[ravenstine]

Couldn't that mean they're at least partially right?

For instance, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the low-hanging fruit of developer AI will be combing AI with no-code so that a small to medium business owner can build their own website or apps using the English language, assuming their needs are pretty typical. This is more or less already possible with sites like Wix, just without the AI part; AI would add some flexibility that Wix and Squarespace lack. A business owner would then be able to say "put a widget on my homepage that shows the latest video from my youtube channel" and AI would probably able to do it when an existing component either wouldn't exist or not be as straight forward.

So what ends up happening is human software development more or less becomes an exercise in shoveling dung rather than building new things from scratch, which I think we're already seeing more or less regardless of AI.

[mjr00]

Yeah. The skill floor and skill ceiling keeps continually rising as tools get better. AI is just another tool in the toolbox.

As an example, even as late as the 00s, you could still get a job as a "web developer" where you only made static sites with HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript. First tools like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, and now sites like Wix, made that kind of position obsolete. However, a "web developer" is now called "front-end developer" and is still very much alive, just focusing on different things.

Or another example, there is this nearly extinct breed of people known as "database administrators." You used to be able to get a job as a DBA by just knowing how to set up backup scripts, optimize indexes and set up disk space monitoring. (If you could set up a read replica, you were top-tier!) Now cloud tooling has made all of those things trivial. Yet those same people are now very likely "DevOps Engineers" or "Cloud Engineers" which, again, are in extremely high demand.

You should only feel threatened by advances in tech if your life plan was to learn how to do one thing, then never develop any skills. In the tech industry, that's been a path to failure since the beginning. For most of us, AI will, in the best case, be another tool and allow developers a whole to move onto the next big thing.

[ravenstine]

I'm pretty sure there's still reason to feel threatened even if one's life plan isn't to learn just one thing. Being willing to continually learn doesn't mean there's an infinite capacity for how many skills a person can learn frequently or simultaneously. Being "willing to learn" sounds cool when you're in your 20's, but eventually the constant (and 99.9% needless) churn is going to become tiring and even insulting to one's intelligence. I feel sorry for anyone still in the constantly-learning mode in their 30s or greater, or the time in their life when they should be doing other things besides hustling.

It's not that I don't agree with you up to a point, but I wonder just how sustainable this trajectory really is. AI hasn't really been a "thing" in everyday life until relatively recently.

[ilaksh]

I am working on a natural language programming tool using the OpenAI APIs. I have a version that I started which I believe can do your task if there is a file in the directory named "latest_youtube" or something and if the home page is less than 12kb. I believe text-davinci-003 knows how to embed a YouTube video and knows how to select files to look in, and will be able to find the latest in the JSON file.