[analog31]

I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering.

It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all.

But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition.

A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.

[wiseowise]

This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?

[braebo]

There will be, code was just a natural first start because it’s just text.

[zdragnar]

Overly optimistic people are already talking about using LLM based AI as a way to provide healthcare access in underserved (i.e. rural) areas. There's already lots of studies going on for things like using AI to identify tumors and cancers in MRI and other images.

There's national headlines every few months for lawyers getting in trouble for submitting LLM hallucinated citations in court, so lawyers are starting to do it to themselves as well.

It's early days yet, because unlike most CRUD apps, the consequences of hallucinations and outright bad calls in medicine and law are life ending. Unless the bubble pops soon, it's coming though.