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_diyar • today at 8:42 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

You sound dismissive, but taking your description to its conclusion, the engineer value can be approximated as:

  {(P(AI mistake) * P(human spots the mistake | AI mistake) * P(human fixes mistake | given AI mistake, human spots it) - P(AI mistake)} * cost of AI mistake
For many engineering jobs, P(AI mistake) is very low and decreasing, and cost of AI mistakes is also usually (consider the cost of a bug for an average engineer; unless you’re building avionics or working on MRIs or such, usually very low).

So even if you can “make things right” or “tell the difference” as you say, the value of any given engineer is dropping.

Replies

bryanrasmussen • today at 8:54 PM

it's worse than that, as you need to also compare

human mistake, AI spots the mistake

Human mistake, human spots mistake

AI mistake, AI spots the mistake.

Everybody is always talking as if they don't make mistakes, but every software engineer does; it used to be that human caught those mistakes and fixed them, but if AI catches those mistakes and fixes them, then that is also a decrease in value of human.

bigstrat2003 • today at 8:53 PM

> For many engineering jobs, P(AI mistake) is very low

Not remotely the case. LLMs make mistakes very frequently, much more frequently than humans do.

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