abrandis t1_j6fhpll wrote on January 29, 2023 at 11:36 PM

Reply to comment by Substantial_Space478 in AI will not replace software developers, It will just drastically reduce the number of them. by masterile

No the OP is NOT wrong, Software development like any other industry is becoming more and more commoditized.

When I started my work in the 90s almost any organization beyond mom and pop size had a development staff in house, over time it was either outsourced and now a days it's all cloud and SaaS , most large corporations for their common functions (HR,accounting, logistics) subscribe off the shelf/cloud products and maybe pay a few developers for some customizations, a lot less than hiring an in house team to build and maintain such a system. This will happen more and more into the future. Eventually AI will become good enough that a proper description of a customized app can be created ..

.for example I can envision a AI prompt like, "create me a complete accounting application for a mid-sized construction company that is government compliant " , and AI would stitch together all the relevant SaaS services into a working portal and/or mobile app. No programming knowledge needed.

Software development is like any other mature industry , abstraction + time means there's less need to focus on the minutia of bits and bytes and more on the desired outcomes.

Substantial_Space478 t1_j6fkzql wrote on January 29, 2023 at 11:58 PM

so much more goes into development of an application than a few basic facts like that. every company has unique needs. construction is such a broad field and that limited description you gave would not result in a useful program for any company. a software developer is needed to communicate with the company and determine its needs (which the owners/managers will guaranteed not be able express in easy to understand terms). database and software modeling and development are complex abstract aspects that a code writing AI cannot reproduce

what you described is something that writes code, not something that develops software. just because you can "envision" it doesn't make it the reality of how things work

KYWizard t1_j6inmbn wrote on January 30, 2023 at 4:40 PM

Right, but what you have done is cut out many many many hours of work. Those are people's jobs. Gone. Now a team will definitely polish it, but AI gives you a massive headstart without the need of paying pesky humans to do it.

abrandis t1_j6frwyy wrote on January 30, 2023 at 12:44 AM

My general premise is less about AI code generation and more commoditization of Software, reality is most business problems already have software solutions, companies make use of those everyday, customization becomes less and less essential as time goes on..

sysnickm t1_j6gtop8 wrote on January 30, 2023 at 5:28 AM

But not software solutions that meet every businesses specific needs.

Customization becomes more essential as different localities create new regulations.

When Europe passed GDPR, millions developers had to work with lawyers and others to update their code to follow the new laws.

kroopster t1_j6p82al wrote on January 31, 2023 at 10:38 PM

If you think about this for a sec you know it won’t work like that. At best the ai is a new abstraction layer on top of dozens we have there between the developer and cpu already. But a new layer does not make the definition go away somehow magically. There are endless combinations to be defined in your accounting example and that won’t happen by a machine before singularity. And we are not there yet, not even close.

Coding of today is like writing definitions for an ai when you compare it to coding in the 80s. This is just a new step, new tool in the stack.