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by chadcmulligan 226 days ago
> skill of an all-around businessman

So do you imagine that AI will reach the point that a business guy will say make me a web site to blah blah blah, and the AI will say sure boss and it will appear? Sort of what a dev/team of devs/testers/product managers/BA's would do now? the current batch is a long way from this afaik

2 comments

Maybe. I have a fair amount of uncertainty about the speed of AI development but I think that that is well within the realm of possibility (and definitely a possibility developers should be considering). Note that even if AI replaces an entire dev team, it's still not apparent that the process would be as easy as you're saying (at least for a while after that), since after all even with a crack dev team products are almost never as easy "make me this product" "okay!" and then the product is created.

But that wasn't what I was trying to get at. My point is that this is what the author was predicting, and if that were to pass, that is more or less the death of software development as a profession, contrary to what the author says when he says "I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it."

Indeed, but if we reach that point then we've probably got AGI, so not really much to worry about. Is there a point where AI can replace entire software dev teams, but nothing else? ie not quite AGI, seems unlikely, if you ask a product manager, they'd say Impossible! I look forward to the singularity, but I don't think this is it sadly. LLM's are a neat tool, and dev will probably change but I think it's wishful thinking on the part of business folk. the other argument is that LLM's will actually increase the software dev work, cause things that weren't possible now are which is something I find interesting.

The other thing I've been thinking is that most corporates now are mainly software (so it's been said), if thats the case and software becomes cheaper the barrier to entry to compete with corporates lowers, they become ripe for disruption. Insurance comes to mind, same with banking, probably others, search? its already disrupted, new industries will probably arise to - data validation, for example, is going to be an issue in the age of AI. The idea that making web sites for a living for the next century was probably always a very wishful way of thinking, but the idea that software development will disappear is also naive imho. However it's yet to be proved that software dev is cheaper with AI.

Why we are discussing like business person cannot be technical one - or must be dumb “make me a website, do it now do it computers”.

There is lots of founder developers, there is a lot of people who can configure lots of complex tech but are just not strictly speaking coders.