2003 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI

That's nonsense. There is zero reason to believe that AI (with the current techniques) will ever become reliable enough to let it do its own thing, let alone better than a human. It's been years of development and you still can't trust it to get basic facts correct, not even "well it's better than it used to be". Saying it'll replace humans in 5-10 years is a fantasy (or a prediction that people are stupid enough to fall for hype, I guess).

	▲	pixel_popping 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You come from the principle that humans are reliable at first which is partly right but also wrong in so many scenarios, you can even see lately the CVE spree happening, which demonstrates that human-made codebases have serious vulnerabilities and without the help of AI, we probably won't even know about them which proves that humans are not that "reliable", the current societal structure is also built around the fact that humans can't really be trusted, nothing really different with AI, we can't fully trust them like we can't fully trust humans. It's not a fantasy, I would bet that no serious engineer nowadays is putting in prod a codebase not AI reviewed meaning we already can't work on our own, we must factor in the on-going decline of human capabilities (at least developers) as well of course. I'm not really saying this because of any sort of hype, but I can personally relate where I went from actually coding to NEVER CODE in less than 2 years, and everyone around me is the same thing, what it will be in 5 years? Knowing that really, most developers aren't even using proper tooling yet so they are very slow compared to what they could be, I mean how many people we hear saying they can't even saturate an Anthropic Max 20 subscription? I saturated 7 accounts the last 2h alone, it's because they haven't entirely rethought their workflows yet, why do they even have "downtimes", it should be 24/7.
	▲	Ancapistani 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> It's been years of development and you still can't trust it to get basic facts correct There's the rub: AI is not an oracle. It's neither designed nor intended to provide accurate recall of all facts. It's closer to a reasoning engine than anything IMO. Oh, and for the record: I don't trust people to get basic facts correct, either. It's already far better than the average human at trivia.
	▲	graemep 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It can spot mistakes made by a human if asked to review code or write tests. GP is is over the top ins saying humans will "be inferior soon" but AI can be a nice additional check so AI review might be come standard.

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horticulturist 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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