Comment by the_af
I think it's qualitatively different this time.
Unlike with offshoring, this is a technological solution, which understandably is received more enthusiastically on HN. I get it. It's interesting as tech! And it's achieved remarkable things. But unlike with offshoring (which is a people thing) or magical NOCODE/CASE/etc "solutions", it seems the consensus is that AI coding assistants will eventually get there. At least a portion of even HN seems to think so. And some are cheering!
The coping mechanism seems to be "it won't happen to me" or "my knowledge is too specialized" but I think this will become increasingly false. And even if your knoweldge is too specialized to be replaced by AI, most engineers aren't like that. "Well, become more specialized" is unrealistic advice, and in any case, the employment pool will shrink.
PS: I am offhsoring (in a way). I'm not based in the US but I work remotely for a US company.
> But unlike with offshoring (which is a people thing) or magical NOCODE/CASE/etc "solutions", it seems the consensus is that AI coding assistants will eventually get there.
There's no consensus to that point. There are a few loud hype artists, most of whom are employed in AI and have so have conflicts of interest and also are pre-filtered to the true believers. Their logic is basically "See this trend? Trends continue, so this is inevitable!"
That's bad logic. Trends do not always continue, they often slow or reverse, and this one is showing all signs of doing so already. OpenAI has come straight out and said that they don't expect to see another jump like GPT-3 to 4, and have resorted to throwing more tokens at the problems, which works with diminishing returns. I do not expect to see a return to the rapid growth we had for a year or two there.
> PS: I am offhsoring (in a way). I'm not based in the US but I work remotely for a US company.
Yes, and this is a good example: there's a place for offshoring, but it didn't replace US devs. The same thing will happen here.