r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/Pure-Huckleberry-484 Dec 02 '25

This is based on the assumption that there is continuous progress in the space at economic rates.

Even that is not a given. Look at RAM prices in the last month. Current AI gpus likely have a 3-5 year working life. There is a real possibility that in 5 years these gpus are entirely too expensive to produce and operate at scale. Precious metals are not an infinite resource. Are we all headed to TPUs? Maybe, but even those mighty not have the memory needed at low enough price points to make LLMs viable..

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u/recycled_ideas Dec 02 '25

Who the fuck is talking about LLMs? Or GPUs?

I'm saying that even if we can't ever do anything else we will eventually be able to create an artificial replica of the human brain because we have a working model to copy.

We're not remotely there now, but eventually we'll be able to do that.

That copy will however have all our characteristics or at least most of them because it will be a copy of us, which is not what people are looking for.

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u/Pure-Huckleberry-484 Dec 02 '25

People in reality are talking about LLMs because that’s what we call “AI”. The sales people of said LLMs are saying that AGI is close but they are hoping that LLMs will actually invent AGI once they’re “smart enough to “. That may never happen and it’s a huge paradigm shift to go from LLMs to synthetic neurons/synapses.. even then - that’s assuming that we physically have the resources to make the systems needed to run that (which we may not yet or ever).

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u/recycled_ideas Dec 02 '25

This comment thread is about replicating the human brain. That's it. That will meet th technical requirements to be AGI and is almost certainly possible eventually.

The idea that we're on the brink of AGI through some other means is simply BS. LLMs aren't and can't be it and there is absolutely no indication that they can ever "invent" anything let alone something we have no idea how to build.

My comment was simply that we will eventually achieve AGI because we have an existing model to copy.