alt Hacker NewsThe dumb part of this is: so who prompts the AI?
Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well.
Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people.
So a programmer then...
I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, rather than being driven by dispassionate logic.
Maybe it's the ancient jocks vs nerds thing.
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Devs are where projects meet the constraints of reality and people always want to kill the messenger.
Some people just see it as a cost, one "tech" startup I worked at I got this lengthy pitch from a sales exec that they shouldn't have a software team at all, that we'd never be able to build anything useful without spending millions and that money would be better-spent on the sales team, although they'd have nothing to sell lmfao. And the real laugh was the dev team was heavily subsidized by R&D grants anyway.
Even that is the wrong question. The whole promise of the stock market, of AI is that you can "run companies" by just owning shares and knowing nothing at all. I think that is what "leaders" hope to achieve. It's a slightly more dressed get-rich-quick scheme.
Invest $1000 into AI, have a $1000000 company in a month. That's the dream they're selling, at least until they have enough investment.
It of course becomes "oh, sorry, we happen to have taken the only huge business for ourselves. Is your kidney now for sale?"
The day you successfully implemented your solution with a prompt, you solution is valued at the cost of a prompt. There is no value to anything easily achieved by generative tools anymore. Now it is in either:
a. generative technology but requiring substantial amount of coordination, curation, compute power. b. substantial amount of data. c. scarce intelectual human work.
And scarce but non intellectually demanding human work was dropped from the list of valuable things.
Who fixes the unmaintainable mess that the AI created in which the vibe coder prompted?
The Vibe Coder? The AI?
Take a guess who fixes it.
They don't need to put all developers out of work to have a financial impact on the career.
> who prompts the AI
LLMs are a box where the input has to be generated by someone/something, but also the output has to be verified somehow (because, like humans, it isn't always correct). So you either need a human at "both ends", or some very clever AI filling those roles.
But I think the human doing those things probably needs slightly different skills and experience than the average legacy developer.
How about another AI? And who prompts that AI? You're right - another AI!
Outside of SV the thought of More Tech being the answer to ever greater things is met with great skepticism these days. It's not that people hate engineers, and most people are content to hold their nose while the mag7 make 401k go up, but people are sick of Big Tech. Like it or not, the Musks, Karps, Thiels, Bezos's have a lot to do with that.