s/LLM/StackOverflow/g and squint, and you're basically describing the preceding decade.

Well, stackoverflow required competent users to participate. There's no need for that any longer. The "gap" will probably be addressed by LLM-designed tools that are only usable via LLMs and bigtech will be more than happy to put their own LLM-designed tools at work for their products, which means there'll be vendor lock at scale, so in the vein of the "digital realm emulating the analog realm" there'll be companies you'd have to specifically train for and none of it would carry over...

but this is assuming this current level of progress stagnates for at least the next five years. Sigh...

> There's no need for that any longer.

I don't think so:

LLMs have used Stackoverflow's answers for training. Now, if people would stop going there for questions, people would stop giving answers, so LLMs would have no data to train on for new problems.

I think unless there's a reward system for contributing to LLMs, the internet will mostly be devoid of new content. People will move to walled gardens. All you need is a short demo showing how something like GPT-4 with the internet access plugin can make a profile of you based on your publically available comments.

> LLMs have used Stackoverflow's answers for training

have used, perfect tense. But future tense? who knows.

We shouldn't assume future LLMs won't be able to parse documentation of new libraries and extrapolate full, detailed implementations.

This assumes that a future version won't have super-human coding abilities which can write code vastly better than any human. The language it writes in might not look anything like our current languages, because it might be able to write highly efficient code that it would be too slow and impractical for a human to write, and refactoring the entire codebase might happen automatically overnight rather than slowly across months.

In that world the skill won't be to code, but to accurately describe software/business requirements. Unless a future AI can do that too.

There always seems to be a lot of "We Can Do The Thing We Do Today But Faster" in these comments.

It misses that we won't be doing Old Thing. We'll be doing New Thing.

It's not a step change in an old medium. It's a qualitatively different change to a completely new medium, whose properties haven't yet been revealed.

It's like waving an iPhone at Babbage. An iPhone is so far ahead of an Analytical Engine that it offers a completely new and unimaginable set of affordances.

It's also faster, smaller, and more reliable, with much more memory - which is an interesting implementation footnote, but incidental to the fact that from a user POV it's a completely different class of device.

I agree, but that's a long time away, maybe five or six years. Until then (and even after) we'll need people that can interface with lower-level systems and also have prior experience. This also doesn't take into account countries that will effectively ban usage of companies like "Open"AI (which "Open"AI will be more than willing to enforce), and on top of a possible thin-client revolution, we'll see demand for human coders in the new tech-ghetto parts of the world.

Countries would be insane to ban companies like OpenAI. What a huge foot-gun that would be!

Imagine if a country banned computers in 1979 to protect jobs, other countries would have run circles around them and it would have had huge economic implications.