Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Should You Still Learn To Code? | Prime Reacts" video.

I've been writing software professionally for 20+ years and I see future of software development that I'll be competing in communicating with normal people about their needs for new software. Once normal people feel that they can more successfully explain their ideas to AI than to me, then AI will take my job. Until then, I see future software development as I communicate with normal people and I then communicate with the AI and fix possible mistakes that future AI still makes. Right now, the AI can do pretty little compared to my output but I'm fully expecting future AI systems will be smarter and smarter every year and at some point the future AI will produce better code for a clearly specified requirement spec. I'm still not sure how long it will take until AI can communicate with normal people so well that AI can get the requirements directly from the normal people so they can cut me off the chain. I would have probably 20+ years until retirement and I have trouble seeing the future where my current work cannot be done with high level AGI which some will call ASI. And I can only hope that we switch to universal basic income (UBI) or something similar until the society collapses because so many people will be miserable otherwise.
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9:50 As I see it, when AGI is invented (my guess is still around year 2030), there's no need to have average humans do verification of generated code nor write tests or be prepared to generate hot fixes when something fails in production. AGI can do all that just fine. It will take years more until the AGI is better at everything than the best human at the same task. But most companies employ a lot of average people and replacing those with average level AGI is going to be pretty simple. And it will happen fast once AGI is cheaper to use than humans. For a couple of years, many people will feel that they can compete with AGI if they cut their salary. And that may allow having higher standard of living than the people that will not cut their salary on principle and will end up without a job as a result. But AI will get cheaper every year and it will not be long until AGI will take all jobs that a worker with average skill for that field can do.
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14:50 I think the biggest question will be if there are enough paying customers to make AI systems much smarter than GPT-4 et al, assuming that running smarter AI would be 10–100x more expensive because smarter AI needs so much computing power to run. If you had ChatGPT generate truly human-level responses but every response cost $1 or more, would you use it? If there are enough willing to pay for smarter AI, the progress will continue as fast as last couple of years. Right now it seems that computing costs raise exponentially compared to the intelligence that the system can show. It seems that there's no limit how smart AI system we could create even with the current design, but creating highly intelligent system would be insanely expensive.
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@lost4468yt I totally agree. Most software developers I know are not exactly stellar in communicating with normal people. As a result, AI will take over programming jobs once the AI is intelligent enough and cheap enough to run. If I understood correctly, Devin already costs hundreds of dollars to use for even simple tasks. That's not a threat to human programmers at that cost level, especially when Devin is not yet at even jurior developer level. However, give it a couple of years and it's at junior developer level and costs $0.10/h to run and trying to get any new human developers to senior level is going to be really really hard because all junior positions will be taken by AI.
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19:19 Am I the only one that read "ffmpeg out to ship with Windows" with a reaction that "Do you really think that ffmpeg should include all of Windows in the monolith, too?"
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Coding is already ultimately just prompt engineering. The current "AI" system we have to actually create the software are typically called compilers and the prompt is called source code. And because existing systems are so primitive, prompting those to output an usable software is really hard, hence the need for pro software developers. Future AI-based compilers may be able to understand instructions that are at or near the level of average human communication. And if such future AI can generate the resulting software rapidly and for cheap, it doesn't even matter if normal people fail to communicate their needs at first because rewriting pieces of software will be so cheap that it doesn't matter if there are misunderstandings and creating software that will be thrown away immediately when it has been made. The reason great human software developers work so hard to truly understand the needs of the end user before writing the code is because they want to avoid wasting work. If work is next to free, normal people can just iterate the full software and generate the spec by telling AI to replace the incorrectly guessed parts until the resulting software is deemed good enough for them. It all boils down to communication. The party with money is trying to communicate what they want and the current way to creating software is definitely a compromise because software development is so expensive right now. And most software ever done is broken in every imaginable way and just barely works well enough to be usable. Before AI, I was thinking that there will be always programming work available because we cannot ever fix even all the existing software for real.
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