Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dasil003 371 days ago
I find it helpful to ignore the hype and the pitches, and instead focus on how AI tools are enabling better software to be made. I may personally prefer old workflows, but if they are inefficient and I cling to them, then my value as a software professional will trend to zero over time. On the other hand, the volume of software and it's importance is still continuing to increase—AI is only accelerating this trend. So understanding how software works and what AI can and can't do with it has never been of higher value.

Sure investors and CEOs want to reduce software engineering costs, but at the end of the day software is built to serve human needs, and only humans can reason and make a judgement call about whether software systems are working well or not, and because software is so precise and deterministic, there will always need to be someone who thinks like a programmer to tell the AI what to do with sufficient precision to be useful. Sure I can imagine AGI could at some point invalidate that thinking, but I believe we are very far from that point if its even possible, and even if we do reach that point we'll need massive social change or the pitchforks will be coming out from many directions.