Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation".
Was good while it lasted though.
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Was good while it lasted though.
I have a feeling language models will be good at virtually every "sit at a desk" job in a virtually identical capacity, it's just the act of plugging an AI into these roles is non-obvious.
Like every business was impacted by the Internet equally, the early applications were just an artifact of what was an easy business decision.. e.g. it was easier to start a dotcom than to migrate a traditional corporate process.
What we will see here with AI is not the immediate replacement of jobs, but the disruption of markets with offerings that human labor simply can't out-compete.
I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me.
When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads?
These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at that time did. For the most part, the computer does them all now. People still do them, but only when it really counts and applications are niche.
Think about how large code bases are now and how complicated software systems are. How many layers they have. Complexity on this scale was unthinkable not so long ago.
It's all possible because the computer manages much of the complexity through various forms of automation.
Expect more automation. Maybe LLMs are the vehicle that delivers it, maybe not. But more automation in software is the rule, not the exception.
Inevitably, people remember that the hard part of programming isn't so much the code as it is putting requirements into maintainable code that can respond to future requirements.
LLMs basically only automate the easiest part of the job today. Time will tell if they get better, but my money is on me fixing people's broken LLM generated businesses rather than being replaced by one.
I don't think LLMs alone are going to get there. They might be a key component in a more powerful system, but they might also be a very impressive dead end.