Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by game_the0ry 705 days ago
I feel I am going to be downvoted for this, but...

I think the technical specialty that will be most at threat from automation by AI would be the exact job that he authored has -- solutions engineers that build commodity cloud infra on AWS, Azure, G cloud, etc.

Look at progressions and range of abstraction between standard sys admin IT work to serverless deployments, especially with IaaC tools.

You can describe your architecture to chatGPT and it can spit out a CloudFormation YAML. It will be rudimentary and poor, but I could see a Gen AI tool offered by cloud providers where al you do is describe your app and then deployed infra on your behalf, and optimize form there.

Not trying to talk down on folks who do this type of work, but sharing my opinion on where I think the author is ultimately coming from.

3 comments

> the technical specialty that will be most at threat from automation by AI

Can you point to any actual AI product in this space that functions? Everything I've seen is like, if you squint then it kinda looks like it's doing something, but it's actually producing something embarrassingly wrong, unsafe, or otherwise unusable. And no, having a SME repeatedly prompt until it does the right thing doesn't really make sense.

If we're just talking about hypothetical tools that someone could make, but haven't, we're talking about magic.

> embarrassingly wrong, unsafe, or otherwise unusable.

You might know the difference as an SME, but if you're not, and it passes terraform apply, it's getting used.

This mentality is why I'm confident that I'll have a job in both software development and security.
> Can you point to any actual AI product in this space that functions?

Today? No. But I think we will get here sooner than automating on any other type of engineering role.

Sure. It's coming with GPT-5.
Serverless, architectless, and programmerless.
AIless will be next.
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that, Dave.”
GenAI can definitely churn that code out, but most of the code that we write is extremely situational. We rely heavily on specific customer needs and very specific use cases within the products we're trying to sell.