We're not all Magnus Carlsen. Some of us are hacks or very ordinary 'players', and can be replace without a ripple on the pond.

> Code review becomes your post-game analysis. Magnus reviews his games with engines to learn from their superior analysis. You review LLM code to ensure it's actually correct.

If AI coding assistents really worked like Chess engines, they would review your code, pointing out issues and suggesting improvements.

And to what end? I sometimes get the impression software people want to optimize out everything so in the end, when there's nothing left to do, they can lay down and die.

This is a poor analogy. Magnus Carlsen stays because chess consumers decide to pay for humans even though they are inferior to Stockfish. BigCorp will always pick machine over you if they can.

AI won't replace you ... if you are the Magnus Carlsen of your field.

How you will get experience to grow into the Magnus Carlsen of your field is an open question, however.

Magnus Carlsen is a performer.

If people wanted to see "perfect" chess they would be watching chess engine championships. These feature some of the deepest and most thought out moves ever performed in chess. They also get a few hundred live viewers.

Magnus is objectively an inferior player to top chess engines. If there was a technological problem that requires the best chess abilities, nobody would be paying Magnus to solve that problem, they would be using a chess engine.

The analogy does not work at all, because Magnus is not paid to be a good chess player in absolute terms, but a good chess player relative to other human top chess players.

I agree with the conclusion but the premise is bunk. AI won’t replace you because it’s unsustainable and grossly overhyped, not because it’s as effective at general tasks or code review to the same extent that computers can play chess.

This is like saying automated delivery drones haven’t replaced Saquon Barkley, so they won’t replace you (delivery driver).

Imagine if you will that chess engines don’t exist but apps do. A chess game company might employ a small army of excellent chess players to play games against their customers. You load up your app, request a medium difficulty game, and get connected with James, who’s playing 10 games at once for $20/hour. It’s a decent gig. Customers pay a fee for the experience but it’s worth it to them.

But now let’s say Google publishes a groundbreaking paper that lays out the foundation of an automated chess engine. Should James be worried about his job? Carlsen’s going to be fine. I’m not so sure about James.

Crazy cope lately , understandable human emotions though

One thing that might not be apparent to non-chess players is that an experienced human (particularly a GM or Super-GM) with an engine can often beat the same engine or another engine that lacks human assistance. There are some positions, particularly in closed games where this can become more of a factor. It'll be interesting to see if a similar logic plays out in other fields. I imagine that some companies may be quick to automate away roles to save money, however, if you follow what we've learned about chess, there's likely an opportunity to make a bet (start a company) on AI-assistance outperforming full AI automation in some domains.

Mildly OT: but which one is the best (offline) frontend for Stockfish? Or just what do HN people use? There are so many options [0] from free to paid I wish there was a big comparison table somewhere

https://official-stockfish.github.io/docs/stockfish-wiki/Dow...

It wasn't that long ago that if you worked at an engineering firm, you needed a whole floor or floors of skilled draftsmen to produce the engineering drawings of your bridge, or your widget. Now an intern can do that in seconds with modern CAD software.

The same phenomenon is already occurring with AI. The concern is not that it will replace people, it's that it will make people so productive that it will create an oversupply of workers and thus kill a lot of jobs.

Nobody is paying money to watch you code

While I agree that AI wont replace you, the analogy is BS. Magnus Carlsen is not replaced by a chess engine because he is not paid solely because of his raw skills. As any professional player of any massive sport, he is an entertainer first. He gets paid only because people want to watch him play.

Even though cars are faster, there are still human runners.