Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      In this hypothetical, why would we create new languages? What benefit does that have for AI-gen code?

      So either we’re going to improve AI-gen to the point where we rely on it, or human devs are still important in which case new languages matter. The main exception here are languages specifically designed for AI, in which case error-rate would go down.

      So either AI pushes out broken code and human devs are still important, or AI doesn’t push out broken code and new languages aren’t valuable.

      • owl@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Someone still has to write the instructions. AI might not become a replacement for the engineer, but a more powerful compiler, that is still fed with code written by engineers.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Yeah, I agree that’s the more likely scenario. People seem to worry way too much about AI, when it’s really only going to replace junior devs, and only for short-sighted companies.

          • owl@infosec.pubEnglish
            1·
            31 minutes ago

            But I mean many people have already lost their job because AI automated it away.

      • hex@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        23 hours ago

        I think both can happen at the same time. There’s a lot of fkn nerds out there. (I’m a software developer myself)