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by datadrivenangel 226 days ago
This is a very insightful article:

"You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of software development. That I would start on how the strange new angels of agentic AI are simply going to replace us wholesale in order to feast on that $150/hour, and that it's time to consider alternative careers. I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The trouble comes in that most people don't know what code needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems. Who does know what code would be needed to solve complex problems? Currently that's only known by software developers, development managers and product managers, three job classifications that are going to be merging rapidly."
2 comments
amflare 226 days ago
This. AI is not replacing us, it is pulling the ladder up behind us.
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keybored 226 days ago
I don’t understand why the software luminaries are coalescing around rapid-coding. Code generation was already a thing for forever. And deterministic code generation is as good as it possibly gets for “what I would have written but faster”—you know what it’s going to create. (Yes that was an EMDASH.) But code generation isn’t that much used, I think. I don’t count compilers or other black-box code generation. I mean any kind of ad hoc or more structured “what I would have written but faster” approach. Looking at the AI conversation you’d expect to see many more ad hoc code generation tools to deal with any and all boilerplate.

The downsides of code generation are only amplified with LLM code generation. Oh it’s just what I would have written. Now on the fifteenth iteration/rewrite. Generated idiomatic code for twelve years ago. squints oh yeah I would have written that back then... gosh it feels good to be in this exclusive club.

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