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liqui_date_me t1_jds3b6q wrote

Reply to comment by ngildea in [D] GPT4 and coding problems by enryu42

I would say it's controversial around many folks who aren't directly involved in programming and who get impressed by cute demos on Twitter. People who actually know how to code see it as a superpower to make themselves more efficient, while also lamenting about how it makes silly mistakes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1226hcn/im_worried_about_ai_taking_our_jobs/

I highly doubt that software engineering jobs will become obsolete. There's going to be a lot of disruption and there might be some wage deflation too (imagine the price of writing the boilerplate components of an iOS app goes from 50,000 dollars to 50 dollars), but so much of software engineering is testing, QA and human collaboration. I think we're just going to have to re-orient our careers around correcting code from LLMs.

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ngildea t1_jds53pl wrote

Yeah I agree with all that. I've been trying to think of an analogy. Maybe in the same way that spreadsheets didn't make accounts obsolete?

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robobub t1_jdswai9 wrote

Indeed, it just made them more efficient so we need less of them and/or less pay for them.

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No_Brief_2355 t1_jdthreb wrote

Less bookkeepers and lower pay but accountants (CPAs) are pretty in demand and still well paid.

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__scan__ t1_jdxj30g wrote

This is what will happen if we’ve either a) exhausted demand, or b) made software development much easier such that people who previously couldn’t do it now can.

The first was likely true for accountants, but is less obviously so for software — there’s still vastly more useful software to build than actually gets built, and each piece of new software that gets built generally increases that demand.

Perhaps the second is true though — do you foresee enough non-developers being able to write, deploy, maintain, and operate production systems as a result of LLMs (in a way that high level languages and previous tooling didn’t)? If not, or if not in sufficient numbers, maybe what happens is that software developers become more in demand than ever due to their productivity increases resulting in even demand for more software (because they can write it quicker).

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