I wouldn't say so. The 'Learning by mistakes' step in the demo shows that the AI can work through these issues, presumably this can be done more efficiently than a human.

As long as their reasoning capabilities for the general case (system 2 thinking) remains limited, trial and error will only get them so far.

unless the "try again stage" incorporates the results of a google search for the error message of the api

The Google search that would be returning results from human programmers…?

So given time the AI could no longer debug new software as there would be no programmers only assistants.

The learning from mistakes part of the example is – you tried /port_wines but the path is /wines/port instead.

But what about if the path is actually /beer. Also you have to pass a hidden undocumented query parameter called ?wine=1 for it to give you wines. But then the response is still of Beer objects (because that's the only thing the API validator would allow), so you have to map all the Beer fields to their equivalent Wine counterparts. But not all of them make sense, so you have to ignore them. Which ones? Ask the engineering team. Turns out the guy who wrote all this left years ago, and no one remember how it works. Someone digs up a link to a documentation page, but that internal wiki was taken down and so it returns a 404. You ping a sysadmin to see if they kept any backups. He points you to a few PBs worth of SQL dumps from an internal migration a few years ago and asks you to take a look in those. You simultaneously write up a status update for senior leadership which is due by end of day and give them a revised launch date for the project. They want to know why it can't be done in half the time.

The day an AI can figure all this out, I will be looking for another job. Until then I'm fine.

not to give anyone any ideas, but you could just give it an owasp fuzzer...

The problems you describe are working around problems that humans have created.

If you let the AI both create the API and use it, you can avoid the problems humans create.

How did you gather all that from the linked example?

Because that's what the linked example showed? Is there a similar example of a more complex case?

Yep, I worked in a factory assembly line 'Wrangling the robots' and I'm not an engineer. They require watching and they can't do parts of the job. They get hung up easily and require alot of resetting. There's good reason factories still hire plenty of manufacturing laborers.

Our jobs are safe for now. That's not my takeaway. Our jobs will eventually be "unsafe."

Our jobs could eventually become unnecessary

People who say this are just short sighted.

Unless all jobs are unnecessary, you just change your job. People seem to assume that if robots can code, all coders are out of a job, but I mean, if I didn't have to code, I'd just start all the businesses I've always wanted to start because like all the businesses people who are going to be replacing me with a bot, I too will have the time to replace business people with my bots.

Hell you will be able to replace all of Microsoft, with...a bot, just ask other similar bots to reproduce all their products as open source, compile them and use them.

Pretty much all computer related jobs are at stake...in the short term, I guess we're in for quite a dystopian economic collapse if basically the whole world is put out of a job?

On the other hand, I'm more concerned about where we're going with "AI". At this point it feels completely reckless, kind of barrelling towards some type of future, which does seem like it's going to be "interesting", but we're really, as a society not discussing the intended outcomes, I guess just hoping for the best?

Seems like an unpopular take, but I agree with this sentiment

The most I can imagine coming out of this is that those "app creator" apps/websites will actually work. So you can get a reasonably functional app without necessarily being a software engineer. A current-day software engineer could end up with the capabilities of a pre-2023 VP of Engineering in charge of a 200 person department.

That doesn't mean there'll be no work, it just means the work will be different and possibly much more interesting

Every job could eventually become unnecessary.

Yep, they're safe in 2023. At the rate things are going, I don't even know what's gonna happen in 2024.

lol!

something funny about the way I interact with ChatGPT, I basically never give a shit about correcting mistakes or bothering with good grammar because no matter what, it pretty much always understands me. and it's insanely good at solving tip-of-my-tongue type problems.

I guess maybe we should go back to SOAP to eek out a few more months of job security?

Many humans can't do this.

Most humans can’t do it. Most humans aren’t expected to do it in their jobs, though.

You already have Zapier and their competitors which are filling this need (and they didn't destroy the whole industry)

Not really - our jobs are going to get changed to "AI operators". Or more brutally: "AI assistants".

parent comment emphasizes on the fact that no matter how big the effort was, ultimately our tools will always be imperfect. Therefore we will always have something to do.

The automation of telephone systems didn't make front desk workers "PABX assistants" or even "PABX Operators", the automation becamw a tool and faded into the background.

Automation of telephone systems have been rule-based and unable to communicate with knowledge bases. An AI-powered automation system that have access to knowledge bases... now that's a different story.

For now. But how about 5 years from now? or 10? or 15?

Given what things looked 10 years ago, and what was revolutionary back then (ImageNet challenge) - it's hard to comprehend what state of the art will look like 10 years from now.

I’m saving and investing like I only have 10 more years of work before AI takes my job.

Either I’ll be well prepared for unemployment or I’ll have plump investment accounts and still be employed. Good outcome regardless.

Agreed. The network architectures have evolved so much in the past few years alone. Imagine what they can do in just 5 years if they can embed domain-specific knowledge to the current “dumb” statistical word guessers. Ten years is truly unimaginable.

I’m not expecting the singularity within that timeframe nor do I think we need it for lots of disruption in knowledge-based work. Still, I’m leaning towards a near future where these AI tools augment our capabilities more than the alternative where we lose all our jobs.

Now if only the AI can write perfectly written API documentation...