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by compacct27 959 days ago
I’m hopeful this is the right answer, but I’m not optimistic it is. AI seems more like the introduction of the assembly line for software workers, minus huge blockers for physical labor. It’s not there now, but at this rate? Not infeasible either
1 comments
nameless912 959 days ago
How will you tell AI what you want to build? I'll take an example from my current work: I'm currently working on adding producing data to a kafka feed from an API server that will be aggregated downstream into a big huge in-memory datastore for fast access. That's a moderately sized problem, one that a reasonably competent engineer can solve in a week or two, but how much work will you have to do to tell the AI that this is what you want? And if you tell it at a higher level than this, how will it know what tools it has available? How will it deploy stuff?

There are some fairly intractable problems in the "AI writes software" space. I don't think they're getting solved any time soon.

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ben_w 959 days ago
> How will you tell AI what you want to build?

If software engineers have been replaced, it won't be any of us telling the AI anything, it would be a manager. Ask a manager about Kafka, I recon more would respond with something about Franz than anything about Apache.

> And if you tell it at a higher level than this, how will it know what tools it has available? How will it deploy stuff?

Step 1. Ask it to come up with a plan, after giving it read access to your corporate documents.

Step 2. Ask it to execute the plan it came up with in step 1, after giving it write access.

Of course right now there's a step 3: "Get real engineer to read and then perform business continuity/disaster recovery plan because current AI is about as good at this as someone fresh out of university, what on earth were you thinking, …" etc.

I don't know how long we've got in these jobs, but based on the rate of change (and the training cost for the larger models and supply shortage for the chips used to train the better models) I'm thinking at least 2 and no more than 15 years — though I'm hoping more towards the latter.

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