Is this technically a form of retroactive mind rape? If so, at least we have the right oligarchic friends experienced in this running the big show. (Apologies if I just any broke rules here).
This seems to be a touchy subject for YC people with 500+ karma. Not a repudiation but an 'invisible hand' downvote to avoid a response or exposure of an opinion. My ancestors fought in the revolutionary war and like them, I'll die on this very subtle rolling hill of a question. I loved you all as brothers, this may be the end for mrwaffle.
Sure but the lower hanging fruit is mostly squeezed, so what else is driving the idea of _job replacement_ if the next branch up of the tree is 3-5 years out? I've seen very little to indicate beyond tooling empowering existing employees a major jump in productivity but nothing close to job replacement (for technical roles). Often times it's still accruing various forms of technical debt/other debts or complexities. Unless these are 1% of nontechnical roles it doesn't make much sense other than their own internal projection for this year in terms of the broader economy. Maybe because they have such a larger ship to turn that they need to actually plan 2-3 years out? I don't get it, I still see people hire technical writers on a daily basis, even. So what's getting cut there?
Mostly true, compared to other billionaires he's a much better flavor and a stronger record of appearing human but still, agree. I'd recommend reading
The Snowball for a more complete understanding of him.
My overall concern has to do with our developer ecosystem from the important points mentioned by simonw and narush. I've been concerned about this for years but AI reliance seems to be pouring jet fuel on the fire. Particularly troubling is the lack of understanding less-experienced devs will have over time. Does anyone have a counter-argument for this they can share on why this is a good thing?
The shallow analogy is like "why worry about not being able to do arithmetic without a calculator"? Like... the dev of the future just won't need it.
I feel like programming has become increasingly specialized and even before AI tool explosion, it's way more possible to be ignorant of an enormous amount of "computing" than it used to be. I feel like a lot of "full stack" developers only understand things to the margin of their frameworks but above and below it they kind of barely know how a computer works or what different wire protocols actually are or what an OS might actually do at a lower level. Let alone the context in which in application sits beyond let's say, a level above a kubernetes pod and a kind of trial-end-error approach to poking at some YAML templates.
Do we all need to know about processor architectures and microcode and L2 caches and paging and OS distributions and system software and installers and openssl engines and how to make sure you have the one that uses native instructions and TCP packets and envoy and controllers and raft systems and topic partitions and cloud IAM and CDN and DNS? Since that's not the case--nearly everyone has vast areas of ignorance yet still does a bunch of stuff--it's harder to sell the idea that whatever AI tools are doing that we lose skills in will somehow vaguely matter in the future.
I kind of miss when you had to know a little of everything and it also seemed like "a little bit" was a bigger slice of what there was to know. Now you talk to people who use a different framework in your own language and you feel like you're talking to deep specialists whose concerns you can barely understand the existence of, let alone have an opinion on.
> Do we all need to know about processor architectures and microcode and L2 caches and paging and OS distributions and system software…
Have you used modern software… or just software in general to be honest.
We have had orders of magnitude improvement in hardware performance and much fewer orders of magnitude increase in software performance and features.
May I present the windows start menu as a perfect exhibit, we put a web browser in there and made actually finding the software you want to use harder than ever, even search is completely broken 99% of the time (really try powertoys run or even windows + s for a night and day difference).
We add boundless complexity to things that doesn’t need it, millions of lines of code, then waste millions of cycles running security tools to heuristically prevent malicious actors from exploiting our millions of lines of code that is impossible to know because it is deemed to difficult to learn the underlying semantics of the problem domain.
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