this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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The bad firms are going to lay off most or all of their juniors, hire AI leash-holders or something and do fine to code everything their hearts dream of, but at some point (5-10 years my estimate) enough of the seniors have left and shit hits the fan in a way where AI models can't save the company from its own creations.
The thing that ChatGPT doesn't have (at least right now) is the ability to tell management to piss off. I assure everyone that this is what the recipe for disaster for many firms will be, if any.
The smarter firms will have a keep a sizable contingent of juniors, who will work with help from LLMs, but have seniors teach them to have a bullshit detector in their industry.
Or, we start up all the coal power plants to keep the ever-hungry AI chatbots alive so humanity is fucked in the end anyway.
That was my first though also, but then I realized in that timespan the coding assistants will be able to replace the senior engineers as well. If not earlier.
In 10 years time a coding assistant is going to spin up a development environment, install the necessary frameworks and sdk's, create accounts with 3rd party software providers, activate said accounts, process the payment if necessary, process the emails sent by these providers to either obtain some kind of key or download a file, then apply this to the codebase to activate the use of 3rd party tools. It's going to compile the code it generates based on a 100 page prompt, for the appropriate platforms, configure the right environment variables for the target system and create a distributable package. It's going to create accounts with 3rd party hosting providers, activate said accounts, process the payment if necessary, setup mfa authentication, setup the deployment environment, install the necessary frameworks and runtimes, upload and deploy the distributables. It's going to take customer bug reports in spoken or written form, process them, reproduce the issue and apply fixes to the codebase, verify and provide feedback to the customer. It's going to take customer feature requests in spoken or written form, process them, apply changes to the codebase and provide feedback to the customer, etc, etc, etc...
Kinda doubt it to be honest.
That's not just engineering but also product and support. But yes, each one of those tasks are already on their way to being possible today, and agentic planning and coordination could make it feasible in much less time than you think. Until we get AGI /ASI it'll need some human supervision, but not a lot more than that.