"I work at NVIDIA during the day as a software engineer, and fiddle with AI for fun on the side"

Every single time. This article is concern trolling or advertisement trolling. I hope Nvidia's stock goes up due to the AI assisted existential crisis thoughts of this programmer.

While the definition changes, the expertise shifts and with it the field. Computers eventually became statisticians and data scientists. Printers became graphic designers.

What I found most interesting is that when positions undergo such evolution (printer -> graphic designer), a number of skills which were previously different expertise altogether, combine to create a new field. In other words, a new multidisciplinary field is born.

I think a good example is data science, the field at it's core is applied statistics using modern techniques such as data management and computing [0].

The question is, what is the new evolution of a programmer? Lots of folks like to use the term "engineer", and previously I thought this was silly. But now with LLMs, maybe that is a good descriptor; software engineer.

[0] https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/story-origin-...

Just raw code output is not really what anyone is paid for

There already existed billions of lines of code doing every possible thing imaginable that software is capable of doing and you could use all of it free of charge with the authors bending over backwards to make it as easy as possible for you to utilize.

Code that nobody understands and cannot be responsible for is just a flat out liability for the business, so these are not the same outputs.

And just going by raw numbers this would imply more than 100x productivity yet there is no tangible productivity change in big picture. 99 per 100 software devs are not fired, software is not getting better. In 600 days doing it the old way people could do any AAA game from scratch. If there is 100x improvement that should take 6 days now. Do you realize how insane even 10x sounds let alone 100x?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

[3] https://www.karriweaver.com/selvagenotes/weaving-computing-t...