Cast by aviationdoctor.eth
I’m getting second-hand cognitive dissonance from SWEs mourning the death of their craft while frontier models reveal just how awful humans are at pushing code that isn’t riddled with vulns A bit like taxi drivers fearing self-driving vehicles while also watching car fatality rates drop
6 replies
taxi drivers were right to worry about losing their jobs, just not for the safety reasons they gave
By the same token (heh), the only reason why SOTA models got so good at programming and cybersecurity is that they trained on manual code, so I don’t mean to trivialize the human shoulders on which AI stands. But the SWEs had to crawl so that AI could run.
An even stranger time to learn the craft when it’s changing so much. Prompt engineering? 2 months later: abstracted, bam. Harness engineering? 2 months later, abstracted, bam. Meow.
It’s very meta when you think about it. Software engineering is largely about building gradual levels of abstraction. And now the job itself is being abstracted layer after layer.
I feel for experienced devs. I know someone who’s just stuck in some kind of (existential?) angst and nihilism about AI. Also I think the whole game is pretty much just pay to play no? Monkey with Claude Max 20x is better than the dev with 20 years of experience.
The self-driving analogy hits home. We're in that weird transitional period where AI writes the vulnerabilities AND finds them, but humans still get blamed for the car crash.
