Think we've got a long time yet for that. We're going to be writing code a lot faster but getting these things to 90-95% on such a wide variety of tasks is going to be a monumental effort, the first 60-70% on anything is always much easier than the last 5-10%.
Also there's a matter of taste, as commented above, the best way to use these is going to be running multiple runs at once (that's going to be super expensive right now so we'll need inference improvements on today's SOTA models to make this something we can reasonably do on every task). Then somebody needs to pick which run made the best code, and even then you're going to want code review probably from a human if it's written by machine.
Trusting the machine and just vibe coding stuff is fine for small projects or maybe even smaller features, but for a codebase that's going to be around for a while I expect we're going to want a lot of human involvement in the architecture. AI can help us explore different paths faster, but humans need to be driving it still for quite some time - whether that's by encoding their taste into other models or by manually reviewing stuff, either way it's going to take maintenance work.
In the near-term, I expect engineering teams to start looking for how to leverage background agents more. New engineering flows need to be built around these and I am bearish on the current status quo of just outsource everything to the beefiest models and hope they can one-shot it. Reviewing a bunch of AI code is also terrible and we have to find a better way of doing that.
I expect since we're going to be stuck on figuring out background agents for a while that teams will start to get in the weeds and view these agents as critical infra that needs to be designed and maintained in-house. For most companies, foundation labs will just be an API call, not hosting the agents themselves. There's a lot that can be done with agents that hasn't been explored much at all yet, we're still super early here and that's going to be where a lot of new engineering infra work comes from in the next 3-5 years.
It's mind blowing to me how many developers are happy about the developments here.. as if they're going to eventually be paid to just sit there while agents do everything. Ah, work is now so easy!
I think in the success case (still TBD), that it will increase productivity to the point where things that can’t be affordably addressed by software will now be able to be addressed with software.
I expect that anyone who is a skilled dev today will be fine. Expectations and competition might be higher, but so will production and value creation.
I think the demand will come, just as Excel didn’t put finance people out of jobs in aggregate.
Why would "primary benefactor" be the most relevant question rather than mere "benefactor"? If my life is improved by something, I don't care that someone else's life is improved by more; I don't want to reject that improvement out of spite, jealousy, or envy.
Bankers (and customers) benefited from ATMs as far more bank locations became economically sustainable and bank tellers could do higher value work (and do so more safely).
Millions of software developers continue to benefit from improvements in productivity, the resulting value creation, and the resulting high pay in our sector from ever more productive languages and frameworks. Can you imagine how little pay you'd make trying to sling websites in assembly language at less than 1% of the pace of today?
> Millions of software developers continue to benefit from improvements in productivity
You're absurdly naive if you think developers will see the most benefit. We will have fewer developers just as we have fewer farmers and factory workers. When labor is automated it becomes owned by fewer people, this is historically consistent for over a hundred years across every sector. Thousands of towns have collapsed under this sort of change and effects are felt for generations.
> Can you imagine how little pay you'd make trying to sling websites in assembly language at less than 1% of the pace of today
Productivity gains do not align with income gains, this is a complete strawman. Developers today may be 100x more productive, but they do not have a 100x higher income.
Ask yourself, where did that value go — and is that fair? We're creating the automation and someone else is taking the lions share of the benefit. We're being conned.
You seem hyper-focused on the share of benefit going to others and I am much more focused on the share of benefit going to my family. My family benefits enormously from the value created through technology development and I have benefited enormously from being able to work in a field where I am generously rewarded for doing things that I happily do free in my spare time. If I work on someone else's technology puzzles instead of my own, they are able and willing to pay me a well-above median salary in exchange.
I genuinely hope that they think they're getting rich as part of that exchange (and work to ensure that outcome happens), because that's the very best way that I know how to make the overall situation, including the benefits for me and my family, continue.
If you think I'm being conned in this exchange, thanks for the concern, but I'll tell you that I'm working hard to ensure that it keeps happening.
> they are able and willing to pay me a well-above median salary in exchange.
AI is what they're doing to try to stop this, when we work on AI we're enabling it.
They are making much more money for themselves than they are for you. Your salary is overhead. They will stop paying you if they can and they are trying to use AI to do it.
In a fair agreement you would have more time to spend with your family because you would earn a higher share of the profit and need to work less for it.
If I wanted to keep all of the value I created for myself, I'd start my own business and own all of it.
I don't, because I highly value the structure and capital that others have put up to create the company I work for. They offload an enormous amount of risk and overhead and, so long as they pay me what we've agreed, I'm happy for them to keep the portion of value that is above what they pay out to me and my colleagues.
The agreement is fair to my eyes, because I've agreed to it and both sides have kept up their ends. If yours is not fair to your eyes, perhaps you should change it, possibly up to striking out on your own and keeping 100% of the surplus value you create.
> it will increase productivity to the point where things that can’t be affordably addressed by software will now be able to be addressed with software
employing humans is something that couldn't be affordably addressed by software, and is what they're trying to now address with software
this is good for owners, and bad for workers
thusly AI is bad for workers as a class, and you're betting that you're one of the workers they decide to keep
all I have left to say on the matter is, good luck
I mean, I get what everyone's saying. But, just Devil's Advocate, what would be so terrible about software developers having to find some other line of work?
We've used our software development skills to automate other people out of work for what can be argued to be literally decades. Each time we did it, we certainly expected that the people affected would find other work. New jobs were created. The world didn't end. I honestly don't think it would be that much worse this time.
> We've used our software development skills to automate other people out of work for what can be argued to be literally decades.
And that's the shitty part of the job, and everyone should be uncomfortable with it. I haven't literally automated anyone out of a job (that I know), but I definitely did not like finding out (after the fact) that one project was meant to enable a large offshoring effort.
> Each time we did it, we certainly expected that the people affected would find other work.
I do not expect that. That's a comforting lie people tell themselves.
> New jobs were created. The world didn't end. I honestly don't think it would be that much worse this time.
It didn't end, but it often got significantly worse for some. If the AI hype pans out, it's going to get significantly worse for software engineers. Your "newly created job," if it exists, will likely pay out a lot less that you're used to. At best, you'll get knocked down to the bottom of the career ladder.
It's a mistake to think about things in aggregate like you're doing. It's easy to hide inconvenient truths.
> what would be so terrible about software developers having to find some other line of work
Uh.. I'm having trouble considering this as a serious question. It's objectively going to lead to them being in a worse situation. Mostly irrelevant resume and needing to re-skill into something and start from the bottom.. out of a well paid career that many enjoy and find fulfilling
My question wasn't an ethical one. It's why are the people that are the target of this automation happy about the progress, to the point of trying to push it forward faster, cheering it on
> It's mind blowing to me how many developers are happy about the developments here.. as if they're going to eventually be paid to just sit there while agents do everything. Ah, work is now so easy!
Well, the optimistic take is that if something gets cheaper to produce (e.g. code), demand for it actually increases.
Now you could argue that any non technical person could just oversee the agents instead. Possibly. Though in my experience, humans like to have other humans they trust oversee and understand important stuff for them.
It is most definitely going to be the unemployment line. When in the history of productivity gains, has it translated to more time for people to do other things that are not work? It always translates to more profits for shareholders and bigger pay for executive class, followed by more work for half the workers to fill up the time opened up by the said productivity gains, and unemployment for the other half.
200 years ago, 80% of Americans worked in farming. 150 years ago, that was still over half. It’s now under 2%.
If you’ve seen the work hours and work ethic of farmers, it’s safe to say that most of those people got other jobs that take far less work than farmers did/do.
Closer to our field, I think we’d have far worse work lives (fewer of us employed and much lower pay) if we had to code everything in assembler still. The creation of more powerful abstractions and languages allowed more of us to become software devs and make a living this way than if all we had were the less productive tools of the early days of computing.
Many people lost their livelihoods though in each transition. I find each life valuable but that's just me - yes we are better in aggregate long term but in some ways it is paved with their sacrifice.
If we can find a way to support those displaced even that would be a much better start. e.g. re-education funds, training schools/government run apprenticeships on projects, etc. Especially if the scale of the displacement is large. We all only have the one life IMV - its about giving those lives the opportunities to pivot. Ageism, and gatekeeping will stop many from changing careers.
Yeah but if you look to the present... there aren't really any jobs where someone is blissfully wandering the earth delegating tasks. Most of the time I can't even take a walk on calls because someone wants to screen share something with me...
I'd like you to be right, but I live in society where joy at work is often considered antithetical to productivity. No matter how much more productive I get, that space is used to fill in more productivity. We'll need more than tooling to stop this.
In aggregate it was good for society, but it was a disaster for a lot of people and a lot of areas. This is the theme of e.g. The Grapes of Wrath.
We should welcome automation and efficiency, but also address the situation of the "losers" of the development and not just expect the invisible hand will sort everything out.
Can you elaborate why having a less diverse farming economy is good for every individual? Automation didn’t invent commodities so it’s unrelated to the advent of a food surplus. It might make obtaining surplus easier but it didn’t give more purpose to people by forcing them to sell their land to a bigger corporation. Even if 50% of farmers don’t want to be farmers anymore doesn’t mean they’d gladly give up their job for a recliner and ubi.
This feels so hopelessly optimistic to me, because "effectively away from our desks" for most people will mean "in the unemployment line"