The tools of today, even fucking Eclipse and gah Xcode from the early 2000s make programmers far far more than 10x more productive than machine code on punch cards. By your implied logic there should be a tiny fraction of the programmers there were in the 60s.
Anyway I think this 10x more productive claim is still a bunch of BS with the current crop of AI demos.
Why hire new people, because companies want to do things they couldn't do before. This has been happening for decades already as tooling has evolved. It used to be very hard for average companies to write cross-platform commerce software, now it's a standard thing in the form of a website + payment processor.
There might be some companies or departments that don't need to evolve anymore, and they cut people. That happens already; the product gets finished, so they lay people off. But those people find new jobs.
My guess is that the goals for existing software projects have always been limited by how much talent could be purchased, not by vision. So unless we run out of vision, nobody is actually going to be put out of a job by this technology. We'll just shoot for bigger goals.
Companies always have ideas on the backlog. I myself have a huge backlog of dream projects that I don't have time to implement, and I'm just one person.
Tech like this helps us make a bigger impact faster.
If you want to do a $100 bet I’ll bet you in 5 years that won’t happen. I’ll even take it further, I’ll bet you $100 a year for the next five years it won’t make a huge difference. I’ll pay you in full early if it happens and you can wait to pay me in full after 5 years.
I dislike betting money at all and I think $100 is fair.
It takes fewer people to maintain a system than it does to build it. You do not need a team of 7 engineers to stick around to read logs and code, you need exactly one, and in all likelihood he's going to spend most of his time watching YouTube because he's so out of practice that if anything was wrong the AI would most likely find it before him, and when he does find something he's going to just ask the AI to fix it instead of exerting the mental effort to do it himself.
I’ll take the Pepsi Challenge on GPT-4 replacing SEs. It’s the same take I’ve had on self-driving. Outside of very niche situations it’s never going mainstream.
The only people in the short term who are going to greatly benefit from GPT coding are people selling tutorials for using GPT to code.
The problem is and always been how do you describe what you want the computer to do to the computer. This is where this will see some traction as a tool that helps developers do this faster, but my bet is that these sorts of systems will still work a lot better using an artificial language to state the requirements and these advances will be integrated into our languages and compilers.
