Honestly, that’s the hope. Putting together well-solved combinations of computer functionality ought to become less-skilled work as technology progresses.

That's been the objective of programming languages for 50 years. It hasn't happened yet, because the essential complexity of programming problems isn't in writing the code.

I think it definitely has happened. We're creating more things, for cheaper.

We're also creating more complex things, that costs more money.

anecdotally, this is where the famous lack of modern skills comes from in engineering culture. If you keep doing the same things you've been doing, you'll look around one day and see that everyone has moved on.

The market for simple SMB websites is a great example. This went from custom HTML+webservices, to Wordpress, and now to WIX/shopify/square. I'd bet the market for SMB marketing will similarly move to near plug+play google/FB offerings.

However if you started out making websites in 1993, then there are a vast array of products and services one could move into over the last 3 decades.

We have just moved up the complexity curve.

It's the same with doctors, lawyers, everything.

If law - the human language equivalent of programming - hasn’t gotten simpler in past thousands of years as new abstractions and complications have arisen, I hold no hope for programming.

Surely the human language equivalent of programming is recipes and other types of written instructions. Law is far more abstract and subjective than programming.

Law is opposed to these sorts of changes due to the business model of the law firm. In the law firm world billable hours are king. Automation reduces billable hours. No law firm wants to do that.

I think this really depends on what kind of firm you're talking about. You could make the same case for contractors i.e. "billable hours are king". Take the example where you need to paint a house. You could hire someone off the street who does it with a paintbrush and rollers or hire a pro with a sprayer and prep knowledge to do it in 1/4 the time and with 10x the quality.

In this context automation could be a tool that a law firm uses to enhance the quality of their product. Personally, I would pay more for a tech-savvy law firm that embraces automation, not less.

A lot of contractors in painting/drywall do piecework rather than hourly. My roommate has been a drywall taper for 20+ years. When he quotes a job it’s a flat rate and then he tries to finish as fast as possible by using his best tools to speed up the job. On the other hand, if someone hires him on an hourly basis he puts away those fancy tools and does a lot more manual work, getting the job done slowly.

His rationale: why put wear and tear on his expensive tools if it’s just going to reduce his income in the end? Needless to say he prefers piecework because he likes to move from one job to the next as quickly as he can. He makes a lot more money that way.

I think it has more to do with having an adversarial law system. It doesn’t matter what new tool you come up with in the arms race. Your competitor will soon have it as well.

Law is different in most places because the “execution model” isn’t intended to be a process, but is instead a mediated dispute.

Maybe they will converge, and all programs will be written in legalese and interpreted by Copilot.

A'la Ethereum's smart contracts?

Code isn't flexible enough to work for laymen. It feels like you need to be a developer and a lawyer to make a smart contract work as intended.

Maybe that works against my earlier premise, but I don't think that this is the way we want to go.

Or maybe they’ll replace a junior dev with copilot and make the more experienced folks spend more time “fixing” broken copilot code.