Cropped shot of computer programmers working on new code
Job loss is a serious problem around the world, but professional computer science students should prepare for belt-tightening in their field.
A Article Semafor published this month, written by Reed Albergotti, shows how Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, is enthusiastic about cutting the company’s workforce in half, while increasing revenue by around 500% through Agentic AI.
Replit’s new tool would be able to “write a working software application with nothing more than a natural language prompt” and it will usher in a new renaissance in computing, while costing some careerists their jobs.
These are the kinds of ideas that lead us to realize that AGI, to some extent, is already here. Much of the rest is semantics: will we have “weak” AGI or “strong” AGI? Or, probably, something in between, say, by 2030?
Accelerated deadlines
On the topic of rapid innovation, Albergotti points out that Masadd didn’t think this kind of progress would be possible by this year.
“If you had listened to Masad over the last few years, ‘Agent’ (the driving force behind Replit) shouldn’t have been possible yet,” Albergotti writes. “He said at one point it might not be possible in this decade. Even though he set up an “agent working group” to develop the product last year, he wasn’t sure it would work.
But Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet earned high marks on the SWE bench late last year, and the meteoric progress on reasoning models has been a game-changer.
Basically, Replit had compiled a lot of internal data representing its knowledge based on the coding process. But today, Masad realizes that this strategy will become obsolete as no-code technologies proliferate.
“Just the fact that we can do this without using our data poses a lot of questions for the industry,” Masad was quoted as saying. “As long as we maintain the pace of innovation and progress, and continue to deepen it, I believe we can continue to be ahead. But the business question is: “What is the sustainability gap?” »
What, indeed, is the gap in modern business, when AI levels all the playing fields? Will it mainly be about company branding?
No-code services: what is their use?
The rest of the article reveals that Replit’s business model is now something of a model for using Claude for AI coding, leading to this slogan, quoting Masad: “we don’t care about professional coders anymore.” There is also a reference to something that Albergotti says was attributed to Masad himself: “Amjad’s Law”, which suggests that every six months, parties get a certain return for grassroots knowledge of code.
The personal computing revolution
Here’s another part of the article that I particularly liked: This is where Albergotti suggests that we can get guidance on AI and no-code development from how visual interfaces operating systems developed in the late 20th century. He mentions the “obscure” process of using PC-DOS: you had to type commands into the command line interface to get things done. Then came Windows – a bold new visual design where all you had to do was click a mouse. The menu commands were written for you. They were nested and easily visible with just a few points and clicks. And this has enabled many more people to be able to use their personal computers effectively.
It’s the same with the no-code process. Suddenly, you no longer need to know how to code to create software.
Practical applications of No-Code: obstacles remain
Despite all the enthusiasm here and elsewhere, I would say that accessible design without code is still a bit far away.
After playing with some of the major no-code systems, I realized that unless the user tools are easily intuitive, the non-programmer runs into the same problems they would have if they were trying to learn a language computer programming.
In other words, how do you make these visual elements do things? How to integrate variables into the interface even if you don’t type lines of code?
I even asked ChatGPT about the best no-code tools, and it returned options like Wix and Squarespace. But website builders aren’t new. Software creators are much newer. And I would say they’re still new enough that most people don’t know how to use them.
We’ll probably need an application similar to the original Windows desktop GUI to onboard all these non-technical people and allow everyone to be a programmer.
At the same time, it’s not too early to think about the victims of this type of change: professional coders themselves. It’s easy to forget that these are people with families and bills to pay. It is high time to think about how to finance human life when AI is capable of doing most of our tasks.