[palmotea]

That's probably the mechanism by which AI will take over many jobs:

1. Skilled people do a good job, AI does a not-so-good job.

2. AI users get dumbed down so they can't do any better. Mediocrity normalized.

3. Replace the AI users with AI.

[bee_rider]

It’s always been very weird that little hobbyist open source projects produce much better software than billions dollar companies. But I guess it will be even more notable now that the billion dollar garbage shoveling companies are getting self-operating shovels.

[palmotea]

> It’s always been very weird that little hobbyist open source projects produce much better software than billions dollar companies.

Kinda sorta. Little hobbyist projects can do better on relatively small and focused stuff, where the passion of a couple part-time people can cut through the crap that would be created by a thousand half-ass mythical man-month producers.

However, for a lot of stuff, only a "billion dollar company" (or other organization) can do it. Stuff with a lot of unavoidable but unrewarding scut work (e.g. web scraper maintenance) or stuff that requires more focus and effort than a couple of passionate part-time people can provide.

[Cyclone_]

In this scenario, if AI does a not so good job, there will still be good developers left to code.

[mlhpdx]

Maybe. It might be that the “industry” continues on without good code, slowly dying.

[bee_rider]

If bad code could kill the software industry, it would be long dead by now.

[mlhpdx]

Definitely a fair point. But I observe that dS/dt may not be positive already.

[pdpi]

Sure, the problem then becomes finding the ideal ratio between good "proper" programmers and AI code monkeys.

Also, it'll be interesting to see how LLM prompt writing develops as a skill unto itself.

[pests]

> it'll be interesting to see how LLM prompt writing develops as a skill unto itself.

MIT already offers an online prompt engineering course as of a year ago so I'm sure it already has.