yeah sorry I was arguing with an imaginary critic not you. and I agree we're all still going to be programming in 12 months. or most of us. I think there'll be job losses but mostly ill-thought. the thing is people hire and fire programmers for lots of bad reasons. the labor market is very .. moody.
like capital already does and will continue to use LLMs as a tool for labour discipline, to put pressure on wages, and to replace people at the margins. and since 90% of software never needed to be written anyways, maybe their delusional "business needs" will actually be met by that? who knows.
I especially think: for the part of the software industry that never ships a finished thing at all -- the "investor storytime" model of just getting rounds for a while then getting acqui-hired -- you might find even today's LLMs perfectly fit your needs for "crappy prototypes that change rapidly"?
Just as call centers with the common business model of "make the customer go away, at low cost" may be quite happy with chatbots RAGing up existing FAQs. Not a satisfying simulacrum of concierge-level customer service but the existing bar being cleared may be so low it's actually underground.
yeah, exactly. there is already a lot of code shipping at quality levels we don't care to discuss in polite company. not because the coders are necessarily bad, but the businesses are intensely cost sensitive. and if you replace those jobs with LLMs, you just move that wage pressure elsewhere.
(part of me, darkly, thinks FOSS people are so critical of this because deep in our hearts we know we did a similar wage pressure commodification routine to proprietary people 20 years ago, and are either displacing guilt or can't stand the thought of being next. capitalism is terrible: news at 11.)
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