[gobdovan]

I had the same thought about ML engineering a while back, when Google released the AutoML suite, that was banned from Kaggle competitions. At the time, it seemed obvious to me that the closer you were to the models, the easier it was for them to replace your work, since most of the work on models was itself hill-climbing, grind searching and mutation search. So, the more your work is an explicit, measurable search loop, the more automatable it is.

Same with prompts, most attempts seem to be fidgeting with the models till they get your intend right, which is also a matter of hill-climbing, subtle mutation, and so on.

If I were to clarify anything from the article, I'd probably say that I'd rather do the factorisation of programming roles by how long they already existed. If someone is an AI engineer and his work only became relevant a month ago, very probably it will be obsolete in another month. If they do the same thing for the past 10 years, changes are that their skills would be useful for another 10 years to come.

[Doch88]

I agree with you, although you could argue that history teaches the opposite, for example the many jobs that disappeared after medieval times, even if they existed for centuries. Maybe you will still find a cobbler or a blacksmith, but now it's something very niche; which is more or less the point of the post.

[gobdovan]

Perhaps we should not go into any even older professions on HN.