[rogerkirkness]

Appealing, but this is coming from someone smart/thoughtful. No offence to 'rest of world', but I think that most people have felt this way for years. And realistically in a year, there won't be any people who can keep up.

[dontlikeyoueith]

> And realistically in a year, there won't be any people who can keep up.

I've heard the same claim every year since GPT-3.

It's still just as irrational as it was then.

[adventured]

You're rather dramatically demonstrating how remarkable the progress has been: GPT-3 was horrible at coding. Claude Opus 4.5 is good at it.

They're already far faster than anybody on HN could ever be. Whether it takes another five years or ten, in that span of time nobody on HN will be able to keep up with the top tier models. It's not irrational, it's guaranteed. The progress has been extraordinary and obvious, the direction is certain, the outcome is certain. All that is left is to debate whether it's a couple of years or closer to a decade.

[umanwizard]

Why is the outcome certain? We have no way of predicting how long models will continue getting better before they plateau.

[adventured]

They continue to improve significantly year over year. There's no reason to think we're near a plateau in this specific regard.

The bottom 50% of software jobs in the US are worth somewhere around $200-$300 billion per year (salary + benefits + recruiting + training/education), one trillion dollars every five years minimum. That's the opportunity. It's beyond gigantic. They will keep pursuing the elimination of those jobs until it's done. It won't take long from where we're at now, it's a 3-10 year debate, rather than a 10-20 year debate. And that's just the bottom 50%, the next quarter group above that will also be eliminated over time.

$115k + $8-12k healthcare + stock + routine operating costs + training + recruitment. That's the ballpark median two years ago. Surveys vary, from BLS to industry, two to four million software developers, software engineers, so on and so forth. Now eliminate most of them.

Your AI coding agent circa 2030 will work 24/7. It has a superior context to human developers. It never becomes emotional or angry or crazy. It never complains about being tired. It never quits due to working conditions. It never unionizes. It never leaves work. It never gets cancer or heart disease. It's not obese, it doesn't have diabetes. It doesn't need work perks. It doesn't need time off for vacations. It doesn't need bathrooms. It doesn't need to fit in or socialize. It has no cultural match concerns. It doesn't have children. It doesn't have a mortgage. It doesn't hate its bosses. It doesn't need to commute. It gets better over time. It only exists to work. It is the ultimate coding monkey. Goodbye human.

[throw234234234]

Amazing how much investment has mostly gone to eliminate one job category; ironically what was meant to be the job of the future "learn to code". To be honest on current trajectory I'm always amazed how many SWE's think it is "enabling" or will be anything else other than this in the long term. I personally don't recommend anyone into this field anymore, especially when big money sees this as the next disruption to invest in and has bet in the opposite direction investment/market wise. Amazing what was just a chatbot 3 years ago will do to a large amount of people w.r.t unemployment and potential poverty; didn't appreciate it at the time.

Life/fate does have a sense of irony it seems. I wouldn't be surprised if it is just the "creative" industries that die; and normal jobs that provide little value today still survive in some form - they weren't judged on value delivered and still existed after all.

[korianders]

>Your AI coding agent circa 2030 will work 24/7

Doing what? What would we need software for when we have sufficiently good AI? AI would become "The Final Software", just give it input data, tell it what of data transform you want and it will give you the output, no need for new software ever again.

[dontlikeyoueith]

And there's the same empty headed certainty, extrapolating a sigmoid into an exponential.

[rogerkirkness]

I can tell you don't control any resources relating to AI from your contempt alone

[dontlikeyoueith]

You're entitled to be wrong.

[Arainach]

People claimed GPT-3 was great at coding when it launched. Those who said otherwise were dismissed. That has continued to be the case in every generation.

[stale2002]

> People claimed GPT-3 was great at coding when it launched.

Ok and they were wrong, but now people are right that it is great at coding.

> That has continued to be the case in every generation.

If something gets better over time, it is definitionally true that it was bad for every case in the past until it becomes good. But then it is good.

Thats how that works. For everything. You are talking in tautologies while not understanding the implication of your arguments and how it applies to very general things like "A thing that improves over time".

[esafak]

Are you saying the current models are not good at coding? That is a strong claim.

[Arainach]

For brand new projects? Perhaps. For working with existing projects in large code bases? Still not living up to the hype. Still sick of explaining to leadership that they're not magic and "agentic" isn't magic either. Still sick of everyone not realizing that if you made coding 300% faster (which AI hasn't) that doesn't help when coding is less than half the hours of my week. Still sick of the "productivity gains" being subsidized by burning out competent code reviewers calling bullshit on things that don't work or will cause problems down the road.

[dwaltrip]

A bit reductive.

[airstrike]

> And realistically in a year, there won't be any people who can keep up.

Bold claim. They said the same thing at the start of this year.

[adventured]

You're all arguing over how many single digit years it'll take at this point.

It doesn't matter if it takes another 12 or 36 months to make that claim true. It doesn't matter if it takes five years.

Is AI coming for most of the software jobs? Yes it is. It's moving very quickly, and nothing can stop it. The progress has been particularly exceptionally clear (early GPT to Gemini 3 / Opus 4.5 / Codex).

[bdangubic]

> Is AI coming for most of the software jobs?

be cool to start with one before we move to most…

[esafak]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124063

[yuedongze]

im hoping this can introduce a framework to help people visualize the problem and figure out a way to close that gap. image generation is something every one can verify, but code generation is perhaps not. but if we can make verifying code as effortless as verifying images (not saying it's possible), then our productivity can enter the next level...

[drlobster]

I think you underestimating how good these image generators are at the moment.

[yuedongze]

oh i mean the other direction! checking if a generated image is "good" that no one will tell something is off and it look naturally, rather than checking if they are fake.