The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...
In a program, you can't really afford that. A small mistake can have dramatic consequences. Now, maybe in the next few years you'll only need one human supervisor fixing AI bugs where you used to need 10 high-end developers, but you probably won't be able to make reliable programs just by typing a prompt, the way you can currently generate a cover for an e-book just by asking midjourney.
As for the political consequences of all of this, this is yet another issue.
I don't think this is going to put developers out of work, however. Instead, lots of small businesses that couldn't afford to be small software companies suddenly will be able to. They'll build 'free puppies,' new applications that are easy to start building, but that require ongoing development and maintenance. As the cambrian explosion of new software happens we'll only end up with more work on our hands.
Could the bot not curate its own output? It has been shown that back feeding into the model result in improvement. I got the idea that better results come from increments. The AI overlords (model owners) will make sure they learn from all that curating you might do too, making your job even less skilled. Read: you are more replaceable.
Please prove me wrong! I hope I am just anxious. History has proven that increases in productivity tend to go to capital owners, unless workers have bargaining power. Mine workers were paid relatively well here, back in the day. Complete villages and cities thrived around this business. When those workers were no longer needed the government had to implement social programs to prevent a societal collapse there.
Look around, Musk wants you to work 10 hours per day already. Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed job..
I think it's more a matter of enlarging the scope of what one person can manage. I think moving from the pure manual labor era, limited by how much weight a human body could move from point A to point B, to the steam engine era. Railroads totally wrecked the industry of people moving things on their backs or in mule trains, and that wasn't a bad thing.
> Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed job..
That's kinda my point, I don't think this is going to make less work, it'll turbocharge productivity. When has an industry ever found a way to increase productivity and just said cool, now we'll keep the status quo with our output and work less?
You describe stuff that is harmful or boring. In an other comment I touched upon this, as there seem to be a clear distinction between people that love programming and those that just want to get results. The former does not enjoy being manager of something larger per se if the lose what they love.
I can see a (short term?) increase in demand of software, but it is not infinite. So when productivity increases and demand does not with at least the same pace, you will see jobless people and you will face competition.
What no one has touched yet is that the nature of programming might change too. We try to optimize for the dev experience now, but it is not unreasonable to expect that we have to bend towards being AI-friendly. Maybe human friendly becomes less of a concern (enough desperate people out there), AI-friendly and performance might be more important metrics to the owner.
There's nothing stopping anyone from coding for fun, but we get paid for delivering value, and the amount of value that you can create is hugely increased with these new tools. I think for a lot of people their job satisfaction comes from having autonomy and seeing their work make an impact, and these tools will actually provide them with even more autonomy and satisfaction from increased impact as they're able to take on bigger challenges than they were able to in the past.
I think we are talking about a different job. I mentioned it somewhere else, but strapping together piles of bot generated code and having to debug that will feel more like a burden for most I fear.
If a programmer wanted to operate on a level where "value delivering" and "impact" are the most critical criteria for job satisfaction, one would be better of in a product management or even project management role. A good programmer will care a lot about her product, but she still might derive the most joy out of having it build mostly by herself.
I think that most passionate programmers want to build something by themselves. If api mashups are already not fun enough for them, I doubt that herding a bunch of code generators will bring that spark of joy.