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165 points gdudeman | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.55s | source
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pyman ◴[] No.44481864[source]
Two years ago, I saw myself as a really good Python engineer. Now I'm building native mobile apps, desktop apps that talk to Slack, APIs in Go, and full web apps in React, in hours or days!

It feels like I've got superpowers. I love it. I feel productive, fast, creative. But at night, there's this strange feeling of sadness. My profession, my passion, all the things I worked so hard to learn, all the time and sacrifices, a machine can now do most of it. And the companies building these tools are just getting started.

What does this mean for the next generation of engineers? Where's it all heading? Do you feel the same?

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1. diggan ◴[] No.44482816[source]
> My profession, my passion, all the things I worked so hard to learn, all the time and sacrifices, a machine can now do most of it

Can it? It doesn't have experience, it doesn't have foresight nor hindsight, it cannot plan and it just follows the instructions, regardless if the instructions are good or bad.

But you, as a human, have taste, ideas, creativity and a goal. You can convince others of your good idea, and can take things into account that an LLM can only think about if someone tells it to think about it.

I'm not worried about programming as a profession disappearing, but it is changing, as we're moving up the ladder of abstractions.

When I first got started professionally with development, you could get a career in it without knowing the difference between bits/bytes, and without writing a line of assembly, or any other low-level details. Decades before that, those were base-level requirements for being able to program things, but we've moved up the abstraction ladder.

Now we're getting so far up this ladder, that you don't even need to know a programming language to make programs, if you're good enough at English and good enough at knowing what the program needs to do.

Still, the people who understand memory layout, and assembly, and bits and bobs will always understand more of what's happening underneath than me, and probably be able to do a "better" job than me when that's needed. But it doesn't mean the rest of the layers above that are useless or will even go away.