GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

Imo this is a misunderstanding of what AI companies want AI tools to be and where the industry is heading in the near future. The endgame for many companies is SWE automation, not augmentation.

To expand -

1. Models "reason" and can increasingly generate code given natural language. Its not just fancy autocomplete, its like having an intern - mid level engineer at your beck and call to implement some feature. Natural language is generally sufficient enough when I interact with other engineers, why is it not sufficient for an AI, which (in the limit), approaches an actual human engineer?

2. Business wise, companies will not settle for augmentation. Software companies pay tons of money in headcount, its probably most mid-sized companies top or second line item. The endgame for leadership at these companies is to do more with less. This necessitates automation (in addition to augmenting the remaining roles).

People need to stop thinking of LLMs as "autocomplete on steroids" and actually start thinking of them as a "24/7 junior SWE who doesn't need to eat or sleep and can do small tasks at 90% accuracy with some reasonable spec." Yeah you'll need to edit their code once in a while but they also get better and cost less than an actual person.

Folks who believe this are going to lose a lot of money fixing broken software and shipping products that piss off their users.

That is the ideal for the management types and the AI labs themselves yes. Copilots are just a way to test the market, and gain data and adoption early. I don't think it is much of a secret anymore. We even see benchmarks created (e.g. OpenAI recently did one) that are solely about taking paid work away from programmers and how many "paid tasks" it can actually do. They have a benchmark - that's their target.

As a standard pleb though I can understand why this world; where the people with connections, social standing and capital have an advantage isn't appealing to many on this forum. If anyone can do something - other advantages that aren't as easy to acquire matter more relatively.

Good for outsourcing companies. India used Y2K to build its IT sector and lift up its economy, hopefully Africa can do the same fixing AI slop.

Thought not as much as they ought to, if all their competitors jump off the same cliff to fit in. :/

This sounds exactly like the late '90s all over again. All the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to other countries and you'd be lucky to make minimum wage.

And then the last 25 years happened.

Now people are predicting the same thing will happen, but with AI.

The problem then, as is now, is not that coding is hard, it's that people don't know what the hell they actually want.

> Software companies pay tons of money

Software companies make a single copy and sell it a billion times. The revenue per employee is insane. The largest companies are trying to make the best product in the world and seek out slight advantages.

The cost saving mindset you are describing is found in companies where software isn’t a core part of the business.

I mean duhh? Is there anyone who denies this is what they would want to happen? That's capitalism. They'd also kill all other roles if they could - and there are other very expensive personnel like sales people, marketers, accountants etc. Whether it's going to happen ,when , and by how much is a different matter to what they want though.