<story><title>GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview</title><url>https://github.blog/2024-04-29-github-copilot-workspace/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>imiric</author><text>&amp;gt; And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago.&lt;p&gt;This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn&amp;#x27;t to do every task an accountant can do, so they augmented their capabilities. Compilers don&amp;#x27;t have the capability to write code from scratch, and Python doesn&amp;#x27;t write itself either.&lt;p&gt;But AI will continually improve, and spread to more areas that software engineers were trained on. At first this will seem empowering, as they will aid us in writing small chunks of code, or code that can be easily generated like tests, which they already do. Then this will expand to writing even more code, improving their accuracy, debugging, refactoring, reasoning, and in general, being a better programming assistant for business owners like your friend than any human would.&lt;p&gt;The concerning thing is that this isn&amp;#x27;t happening on timescales of decades, but years and months. Unlike GP, I don&amp;#x27;t think software engineers will exist as they do today in a decade or two. Everyone will either need to be a machine learning engineer and directly work with training and tweaking the work of AI, and then, once AI can improve itself, it will become self-sufficient, and humans will only program as a hobby. Humans will likely be forbidden from writing mission critical software in health, government and transport industries. Hardware engineers might be safe for a while after that, but not for long either.</text></item><item><author>lelandbatey</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -&amp;gt; calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He&amp;#x27;d put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually it stopped being able to make the highly specific changes he needed as he used it more and more. He came to me for some help and I was able to work through it a bit as a friend, but the code quality was bad and I had to say &amp;quot;to really do this, I&amp;#x27;d need to consult, and there&amp;#x27;s probably a better person to hire for that.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s muddling along but is looking for low cost devs to contract with on it now that he&amp;#x27;s getting value out of it though. And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures.</text></item><item><author>sixhobbits</author><text>Accountants thought spreadsheets would kill their profession, instead demand for them exploded.&lt;p&gt;Compilers made it much easier to code compared to writing everything in Assembly. Python made it much easier to code than writing C. Both increased the demand for coders.&lt;p&gt;Code is a liability, not an asset. The fact that less technical people and people who are not trained engineers can now make useful apps by generating millions of lines of code is also only going to increase the need for professional software engineers.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re doing an HTML or even React boot camp, I think you&amp;#x27;d be right to be a bit concerned about your future.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re studying algorithms and data structures and engineering best practices, I doubt you have anything to worry about.</text></item><item><author>studenthrow3831</author><text>Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they&amp;#x27;ve gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in &lt;i&gt;3 years.&lt;/i&gt; I&amp;#x27;m not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we&amp;#x27;re heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme productivity multiplier not be catastrophic to labor demand.&lt;p&gt;Are there any arguments that could seriously motivate me to continue with this career outside of just blind hope that it will be okay? I&amp;#x27;m not a total doomer, currently &amp;#x27;hopium&amp;#x27; works and I&amp;#x27;m making progress, but I wish my hopes could at least be founded.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lispisok</author><text>You are extrapolating from when we saw huge improvements 1-2 years ago. Performance improvements have flatlined. Current AI predictions reminds me of self-driving car hype from the mid 2010s</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub Copilot Workspace: Technical Preview</title><url>https://github.blog/2024-04-29-github-copilot-workspace/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>imiric</author><text>&amp;gt; And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t you think that this tech can only get better? And that there will come a time in the very near future when the programming capabilities of AI improve substantially over what they are now? After all, AI writing 300 line programs was unheard of a mere 2 years ago.&lt;p&gt;This is what I think GP is ignoring. Spreadsheets couldn&amp;#x27;t to do every task an accountant can do, so they augmented their capabilities. Compilers don&amp;#x27;t have the capability to write code from scratch, and Python doesn&amp;#x27;t write itself either.&lt;p&gt;But AI will continually improve, and spread to more areas that software engineers were trained on. At first this will seem empowering, as they will aid us in writing small chunks of code, or code that can be easily generated like tests, which they already do. Then this will expand to writing even more code, improving their accuracy, debugging, refactoring, reasoning, and in general, being a better programming assistant for business owners like your friend than any human would.&lt;p&gt;The concerning thing is that this isn&amp;#x27;t happening on timescales of decades, but years and months. Unlike GP, I don&amp;#x27;t think software engineers will exist as they do today in a decade or two. Everyone will either need to be a machine learning engineer and directly work with training and tweaking the work of AI, and then, once AI can improve itself, it will become self-sufficient, and humans will only program as a hobby. Humans will likely be forbidden from writing mission critical software in health, government and transport industries. Hardware engineers might be safe for a while after that, but not for long either.</text></item><item><author>lelandbatey</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen it already. A small business owner (one man show) friend of mine with zero developer experience was able to solve his problem (very custom business specific data -&amp;gt; calendar management) in a rough way using ChatGPT. But it got past about 300 lines long and really started to get bad. He&amp;#x27;d put dozens of hours of time on his weekend to getting it to where it was by using ChatGPT over and over, but eventually it stopped being able to make the highly specific changes he needed as he used it more and more. He came to me for some help and I was able to work through it a bit as a friend, but the code quality was bad and I had to say &amp;quot;to really do this, I&amp;#x27;d need to consult, and there&amp;#x27;s probably a better person to hire for that.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s muddling along but is looking for low cost devs to contract with on it now that he&amp;#x27;s getting value out of it though. And I suspect that kind of story will continue quite a bit as the tech matures.</text></item><item><author>sixhobbits</author><text>Accountants thought spreadsheets would kill their profession, instead demand for them exploded.&lt;p&gt;Compilers made it much easier to code compared to writing everything in Assembly. Python made it much easier to code than writing C. Both increased the demand for coders.&lt;p&gt;Code is a liability, not an asset. The fact that less technical people and people who are not trained engineers can now make useful apps by generating millions of lines of code is also only going to increase the need for professional software engineers.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re doing an HTML or even React boot camp, I think you&amp;#x27;d be right to be a bit concerned about your future.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re studying algorithms and data structures and engineering best practices, I doubt you have anything to worry about.</text></item><item><author>studenthrow3831</author><text>Student here: I legitimately cannot understand how senior developers can dismiss these LLM tools when they&amp;#x27;ve gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in &lt;i&gt;3 years.&lt;/i&gt; I&amp;#x27;m not a singulatarian, but this seems like a brutal S-curve we&amp;#x27;re heading into. I also have a hard time believing that there is enough software need to make such an extreme productivity multiplier not be catastrophic to labor demand.&lt;p&gt;Are there any arguments that could seriously motivate me to continue with this career outside of just blind hope that it will be okay? I&amp;#x27;m not a total doomer, currently &amp;#x27;hopium&amp;#x27; works and I&amp;#x27;m making progress, but I wish my hopes could at least be founded.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>layer8</author><text>&amp;gt; But AI will continually improve&lt;p&gt;There is a bit of a fallacy in here. We don’t know how far it will improve, and in what ways. Progress isn’t continuous and linear, it comes more in sudden jumps and phases, and often plateaus for quite a while.</text></comment>