AI的未來將與現在截然不同

Alex Martsinovich

AI future will be nothing like present

There is a very popular opinion that coding agents just make senior devs more
productive. AI is just a tool that allows you to off-load the boring part of
writing code to the agent so you can focus on real engineering™. Nothing
dramatic is happening, just another addition to the toolbox.

And it's not like this isn't true. It's absolutely the case that great devs are
more productive with AI than ever. But in the long run this is irrelevant,
because developers as we know them are about to become a historical curiosity.

How do software engineers become "great"? Apparently, through a combination of
learning, working, tinkering, open sourcing, talking, and whatnot. All the normal
things we did before 2023, you know what I'm talking about. That was the journey
of every single great engineer of past and present. But this won't be the
journey of the future, because AI is already inserted in every single step of
this pipeline.

The world where you were forced to learn before you can do things quite
literally does not exist anymore. And I don't care if you still have what it
takes to read a book from start to finish, we're talking about
incentive structure change for our group as a whole. Sure enough, there will
be new things to learn and a new journey to take. Maybe it will be better or
worse, that's irrelevant for now. What's important is that it will be
different and it will produce a different kind of engineers.

We all know about valuable pre-2022 datasets, but there's also a very limited
stock of pre-2022 people. This means that the current situation where we have
thousands of competent engineers "just using AI to be more productive" is a
historical anomaly. We look at our own experience and extrapolate it, but
we're already a thing of the past. It doesn't matter how we use AI.

The current state of AI affairs simply can't continue past the current
generation. Something will have to change. Maybe we'll figure out a new way to
learn that is compatible with AI. Maybe AI will become so good that humanity
won't need people who understand how things actually work. Or maybe we'll move
universities off the grid Anathem
style. I don't know what it will be, but it will definitely not be what we see
now.

And yes, I know about fundamental technological advancements of the past. I don't care
how similar AI is to printing press, or steam engine, or photography, or internet,
it's also very different. AI is a genuinely novel technology and our generation
has a duty to figure it out. It might take updating our
etiquette or developing new
tech, but we need to take this seriously.