John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this

Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by antupis on Sunday March 19, 2023 @11:25AM (#35219894)

if GPT or copilot make developer 5-50x more productive then you need just 2 good programmers instead of team of 10-100 person, so out of window goes all formalized agile processes, safes etc so you don't need anymore those managers who are doing communicating, process planning and other big business stuff. Of course this will also affect for developers but I bet less because there is huge need for software developers and mid-size business did not have money to do that previously but it will change when you need only two people instead of 40.

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Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by esailija on Sunday March 19, 2023 @12:29PM (#35220652)

There are a lot of tools that have made developers far more productive than that and it has never resulted in reduction of demand.

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Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by weatherlite on Sunday March 19, 2023 @12:44PM (#35220824)

I don't disagree we just don't know yet. I do think these 2 guys will be overworked as f** and constantly context switching to the point they barely know what they're doing anymore...hope we don't get there.

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Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by chiefalchemist on Sunday March 19, 2023 @06:26PM (#35224342)

Funny enough, last week I was talking about Copilot with a colleague. Out loud, I wondered if there was a diminishing return from Copilot. That is, Copilot is great at filling in boilerplate / the obvious, and I get to focus on the more intricate parts of the solution. But can my brain operate at the higher level day after day? Week after week? TBH I have my doubts.

Maybe it's going to be AI enables quality more than quantity?

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Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by sarchertech on Monday March 20, 2023 @09:13AM (#35230990)

Same thing is happening with doctors. I read a post from a GP a while back talking about how it used to be that he got a wide mix of acuity/difficulty all day long. Now all the "easy" patients go to the Nurse Practitioner, and all he gets is the difficult ones.

He's still expected to put in the same amount of time, but now he has to expend brain power the entire time.

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Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by chiefalchemist on Monday March 20, 2023 @09:05PM (#35241230)

Sounds like we're both making the case for the 4-Day work week.

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Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by kaashif on Sunday March 19, 2023 @02:17PM (#35221887)

If C makes developers 5-50x more effective compared to writing assembly, then you just need two devs instead of a team of 10-100.

Obviously that didn't happen. And people actually made predictions like that once upon a time.

As software becomes cheaper, and the production of software can be done with fewer people, demand has always increased and I don't see any reason that's going to stop.

Reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox but the situation with software is a bit different.

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Re:John Carmack: From a DM, just in case anyone else needs t... by bitwize on Sunday March 19, 2023 @10:49PM (#35226672)

I recall seeing a video in which a senior vice president of Symbolics (yes, the Lisp machine people) claimed that their aim was to put the largest software projects within reach of a small team, and everything smaller would be feasible by a single person.

Had Lisp machines (as an idea) remained viable, we might've come close! But managers just love having large teams to command, and we've invented process and ceremony to fill up the spare time necessary to do the work of ten programmers with a hundred, as well as rejecting technologies like Lisp and Smalltalk that give individual programmers tremendous leverage over the problem space.

Should AI actually make people more productive, instead of being an endless generator of messes for fleshbags to clean up, I imagine some successor of Scrum to come along to tie up most of staff programmers' work days with meetings. Hell, that may happen anyway.

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