Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

> If AI is a threat to software engineering, I wouldn't expect many software engineers to actively accelerate that trend.

This is a naive take. Throughout history things have been automated with the help of professions who were being automated away.

I don't disagree it's a naive take, and I would love to read about some examples where this happened.

I haven't seen too many industries be automated away first hand, and I'm sure there are historic examples. I wouldn't expect the lamp lighters to have been championing the rise of electric lamps. Maybe they did though because it meant they could work less hours.

Yeah, this needs to be considered down to the individual level. If your employer not only incentives you to go against your best interests but also threatens the stability of your role, then your choices are either do the job or accept that you might not be reliably employed. This is the culmination of decades of moving power from the employee to the employer.

Software developers have been automating away software developers since the beginning of the field. Higher level languages, better+safer languages, improved IDEs. All the ways in which we made developing software easier and more efficient. QA teams investing in automated testing.

It's everywhere.

One example is probably blacksmiths. Before, each larger village used to have one. Nowadays, this is not the case any more as people order replacement parts for whatever metal piece that broke in your car, house, etc. The metal molding happens in factories instead. But in order you still need to have people who know how to mold metals. The early folks for this profession were blacksmiths. Nowadays you would not call them any more. But it's definitely been "engineers with AI".

Same goes for industrialized food. The huge industrial bakeries still employ people who know how to bake bread, but they can do 1000x more than they could do if they had to knead the dough on their own, separate it, form little pieces of bread, order it nicely on a tray, etc.

Now it's a machine doing most pieces of work, but they still have folks who design new bread products, adjust machines, know what to change in the formula if one particular product from one particular supplier is not available in the quantities needed, etc. A lot of the skills needed aligns enough with the traditional job of a baker that these factories employ actual bakers.

As for software, whenever I use AI tools, I don't really feel that they help me save time much. But it's entirely possible that this is going to change in the future. They are only going to get better. And of course a lot of people say it's useful for them, so it already affects folks. Just because something is not useful to me doesn't mean it's not going to be useful to anybody.

At some point, if this process continues, it is expected to actually automate software developers, would you agree?