zlacker

> Is it irrational that this makes me a little anxious about job security over the longterm?

In the 50s, we programmed computers with punch cards. Who does now? How many web developers today could tell the difference between `malloc` and `calloc`? Probably not that many.

For a lot of developers, programming today bears very little relation to programming decades ago. Copilot is like any other innovation - it obsoletes some skills, and it introduces new ones.

I doubt copilot will reduce the need for engineers: but it may change the work they do. But that's no different to any other industry.

>>objclx+(OP)
I don’t like this narrative. Going from punch cards, to Assembly, to C and to dynamic languages all empowered the programmer with more expressive languages. I don’t believe going from Python to programming via code comments is the same deal.

It would be more like we still write asm but we have editors that let you write a little C code and then it spits out a paragraph of ‘reasonable’ asm that still has to be maintained.

>>eloisi+oc
That's roughly how I've seen experienced people work on high-performance code. I mean, they rarely maintain the generated assembly directly, but they do write code with the assembly it would generate in mind, and keeping the code generating comparable assembly over time is part of maintaining the performance-critical parts of the codebase.

>>objclx+(OP)
>I doubt copilot will reduce the need for engineers

Every time this happens, everyone just shifts the goal posts and they now want more features, faster. The majority of software out there sucks. If programmers are now 2x faster, users will demand that some random crud app be at Google software quality. And Google's software will be unimaginable by today's standards.

All of this will increase the value delivered by software, which will bring in greater revenue, which will be reinvested in more developers.