[mxwsn]

Good take but I'm not convinced. I would suspect (see epistemic status) that while correctness is easy to reason about and maintain by a single accountant using spreadsheets, since there is a clean mapping from a precise excel api to function, the mapping from natural language to code is problematic. I won a t-shirt in the recent OpenAI codex challenge and found it hard to reason systemically about the behavior and generalization properties of generated code. When the generated code is wrong, it was frustrating on a different level than if I wrote the code myself.

Epistemic status: I don't know anything about accounting

[Tarq0n]

It's not about what Codex can do now, but what the technology will be able to do a few generations into the future. Anticipating this shift in the software labor market is important to many people on HN.

Codex as it stands is just a novelty, but it does show the shape of what's to come.