Job displacement is a serious issue everywhere, but professional computer science majors should get ready for a tightening of the belt in their field.
A Semafor article published this month, written via Reed Albergotti, shows how excited Replit CEO Amjad Masad is to cut the company’s revenue in half while expanding profits by about 500% with AI agent.
Replit’s new tool would be to “write a functional software application without any messages yet in natural language” and this will usher in a new renaissance of computing, while costing some careerists their jobs.
These are the kinds of concepts that lead us to realize that AGI, to some extent, is already here. Much of the rest is semantic: will we have a “weak” AGI or a “strong” AGI?Or, probably, something in between, say, until 2030?
Covering the rapid innovation, Albergotti points out that Masaddidn’t think this kind of progress was going to be possible by this year.
“If you had listened to Masad in recent years, ‘Agent’ (Replit’s engine) would not deserve to be imagined yet,” Albergotti writes. “At one point he said that maybe it would not be imaginable in this decade. Even though he set up an “agent task force” to expand the product last year, he wasn’t sure if it would work.
But Anthropic‘s Claude 3.5 Sonnet demonstrated high marks on SWE-bench late last year, and the runaway progress on reasoning models changed the game.
Basically, Replit had been compiling a lot of in-house data representing its knowledge based on the coding process. But now, Masad realizes, that strategy is going to be obsolete as no-code technologies proliferate.
“The very fact that we can do this without our knowledge raises a lot of questions for the industry,” Masad said. “As long as we keep up the pace of innovation and progress, and continue to deepen it, I think we can continue to be ahead of the curve. But the business question is: what is the sustainable gap?
What, in fact, is the hole in a fashion business, when AI classifies all fields of the game? Is it basically a corporate brand?
The rest of the article shows that Replit’s business style is now something like Claude’s use for AI coding, leading to this Masad-quoting slogan: “we don’t care about professional coders anymore. “Albergotti’s claims have been attributed to Masad himself: the “Law of Amjad,” which suggests that every six months, the parties receive some feedback on the wisdom of the codebase.
Here’s another part of the article that I really liked: This is where Albergotti suggests that we can get guidance on AI and codeless progress from how visual interface operating systems evolved in the late 20th century. He mentions the “obscure” procedure of PC-DOS: you had to type commands in the command line interface to get things done. Then came Windows: an ambitious new visual design where all you had to do was click your mouse. The menu commands were written for you. They were nested and viewed seamlessly with just a few steps and clicks. And this has allowed many more people to use their private computers effectively.
The same goes for the no-code process. As a result, you no longer need to know how to code to create software.
Despite all the hype here and elsewhere, I’d say that no-code design is still a bit of a way off.
After playing around with some of the prominent no-code systems, what I realized is that unless the user tools are easily intuitive, the non-programmer runs up against the same problems they would have if they were trying to learn a computer programming language.
In other words, how do you get those visuals to do things?How do you embed variables in the interface even if you do not type lines of code?
I even ask ChatGPT about the best no-code tools, and it returned options like Wix and Squarespace. But website builders aren’t new. Software builders are much newer. And I would argue that they’re still new enough that most people can’t figure out how to use them.
We will want an application similar to the original Windows desktop GUI to bring in all those non-technical people and allow everyone to be a programmer.
At the same time, it’s not too early to think about those who suffer from this kind of change: the professional coders themselves. It is simple that these are other people with families and expenses to pay. It is the best time to think about how to finance human life when AI is capable of performing the maximum of our tasks.
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