This is correct. AI is a huge boon for open source, bespoke code, and end-user programming. It's death for business models that depend on proprietary code and products bloated with features only 5% of users use.
I'm thinking a lot about this currently as a recent convert (as of Opus 4.5).
I think this post is on the right track, but like much of this discourse, it isn't really addressing how the technology will grow and the disciplines will adapt.
I'm by no means a doomer, but its obviously a huge change.
Generative coding models will never be 100% perfect. The speed of their convergence to acceptable solutions will decline in complex and novel systems, and at some point there will be diminishing returns to increasing investment in improving their performance.
The cost of software will fall precipitously and it seems unlikely that the increase in the value of programmers / engineers as they currently practice will offset the decline in the price in software. However, following the law of supply and demand, the supply and the amount of software produced will surely grow, and I think someone has to use the models to build software. I expect being trained in software engineering will be very helpful for making effective use of these tools, but such training may not sufficient for a person to succeed in the new labor market.
The scope of problem that a valuable engineer is expected to manage will grow enormously, requiring not only new skills in using generative coding/language models, but also in reasoning about the systems they help create. I anticipate growth in crossover PM / engineering roles. I guess that people who generalize across the stack and current sub-disciplines will thrive and valuable specialties and side-disciplines will include software architecture, electrical engineering, robotics, communication, and business management.
Some people will thrive in this new field, but it may be a difficult transition for many. I suspect that confusion about model capabilities and how to make the most of them and which people are doing valuable things will put a lot of friction and inefficiency into the transition time-frame.
Last thought, given how great models are at coding compared to general of knowledge, administrative, and bureaucratic work, I expect models are widely used to build systems that are supply shocks on such work. I don't think my argument above applies to such workers. I'm worried most about them.
Only if visas can only be paid through earned income or returns on investments made with such. Otherwise you're mixing people who bring value by contributing labor with people who contribute capital. Both can be nice, but should we treat them the same or independently?
You’re describing a tax on visa holders. That’s an interesting idea; I can think of some benefits and some scary drawbacks/abuses/perverse incentives to doing this as well. Has that been tried anywhere?
You can still require people to sustain employment in their field. Maybe companies can attest that a particular role classification requires a type of high-end talent. Auditing or otherwise verifying the attestation addresses the current allegations that H1-Bs are given for some jobs not requiring high-end talent.
Having managed people on H1Bs (and therefore been intimately involved with the process) the problems with switching jobs are not the requirements. You’re only allowed to switch to a similar job or a “better” job in a similar line of work.
The problem is that the mechanics of the switching process is extremely cumbersome. Some of the relevant documents are held by your current employer and not with you. The new employer effectively needs to apply for a new application minus the lottery system. There are significant weeks to months worth of delays for the new employers to get approvals, so most H1B employees that transfer are actually working provisionally on the basis of their new approval still being pending. They are very limited in terms of traveling etc during this period. There are significant risks to changing your job when you’re approaching the end of your current H1B visa expiry. This was particularly bad for Chinese applicants who unlike most other nations’s applicants who got 3 year approvals, usually only got 1 year approvals.
The real problem in switching jobs aren’t the policies but the extreme uncertainty and bureaucracy involved in doing so.
The huge fee won't solve the cheap labor problem, only shift the equilibrium. The USA Tech job market faces increasing competition from Canada and Eastern and Southern European countries with lower wages but competitive talent better than available from generalist outsourcing. The new policy accelerates this trend as companies will seek to transplant workers from the USA into other countries. This is bad for American workers whose status as the geographic center of the organization declines.
In my view, the real problem with the H1-B program stems from the sponsorship system which ties each employee to a particular company and role. Unable to leave their position without threatening their residency, they are more willing to demand abuse (e.g., long working hours, poor leadership, subpar compensation) than the labor market requires.
An improvement to the program would make it easier for people to change job. Perhaps the government could permit highly skilled individuals to qualify personally for the visa so long as they sustain employment in their field.
We told everyone to "learn to code", but now it's "ho sorry guys, you're still too expensive so either we'll hire a team of devs in Eastern Europe, or bring in an Indian dev who'll work for less than you".
Yeah of course people are not happy about such bait and switch behavior.
This is the same ridiculous dynamic that keeps American manufacturing in the dump. People whine about wanting local manufacturing, then complain it doesn't pay enough, and then are surprised that the rest of the world doesn't pay their price (and funnily enough, are mostly unwilling to bear the price themselves too).
My impression is that Americans are having a hard time coping with the fact that Europe and Japan aren't bombed out husks anymore, China has developed, and India is slowly getting there too. That's why over the decades, Americans have slowly gone through hating every one of them.
Thus, the socialism hating capitalists seek strong isolationist market controls, as anything that doesn't have them winning must actually be unfair.
> Perhaps the government could permit highly skilled individuals to qualify personally for the visa so long as they sustain employment in their field.
That is kind of how it works: when I was on a H1B I did look at switching jobs and had an offer from a company who would sponsor me. They need to file a Labor Condition Application to show that the position qualified for a H1B worker, but you can start working as soon as the LCA is approved if you already have the visa, while the I129 is processed.
That is mechanically different. All the leverage is in the hands of the companies seeking out cheap labor in that case.
I actually don’t think it should be like the poster you replied to suggested where the immigrant employee in question needs to maintain employment.
I would advocate that we structure employment visas like we do marriage visas which would mean we calculate whatever the total cost of the drain on our system would be if the new immigrant wasn’t working, charge the company that much to have them enter, and then the employee is free to quit immediately if they feel it’s in their interests
This is so cool! I'm someone for whom emacs has steadily expanded its role in my computing life, but who will never adopt a text-based browser as a daily driver.
Looking forward to the stable 4.0 release when I'll be prepared to use Nyxt and hope it can replace Firefox / Chromium as much as possible for me.
I also tried Nyxt, but I never stuck with it. I believe there are different UI contexts depending on the goal. For example, browsing the web is a different task and experience than editing text. That's why it comes naturally to me to use a mouse- and keyboard-driven application, Firefox in my case, for browsing and Emacs for anything text-related.
In other words, using the purely text-driven Emacs interface to browse multimedia web pages does not feel natural to me.
I'm in the same boat. Gave Nyxt a good try (as an ardent Emacs user), but I came to the same conclusion that it felt unnatural. Maybe I'll give it another go. Another big downside was the lack of extensions like uBlock Origin, Dark Reader, SponsorBlock, etc.
In some fields, sure, cite the 4chan source, ideally with an archived link.
Pure math tends to be much more conservative in citations than other fields though, and even when writing a paper about a longstanding math problem you wouldn't necessarily bother to include existing solutions. You reference the things you actually used, and even then you assume some common background knowledge for your audience and don't reference every little undergrad topology theorem or whatever. The point is to be honest with the reader about what was helpful for this work in particular, both to properly attribute things you actually used and to make any searches based on your work more targeted and fruitful.
You cite the form you encountered and if you're any good of a researcher you will have encountered the original 4chan anon post, Borges' short story, or Chomsky's linguistic paper.
It happens way more than you expect. In my PhD I used to cite unreviewed preprints that were essential to my work but simply for whatever reason hadn’t been pushed to publication. More common for long review like papers
And people who care more for gatekeeping will stick to academic echo chambers. The list of community driven medical discoveries encountering entrenched professional opposition is quite long.
Both models are fallible, which is why discernment is so important.
