Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
Finally free from the Golden Handcuffs, I’d use my extra time to do something I’ve always wanted, like music production, which would also inevitably be taken over by AI.
That’s something that we’re probably going to have to figure out quickly. We won’t though given the lack of accountability of those in power.
If SWEs are losing their jobs you can imagine a lot of other white collar workers will be as well. This would mean you will be competing with many other people in other fields. The large number of unemployed will reduce demand for goods produced by those companies that are also laying off workers due to automation.
This is a bit of a tragedy of the commons where companies adopt the technology to increase profits but actually disrupt the economy, potentially leading to their own collapse.
It’s impossible to really prepare for this scenario because it requires you to simultaneously be ready for retirement in the next few years but also riots. I’m just hoping for the best for now.
We won’t though given the lack of accountability of those in power.
That is not an inevitable condition.
Ai-herder or Robot-farmer or Llama-raiser etc etc
devs still needed to ensure code is sane and not some insane hallucination.
Spend their days (and some nights) tweaking and refining AI prompts to get the stupid thing to generate the software that the dumbass product manager wants and the user does not.
You know…
Pretty much the same thing they do now.
Yeah. The whole job is figuring out just the right away to say “pretty please” to the computer. The ways it’s done changes every decade or so. The fact that it’s a huge pain in the ass has yet to change, in spite of decades of marketing promises.
There are a lot of dumb takes here in the comments
Developer displacement works the same way it does for any other technology
The problem is not that the job is eliminated but that fewer are needed per unit of output
My startup only has 4 engineers because we don’t need 5
This trend will continue until the SV hiring bubble bursts
Even if we stipulate that, I’m not convinced it’s a big deal. The software field continues to grow like crazy and we can never find enough people to hire. If ai gets good enough to take the place of some of that hiring, fantastic!
Thats a whole lot of heavy assumptions, doing some really heavy lifting.
Retire. All I ever wanted to be was a programmer. If I can’t do that anymore I’ll just retire. I’m saving/investing every penny I can just in case.
Same. If I can retire before my job is irrelevant, I’ll work on my own projects on my own terms. If I don’t, at least I have a nice pile of assets and can coast with another job.
That said, I don’t think people like you and I will have problems, because we’ll adapt. It’s the “programming is just a job” crowd that would have a lot of issues.
Coding is just a part of the overall “programming” problem. Most problematic areas are in translating what the customer wants into code (requirements analysis), modifying code to overcome specific constraints, integration, etc and etc
Don’t forget testing the code to make sure what is delivered actually matches what the customer wants.
Well before that level of complexity is achieved, the jobs of CEOs and Managers will be gone. Question is, will the Ai CEO really want to risk the safety of a review, knowing that it IS the company. Pump and Dump won’t do it any more. Then CEOs need to actually work for their money. (Or well… get replaced by an Ai)
The plan is to rehire them back temporarily to babysit the AI and fix all the AI generated crap. Then realize it was cheaper to actually just have the devs make code. Then hire them back at a reduced rate on a more permanent basis with the understanding that they believe the code will still be partially generated by AI and cleaned up by the same people and they aren’t paying top tier for third hand AI slop.
They’ve been doing the same thing in IT for decades, just replace AI with outsourcing.
Same in a lot of other industries too. This is literally how capitalism functions. This is how they reduce costs when they can’t find any other way.
Except it is often more costly to do this in the long run, so it’s a fiscally stupid move that corporations seem to make over and over again.
I think part of what perpetuates it is, the people making the decisions don’t stay there long term, so they never really face the repercussions.
Some more stable places seem like they may have realized this though and keep things all or mostly in house.
They’ll either move up the food chain to higher-touch work where AI can’t compete, or they’ll do other things.
Keep in mind that most devs aren’t really all that good at their jobs, so it will probably be economically beneficial for them to do something else. I say this as a long-time hiring manager with many decades of experience in the field.
It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes
Only if you believe the hype. It can do that in best-case scenarios when the requirements are written as rigorously as code, or where it’s replicating a common pattern.
Do they just become homeless?
During previous layoffs, a lot of them left the field, and some of the rest founded startups. It wasn’t always the case that firms were founded by teenaged sociopaths with strong family connections to VC funding. There was a time when they were founded by people who knew how to do things.
Last time I used it the code it gave me wouldn’t actually run. After 6 iterations and fixing the rest it kind of worked. In theory that should only get better but I’m not sold yet.
I would never have expected it to run, be shocked if it did. You use AI to get over humps, get new ideas and approaches. It’s excellent for time saving in those cases.
AI isn’t ready to replace coders, but it’s quickly going to make a dent on the numbers needed.
I see your thought process there. But I’m not sure modern IDEs led to less devs. Time will tell but I just few most of this as vapor ware atm. Let’s also look at the fact that chatgpt is hemmoriging money even with high price tiers. It is possible this just burns itself out.
AI isn’t ready to replace coders, but it’s quickly going to make a dent on the numbers needed.
Let me push back on this a bit - this belief comes from the assumption that I, as a hiring manager, need more team members because they can only type so fast.
My actual need for separate development team members is to achieve a bench depth of two people in each of the seven specializations necessary to keep my employer un-bankrupt. (My annual bonus is better if I somehow miraculously cover the 14 specializations necessary to make us never look like idiots. But these are wishes, not miracles.)
I don’t currently see any sign that AI will ever materially affect the number of people I need to hire.
In contrast, the specific individuals I hire have massive impact on how many others I need to hire. One person with three specializations brings me massive savings.
But I pay my people to understand our organizational domains of expertise. LLMs don’t bring any new understanding whatsoever into the organization.
That will never happen, or at least with how ai currently works. It’s basically a glorified autocorrect, it uses the same technology underneath.
But presuming it does, yes. We will have to go to another industry, like AI prompting. Coding is a tiny part of professional software development.
Yes, exactly this.
When compilers came along, some people honestly thought it would dumb down programming so much that anyone could do it.
When high level programming languages came along, they rejoiced again - now finally anyone can make software.
When Intellisense meat you no longer had to remember variable names, write your own imports and could guess how most libraries work, the bells rang out once again in celebration.
And now we have AI, it’s cool but really just another step like all those steps before. For me, it’s a replacement for the documentation I never read anyway. I can ask an AI a stupid question rather than bothering a human developer.
These days it’s my job to manage a small team of developers - when I ask them why they wrote a stupid thing that makes no sense, 90% of the time, the answer is that an AI wrote it for them.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
What are you using to get Claude to write for you? I’ve been using it to write a full stack Go/javascript app but it needs a lot of handholding.
I’m using Cursor. It’s done some very impressive things for me. https://www.cursor.com/features
There will always need to be a human operator to guide the machine.
Some days, all I do is code.
So your instincts are correct. You need to learn the rest of the job, before the part you are doing is replaced by robots.
Lots of my colleagues in SWE use full blown AI development tools.
We all use full blown AI development tools. Before that we had other tricks that did the same thing.
We must beware mistaking the instrument for the musician, or we get sold a broken old instrument that doesn’t perform miracles outside it’s master’s hand.
I even used Claude AI to write an entire C# application, I did ZERO coding, yes, literally nothing! I have NEVER coded in C# before, I gave it all requirements, worked with it like a project manager… it created a full blown working application that was beyond my expectations.
I achieved the same in 2000 with a home grown framework, and again in 2006 with Ruby on Rails.
Astonishingly fast prototyping is a quarter of a centrury old.
- How are you enjoying maintaining this app in production? (Or is it not there yet, because it’s just very nice for a prototype?)
- How did Claude AI do at deploying it?
- Are you satisfied with Claude AIs answers to your boss’ traffic analytics and load balancing questions?
- When will Claude AI let you know how the A/B tests proved out for optimizing sales?
- Or doesn’t it do those things yet?
Computers are replacing us. They’ve been at it since their inception.
Keep learning the trade and you’ll find there’s a metric ton more that computers cannot help with, than that they can help with. That will get better. I’m working at making it get better.
I figure that my learning how to train the computers is job security. I didn’t count on it being a harsh lesson in how long it’s going to be before computers get not stupid.
I do have a plan for when I automate myself out of a job. It’s just not a plan I’m really counting on, because I’ve been trying for decades and I only have so many decades left of doing this.
I’ve been constantly advised to have an exit plan, for when the computers replaced me, for the entirety of those same decades.
Most often by the same people who want me to charge less.
Funny thing, that. Take care who you listen to on this topic, and what their motives are.
My motive is to (continue to) charge the rest of you a shit ton of money before the AI finally replace us.
It does help me if you all don’t buy into the bullshit that CEOs have been spouting about replacing us all.
We’ve all been undercharging for about 3 years due to it.
AI hasn’t accomplished jack shit, but a lot of you have accepted lower pay than you probably should.
I make very good money, but I can’t help but notice that it would be a bit more, if the rest of you would wise to the scam and raise your own prices.
And if it’s going to be full-blown AGI then we’ll become AI psychologists.
Glorified autocorrect… YES! It’s a really good analogy that i will use to temper the expectation of my boss. Also: AI hallucination is just a fancy way to say ’it’s a wrong answer’.
I’ll take what money I have stashed away and buy a nice secluded parcel of property with dummy low taxes away from people.
I’ll grow my own food, hunt, forage, etc.
I’ll do odd jobs to fill in the gaps when needed. anything from tech consulting to roof repairs.
I’ll refuse to use any technology unless a job requires it.
and I’ll wait for the inevitable collapse of technological society because a vulnerability was baked into the AI every company is using and nobody knows how to fix it.
I refuse to be a part of a system that denies me a seat at the table.
Combine harvesters are used to till, plow , sow seed , spray, water, reap and manage farms and most livestock have dedicated automated farming tools like cow milkers, feeders, shearers, etc. How long before no humans needed to hunt or forage or farm? When food is even cheaper to produce( of course the ai overlords and ai royalty ) but will hunger games everyone to get the artificially shortage and scarcity farm for vast amounts of resources to select groups.
If it is able to replace software devs, it’s probably able to replace 95% of the jobs that require mainly using your brain.
Yeah it’s being applied to software devs right now but it’s already capable of replacing nearly every manager/supervisor in existence.
It can make schedules, direct tasks based on inventory, and balance a budget. Have a human backup available on call to fix hallucinations and you’re golden.
You seem like someone who hasn’t really worked in software development.
Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.
You’ll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
That’s still a lot of software engineers displaced in the hypothetical scenario. That means you only need the devops and qa engineers, and a solution architect or principal engineer or whatever your company calls that sort of role for the analysis and design part.
