Do you feel this way about every automation you create? I do know some old school sys admins who felt this way about a lot of infrastructure automation advancements, and didn't like that we were creating scripts and systems to do the work that used to be done by hand. My team created an automated patching system at a job that would automatically run patching across our 30,000 servers, taking systems in and out of production autonomously, allowing the entire process to be hands free. We used to have a team whose full time job was running that process manually. Did we take their jobs by automating it?

Sure, in a sense. But there was other work that needed to be done, and now they could do it.

The whole reason I like programming and computers and technology is precisely because it does things for us so we don't have to do it. My utopia is robots doing all the hard work so humans can do whatever we want. AI is bringing us one step closer to that, and I would rather focus on trying to figure out how we can make sure the whole world can benefit from robots taking our jobs (and not just the rich owners), rather than focus on trying to make sure we leave enough work for humans to stay busy doing shit they don't actually want to do.

Humans have been minimizing how much work is needed to get a certain level of output for as long as we can track. It's civilization. Should we go back to farming by hand with hoes, to maximize labor used? Go back to streetlights that are individually lit? The society that falls behind on automation becomes poorer, and eventually just dies, as even the people born there tend to choose to leave to higher productivity places. It happened to eastern europe, it happens to the Amish. To any poor society which gets emigration. Doing more with less has always been exciting.

Right now it's not clear in which direction everything is involving and that's why people experiment with handing all their data to random agents, figuring out how to store and access context, re-use prompts and other attempts to harness this tech. Most of these will maybe be useless in a year as they might be deeply integrated into the next wave of models but staying on top of the development has always been part of the fun of working in this field.

I think both groups (pro vs anti) will be a bit surprised when the long-term data shows productivity gains were modest on average and producing quality software still needs care/human attention, even with the support of advanced, frontier models. Same job as before, now we just have a power drill instead of a screwdriver. Some people build houses that stand for hundreds of years, others less so.

At the end of the day, the more automation, the more people you need making sure things work.

There's always going to be a minimal bottleneck for how much an engineer can oversee if they need to do zero implementation.

We're not as far from that point as people think.

Most languages most things are developed in are 10x more expensive than languages of yore.

Rust has a bad reputation for being hard, but it is actually quite expressive.

Less than 50% of what engineers do is code.

IBM was famous, in the early 2000s, for the average dev writing one line of code per day on average.

We're just going to move to a world where the average dev spends <10% of their time coding, but there's likely to be x times more work, so it mostly evens out.

a worker is just the sum total of all work related context. to collate, verify and organize this context is just asking to be replaced.