[andai]

I think you're missing the point. Effort is a moat now because centaurs (human+AI) still beat AIs, but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed).

The goal is to replicate human labor, and they're closing that gap. Once they do (maybe decades, but probably will happen), then only that "special something" will remain. Taste, vision... We shall all become Rick Rubins.

Until 2045, when they ship RubinGPT

[pegasus]

> but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed)

As long as you build software for humans (and all software we build is for humans, ultimately), you'll need humans at the helm to steer the ship towards a human-friendly solution.

[boshalfoshal]

The thing is, do humans _need_ most software? The less surfaces that need to interact with humans, the less you need humans in the loop to design those surfaces.

In a hypothetical world where maybe some AI agents or assistants do the vast majority of random tasks for you, does it matter how pleasing the doordash website looks to you? If anything, it should look "good" to an ai agent so that its easier to navigate. And maybe "looking good" just amounts to exposing some public API to do various things.

UIs are wrappers around APIs. Agents only need to use APIs.

[9rx]

> And maybe "looking good" just amounts to exposing some public API to do various things.

Maybe, but you still need humans to make that call. The software is still built for humans no matter how much indirection you add.

There is a conceivable day where that is no longer true, but when you have reached that point it is no longer AI.

[pegasus]

> do humans _need_ most software?

Yes, if it's not redundant software. The ultimate utility is to a human. Sure, at some point humans stopped writing assembly language and employed a compiler instead, so the abstraction level and interfaces change, but it's all still there to serve humans.

To use your example, do you think humans will want to interact with AI agents using a chat interface only? For most tasks humans use computers today, that would be very unwieldy. So the UI will migrate from the website to the AI agent interface. It all transforms, becoming more powerful (hopefully!), but won't go away. And just how the advent of compilers led to an increase of programmers in the world, so will AI agents. This is connected with Javon's paradox as well.

[andai]

Yeah. The UI will still be there, but it'll be a guy.

A little guy who lives in your phone and who's really good at APIs. (And, by that point, hopefully good at keeping track of things, too!)

[koe123]

I imagine that the gap with current work can largely be closed, but are we really confident that this will hold with the new work that pops up? Increasingly I think we’re lacking imagination as to what work can be in a post AI world. I.e. could an abacus wielder imagine all the post computer jobs?

[monknomo]

do you need taste if you can massively parallel a/b test your way to something that is tasteful? say like you take your datacenter of geniuses and have a a rubin-loop supervising testing different directions. shouldn't that be close enough?

[all2]

"taste" here is an intractable solution. Just take a look at how architecture has varied throughout the history of mankind, building materials, assembly, shape, flow, all of it boils down to taste. Some of it can be reduced to 'efficiency' -- like the 3 point system for designing kitchens, but even that is a matter of taste.

Find three professional chefs and they will give you three distinct visions for how a kitchen should be organized.

The same goes for any professional field, including software engineering.

[timacles]

Can infinite monkeys produce Shakespeare?

[theYipster]

It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times.

[skejeke]

That approach leads you to products like instagram.