[rajnathani]

I feel that in the short run, all programmers will simply become more productive. But in the medium and long run, the narrow SE roles will become obsolete: Such as any SE role where there’s a “certification process”, eg: Cloud (AWS, GCP, Kubernetes), iOS, Android, even CCNA, etc.

A generalist SE (side note: like how I assume HN’s readership bends towards) will be the one to benefit, as a good generalist SE can have networking understanding (CCNA), Ops/DevOps (cloud), and SE (backend, frontend, mobile) and more (at embedded programming is where the line could be drawn, but ChatGPT is good at explaining hardware concepts too!), to thrive and depend on ChatGPT or equivalent system for discernible assistance.

(Minor: I even tweeted my opinion with my personal note about it too: https://twitter.com/raj_nathani/status/1615709768487948292?s...)

[skohan]

I agree. I think we are getting close to where a machine can do "programming" but it will be a while before a machine can do "software engineering".

I.e. maybe you will be able to use AI to solve a problem, like "write a lambda to to accept JSON in this format and put it in a database with this scema", or even potentially "optimize this function to run as fast as possible on a multi-core processor", but it seems we're quite far from something like "write an application with a GUI that looks like this which has the following functions".

[karmakaze]

What I think will happen is changing of software development roles. They'll be split into things AI/ML can do and things humans will continue to do (using copilots). And the work that humans do will be constrained in ways to interface with the machine, as well as take the output from machines and complete integrations. We might even use programming languages that the machine handles better. So software development has humans producing/validating that then gets used by machines, and that output being used for final integration/validation. With these new formalized structures, AI [that ship has sailed] will train on it and replace more of the stack.