[yrgulation]

Any decent developer will use existing libraries and tools for common tasks, so 90% of the code is already written. The remaining 10% of the code is business and use case specifics that change frequently and is made by pulling the pieces provided by libraries together. The ai assisted auto complete will likely never be able to understand use cases, for that it would need sentience - and even humans fail at understanding what non techies want in their apps. As others pointed out such ai tools reduce the time taken to google something, so its more like a built in code search engine and very good at it. Other than that all the “software jobs automation” stories such as this article are written to impress either non techies or gullible newbies. A waste of content, scifi at best.

[coffeefirst]

Right. The efficiencies are already here in the form of CI/CD, workflow tools like IntelliSense, and boring old stuff like ORMs and libraries. It's probably about 50% faster to make a common CRUD app than it was 20 years ago.

Luckily the industry has found a way to compensate for this by building the common CRUD app in React and Microservices, so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it.

[yrgulation]

> so now it takes 3x longer again and requires twice the staff to maintain it

precisely. or like with aws, what used to be a sysadmin is now two to three devops engineers doing the same stuff. if anything ai will enable even more people to get into software dev and thus allow even more businesses to thrive and thus create more jobs. ais and tools like you mentioned are like fertilisers. the more crap the more jobs for us.

[Ekaros]

I happily wait for the few rounds when non-technical people attempt to use them to make system that works and is secure...

As someone working in security I'm not very worried about career prospects. There is plenty of time to point out crap yet...

[qualudeheart]

The AI will need a knowledge base wiyh real world information. That may take a long time before it exists. If the scaling hypothesis doez hold you could get that knowledge base as part of a large language model.

You could have a setup like the Socratic Models paper where the code AI talks to the language model AI which is fine tuned on facts about the business context.

I just don’t know how far out we are from that. Someone at Deepmind, OpenAI or Salesforce (Salesforce have their own code AI research unit that few people know about) should work on this.

If someone reading this has a background in economics I’d like to hear what they have to say about this. In all these discussions on this topic I never see anyone bring up economics or empirical economics papers.