What impact do you think tech like openAI will have on the software industry?

12 comments

1. [deleted]

2. Too many will try to embrace it at once and it’s going to send a legislative red flag to governments around the world

3. i think people way overestimate it’s impact

   i bet it’s most useful features will be blocked by most corps for security reasons which will cripple it’s utility and people will only use it as a supplemental thing

   a lot of my friends in the tech industry have already gotten emails from executives with new policies barring the use of any ai tools, i haven’t gotten one yet but i’m sure it’s coming

4. It’s probably going to be like the early 00’s when they were shipping our jobs off to india and it ended up biting companies in the ass and had to bring a lot of those jobs back home.

   I also can’t see non technical users being able to give proper requirements to an AI and get exactly what they want.

5. It’ll be another tool in the toolbox. Learn to wield it rather than fight it and you’ll do fine. Writing the code is actually just a part of the job.

6. Depends on how the legislation and lawsuits go .. if the datasets are cleared up.. if copyright is respected. If we get fucked over by big tech then I think they will squeeze us until legislation is fixed to a state where business can work again and labour is respected. There is no future for the internet that rewards spam and doesn’t respect copyright.. only a very idiotic future and that’s unsustainable.
   There is actually a great opportunity for ethical players to come along and snatch viewership and users under these idiots that are prioritising the AI hype.
   I wouldnt jump on any hype trains or try and educate myself on how to become dependent on these “tools”
   And if we get no wins on the law side of things then we have bigger problems than a reskilling .. think about how corrupt the whole thing is if this massive IP theft is legalised.

7. Didn’t the five biggest software companies in the world lay off like 50k people? yeah

8. The software industry will grow, that’s it. Programmers will not be replaced.

9. Two points.

   First, the idea that ChatGPT will replace or even noticeably reduce the number of software developers because clients can just tell it what they want doesn’t hold water. They already tried that with WYSIWYG editors, visual design programs, “no code” programming tools, and a bunch of other products. That effort didn’t pan out in the slightest, and it’s not going to pan out with ChatGPT either, no matter how much “smarter” or “more powerful” ChatGPT is than those other tools.

   Why?

   Because, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, clients are _fucking morons_.

   Software development isn’t about turning specifications in English (or other natural languages) into code, and it also isn’t, as is often said, about turning customer requirements into code.

   It’s about ignoring what the client _says_ they want in favor of what they _actually_ want, about taking a toy program that kinda sorta works on one guy’s laptop and making it function at scale, about _not_ implementing a feature because if you do the client is going to hose their systems within the week and then blame you for it, about building in data redundancy because clients always _say_ they’ll take proper and regular backups and almost never do.

   AI will replace software developers either when we can train full-on AGI instances to think like humans (those poor, poor AIs…) or when we can train John Doe in Accounting (who’s been in his job for 30 years and does nothing but work with Excel spreadsheet, yet still nervously says he’s “bad with computers” when asked and is terrified of catastrophically breaking something if he clicks the wrong icon) to think like a computer, and not a moment before.

   Second, StackOverflow is already seeing a loss of traffic due to ChatGPT, as are other developer-centric and/or coding-help sites, which would seem to be a good sign for ChatGPT…except it’s actually a big problem because those sites are where ChatGPT gets its coding “knowledge” and as they fade away or lose popularity ChatGPT’s already-very-questionable coding skills will fade with them.

   It’s exactly like the problem with COBOL and other supposedly “obsolete” languages that are still in use: as development moved away from those languages and fewer people worked on projects using them, the institutional knowledge base around them atrophied, and now not only is it hard to find people who are willing to work on COBOL projects but all the real expertise is gone and new developers have to rediscover everything from scratch.

   Obviously communal knowledge of Python won’t just vanish in the modern era in the same way that communal knowledge of COBOL essentially did in the pre-internet days, but there are definitely some severe diminishing returns in training an AI on a source of data that will shrink and worsen as the AI grows and improves. If some new language comes out that ChatGPT isn’t already trained with and there’s no StackOverflow hanging around full of code snippets in that language, well, the AI is kinda out of luck.

10. It wont. It will smash the useless jobs aka the Twitteratti that Musk fired

11. Its basically like web search to a higher level.

    So, most people will be functionally unable to apply it productively. Then there’s the people who are limited by software licenses and legal issues from using “rando code from the internet”. Then there’s people who get in too deep and just because you can cut and paste something doesn’t mean its doing the correct thing nor does it mean you can debug it and make it work or alter it. Internally it does mashups of existing concepts which is not necessarily useful IRL.

    For the small fraction of remaining people remaining, its pretty handy to introduce a new topic or see example code.

    Remember this will be like Youtube or cable TV or hard drugs or anything else, “first hit is free”. Wait until ChatGPT costs more than CAD/CAM software or finite element analysis software per year, LOL. Sure its free-ish now, but soon enough marketing will decide its saving $9001/yr on the productivity of your average developer, so lets raise the price to $9000/yr to maximize their profits. Which might kind of work.

    Given the growth rate in programming employment, it probably eats about a years growth as a percentage. Maybe less.

12. >( atleast mobile and web devs)

    >companies that have like 50 devs would be able to run on 5

    You dont need AI for that. WordPress, Squarespace. etc have a huge impact in the same way Ikea has an impact on carpenters.

    How many employers no longer manage their own exchange server? How about sharepoint vs the “old school intranet”?

    What about Tableau, QlikView etc

    A lot of these things dont eliminate the need for the conventional professional implementation, but the impact is still there.

    IT has had the pattern of using IT to build tools to need less IT for as long as IT has existed. AI isn’t required.

    I’d say AI is less of a direct threat than a lot of what already exists. Instead of making AI website generation competitive with WordPress, people will just say “fuck it use WordPress”

    Combine AI with WordPress? I wont rule it out, but wouldn’t a few forms get you 80% of the way there?

    Whats the indirect threat? Well, as AI/automation impacts non IT jobs, what happens when people increasingly funnel into IT?

    You could probably come up with 10 pages of examples where an IT task has been dramatically simplified or automated.