[jcoq]

This viewpoint manages to miss the purpose of nearly all software engineering.

We've already solved the tough algorithmic challenges relevant to most industries and those software engineers spend their time writing specifications that just happen to be programs. Their job is to have hours of discussion and think through edge cases to provide an exact description of the business requirements. Good engineering means thinking through edge cases and gray areas while the PMs and designers capture broad requirements from users and focus on high level details. You're not going to replace engineers in this capacity without human level, general AI.

Further, you cannot capture the needs of a tech-enabled business with natural language descriptions while remaining unambiguous and changeable. If you had an AI to write your programs, you'd still have engineers writing specifications into the AI (and even more importantly, deciding on those specifications down to the most intricate if details).

We will in fact see an explosion, or at least mild expansion, of software engineering into areas that are algorithmically challenging. AI will manage to solve the tough algorithmic parts and engineers will drive the AI through increasingly specialized languages. In this world, AIs will act like compilers.

But it's just super futuristic and naive to think that a PM will tell GPT-3 what to make like a Google Home and have it pop out the other side.

[fragmede]

Have you seen the GPT-3 programming demos? It is super futuristic. We programmers are still going to be needed, but what we do will evolve. Just look at how much Github Copilot gets right. It's still early days so there's still a lot it gets wrong, but there are a lot of improvements yet to be made.

Eg https://machinelearningtokyo.com/2020/07/26/10-cool-gpt-3-de...

[tartoran]

It’s still a tool though. If these AI tools simplified the work of sw engineers there would indeed be fewer of our ilk wielding these tools but a larger chunk of engineering would move towards maintaining and co-evolving these tools. I don’t really see an end to it while I do see an end to my own willingness to keep up with it.

[immigrantheart]

I think the commenter above you is just being sarcastic.