Shirayuki2
new account of Shirayuki, lost old password
User ID: 4180
My impression is that the SOTA agents (Claude Code or Codex) can now, if given a sufficiently detailed specification and sufficient tools to validate their work, provide code that fully satisfies that spec for the vast majority of moderately long coding tasks now. This is a big jump in capabilities and obviously very powerful.
This does come with a lot of caveats that imo make the claims of 100% AI written code misleading at best; the creation of "sufficiently detailed" specs (which is famously difficult) fed to the agent and validation of the generated code is still dependent on engineering skill, and one-shotted code will generally be of worse quality than code written for the same purpose hand-crafted by a skilled engineer.
In the short term I think this is actually bullish for SWE, coding agent output is still bottlenecked by engineering skill and I don't believe we've yet saturated the demand for software. In the mid-long term it's unclear if there will still be value in having engineers in the loop, but imo end-to-end automation of software engineering is/requires AGI so my job isn't high up on my list of concerns in that scenario.
I am curious how you evaluate these life trajectories from the perspective of AI timelines.
I know you're pretty bullish on AI; even if you don't subscribe to short 5-10 year timelines, it would seem to me that if you believe in transformational AI, there would be a very high probability you would see some sort of strong AI by the time you are 60 or 70.
It would seem to me, then, that the optimal strategy is to front-load your life trajectory by not having children early. If AI goes poorly, then at least you managed to enjoy your 20s and perhaps your 30s without having to deal with the suffering of your children, while if it goes well it's unlikely that your age would be a barrier to having children, and indeed it would be much easier to raise children in such a world.
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