these guys are just trolling you.. very uncharacteristic for HackerNews

I was in a similar situation to you during the dot com crash. For years I'd been reading about how all coding jobs were getting outsourced to India, and I was dreading entering the job market.

I never had any trouble with my job being outsourced, and years later I looked back on it and realized that the opposite had happened: Now it costs almost as much to hire a top dev in India/China as it does to hire one in the USA or Europe. The best of the best come to the USA and make a ton of money, and the incredible value that software engineers create feeds back into a healthy job market all over the world.

For one thing: Current "AI" can't actually program. You can't go to ChatGPT and give it an app idea and get something out. It can help you auto-complete code, but you're still the one programming.

For another: If we develop strong AI that can program (and for whatever reason it decides to hang out and be our slave..) the job of a computer programmer will go from what it is now (translate detailed technical requirements into working computer code) to something a little higher up the management chain. A coder 30 years from now might be doing a job that's more like what today's product managers or CTOs do. Rather than put you out of the job, it would just make you vastly more wealthy and productive.

It's already here: https://gptlabs.us/upg

The profession went from writing machine code by hand to auditing "auto-generated" machine code from assembly. It led to more jobs, not less. And so on with every generation of programming languages. With every new higher-level language with new abstractions, we're often just adding another chain to the inputs to a machine code translator.

If you showed a programmer from the 1950s python syntax and told them that all you have to do is write these words to build a program, they'd think it was artificial intelligence.

I would highly recommend the book by Cal Newport, so good they can’t ignore you. It lays out a framework for developing rare and valuable job skills that you can use to navigate a fast changing tech landscape. It has been immensely helpful to me and a great guide for how to navigate sea changes like this over decades

I second this. It is an outstanding book. In my opinion, Cal’s books stand alone in the genre of “self help”. Over 12 years of a career so far and his advice has endured.

It's a parlor trick. It's not sentient and it won't produce correct code if you push it beyond stuff it's been fed good examples of.

It's remarkable how far it's possible to go with a statistical language model like this, but it's not going to take your job.

No, it doesn't mean that and it's not worth worrying about.

If, as lots of people here are claiming, this stuff is going to "replace entire industries" it's going to take a while and will alter society radically, in ways nobody can predict and you can't really prepare for. If that happens you're on the roller coaster with the rest of us. Might as well keep doing what you enjoy and are good at for now.

However, it's much more likely that people are just getting carried away with an exciting (and incredibly impressive) technological advance and spectacularly underestimating the scale of the outstanding challenge. I certainly wouldn't recommend making major life choices on the assumption that AGI is imminent.

You probably don't have anything to worry about in the short-term. It'll just be one adaptation after another.

Most of us senior devs don't write that much code anymore anyway so there is work involved in tech without coding.. although to get here we all wrote code. I'm not sure how juniors will get trained up in the future

Probably but that dosen't mean you can't use the tools and start doing something else.

Not if VR and smart sex toys have anything to say about it!

It’s going to take a while. You can probably get a good 10 years in.