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What is going on right now?

(catskull.net)
378 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 22 Aug 25 07:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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popcorncowboy ◴[22 Aug 25 13:53 UTC] No.44984731[source]▶
This ends in Idiocracy. The graybeards will phase out, the juniors will become staff level, except.. software will just be "more difficult". No-one really understands how it works, how could they? More importantly WHY should they? The Machine does the code. If The Machine gets it wrong it's not my fault.

The TRUE takeaway here is that as of about 12 months ago, spending time investing in becoming a god-mode dev is not the optimal path for the next phase of whatever we're moving into.

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probably_wrong ◴[22 Aug 25 14:10 UTC] No.44984912[source]▶
I think that's only true if you assume that the AI bubble will never burst.

Bitcoin didn't replace cash, Blockchain didn't replace databases and NoSQL didn't make SQL obsolete. And while I have been wrong before, I'm optimistic that AI will only replace programmers the same way copy-pasting from StackOverflow replaced programmers back in the day.

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1. 1970-01-01 ◴[22 Aug 25 15:18 UTC] No.44985680[source]▶
We've already seen the plateau forming[1]. GPT4.X vs GPT5 isn't exactly a revolution. It will become much cheaper, much faster, but not much better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44979107

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2. rrrrrrrrrrrryan ◴[22 Aug 25 16:55 UTC] No.44986832[source]▶
I think this is mostly true, but when it gets cheaper and faster, it will be able to complete much larger tasks unsupervised.

larger != more complex

The widespread adoption of cheap agentic AI will absolutely be an economic revolution. Millions of customer support jobs will be completely eliminated in the next few years, and that's just the beginning.

Soon it'll be easy to give an AI all the same things you give a new employee: an email address, a slack username, a web browser, access to the company intranet, a GitHub account, a virtual machine with mouse and keyboard control, etc. and you'll be able to swap it out one-for-one with pretty much any low-level employee.