Just the opposite, this is letting me pick up more work than ever. The nature of that continues to shift as rote memorization becomes less important, but that was already the case thanks to earlier forms of code completion.

It may be that breadth is becoming more valuable than depth. The engineering design process is more important than ever, along with soft skills and an eye for what kind of work matters.

Exactly! I think the difference between me and some FAANG leetcoder just became hugely apparent

Before calculators were invented I imagine people thought that people who could multiply two big numbers were very smart!

>this is letting me pick up more work than ever

Is this a desirable outcome, to be just a meat robot middleman for the machines doing the actual work? I hope this will lead to a total rethinking of how our relationship to work and the why of it all.

I am on this side of the argument. It is letting me code better than ever before :) I have been able to pick up new languages/build systems much faster than in the past (Swift for example.)

Ugh not this again.

Who the hell is running a business where the developers are mere struggling code monkeys who have no other value to the company, would never code review the AI output, and would find it faster to repl a bunch of imprecise prompts instead of just writing the damn code in the first place?

I mean, I’m with you in sentiment, but there are a lot of those business issuing a lot of regular paychecks. It’s a thing.

These AI products are more like shop tools than automated workshops, but even shop tools cut the need for a lot of apprentice and street labor.

I expected this to be at least 20 years away.

All this does is change how you go about getting computers to work for you. Someone off the street still needs to know how to express themselves correctly to get a result that's not crap. And they don't know what they don't know. So this thread will be filled with people freaking out about the ends of their jobs. When really it just changes how their jobs work.

The nailgun didn't retire carpenters. They just got more productive.

Pre-industrialisation: 80% of population are farmers

Post-industrialisation: <1% of population are farmers

There's going to be a big squeeze in the field (pun not intended).

This will destroy the boiler plate industry.

So bye javascript, it's not been nice.

What will stay, is human level systems engineering, Running things, designing etc. And for a very long time, you're going to have to check AI's work.

Anyway, I don't think it'll be nuclear bomb devastating to this industry, but it should give us all pause and make sure we get skills to compliment coding.

> So bye javascript, it's not been nice.

I don't think frontend development is any less complex than systems engineering.

> What will stay, is human level systems engineering, Running things, designing etc

In fact I think it might be the other way around.

I'd expect systems to be slower to change and subject to their own hard dependencies on consistency. That makes them easier for a language model to imitate.

I'd expect frontend dev to move faster and subject to a never ending churn of non-technical wants from sales and marketing. The huge amount of boilerplate is an attempt to handle the few patterns that exist in an otherwise very sparse space where one design is miles away from another and much glue is required to accomplish the task. Messiness here is not due to inherent complexity, but apparent complexity since things are never allowed to converge onto something more coherent.

Yeah you can start farming! But oh wait tractors can do the job better than humans there too

Because of some cherry-picked niche samples?

Software piracy had a similar problem. You can easily steal and redistribute code for free, and it's nearly impossible to stop. Selling the software with minimal technical restrictions and nag people to pay, was the solution. You focused on building a relationship with the customer because you were the guy who solve their problems, and pirates/competitors trudging through your source code slowed them down.

When ChatGPT speeds up, solves and then freezes in place low-hanging-fruit problems in coding, the relationships will change. We will need programmers to solve what ChatGPT can't.

Cheap websites, GUIs wrapped around analysis software and our bread-and-butter just became way, way less valuable. ChatGPT might have ended the easy jobs, which people are rushing to capitalize on, eventually to their own detriment.

Hiring an experienced professional to ask the right questions about niche, novel and exploratory problems has become valuable.

Yes, the kinds of people who would write a python program in C++ are in trouble.

Maybe it can translate python code to C++. That is interesting. I need to try that.

It definitely should be able to. Any example you would like me to try. Put in an issue and we will do it.

I was about to write an old-fashioned Wu anti-aliased circle-drawing routine for a simple C-like language (it has no structs nor unions yet, for instance), is that something that might be an interesting test case? Worth opening an issue?

Great work BTW. :)