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Dan Franks's avatar

It's fun to read posts like this a year on. You were pretty accurate in your predictions!

March of 2023 I told my boss at the time that I predicted software engineers wouldn't be directly coding within a few years, at least for simpler systems. Little over two years in and I've got six terminal windows open, deploying one website, refactoring a client app, deploying infra on AWS using terraform, building implementation and pricing strategy for a startup nonprofit, building the most "enterprise" grade home lab ever, and constantly iterating on a repo framework I can use to bootstrap new projects. No direct coding in any of them.

Not only am I not coding directly anymore, I'm not even writing business development and strategy directly anymore. I've been waiting for this my entire life, watching compute and storage come down in cost until this moment inevitably occurred. Exciting times

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rational_hippy's avatar

Are you unironically enthusiastic about it? If so, is this because you believe that the progress will stop there/plateau there? Or just that this won't lead to any kind of catastrophic scenario?

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James's avatar

Yes! The medium-term future seems really awesome. A ton of progress is going to be made and raise incomes.

I'm not as sure after a few years, because AI will become so powerful, but I think there's a good chance that alignment is easier than we thought. I'm no expert on this question though!

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