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bombcaryesterday at 9:34 PM3 repliesview on HN

AI is impressive but this same sea-change happened at least twice before - the era when computers went from being rooms full of women(354) to machines programmed in machine language(892) to those with screens, keyboards and even assemblers (assembly language, especially macro assemblers, were considered seriously high level at a time), to mid-level languages like C (considered needlessly complex and slow at one time, now considered barely above a macro assembler), to high-level languages like Java and even higher ones (arguably) like Rust.

Every one of those transitions has resulted in more programmers - though not necessarily the same programmers.

354: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

892: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel


Replies

lelanthrantoday at 6:45 AM

You don't see any way that this is different?

zaptheimpaleryesterday at 9:43 PM

But things really are different this time. Computers and software were nascent industries with lots of room to grow, lots of software to build in previous transitions. Today software and technology companies are the biggest in the world. Every industry uses software. Getting your web app, mobile app or game discovered is actually a huge problem today because we have so much software. There is not infinite demand for software, or for anything else, even if it seems that way in the early days.

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throw310822yesterday at 9:56 PM

AI isn't a technology that replaces programmers, it's a technology that replaces generic human beings. The manager of your agents will be an agent, too.