what other job is purely in text, bound by logic, specs, has version control tracking, bug reports and fixes 😭 no legal monopoly or certification, it is a perfect use case

From a more optimistic perspective, I would rather say AI enables software developers to perform well in almost any job. Because they are the ones who can adopt AI the fastest and can bring it to many other disciplines.

Brilliant point. Does that mean you'd actually use AI to write code, or does that feel like cheating?

so true now may be harder to replicate the body movement than logic lol

The difference between slaves picking cotton for their owners by hand & owners picking cotton with machines for a fraction of the time, effort and moral cost. ...except for the fact that the slaves no longer provide any value to the owners.

The optimistic aspect is that true programmers won't lose their jobs; AI is merely restructuring programming systems engineering. Experienced programming systems engineers who master AI programming are like programming architects leading a team of intelligent agents—more capable than 1000 mediocre programmers. The tragic aspect is that blue-collar worker unemployment means their jobs are completely replaced. They will need to switch to other industries and start from scratch. This is the most worrying outcome.

Depends, I just think it'll change the median role. perhaps it'll be more as a soft architect and reviewer. Remember there always needs to be someone liable e.g. to blame, and I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI care to assume that role. So it'll likely morph into a "software orchestrator" role. Not writing code but in control of what is executed and liable for it.

Bingo plus training data. I can sit in my pajamas and scrape millions of repos/issue trackers/discussions/specs/books (prior to a cut off date - call it the AI epoch lol). All that work and time spent is recorded in text. Can't think of any other role like that, so first to marketbfor software agents is obviously so much quicker vs robots. Plus robots will be liable for physical injury to other things and humans, but are subjected to being easily stolen/injured etc. Waymo on fire! A clean data center no physical body or movement vs physical body in a messy unpredictable city.

yeah so true I think u were on point about the robots having issues in a non controlled environment plus responsibility if causing injuries or accidents. I think is good all that knowledge is saved and recorded, AI giving the ability to analyze and summarize all that data is great, just gotta get used to it and get the advantage of it, I'm an old school developer who grow up in stack overflow and still didn't do much with AI but I see what people are building

Disagree. AI brings new possibilities in automation and UI that where not there before and will expand things we do with computers even more. An you don't need less people who know how computers and programs work if you do more things with computers, even if some tasks get automated, never been the case and this time will be no different.

The people who were screaming “learn to code!” for the last decade have been awfully quiet recently.

should have been obvious in retrospect - ai is "computers", so it's gonna be good at "computers". "we're inventing a new coal mining pickaxe! i bet programmers will lose their jobs and coal miners will be the last to fall" ... uh okay..

government

Nobody with a blue collar job believed that hype that our jobs would be replaced by computer algorithms lol. Office workers are dumb to think they would outlast people that do physical work. Can Claude harvest vegetables or butcher cattle? Can chatgpt build homes? Yes it can effectively replace office workers who reply to emails as a full time job.