Yesterday, I spent several hours figuring out if the business requirement for "within the next 3 days" meant 3 calendar days or 72 hours from now. Then about 10 minutes actually writing the code. Everyone thought my efforts were very valuable.

100%. What makes us what we are is the mindset (in this case, this kind of "attention to detail); that didn't change with (first) compilers, (then) scripting languages, or (future?) AI-assisted programming.

PS - Lawyers aren't even as detail-oriented as we are, it's surprising.

Really?

Maybe that's true in general because the spread in skill for being able to make a living as a lawyer and the same as a programmer depends far less on that attention to detail being a core skill. Still, I wonder if that also holds at the high levels of the profession. I get the impression that at the FAANG-level, lawyers would compare pretty favorably to programmers in detail orientation. In particular, patent and contract law.

That said, it's just my general impression of what lawyers get up to.

...Hmm, thinking about the contract law thing a bit more. Yeah, I do believe you are right. Lawyers aren't writing nearly as many extremely detail-oriented texts as programmers are on a day-to-day basis. Their jobs are much more around finding, reading, and understanding those things and building stories around them.

The GPT family has already shown more than 50x productivity increase by being able to solve not one, but hundreds and perhaps thousands of tasks on the same model. We used to need much more data, and the model would be more fragile, and finding the right architecture would be a problem. Now we plug a transformer with a handful of samples and it works.

I just hope LMs will prove to be just as useful in software development as they are in their own field.

> but it could make developers 50x productive

More likely it will translate the abstraction level by some vector of 50 elements.

If you make developers 50x more efficient, won't you need 50x fewer developers?

>If you make developers 50x more efficient, won't you need 50x fewer developers?

Developers today are 50X more efficient than when they had to input machine code on punched tape, yet the number of developers needed today is far larger than it was in those times.

But think how large of a job program that would have been.

Hundreds of people manually writing assembly and paid middle class wages. Not a compiler in sight.

In the years leading up to the singularity I’d expect to see a lot of Graeberian “Bullshit Jobs”.

Everyone knows they’re BS but as a society we allow them because we aren’t willing to implement socialism or UBI.

There's no reason to believe that we'll need another 50x more developers, though.

There isn't? I feel like there's still a ton of places software hasn't even touched and not because it doesn't make sense, but because no one's gotten to it. It's not the most profitable thing people could write software for.

Even if not, the original claim was that we may see a 50X decrease and I personally don't think that is likely, pre-Singularity anyway :)

Greater efficiency leads to greater consumption unless demand is saturated. Given software’s ability to uncover more problems that are solvable by software, we’re more likely to build 50x more software.

This happened with the introduction of power tools to set building in Hollywood back in the day - literally this same question.

People just built bigger sets, and smaller productions became financially feasible. Ended up creating demand, not reducing it.

Not necessarily. Demand may be much higher than available supply right now. Tech companies will continue to compete, requiring spending on developers to remain competitive. Software is unlike manufacturing, in that the output is a service, not a widget. Worker productivity in general has not decreased the demand for full work weeks, despite projections in the early 20th century to the contrary. Of course, it is possible that fewer developers would be needed, but I don't think it's likely, yet.