GPT 3.5 is 2022. In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out and the models keep getting better rapidly. AI has already radically overdelivered and the biggest returns are in the next 10, 20, 50 years.

It's 1987: The PC is underdelivering.

It's 2000: the Internet is underdelivering.

It's 2010: smartphones are underdelivering.

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afpx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Models are finally good enough that I'm confident that I can repeatably build pretty much any software reliably in less than 2% of the time that I could before 2022. I wouldn't have made that claim 6 months ago.

Even quantized local models like Qwen3.8 are good enough to handle a lot of drudgery. For example, I hooked my wife's computer up to a local model, and now she finally has a clean desktop. She just drops spreadsheets or powerpoints or whatever on her desktop and automation takes care of everything.

The caveat is that I developed software for 30 years, so I understand most of what it produces and can guide it to make fewer mistakes and fix what it can't do. The biggest challenge has been keeping my requirements focused - it's very easy to gold plate everything and prematurely optimize.

The biggest question I ask myself is why am I even still doing this. The smart people are probably already trying to figure out how to pipe raw matter and energy to their homes to build replicators.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

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eudamoniac 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Making your engineers use AI with little to no measurable improvement, but with very measurable high cost, is not delivering

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adventured 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5 are drastically beyond the capabilities of the median software developer. It's not remotely close.

The bottom 2/3 of the human market is entirely dead. Their jobs are gone (AI-shored) they just haven't all gotten the forced retirement or pink slips yet, while they click a few more prompts for a few more pay checks. The frontier pushing forward will knock out most of the remaining top 1/3 without breaking a sweat over the next few years. The really good developers will graduate into babysitting AI as managers.

It is legitimately sad, it's millions of high paying jobs just in the US alone. It's going to be brutal on the housing market. Automation came for another field.

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mkotlikov 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Software engineering isn't unique, if this is true then it's 99% of all white collar work. Those same software engineers are going to help automate every other job on their way out.

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yeeeloit an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you, personally, have a plan for the future? Like what are you doing about this, or are you hoping to be in the 1%?

	▲	fn-mote an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I am improving my Spanish and staring at the massive savings that I have built up from my SV job. When my job goes and the industry is in flames, I am moving to Bolivia. If you have a big mortgage and no savings, it’s going to be tough. Stop taking the Waymo now.

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malfist 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out

What the hell does this even mean? Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL. The fuck is this nonsense wiped out

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p-e-w an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL.

There’s no way this is even remotely true. JavaScript alone is probably 90+%, considering it’s on almost every website.

	▲	f1yght 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Most of the web is php, so JavaScript isn’t even the primary language on the web.

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adventured 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It means in corporations across the globe, the majority of code is no longer being written by humans. That is over and it will only keep dwindling by the quarter.

	▲	malfist 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Writing lines of code by hand is all of human software development? Pretty sure in all of those companies its still software engineers writing the code, even if they're using LLMs to do it. Unless you're making the claim that software engineers aren't involved or that only writing code is software development.
	▲	asadotzler 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Nonsense. Nearly every software house in the world has just as many or nearly as many programmers as they did 7 years ago when GPT-2 was "too dangerous to release." You live in a very tiny bubble if you think most businesses are building software without humans. Total horse shit.