The Post-Developer Era
36 points by telemachus
36 points by telemachus
AI may be generating 25% of the code that gets committed at Google, but it’s not acting independently. A skilled human developer is in the driver’s seat, using their knowledge and experience to guide the AI, editing and shaping its output, and mixing it in with the code they’ve written. As far as I know, 100% of code at Google is still being created by developers. AI is just one of many tools they use to do their job.
I vaguely recall an Googler on HN say this was mostly an exercise in creative accounting: Google was classifying any computer-generated code, including IDE autocompletes and yeoman project generators, as AI.
Is Automatic Semicolon Insertion machine generated code? If you need it to be.
Reminds me a lot of the aged idea that compilers are ‘automatic programmers’ and are quickly replacing the need for humans. It aged poorly, of course.
Yeah, from the very start:
“Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” – FORTRAN Report, 1954
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusEtAl-Preliminary%20Report-1954.pdf
We get this every couple of decades. Compilers, CASE-Tools, Modeling, Low-Code, now AI.
Now that doesn’t mean it can’t become true at some point. But usually we just don’t do the old thing (much) any more and then the new thing becomes “programming”.
There’s some irony in that each attempt appears to be less and less serious than the previous proposal. Compilers: fundamentally good idea. And it’s mostly downhill from there.
When I wrote this post a couple of years back, it was a pretty tough time in the job market. Unfortunately, things are still pretty tough out there.
The job market for tech likely will take a couple more years to recover, even without significant AI disruption.
If we take the dot com crash as an analogy, it arguably took the market 15 years to recover.
I agree with the couple more years assessment, but I don’t think the dot com crash is a good reference point. Back then almost all of the funding in the IT sector was purely speculative, and there was almost no revenue to back it up. Today, the funding is still much more speculative compared to traditional sectors, but we’re a few orders of magnitude closer to sensible P/E ratios compared to the dot com era.