I feel triggered by this post especially because I've made it a career writing automation code haha.

This stage is called denial. There's also anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, in the end, acceptence. I'm saying in a funny way, but I suspect it's true. Who can say how AI will develop, but beware of happily-ever-after stories. It could be a nightmare for all of civilization, for just engineers, or just not develop much futher.

I feel literally the opposite: the reason why I'm disappointed by the current state of AI is because I really want it to work so I can focus on the actually useful part of my job instead of doing boring stuff. What's the useful part of my job? It's bringing values to my customers: they want to do something, and they need help. But today, unfortunately I must always tell them to reduce their ambition because they wouldn't be able to afford it or to be stuck waiting for the project to deliver even if they could fund it. I've seen a enormous shift in developers ability to actually ship valuable products to customers when opensource became mainstream, thanks to github and things like npm: no more custom half-backed libraries for doing all the features necessary for the product to work, we could just re-use an existing library. More than half of our job disappeared these days, yet nobody regr…

And this is the worse it will ever be at doing this task, it's impressive in a scary way. It's extra funny when you think that resilience was the first thing Sam Altman answered when asked what kids should be learning today . https://youtube.com/shorts/OK0YhF3NMpQ

HN also underestimated cryptocurrency craze. Yet years later, it is busted. Seeing the same patterns with AI. Every startup is now incorporating “AI” or “deep learning” or “OpenAI” into their decks/motto/pitch. Have yet to see anything worth using beyond the initial hype. Using AI to me is like learning another programming language. Same shit. Different interface.

Well, you say we underestimate but are you sure you are not the "underestimater"? Amongst other things, one of the tasks I tried to put ChatGPT to was writing scripts in a not so popular dialect of a very popular language: PowerCLI (PowerShell). Gemini is even worse! The issue is of course the relative lack of PowerCLI vs the huge body of PowerShell generic stuff. Hallucinations include invented function parameters and much worse. It doesn't help that PowerCLI and MS's Hyper-V effort (whatever that is) both have a Get-VM function etc. These things are "only" next token/word guessers. They are not magic and they are certainly not intelligent. I do get great results in other domains and with a bit of creativity but you have to be really careful. No need to feel triggered. Use these tools as best works for you and crack on but do be careful to be an engineer and critically examine the outpu…

If you can automate my job--and I maintain we not only aren't there yet even but still won't be even if you make it so I never have to write another line of "syntax" ever again (as that isn't now and never was the job of a programmer)--you clearly can automate the jobs of most of the value chain above me, all the way up to the limited partners at the VC firms being paid management fees to pick portfolio companies... the issue here honestly isn't "programmers will be replaced and y'all are in denial", it is "humanity is going to have a crisis of purpose when capitalism can't figure out what to do with an entire civilization of meatbags that suddenly become cost in-effective for most any purpose" and I don't know what you expect anyone to do about that other than like, stock weapons or whatever (as there simply aren't enough jobs doing skilled physical labor to absorb enough people that be…

I would extend that from engineer to knowledge professionals in general. Our specialized tools, strange syntaxes, and invented worlds of code may shield us somewhat, but when you just want expertise and opinion typed out? That’s firmly in the LLM ballpark. LLMs are starting to nail memorization with perfect recall, beating humans. My own memories are always fuzzy and I need emails and notes and books to help me along. An LLM won’t need all that and even if it did it can access all of that much quicker than I.

We're building an AI Agent that can perform manual testing on feature branches [1]. I can tell you, it works, and it's going to get better, and it's going to happen fast. It's not hard at all for an AI to read text on the screen and click it. What's amazing is the social impact this has - often people don't believe it's real. It feels like when I had to explain to my parents that in my online multiplayer game, that the other characters were other kids at home on their own computers. I think it's a matter of denial. Yes, software is made for humans and we will always need to validate that humans can use that software. But should a human really be required to manually test every PR in 10k person teams? Again, as a founder of an AI Agent for E2E testing, we work with this every day. If I was a QA professional right now, I would watch the space closely in the next 6 months. The other option …