Even knowing this was coming, it's still a bit unnerving. Sad too, but it's for the best. Let the machines program the machines. Schmidhuber's Gödelmachine. The automatic scientist.
Just the opposite, this is letting me pick up more work than ever. The nature of that continues to shift as rote memorization becomes less important, but that was already the case thanks to earlier forms of code completion.
It may be that breadth is becoming more valuable than depth. The engineering design process is more important than ever, along with soft skills and an eye for what kind of work matters.
I am on this side of the argument. It is letting me code better than ever before :) I have been able to pick up new languages/build systems much faster than in the past (Swift for example.)
Is this a desirable outcome, to be just a meat robot middleman for the machines doing the actual work? I hope this will lead to a total rethinking of how our relationship to work and the why of it all.
Who the hell is running a business where the developers are mere struggling code monkeys who have no other value to the company, would never code review the AI output, and would find it faster to repl a bunch of imprecise prompts instead of just writing the damn code in the first place?
All this does is change how you go about getting computers to work for you.
Someone off the street still needs to know how to express themselves correctly to get a result that's not crap. And they don't know what they don't know. So this thread will be filled with people freaking out about the ends of their jobs. When really it just changes how their jobs work.
The nailgun didn't retire carpenters. They just got more productive.
What will stay, is human level systems engineering, Running things, designing etc. And for a very long time, you're going to have to check AI's work.
Anyway, I don't think it'll be nuclear bomb devastating to this industry, but it should give us all pause and make sure we get skills to compliment coding.
I don't think frontend development is any less complex than systems engineering.
> What will stay, is human level systems engineering, Running things, designing etc
In fact I think it might be the other way around.
I'd expect systems to be slower to change and subject to their own hard dependencies on consistency. That makes them easier for a language model to imitate.
I'd expect frontend dev to move faster and subject to a never ending churn of non-technical wants from sales and marketing. The huge amount of boilerplate is an attempt to handle the few patterns that exist in an otherwise very sparse space where one design is miles away from another and much glue is required to accomplish the task. Messiness here is not due to inherent complexity, but apparent complexity since things are never allowed to converge onto something more coherent.
I was about to write an old-fashioned Wu anti-aliased circle-drawing routine for a simple C-like language (it has no structs nor unions yet, for instance), is that something that might be an interesting test case? Worth opening an issue?
It may be that breadth is becoming more valuable than depth. The engineering design process is more important than ever, along with soft skills and an eye for what kind of work matters.