alt Hacker Newsive been coding 5+ hours a day almost every day for 15 years. i think ai will replace 70% of SWE in the near future. not employement, but 70% of the current work done by engineers
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Agreed. I see AI as a major tool upgrade in the same way the IDE was an upgrade from text editors. It will quickly replace the need to do trivial things and greatly reduce the time needed to do complex things.
I’ve been coding 5+ a day since the late 80s
And I agree. Because ultimately we don’t need that much code in the first place. We need robust data sets.
AI models will enable the data driven machine state dream. Chips that self improve models will boot strap from them and rely on humans to iteratively improve updates.
Coding like it’s 1970 in the 2020s and beyond is not that high tech.
At which point you're potentially looking at Jevon's Paradox.
Software developers do X and Y. AI thing can now do X, so it's used for that, and it's cheaper, so the number of projects increase because you get more demand at a lower price. Those projects each need someone to do Y.
I don’t even spend 70% of my time coding. I suspect that’s common and looking at data it’s more like 25% on average. So even if it replaces 100% of coding (unlikely) that’s the extent of the gain.