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by DabbyDabberson 811 days ago
The way I see it, its undetermined if Generative AI will be able to fully do a SWE job.

But, for most of the debates I've seen, I don't think it the answer matters all too much.

Once we have models that can act as full senior SWEs.. the models can engineer the models. And then we've hit the recursive case.

Once models can engineer models better and faster than humans, all bets are off. Its the foggy future. Its the singularity.
3 comments
dvt 811 days ago
> Once we have models that can act as full senior SWEs.. the models can engineer the models.

This is such an extremely bullish case, I'm not sure why you'd think this is even remotely possible. A Google search is usually more valuable than ChatGPT. For example, the rust utf-8 example is already verbatim solved on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/l5m1rw/how_can_i_effi...

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int_19h 811 days ago
The implicit assumption here is that a human "senior SWE" can engineer a model of the same quality that is capable of simulating him. Which is definitely not true with the best models that we have today - and they certainly can't simulate a senior SWE, so the actual bar is higher.

I'm not saying that the whole "robots building better robots" thing is a pipedream, but given where things are today, this is not something that's going to happen soon.

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vertis 811 days ago
People (SWEs) don't want to hear this. I think it's an inevitability that something of this nature will happen.
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