alt Hacker NewsSoftware engineering will be completely solved. Even systems like v0 are astounding in their ability to generate code, and are very primitive to whats coming. I get downvoted on HN for this opinion, but its truly going to happen. Any system that can produce code, test the code, and iterate if needed will eventually outperform humans. Add in the reinforcement learning, where they can run the code, and train the model when it gets code generation right, and we are on our way to a whole different world.
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It is not that you get downvoted because they don’t understand you, it is because you sell your opinion as fact, like an apostle. For example what does it mean that software engineering is solved?
Everyone will just turn into a problem solver until there are no more problems.
> Any system that can produce code, test the code, and iterate if needed
That isn't every problem in software engineering.
What about brownfield development though? What about vague requirements or cases with multiple potential paths or cases where some technical choices might have important business consequences that shareholders might need to know about? Can we please stop pretending that software engineering happens in a vacuum?
lol
There's cope in the comments about possibility of some software adjacent jobs remaining, which is possible, but the idea of a large number of high paying software jobs remaining by 2030 is a fantasy. Time to learn to be a plumber.
"Coding" might be solved, but there is more to software engineering than just churning out code - i.e. what should we build? What are the requirements? Are they right? Whats the other dependencies we want to use - AWS or GCP for example? Why those and not others - whats the reason? How does this impact our users and how they use the system? What level of backwards/forwards compatibility do we want? How do we handle reliability? Failover? Backups? and so on and so on.
Some of these questions change slightly, since we might end up with "unlimited resources" (i.e. instead of having e.g. 5 engineers on a team who can only get X done per sprint, we effectively have near-limitless compute to use instead) so maybe the answer is "build everything on the wish-list in 1 day" to the "what should we prioritize" type questions?
Interesting times.
My gut is that software engineers will end up as glorified test engineers, coming up with test cases (even if not actually writing the code) and asking the AI to write code until it passes.