[mrbombastic]

Its not a bad thing until its a bad thing. There are certainly computer related tasks I am happy to relegate to AI, my concern is that we are already bad at maintaining software made by humans. If old school software engineering becomes an arcane art as everyone becomes prompt engineers and software starts to explode in complexity we better hope AI learns to maintain it too.

[EarthLaunch]

Maybe it'll be like hard goods; a blender you buy today is made of moulded plastic and lasts 5 years, instead of being metal and made to last 20 years. For 1% of the price.

[nonethewiser]

That is an excellent, albeit concerning analogy.

[waboremo]

Funny you mention old school software engineering, because it has become an arcane art! We do not feed punch cards into our computers anymore. Should also mention I don't believe "prompt engineer" will be a serious long term role, that task will just be incorporated into everyone's roles instead.

IMO maintaining software will become easier, so much of what we do today with maintenance is really just tedious. It's tedious to keep packages updated, to write documentation every update, to keep the community informed on what's going to happen in the next. It's tedious to rewrite the exact same functionality but in a modern language. List goes on, so much tedious busywork. What if these things were handled for core maintainers, so they can allocate funds to more complex problems?