Freelance software engineering is a lucrative and dynamic field where skilled developers tackle diverse challenges, from bug fixes to full-stack feature development. In recent years, these workers have been among the first to incorporate AI systems into their workflow to help write code.
That raises an interesting question: could an AI system do the same job by itself? In other words, have software engineers effectively developed themselves out of their own jobs?
Now we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Samuel Miserendino, Michele Wang, and colleagues at OpenAI Research, who have developed a benchmarking tool that determines whether state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) can complete a set of real software development tasks that have been solved by humans. These human developers earned themselves $1 million in the process, raising the obvious question of whether AI systems could earn their crust alone.
