> Users think with data. Imagine you are a cashier at a grocery store. You learn how to calculate the amount by watching the owner do it for a couple of customers.
No one does that. You go to school and learn numbers and basic arithmetic, which gives you all the formulas you need. And even illiterate people work out quickly the minimum they need to do transactions.
> This ability to abstract logic is what separates developers from users
Then everyone is a developer as everyone can write a serie of instructions which abstract action from context. It just that the computer is very limited and you need to be very precise. But what it can do, it can do it very fast. What is instant for us is an eternity in CPU time, and you can do a lot with simple operations if you can do a great number of them.
> Just like a developer's brain can think about a problem and come up with a solution using code, o3 generates a program (i.e., metadata) on the fly to solve the problem
Again that's not happening. You think about a problem and solves it by constraining yourself to the basic operations you have available (the APIs, languages, libraries, platforms). The code is just the written form of that solution. You can't invent operations that does not exist, you can only group them under a new name. Each set of names is another layer of abstraction that make it easier to write the code. But the constraints don't go away.
The code is not how you create a solution. It's how you instruct the machine to replicate the solution you came up with.
Wouldn’t the end game here be that the AI just writes straight to machine code? It’s not like some devs are safe, those who maintain coding languages would be out of a job too. I think AI would find it awfully silly to have to code up a language, maintain it, then turn around and use that language to code with. Bare metal AI seems like the end game to me.
Why do developers continue to work on AI? Sooner or later (probably sooner) it will be adequate enough to remove the need for many or most developers.
I listened to this week’s All In podcast and the podcasters (all wildly successful tech entrepreneurs) were quite emphatic that they were seeking a world where they were not beholden to developers. They envision a world where non- or semi-technical employees create the desired software via AI; other AI agents would then figure out how to deploy it.
I feel like we are at a similar point to many other professions in the past facing a rapid technological change. But in the case of software development, developers themselves are hastening their own demise.
Just something to think on.
I wouldn't call o3 a reasoning AI yet. It gets better with its abstraction abilities but that's a still a very far step from reasoning and logic. Something like 10%
The interesting development of course being the approaching Age of reasonable software made by mere mortals and AI
These articles are like web3/crypto spams.
a little melodramatic at the end.
As with every openai release, I’d take it with try a grain of salt until it sees wide public usage.
So far every iteration of gpt since 4 has been pushed as a replacement for developers, but I have yet to feel that these tools are even consistently useful for my day to day.