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by mwcampbell
1164 days ago
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> So - programmers who just want to play code golf, be ready for that to become more of a hobby than a job. But for programmers who always wished they had more hours in the day to get through all their ideas, it will enable them to create a lot more value and that value will in turn create demand for yet more value-add on top of that. So it should be a virtuous circle, in theory. But to me, this also implies a vicious circle of yet more crappy, barely-good-enough, bloated, inefficient software. I wish this wasn't the case. I recognize the upside; more real-world problems will be solved. But we really need to do something about the excesses that lead to things like the old (Electron-based) Microsoft Teams. |
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Then ask GPT-4 to convert it to SwiftUI. It actually does it. Or try Jetpack Compose: same thing.
This leads to an obvious thought - part of why people use heavy abstractions is because the cost of native development is too high. You could pay development teams to write a WPF UI, a Cocoa UI, a GTK UI, an Android UI and a UIKit UI for your app but even VC funded firms flush with cash can't justify that level of extravagance. It's too hard and expensive to hire devs, so when you do, the opportunity cost of them porting stuff between endless UI native APIs just can't make sense. AI changes that equation completely. GPT-4 is cheap for what it does. Suddenly, auto-porting your app into 5 different native APIs simultaneously and then assigning the resulting bugs to a bug-fixing bot doesn't seem unimaginable.
Now, for better or worse, even if AI reaches the point where it can do that, it doesn't mean Teams won't be slow. People use Electron for a lot of reasons, not just cost of duplicated development (skills, libraries, Windows lacking a competitive and non-deprecated UI toolkit etc). But it's interesting to think about ideas that we instinctively write off today due to the massive cost of software developer time.