80% of my day to day job has never been pumping out lots of code. it is a complicated career is it? we do a lot of alignment, design and thinking. i can't even agree the idea of outsourcing thinking, i think AI is very good at helping us to think clearly, but it doesn't really "think" for us.
If AI becomes good enough to easily produce maintainable and high quality software, then I really can't see how demand for software engineers would not plummet. Even lots of non-coding work that software engineers do, such as accurately capturing what client actually wants, will become much less valuable - e.g. currently misunderstanding of client's requirements is catastrophic and can lead to waste of months of labour; with AI it could become matter of max few hours lost. So I can understand argument that software engineering careers might be safe because AI may plateau and we might never reach level where it's actually capable of producing good software. But I absolutely don't buy that software engineering will be safe even if such AI exists. Even if your current work is just 20% actually coding, you must remember about second order effects that will take place once quality code generation is 1000 times faster.
AI can also do alignment and pull from its vast training dataset for design and "thinking" -- because 99% of the problems in this world were already solved, multiple times, maybe not in the exactly same format, but in a very similar format.
I also see that in the future humans will adapt to AI, instead of the opposite. Why? Because it's a lot easier for humans to adapt to AI, than the opposite. It's already happening -- why do companies ask their employees to write complete documentation for AI to consume? This is what I called "Adaption".
I can also imagine that in the near future, when employment plummets, when basic income become general, when governments build massive condos for social housing -- everything new will be required to adapt to AI. The roads, the buildings, everything physical is going to be built with ease-of-navigation by AI in consideration. We don't need a Gen AI -- that is too expensive and too long term for the Capitalist class to consider. We only need a bunch of AI agents and robots coordinated in an environment that is friendly to them.
Rather than coining a new word like adaption, I'd call this acculturation. It's reshaping not only SW dev but natural language too -- how we read and write and how we speak.
Everyone knows that AI-written slop isn't worth actually reading. So when reading mass media content we skim over each paragraph's opening phrases rather than read it deliberately, sentence by sentence. We also do this while writing notes, dropping determiners, acronymming common phrases, and making references to characters/scenes in popular media. Now with the rise of vocal interfaces and ever shorter rounds of engagement, all this abbreviating will only exponentiate.
what exactly is going wrong with github aside from all the outages in the past x months? i honestly don't find it particularly disruptive to work/personal stuff. excuse my ignorant, maybe i don't use github enough to know what causes this fury...
fwiw - i do keep a fair amount of code in my computer. i don't push everything..
Just want to comment here. I hate reviewer leave a bunch of nits and stamp the PR. This is ambiguous, are these nits asks or just you opinions? What if I dont address all of them. Also folks need to take rejection lightly - your reviewer wants you to address something, thats really it.
If I've approved the PR, then these are changes I'm asking you to do, but not ordering you to do. You are free to say "no" to my request
> What if I dont address all of them
Then you will have decided that you don't agree with my recommendation and that's OK.
I only ever do this with people I trust - I am trusting you to review each of my nitpicks and make an informed decision if they're necessary or not. Generally I'd like you to reply to the ones you don't do with a reason though.
On Github, there is a way to leave individual comments in the code and in addition give a review a summary.
In addition to hitting the "approve" button, I typically spell it out explicitly in this summary: "Please check my comments and see if anything makes sense to implement."
Often, I also take this opportunity to point out the "one" most valuable change in my opinion.
If the developer of the code doesn't find any of the comments to be applicable/usefuly, they can always go ahead and merge it right away.
I try to tag the line-by-line comments with little labels like [Unimportant] or [Style] so that someone going through them has an idea of their (un)importance without reading the whole thing.
