Futurology

Gottschlich, who claims that Merly’s tech finds bugs in code and fixes them by itself (but who doesn’t shed light on how that works), is thinking bigger. He sees AI one day taking on the management of vast and complex libraries of code, directing human engineers in how to maintain it. But he doesn’t think large language models are the right tech for that job.

I see this being a logical next step too. Something deepmind-ish that has an explicit representation of the rules of the code could be strong where LLMs are weak, and could be very powerful in combination with them. I can envision specifying which working program you want becoming the new bottleneck. I kind of think we should stop there, because that's one step from singularity shit.

For Iansiti, it’s not just about getting existing developers to produce more code. He argues that these tools will increase the demand for programmers because companies could get more code for less money. At the same time, there will be more coders because these tools lower the barrier to entry. “We’re going to see an expansion in who can contribute to software development,” he says.

Ahh, Jevon's paradox! That's in no way guaranteed to happen though, because it depends on an elasticity of demand higher than unity. It's not clear to me how many new projects exactly a drop in the price of code would lead to. On one hand maybe exhaustively coding every aspect of complex problems a-la-Cyc will make a comeback, but on the other it's possible demand is inelastic, and the more intuitive thing would happen, which is that coders start being pushed out. (Either way it's great news for everybody else, though)