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bitfriend6 t1_jcsi72q wrote

Headline is extremely alarmist and clickbaity. Computers won't be able to program themselves for hard, difficult tasks that require actual thought processing. The tasks being automated are ones that are extremely rote or otherwise don't require much thought. Programming, at it's core, is a math problem and computers haven't automated math nor will. The past decade of web development has been extremely easy, extremely rote, and almost totally standardized (compared to scientific or industrial computing) anyway.

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phxees t1_jctygtj wrote

Most of the work that software engineers do has been done before. It’s all just web forms and fairly simple algorithms (yes I am over simplifying). The difficult part is making it maintainable by using best practices and AI can do that today. We are only a few years away from AI being able to make a Reddit clone on its own. A few years after that AI will be able to make one virtually free of bugs, scaling challenges, and security vulnerabilities.

Fortunately after AI takes over the “simple tasks”, software engineers will be left with more challenging tasks like making sure what AI is doing is what is best for us and how to make outcomes less predictable and thus less easily gamed.

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j3wxx t1_jcy2jx4 wrote

The difficult part is context. There’s no way AI is going to make the form with the inputs I need among 1000 other things humans need to decide while developing software

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phxees t1_jd07z8l wrote

It can do that because it will do what you ask. There’s enough code out there today to know what inputs it’ll need for virtually any piece of software. If you don’t like it you’ll just tell it what you want changed.

Changes are a big deal for human development teams, but will be nothing when all the work can be completed in a couple hours.

We aren’t there yet, but with focus it’ll be possible very soon (within a few years).

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tundey_1 t1_jd9is18 wrote

>Most of the work that software engineers do has been done before. It’s all just web forms and fairly simple algorithms (yes I am over simplifying).

You're describing coding, not software engineering or software design.

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phxees t1_jd9wwj7 wrote

Sure, but the AI will be able to handle those tasks as well.

The design and engineering primarily comes from the requirements. If you specify that it should utilize a CDN, AWS, Azure, scale to 10 million monthly active users, have user dashboards, etc, the AI should take those factors into account.

Eventually it will be trusted to handle all aspects.

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tundey_1 t1_jdd2ny1 wrote

>If you specify that it should

Who is the "you" in that sentence? Everybody is hyperventilating about AI...just like they did about every technological leap forward. Yes, it'll destroy some jobs but it'll create way more jobs.

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phxees t1_jdd9oor wrote

I’m not worried, but I do expect everything to change. Many people think their job is too difficult to automate, but I don’t believe that will be proven to be the case.

When we add AI to the cloud and modern software development tools, we find that AI will be able to quickly do some amazing things.

Please note that I am not talking about just ChatGPT, I believe within 5 to 10 years cloud providers could offer a way to create many complex systems in the cloud.

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