[vasco]

> The experience calmed my existential fears about my job being taken by AI.

The issue is that among all the 100k+ software engineers, many don't really do anything novel. How many startups are employing dozens of engineers to create online accessible CRUDs to replace a spreadsheet?

In the company I work for I'd say we have about 15 developers or about 3 teams doing interesting work, and everyone else builds integrations, CRUDs, moves a button there and back in "an experiment", ads a new upsell, etc. All these last parts could be done by a PM or good UX person alone, given good enough tools.

The other parts I'm not worried about either.

[yohannesk]

For the type of engineers you describe the hard part I think is communication with other devs, communication with product owners, understanding the problem, suggesting different ways of solving the problem, figuring out which department personnel (outside other devs) to talk to about a little detail that you don't have... it's not writing the code which is hard, atleast from my experience

[noduerme]

Yes. I won't be worried until the day Joe CEO can write a prompt like "build me an app that lets me know where my employees are at all times," and GPT responds with a list of questions about how Joe imagines this being physically implemented, and then calls up the legal department to clear its methods.

[zeroonetwothree]

I think this is closer than you expect

[oblio]

The question is... writing the code is a very small part of the job.

Figuring out what code to write is one of the big parts.

Fixing it when it breaks in many creative ways is the other big part.

How good is ChatGPT at fixing bugs? Security bugs or otherwise?

[vasco]

Sure but the other parts you don't need an engineering degree for, the other parts amount to design / product work, not engineering.

[oblio]

1. You don't need an engineering degree for software development in many, many cases. So I don't understand your argument.

2. Engineers design stuff :-) I'm not sure what you mean with "product work". Also, engineers debug and fix stuff :-)

[zeroonetwothree]

Product work = figuring out what to build

[oblio]

Product work is a fractal and you don't want "product people" designing things past the 2nd or 3rd fractal step, in my experience.