zlacker

For what it's worth: I'm not dismissive of the idea that these things could be ruinous for the interests of the profession. I don't automatically assume that making applications drastically easier to produce is just going to make way for more opportunities.

I just don't think the interest of the profession control. The travel agents had interests too!

>>tptace+(OP)
Soon as the world realized they don't need a website and can just have FB/Twitter page, a huge percentage of freelance web development gigs just vanished. We have to get real about what's about to happen. The app economy filled the gap, and the only optimistic case is the AI app industry is what's going to fill the gap going forward. I just don't know about that. There's a certain end-game vibes I'm getting because we're talking about self-building and self-healing software. More so, a person can ask the AI to role play anything, even an app.

>>ivape+y2
Sure. And before the invention of the spreadsheet, the world's most important programming language, individual spreadsheets were something a programmer had to build for a business.

>>ivape+y2
None of the LLM models are self-building, self-healing or even self-thinking or self-teaching. They are static models (+rag, but that's a bolt-on). Did you have a specific tech in mind?

>>tptace+(OP)
For a long time there has been back chatter on how to turn programming into a more professional field, more like actual engineering where when something goes wrong actual people and companies start to take security seriously, and get held accountable for their mistakes, and start to actually earn their high salaries.

Getting AI to hallucinate its way into secure and better quality code seems like the antithesis of this. Why don't we have AI and robots working for humanity with the boring menial tasks - mowing laws, filing taxes, washing dishes, driving cars - instead of attempting to take on our more critical and creative outputs - image generation, movie generation, book writing and even website building.

>>tptace+(OP)
It's kind of ironic to me that this is so often the example trotted out. Look at the BLS data sheet for job outlook: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/travel-agents.htm#tab-6

> Employment of travel agents is projected to grow 3 percent from 2023 to 2033, about as fast as the average for all occupations.

The last year there is data for claims 68,800 people employed as travel agents in the US. It's not a boom industry by any means, but it doesn't appear they experienced the apocalypse that Hacker News believes they did, either.

I don't know how to easily find historical data, unfortunately. BLS publishes the excel sheets, but pulling out the specific category would have to be done manually as far as I can tell. There's this, I guess: https://www.travelagewest.com/Industry-Insight/Business-Feat...

It appears at least that what happened is, though it may be easier than ever to plan your own travel, there are so many more people traveling these days than in the past that the demand for travel agents hasn't crashed.

>>noname+5W
https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-are-travel-agents-still-...

Has some stats. It seems pretty clear the interests of travel agents did not count for much in the face of technological change.

>>ivape+y2
Except that FB/Twitter are rotting platforms. I don't pretend that freelance web dev is a premium gig, but setting up Wordpress sites for local flower shops etc. shouldn't require a higher level of education/sophistication than e.g. making physical signs for the same shops.

Technical? Yes. Hardcore expert premium technical, no. The people who want the service can pay someone with basic to moderate skills a few hundred bucks to spend a day working on it, and that's all good.

Could I get an LLM to do much of the work? Yes, but I could also do much of the work without an LLM. Someone who doesn't understand the first principles of domains, Wordpress, hosting and so on, not so much.

>>noname+5W
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254497900A

40% of all travel agent jobs lost between 2001 and 2025. Glad I'm not a travel agent.

>>hostyl+OS
The problem with this argument is that it's not what's going to happen. In the trajectory I see of LLM code generation, security quality between best-practices well-prompted (ie: not creatively well prompted, just people with a decent set of Instructions.md or whatever) and well trained human coders is going to be a wash. Maybe in 5 years SOTA models will clearly exceed human coders on this, but my premise is all progress stops and we just stick with what we have today.

But the analysis doesn't stop there, because after the raw quality wash, we have to consider things LLMs can do profoundly better than human coders can. Codebase instrumentation, static analysis, type system tuning, formal analysis: all things humans can do, spottily, on a good day but that empirically across most codebases they do not do. An LLM can just be told to spend an afternoon doing them.

I'm a security professional before I am anything else (vulnerability research, software security consulting) and my take on LLM codegen is that they're likely to be a profound win for security.

>>hostyl+OS
> Why don't we have AI and robots working for humanity with the boring menial tasks - mowing laws, filing taxes, washing dishes, driving cars

I mean, we do have automation for literally all of those things, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

There's an increasing number of little "roomba" style mowers around my neighborhood. I file taxes every year with FreeTaxUSA and while it's still annoying, a lot of menial "form-filling" labor has been taken away from me there. My dishwasher does a better job cleaning my dishes than I would by hand. And though there's been a huge amount of hype-driven BS around 'self-driving', we've undeniably made advances in that direction over the last decade.

>>tptace+OA1
Isn't formal analysis exactly the kind of thing LLMs can't do at all? Or do you mean an LLM invoking a proof assistant or something like that?

>>pxc+Wf2
Yes, I mean LLMs generating proof specs and invoking assistants, not that they themselves do any formal modeling.

>>Earw0r+k51
Except that FB/Twitter are rotting platforms.

They were not rotting platforms when they evaporated jobs at that particular moment, about 10-15 years ago. There's no universe where people are making money making websites. One could easily collect multi thousand dollars per month just making websites awhile ago before twitter/fb pages just on the side. There is a long history to web development.

Also, the day of the website has been over for quite awhile so I don't even buy the claim that social media is a rotting platform.

>>ivape+y2
Start getting to be friends with some billionaire (or... shh... trillionaire) families, Elysium is coming!

>>ivape+y2
> We have to get real about what's about to happen.

Or maybe shouldn't enthusiastically repeat the destruction of the open web in favor of billionaire-controlled platforms for surveillance and manipulation.

>>tptace+(OP)
Let's be real. Software engineers are skeptical right now not because they believe robots are better than them. Quite the opposite. The suits will replace software engineers despite its mediocrity.

It was just 2 weeks ago when the utter incompetence of these robots were in full public display [1]. But none of that will matter to greedy corporate executives, who will prioritize short-term cost savings. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining essential systems that users and society rely on with robot slop. That's part of the reason why the C-suites are overhyping the technology. After all, no rich executive has faced consequences for behaving this way.

It's not just software engineering jobs that will take a hit. Society as a whole will suffer from the greedy recklessness.

[1]: >>44050152

>>rerdav+jv1
500,000 tech R&D jobs lost since 2017... Glad I'm not... Oh. Wait I AM!! Probably due to toxic Trumpian tax changes, though.