Yes this is not particularly great aesthetically. But visually it is much better than what a lot of "full stack" (i.e. backend) developers can knock up, no matter how long you give them, as a lot of developers have no interest in making things look nice or even making them useable as long as they get to tick off another story point. It is definitely better than anyone without any experience of development could produce. It is also better than what an experienced designer could knock up in 30 minutes. It is also rapidly improving. I genuinely think that five years from now almost all developers front or backend will be obsolete, in the same way that buggy whip makers are now.

Then what do us software engineers do? If we are obsolete. College diplomas are worthless outside of self improvement. UBI isn’t coming. Even then, I’m in the country I live in through a working visa. If what you say is true… I see this on HN every day at this point. It fills me with enough anxiety. To me, as an engineer I like to think of different scenarios but there is no good scenario with AI. The worst one is, I lose my visa, job, house, at that point I lose 10+ years of my life. I’ve thought about just ending it at that point… talking to a therapist over that obviously, but there are days when that dread is there. There is the thread about the 3D artist replaced essentially by AI. Due to my visa I can’t legally work a blue collar job that will be safe until a robot comes. I don’t want to move back to a country I don’t even know anymore. Death doesn’t sound bad…

I feel you, but remember this, every technological upheaval has lead to a higher quality of life (mostly).

Meaning, you might be extinct as banging out code for a living, you might become assisted by the computer and focus on higher tasks like architecture design, communications and ... probably, rewriting half of what the AI did.

When I started, being a web developer was NOT a thing! There were some classical graphic designers that came from Print and started doing web stuff, and it was regarded like a dirty work.

Even today a lot of system developers will look at web developers and say this isn't programming.

Things are in flux, always, so embrace the change, don't deny it, and trust that there will always be something to be adding value to later on. The worst thing you can do is become a denier of change and lock yourself up.

That said, a certain common sense is required, like jumping off the band wagon and calling yourself a web3 crypto bro developer isn't going to do much for your resume. So sit tight, admire the show, and learn what you can.

None of us know how this is going to play out. I feel anxious too but let’s at least see what happens. Right now the world is still much the same as it was before LLMs arrived. Take some time to look at the flowers. They are still there.

I hope so... I really do. Looking at HN, and I understand nobody knows what the future holds, but to get to those flowers a lot of pain is going to come I think. For me, for other people... to me the most disgusting comments I've seen on HN has been SV people who say that I should have saved up enough as a buffer. That isn't the case for us SWEs who live abroad. Not all of us make SV salary. I could go on and on about this. I really just hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel for us in the short term, because if it is coming for our jobs in 5 years or less, many of us in society will be left for rot.

Life is always better than death. If things really do get bad, you won’t be alone. Take solace in the fact that there will be a huge community of people in the same boat as you with whom you can connect and work with.

It's going to raise the bar for people on a lot of fronts. Also, people will get bored with bland, boring fluff pretty quickly. That's always the challenge for marketing people: how do you stand out from the crowd? The generated movie is actually pretty bland and boring. It's mainly impressive because it almost but not quite looks realistic. It's basically a talking head moving its head between 5 or so positions with an expression less bland face narrating some generic marketing pitch. It's not bad. But it's also not very good. It's marketing box ticking "we got to have the talking head thing on the website somewhere" but it's not going to achieve any miracles in terms of engagement.

That's the problem with this stuff: it's formulaic, unimaginative, etc. Like a lot of real world marketing. If you look at what companies actually do, it's mostly pretty low quality and bad right now. For every well run marketing campaign there are hundreds of really poorly thought out and cringe worthy campaigns. Trying to imitate what the good ones do.

So, AI is going to run circles around that crowd. Just like any competent marketing person would. Except an AI will do it a lot cheaper. This is going to decimate the market for incompetent charlatans and create a new market for effective directors that can work the tools more effectively and cheaply.

That kind of is the point. These tools are really effective in the hands of a skilled professional that knows what to ask for and has a notion of what good and bad look like. It's an iterative process of asking and refining and directing that allows them to take a lot of short cuts.

Imagine Steven Spielberg directing a movie. But without the actors, camera people, post production, makeup, lights, CGI, and all the rest. That kind of is what this could be. How would somebody like that use AI to produce a movie. Well, he'd be directing and refining and iterating and be getting results a lot quicker than is possible now. Maybe he'd raise the ambition level a little and ask for things that are really hard right now. But in the end they'd produce a movie that is hopefully very entertaining and interesting to watch.

Now imagine a young inexperienced director with some vague ambition to be a better director. Would that person be able to produce something with the tools. Sure. And they'd learn a lot in the process. As you iterate, you better yourself. It's not a one way street. The more you engage with some activity, they better you get at it. We'll have a lot of very skilled directors in a few years. And they won't just be directing movies.

And now imagine a very cynical third rate director that produces straight to dvd content for the masses. No budget, hilariously bad scripts, actors that don't give a shit and can't act, etc. That guy is going to produce some amazing results. But there will be so much of it that it won't have any value.

Apparently Mr. Spielberg does exactly this: he seems to be on the advisory board of a company for generating movies from phone footage [1].

We will probably have tons of movies with Avatar-like graphics, unfortunately, also with Avatar-like story, since that's really the hard part: encapsulating emotion in the artifact.

[1] https://wonderdynamics.com/#team