[danielvaughn]

No, I don't think it is temporary. As AI becomes more powerful, we'll simply ask it to do more difficult things. There's a level of complexity where "do the thing" is insufficient. We'll never be at a place where AI can infer vast amounts of nuance from simple human requests, which means that humans will always need to be able to describe precisely what they want. This has always been the core skill for software developers, and I just don't see that changing.

[drivebyhooting]

Do you believe a junior developer now will never surpass you?

Why couldn’t AI do the same?

[danielvaughn]

It's not a matter of whether it surpasses me. In some respects it already has - I watch Claude Code spitting out long terminal commands that I've never even seen in my 15 year career.

The question is whether AI will ever become good enough to magically infer information where none is provided.

For instance, I've had this startup idea for an itemized physical storage company. We'll never reach a point where I can simply say "Hey AI, create all the software necessary for an itemized physical storage company". It's not because AI won't continue to improve, it's because there's literally not enough detail in that statement to understand what I mean. It's too vague. I'm sure the AI of tomorrow could do a pretty good job in guessing what I mean by it, but the chance of it capturing my vision is literally 0%.

[drivebyhooting]

It might have a better vision than you and pursue that vision instead. Why should the AI wait for your impetus when countless founders and CEOs didn’t?

[danielvaughn]

AI has no intrinsic way to align its efforts to solve human problems. In order to solve that problem, you'd need an enormous amount of nearly real-time data feeding into the model. Then the model would need to routinely look for patterns and identify ways to improve human life in some way. It would make today's models look tiny by comparison.

What we're building today isn't even remotely close to that.