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Developer Jobs Are Safe

6 points by matt3210 ↗ HN
Give a non-technical (cant even shell) project manager access to ChatGPT-9001 and they still cant make anything useful. Our jobs are safe people! Learn to use it as a tool to make your job easier!

Imagine you last non-technical manager trying to prompt something like "Design a full stack for an API that will unify financial APIs" and watch it probably do nothing meaningful while they get frustrated that they aren't meeting ramp with their few sentences.

9 comments

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dexwiz
I tell people this all the time. My job really isn’t coding. My job is translating fuzzy business requirements into structured schemas and procedures. Coding is just a tool I use to accomplish this.
RAFisherman
System design...that's the hard stuff. Nothing better than having GPT solve easy problems for me. I still have to do the hard work.
rvz
It only means less engineers than before. For a team of 10 engineers split with 5 juniors and 5 seniors, it will be just left with only 2 senior engineers.

Both of these level of engineers are affected.

matt3210
That just frees them up to work for competitors
lisasays
Give a non-technical (cant even shell) project manager access to ChatGPT-9001 and they still cant make anything useful

This plainly isn't true ("can't make anything useful"), given the examples we've seen. It might be buggy, or not integrate so well (or at all) with other stuff you have. But it obviously can generate code that does useful stuff.

Lack of shell skills is a non-issue (anything that can be done in the shell can be done over a webform).

ManlyBread
The fact that useful code can be generated is about as meaningful as saying you can find useful code in a search engine. A non-technical person won't even know where even to begin with utilizing it.

OP is right, nothing will really change as long as there's no tool that can turn a Jira ticket into a pull request.

lisasays
What you're talking about is trivially within reach of GPT:

Automatic programmer: GPT-4 powered Github Issue solving with Pull Requests Project

I've created a tool that reads Github Issues and creates a Pull Request to complete it. It uses GPT-4, of course. There are a bunch of reasoning steps the tool does, but it can be much, much better with better steps and prompting. It's just a Proof of Concept. I haven't even added Langchain, yet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/11upow0/automatic_p...

And here's another: https://github.com/irgolic/AutoPR

You can keep shifting the goalposts if you want - "but the code will be buggy", "but it can only do simple stuff, doesn't understand the broader systems architecture" - but all indications are that, on a plug-and-play level, GPT is able, to at least some extent, to do what non-techies think of as "programming".

It seems you are also underestimating what non-technical managers can do. Yes, some are utter dunces and technophobes. But most are not and can run basic shell scripts and even know what "files" are.

aristofun
For all those carried away by this ai histeria — which product/service would you prefer for yourself, created by dumb manager and smart ai or created by experienced programmers?