[tylermauthe]

My guess is the end result of all this "AI" assisted code-generation is that it will have the same impact on the software engineering industry as spreadsheets had on accounting. I also believe that this AI-powered stuff is a bit of a "two-steps forward, one step back" situation and the real innovation will begin when ideas from tools like Louise [1] are integrated into the approach taken in Codex.

When VisiCalc was released departments of 30 accountants were reduced to 5 accountants because of the improvement for individual worker efficiency, however accounting itself remains largely unchanged and accountants are still a respected profession who perform important functions. There's plenty of programming problems in the world that simply aren't being solved because we haven't figured out how to reduce the burden of producing the software; code generation will simply increase the output of an individual software developer.

The same forces behind "no-code" are at work here. In fact I see a future where these two solutions intermingle: where "no-code" becomes synonymous with prompt-driven development. As we all know, however, these solutions will only take you so far -- and essentially only allow you to express problems in domains that are already well-solved. We're just expressing a higher level of program abstraction; programs that generate programs. This is a good thing and it is not a threat to the existence of our industry. Even in Star Trek they still have engineers who fix their computers...

[1] - https://github.com/stassa/louise

[mxwsn]

Good take but I'm not convinced. I would suspect (see epistemic status) that while correctness is easy to reason about and maintain by a single accountant using spreadsheets, since there is a clean mapping from a precise excel api to function, the mapping from natural language to code is problematic. I won a t-shirt in the recent OpenAI codex challenge and found it hard to reason systemically about the behavior and generalization properties of generated code. When the generated code is wrong, it was frustrating on a different level than if I wrote the code myself.

Epistemic status: I don't know anything about accounting

[Tarq0n]

It's not about what Codex can do now, but what the technology will be able to do a few generations into the future. Anticipating this shift in the software labor market is important to many people on HN.

Codex as it stands is just a novelty, but it does show the shape of what's to come.

[omegalulw]

I disagree, people seem to really overblow how much boilerplate that you write (though I guess it would vary from language to language). The most important job in SWE is to think logically IMO. Codex isn't up for that.

[eggsmediumrare]

It's not a good thing for those 25 other engineers.