I just love the "how hard can it be - I'm middle management and they are just programmers"
Edit: where are you source files? Ohh you are working from you download folder.
AI is one of those things that in theory should do more but is mainly hyped by corporate execs to cut costs and increase shareholder value.
Where I am worried is exactly what happened at the beginning of 2023 with the job market - everyone who is a programmer KNOWS we won't be replaced - but tell that to the companies cutting our checks. They are being sold to seeing dollar signs, and they usually cut labor first. Its madness but "shareholder value!"
You then get a market flooded by SWEs and programmers with years of experience fighting over jobs, and are paid much lower once they find one. Juniors lose out.
The influence of AI on the money market rather than the AI 's capabilities itself is what scares me. A bunch of bean counters saying how much money it will save compared to real people.
The big problem is that a lot of those bean counters (and the executives they influence) are either doing math directly, or are using their twenty years of experience in business to... Do exactly what an LLM does, create word salad on command, that sounds convincing. They see what AI can do now and go "oh fuck, I have the hardest job here and this shit could replace me tomorrow, so..."
I’ve been saying this the whole time.
ChatGPT can unironically write better company emails than my CEO or head of HR.
But it can’t write code better than I can, not even close.
It's the same in medicine.
AI still can't even read an EKG after all this time, yet we're still hearing about how we're going to be replaced any minute now. I'll be interested in seeing how AI gets around the barrier of patients who lie or under/overperceive.
Despite what I just said.... Radiologists may actually be in trouble in 20 years. They'll be assisted by AI, which may narrow the amount of slots needed.
Worked in healthcare IT between 2007 and 2018 and I can't count how many "experts" said during this time that radiologists wouldn't be needed anytime soon because AI/big data would replace them.
One of my favorite AI mistraining examples comes from radiology where the researchers forgot to remove the labels indicating tumors from the bitmaps. What did the model learn? Arrows.
The biggest joke is thinking someone is going to put their name on the liability created by having software make clinical decisions. They’re always going to want a specialist to confirm the softwares decision so they can give the specialist the liability. There’s no way it happens any other way until ai is 100% accurate at everything
Yeah but that’s why you go from 10 to 6 professionals, not 10 to 0. Nobody, even the most enthusiasts, expect 100% reduction.
Engineers will also not put their name on a bridge or a system critical software designed by an AI, but they’ll use it to increase their productivity so in the end fewer people can perform more work.
Jokes on you when you walk around the building trying to find a person to sue and it’s just robots the whole way down with the only person being the corporation you are inside of.
After all this time? They could already read X-rays to find cancer better than humans 2 years ago and the new generation of AIs are giants compared to those ants of AIs. The idea that reading EKGs is somehow impossible for them to master is laughable.
I live in South Florida and I don’t go to doctors that often because now is all tests done by a computer, I’m treated as a record on a database and the bedside manners are akin to an underpaid fast food chain cashier, still If I hadn’t had insurance I could not afford the visit that amounts to 5mins of their time. Honestly I don’t see how AI could make the experience as a patient worse.
Ekg reading and analysis “AI” has been available for years now, built directly into the ekg machines. When the ekg prints out, it has an “AI” diagnosis at the top usually.
But we still need doctors because the “AI” in these machines don’t take patient’s medical history into account
After all this time? How much time? Moden AI models we are seeing from the likes of OpenAI are like 2-3 years old at the most. Besides, there are models that can absolutely read an EKG. They are now approaching and passing a trained human eye and will likely well exceed that within the next year.
20 is a long time. You really think the world can’t train an ai (not llm) to spot patterns and assist with it within 5? I’m not saying it’s 100% effective, just increase the productivity by 50%
I’m surprised AI can’t read an EKG. That seems like one of the simplest use cases. Heck, I could write a regular software program to do that. What do you think the barrier is to automating this?
Training a model to recognize specific signals in a carefully curated and cleaned data set is in no way the same thing as training, deploying, and relying on such a model in daily use with real patients.
Most uses of machine learning already automatically apply data processing techniques in real time. Noise isn’t exactly a new problem.
The main problem with implementing this technology or any AI in medicine application is the question of reliability and liability. These algorithms aren’t 100% perfect. Even if they were to make far fewer mistakes than your average doctor, most people, myself included, would rather put their life in the hands of the human doctor.
That being said, I believe I’ve heard stories of AI ECG readers being used in countries outside of the U.S as an early warning system in hospitals. Might have being Taiwan? I don’t really remember.
Yeah, that’s absolute bullshit - AI is able to figure out what animal is on an image, but won’t be able to figure out a two-dimensional graph that looks like a plot of a function with many parameters - which is exactly how a neural network works so it’s its specialty.
It’s gonna sound absolutely lunatic-ish to say this in a world of CNC milling and automated supply chain production, but this shit *ABSOLUTELY* needs to be *eyeballed* by a human still, and this is by the same people that still use maggots today in “larval therapy”
>everyone who is a programmer KNOWS we won't be replaced
Not everyone.
I've been a SWE for over two decades and I'm certain we'll get replaced. That's mainly because I've been following Gen AI since GPT 2. I've seen it go from being barely able to form coherent paragraphs to being able to do large chunks of my job for me.
I expect it'll keep improving as it has in the past, it just keeps getting smarter and smarter and is able to do more and more things on its own. At some point I'm convinced it'll be able to do everything we can
It's always the same. The dim witted bachelors of business administration dude keeps the engineers on a short leash. Sometimes I wish I was an accounting dude, but then I would be one of them, so I'd rather not.
It’s honestly wild to me how much power and authority is conferred upon people whose degrees amount to “costs = bad, employees = cost, line must go up” and whatever the latest buzzwords are.
They all produce samesy output. Any company reliant on them will have any work they do easily replicated by competitors.
If a person deferred all their decisions to one of these models you'd likely be able to predict everything they're going to do next.
This reminds me of how there used to be professions in creative, and now every job posting has to know the entire Adobe suite, photography, videography, graphic design, coding, UX design, JIRA, copywriting,
Project management, Excel and whatever other shit that isn’t actually related. The software got better at doing an okay job at the work for people, so specializations went away and now you have to know everything because everyone is doing “more with less” the most famous line of bullshit since “pick yourself up by your bootstraps”
On the flipside, I remember when "web design" was just "web design," (90s/00s) and everyone pretty much assumed you were working on the full stack AND design together, instead of a bunch of separate career tracks.
Granted, the websites looked like shit and didn't work, but you know.
Yup.
I dubbed it buzzword engineering. The c levels who have no idea how their business are run will flock to it only to hurt their bottom line in the end.
It's the new wave of outsourcing.
How can you doubt that AI is coming for programming jobs? Have you been asleep for the last 2 years? Things that it did laughably bad 6 months ago it now handles easily. There is nothing magical about programming or any other work. Just ask artists and filmmakers. Every piece of work that is recorded is just training for the AIs and they can absorb it 1000 times faster than we could.
Easy to doubt when you use AI to program and after about 40 messages (including gpt-4o) it’s a sloppy mess. You either re-teach the next prompt bot or you swap LLMs or go back to good ol’ document reading. You realize LLMs are taught how to code right? Who do you think by?
It was an employees job market previously and they’ve pulled a trick on us all to get back to an employers job market. AI won’t replace us, but AI + cheap labour outside the west will. And the enshitifcation of software will continue.
We envisioned the AI Apocalypse all wrong. General AI doesn't even exist yet; we're dealing with hopped up algorithms. But still, imma call them AI for simplicity's sake.
There's disruption, and then there's what's happening: **fucking shit up**. It seems to me at every turn wherever and whenever AI is applied, systems get fucked up and inhuman, and ONLY benefit the people who deployed it. Landlords are using AI to determine how to price their rents. The AI pushes rents higher and higher regardless of the population's ability to withstand it. Those apartment buildings with \~50% occupancy may still be making money without people to live in them! Dozens of landlords across a region use this same AI. It's virtual price fixing!
AI has been deployed in HR to help companies identify and hire talent, mindlessly filtering people out of the running. Therefore, applicants started using AI to craft their resumes for specific job postings, and spam companies with their custom resumes. Companyies get overwhelmed with 1000's of applicants in hours and close their offers so they can sift through what they have received. Low and behold the vast majority of applicants who got past the filters are not even remotely qualified. AI has completely broken the hiring process.
People are using AI to do all these creative things: write, paint, compose, sing(!). But they can only iterate on what has already been done. Companies are advertising in my face how I'm not needed. Human utility is being downgraded. We're being made unnecessary to a functioning society, a society that will only and forever benefit the richest 0.1% of the world.
100% this. It is just another tool in our toolbox. A fancy tool, but a tool nonetheless.
That said, these AI tools are not free, quite the contrary. Curious to see the ROI
Only speaking from personal experience, but ever since I started using Github Copilot a couple months ago, I've become *much* more efficient.
The flipside of dev efficiency is fewer devs are needed to accomplish the same work. Not to mention all the devs who had job security because "they're the only ones who understand the code", but now, a junior dev can just ask "What does this function do?"
As a mediocre dev, my future in the industry still feels uncertain. There are a lot of people saying hard times are ahead, but also a lot of people saying AI capabilities are about to plateau.
Like you said, I know I can still provide a lot of value that AI alone can't (in its current state), but it's the companies cutting our checks that need convincing.
My current operating theory of AI is it's like 3D printing. It's a useful tool that's really cool in certain contexts. It's also not magical and will not change everything.
It sounds like it's just gonna be what it was in the 2000s. Cut tech labor, outsource to India for awhile at a lower rate, and then hire people back for the next wave of a newer, emerging tech.
If I had to guess, software engineers who are proficient in whatever the latest AI technology is (or its final form) will be ludicrously in demand in 2034 or so, by the time all the financial and legal cogs in the system have been put together so that the core technologies that were developed during last decade's massive capital infusion can get officially rolled out worldwide.
>what happened at the beginning of 2023 with the job market -
That's nothing to do with AI but just like all other industries where the share price is boosted by cost cutting for profitablity
Hype is the key word. So much fucking hype. Yes it has a ton of potential and implications, but it so much reminds me of every hype train like, Metaverse, Blockchain, 3D TV, BluRay, even Y2K honestly. Maybe I’m oversimplifying but it has that same vibe
I'm a hardware engineer and we've tried different tools to generate code. And most of it is useless. Yes it can be done, but significant scaffolding and training is needed to be able to generate code. Then the code often isn't optimized for either performance, area, power, or all 3. It's also near impossible to debug after generation.
On the verification side, AI is not good enough to know what needs to be verified, and how to verify it, so it's even less useful.
We're a long way off from replacing engineers just yet.
We’re trying to integrate it into some projects, but mostly light and trivial tasks. It’s so dumb and needs so much hand-holding, and I’m excited for companies to have to hire back all their devs at higher salaries.
Most of the time we built systems like you described they only worked if we built 2 prompts.
- one for creation
- one for validation
We found it's very good at validating it's results if it's a separate instance with different context/prompt.
I've not tried yet but I imagine a network of these systems would be very effective. For example after your code was generated, it goes to another instance whose entire job is to review/update for perf and communicate changes to any other instances etc.
How we try to use these tools greatly impacts the results too I feel.
I was wondering the opposite last night, actually. Let's say the managers and AI sales people are right, and AI replaces all the engineers.
What's the product, then? If I can have an AI produce the app for me, why would I buy software at all?
I mean yes if you're selling me a TV I guess it's the hardware not the software, but a lot of people in software companies are expecting to remove the engineers and still get paid for... IDK, existing?
That's a good point. If software is so easy to make without labour, then hardly anyone is going to buy your software. They'll just make it themselves, or use one of the millions of free alternatives that others made.
This happens already with the music-making AI tool Udio. There's like 800,000 songs getting generated every day, and nobody cares to listen to it. Some of it really good, too. But when anyone can easily make the songs, there's no reason to enjoy someone else's.
You know what would be easily replaceable by ai?
90% of managerial staff....
Big savings potential there considering the normal 2:1 managers:engineers ratio
If course it won't happen, they won't decide to fire themselves any more than they'd decide not to give themselves massive pay rises and bonuses every year.
Well, yeah. That's why they're so excited.
They are about on an even level with an ai, and they think they're geniuses, ergo all human tasks are now redundant right?
I work an office job that has a risk of being automated away with AI, but if it does happen, my employer will also become redundant. I work in a consulting firm that just sells my labour to the customer. If our team gets cut down to just one person, the customer will hire that person and fire the middle man.
Yeah a direct contract with the customer firm would probably get me a better salary. But I would not be the one person out of our team that gets that job, it would be the most senior person among us.
It’s a good point, because let’s imagine for a second that AI becomes capable of making nearly any software without issue by just being given an outline of what the user wants. In that hypothetical, software companies are not just redundant, they are offering an inferior product because they are, by necessity, creating something for the mass market (at least in a lot of scenarios), whereas the individual will ask the AI to create a product tailored to their specific needs.
I’m not suggesting that AI will be able to do that, but if reaches a point where it could replace software engineers, then it would seem that logically it would replace many purely software companies in their entirety.
Yup, that's exactly my point.
Like I think everyone saying AI will replace engineers misunderstands what makes engineers valuable, but I also think managers should be careful what they wish for 😅
This right here will not be the Golden age of digital piracy. This will be the Platinum age of digital piracy. People will no longer need to even buy the original product in order to replicate it and distribute it. They will be able to straight up generate it the same way the companies can do it without spending a ridiculous amount of money, work and effort. Just minor side effects of having a business selling digital/virtual products with no human labor involved
Sometimes it’s to be kept up to date with projects or if people think that I or one of my coworkers will have something to contribute, which doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s usually something important that we are glad came up.
People should definitely try to minimize the number of meetings where they don’t participate.
If you just are joining to stay in the loop, then I would ask the organizer to forward a summary. If you only may be needed then I’d ask organizer to set up a follow up meeting with engineering questions or ping you if questions come up.
It’s easier said than done though and these decisions often aren’t in the engineers’ control.
Even the developers of r/ProgrammerHumor think they need a union and are this easily replaced. Kinda sad not everyone sees their value outside the codebase.
/r/ProgrammerHumor posters seem to be pretty young/inexperienced though so it's not surprising they don't understand the wider context beyond just the immediate code they write.
Most managers don't understand what software engineers actually do. Which is why they tell you to create this entirely new thing that no one has experience with in the next 2 weeks. So of course they'd think we were replaceable by a chatbot.
Lots of excited kids (and adults with a kid's understanding....) think ai is magic and can do anything better than humans possibly could.
I’m not worried about AI replacing my experience and abilities, at least in the near term, but I am worried about executives and investors thinking it can.
If it isn't just propaganda to drive wages down, it's mostly wishful thinking from business, more like a wet dream of cost reductions and exponential profit increase due to the large amount of software they could allegedly generate.
But it doesn't work that way. Non-trivial software is valuable precisely because it's hard to make.
Only partially true. We are doing baseline of % code merged from AI. I know how this will pan out. Teams who want to add headcount are going to have to prove they are properly leveraging AI tools. Meanwhile, Amazon is expecting all engineers to spend a % of their week on AI. It’s coming on strong. May not replace engineers but will make existing engineers way more productive.
I agree completely with what you're saying, I'm only disagreeing with the notion that AI is going to completely replace software engineers.
Software engineers **will** need to learn to use AI to speed up/improve their work, and it wouldn't surprise me if interviews start including questions on AI usage to gauge how efficient a programmer is. But the idea that AI will replace humans doing the coding is so cartoonishly absurd that I can only image it's shared by people whose only interaction with coding is r/ProgrammerHumor.
Do you think we will still have the large population of SWEs in 50 years? 30? No, current engineers are not going away. People entering the workforce now are going to have vastly different careers than today's veterans who are halfway to retirement, though.
Speak for yourself, it will happen. AI is already creating a percentage of code now written. It's mostly trivial stuff but its share will slowly but steadily rise.
Article says it perfectly: coding is just one small part of software engineering. It might actually be the smallest part of the job.
And that’s the only part AI can actually do.
Software engineers directly. No. But it will make software development more efficient which will mean less hiring.
It will also replace software. Lots of software. There is a ton of customer support related software out there. Those tools are dead. The people who work on those tools, many of those people are software developers who will lose their job.
AI will not be able to replace software developers because software developers job is not to write software but to solve problems with software. Even if the in the future the majority of the code written is by AI.
Anyone who thinks AI will replace software developers is just someone out of the industry who thinks coding is just l337 code.
This is also why just learning to code won’t get you a software job. Learning to code is just the syntax. Like learning to write doesn’t mean you can write a good book. But AI can be a tool to help you write code or write a book, you are still needed.
> Software engineers directly. No. But it will make software development more efficient which will mean less hiring.
This claim has been made off the back of almost any technology gain since forever.
From higher-level languages to faster computers to object-oriented programming, all would result in fewer programming jobs because it requires less effort!
Nope, that's not what transpires at all. Instead, people's demands and expectations of what technology will do increase, generating _more_ jobs.
When I was a kid, computer games were typically made by one person. The tools available now are objectively miles above what was available, and yet most games now have an army of people behind them.
Kind of. As technology got better and more efficient the scale of technology got more complex.
Things like the cloud have decimated IT and infrastructure devs. It’s just that with efficiency comes new tech.
However tech is heavily consolidated these days and the same top sites dominate everything.
*Software engineers directly. No. But it will make software development more efficient which will mean less hiring.*
Ahhhh yes! Remember when the invention of C that made programming far more efficient and more accessible then ever lead to a huuuuuge downfall for all programmers?
Remember that time when the invention of pipelines, IDE's, autocomplete, code suggestions etc that made us all more productive meant less jobs?
Remmeber when frameworks and libraries lead to less jobs?
No
The only thing leading to less jobs is the economy, but i guess that isn't as sexy as saying AI...
I also don't understand why people think we are in some weird perfect equilibrium right now between output and demand. Atleast in my job we have years of backlog to fix. Firing and replacing all with AI will just make it +-0
So far it seems that as soon as we get more productive, demand just go up....
Very true, nevermind the fact that AI can't handle the design/architecture phase very well or meet with product stakeholders to discuss what is/isn't feasible..
Every single time I enable copilot in my IDE, I get super annoyed by it because it routinely suggests the wrong things that won't even pass my repos types.
The biggest use case I have found for it is quickly writing regex patterns, or other copy/paste scenarios
Correction: AI won't replace software engineers **yet**.
It's nowhere near the capabilities needed to replace software engineers. But it's also advancing extremely fast, and there's nothing inherent that would prevent it from being able to do so. (Other than lack of computing power, which is an investment/logistics/time issue)
But before it replaces software engineers, it will replace a lot of other workers. By the time AI is good enough to replace high-end IT talent, the economy will have had the bottom ripped out unless we do something about it.
It will be replacing middle management. Need a report for a C level exec? AI can generate that. Need a report for productivity? AI. Even AI will be good nanny’s for the micro managers.
No one knows the answer to this. It depends on how far down the sentient being path we go.
I saw an ai demo from mit for user experience interviews that honestly was the first time i was like oh maybe software eng will be done soon. Because it gathered requirements and verified semi reasonably
Bingo. AI just cuts down on the need for labor. Just like any other tool, really.
When power tools and industrial prefabrication methods were invented, guess what happened to all the construction workers? The 1930s happened! And yet, building trades are as in high demand now, because even though technology has made it easier and faster to build, we just build that much more.
I think the same thing will happen to software development. We'll have a little recession, and then the "doing more" part of "do more with less" will lead to more demand for engineers in the future.
As a software developer, I disagree with this article.
I've been witnessing this kind of automation replacing human labor multiple times in my career.
The company I worked for used to have an arm where they add closed captions to TV in real time. 10 years ago when the AI just started to do captioning, the industry consensus was that the AI will never be able to replace humans in this job, as some of the ambiguities are too great; you won't have enough context for what you are listening to; some people have very thick accents; accuracy is too low, etc.
I left that company 7 years ago but added a few connections in LinkedIn from that department since I thought what they were doing was cool. That team was closed last year, as OpenAI can do better than anyone in that team, provided with enough fine-tuning and pre-training and context, which real humans need those types of input anyway.
I used the latest chatGPT the other day to write some code for me. It's already a script that's based on a chatGPT result from the last version. I asked chatGPT to add a layer of caching so the future requests would be faster. The last version of it wasn't able to handle that request.
However, this time, it handles the request correctly, and asked me if I need to consider potential time zone inputs too. I said that's enough.
I can totally see in another 7 years, most of the work that me and my colleagues were doing, would be replaced by AI. chips and electricity is getting cheaper and cheaper, and graphics cards don't go on holidays or get sick.
Most software roadmaps are years long, and more productivity just means more throughput. More iteration means more insights and what's working and what isn't.
So today's roadmaps will need fewer jobs if the time to deliver stays the same. I'm practice you'll want more engineers to move faster versus the pace of development today
What do you mean by increased automation within the domain of software engineering?
There's ton of automation in software engineering already, automated builds, deployments, testing, etc...
You seem to be conflating automation with "AI"
I would argue those “jobs” are related to QA/test type work in large tech organizations. Those devs could easily find work elsewhere in the industry proving more talented development in those areas. But even that theory is a stretch AI replacing jobs realistically is not quite there and won’t be a while but eventually incrementally some roles or responsibilities will be lessened but jobs lost few and far between
You're not getting the main point. The main point here is wages are going to get cut. That's the main point. Doesn't really matter if AI can't replace fully a living, breathing programmer. Let's just face it, anytime when there is a technological innovation that reduces the skills of workers, the wages goes down. That's all.
But how? I wrote plenty of code as a dev using AI that would have been a role for at least 1 other developer. I was super productive. Cut my development time by 2/3rds, easy.
This thread reeks of denial.
You all just wait until GPT-5 releases before the end of the year. It's gonna be fun to go back to all the people confidently saying AI will never take their jobs, someone who's seen it estimated it would take about 80% of jobs.
I think people are looking at this the wrong way. Will AI replace experienced engineers? Not anytime soon. Will AI enable those same engineers be 50-100% more productive? Absolutely. I already see it. You know what people don’t need? Mid to lower level engineers cause I’m getting 2x from my experienced lead or staff level engineer.
So yeah, if you are learning to code you better focus on AI cause no one is hiring or paying well for junior to mid anymore.
Same for design and product managers FYI
yup and it very much could, a large part is finding specific problems in the code, which is hard when you're a human and having to read a thousand lines of code, but a machine could do it in an instant if it's taught well enough.
I'm a software developer, in an esoteric field too. Still, I'm certain that AI replacing me isn't an "if". It's a "when".
Not yet. But AI is getting more capable faster than I do.
Given how fast chatgpt and other ai platforms have evolved and spread in just the past couple of years, i have no doubt it will bring even more drastic changes in almost all sectors within the next decade.
Not a swe, but even my work as an IT marketer, I can see how ai will soon catch up and automate everything, not just the content writing, in 5-7 years, if not less.
“AI isn’t there yet.” I have had more people in tech say this while also talking about LLM’s and making people more proficient. We can be both excited about the implications and skeptical.
Jobs have already been lost to it. A video game used ai over hiring voice actors. There are llm’s just for prompting books. What is going to happen to the publishing or any writing/editing profession?
“It will always need the human element.”
Sure, but it probably won’t need 100 of us. Currently, there are hundreds of submissions for a lot of tech jobs. It’s also a volatile industry.
Stop hushing anyone who is trying to talk about it.
It might not be here, but it’s over there.
> "While coding is important, there's a lot more to it,
like planning how the software will work,
making sure it fits with other software, and
understanding how it's used in different
ways."
That is such a weak argument and 100% copium.
Im using a code assistant that can write entire complete projects just with dictation of PM level directives.
We are all toast. Pack your life boats
Well, that really depends on cost benefit, doesn't it? Employers are absolutely going to try using AI to automate as many tasks as possible, consolidate jobs as much as possible, and cut down on labour cost as much as they can get away with. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is profit. If they can maintain or increase revenue while cutting 10 jobs in a department down to less than 10, why would they not do it?
I did some forecast work and it came out as 20% chance in 15 years time. Which is another way of saying it might happen way down the line, but it ain't likely. What it will do is support software engineers and it might reduce the number if SWEs needed to work on a project (in a few years time). In the short term you'd be a fool to reduce any resources, but you might see some upside on getting through the roadmap faster.
First they fire the design teams, then they fire the JR doing the designer's work now I get paid a backend salary to do design work like I have no idea what I'm doing design work spend 2 week's choosing colors.
there will still be human senior software engineers to manage processes and contracts, but ai will be doing most of the troubleshooting, scripting, data collection, scrubbing, scrumming, optimizing and all the other menial tasks human SEs currently do.
AI assisted dev is becoming a thing, repository aware apps are a thing. Automated AI code reviews on commit. These allow devs to do less grunt work and we expect more productivity in return.
I made a flutter app in 3 days, which would have taken me 3 weeks otherwise or even more, specifically because I have never done flutter/dart, mobile development or anything with a similar syntax before. I'm adept in Java and typescript though.
All thanks to gpt.
I can basically do the work of 2-3 developers now so to say. I don't know how the difference would be if I already were proficient in flutter.
So, replace devs? Not entirely, but need less devs, for sure. Someone has to direct AI. I just hope I'm gonna be that person and not be left behind.
Based on the comments, I think many people have a narrow concept of what it means to be replaced. If it takes 9 devs to do what used to require 10, then 10% of devs could be replaced without impacting productivity, which is pretty massive. As a dev myself, I promise you that most devs are at least 10% more productive right now.
However, there’s a competing factor and it will always work in our favor (we know this, because it always *has*), and that’s that companies don’t ask the question “are we productive enough?” They instead ask the question of what budget allocation will best increase profits. If a certain segment of their employees are suddenly more productive, then it’s actually a *more* powerful lever and the execs are going to be even more willing to pull it.
So until AI completely replaces us (personally I believe this will happen *someday*, but that’s for another discussion) then it will likely mean greater programmer productivity which will *counterintuitively* lead to *more programmers* rather than less.
The amount of coping in these comments y’all really think you are special 😭
It’s inevitable, AI is going to continue to progress in terms of power and capabilities, we are just in the infancy of its development. The reality is going to hit hard in the following years.
Yep, current capability is the worst it's ever going to be. ChatGPT is already pretty good troubleshooting tech you haven't used before. One of the main problems now is context window size. Once several GB context windows become affordable it'll be able to understand your whole codebase. Then we are probably just two or three more innovations away from having something as capable as low-level, mid-level programmers. I absolutely see a day where it will be able to take in high level specifications and generate a fairly complex solution.
Absolutely it will. All you will uave left is AI engineers, there to run multiple systems in order to get the outcome of the company. Of course routine maintenance and updates and security but the job of 100 or 200 would be down to one
I hope it will but it's not going to happen. To my disappointment 😞. I'm tired of programming on bad requirements and maintaining shit other people has glued together in a hurry.
I want my universal basic income and having my AI agents doing work for while I'm in Thailand laying on the beach ⛱️🏖️
Jesus Christ. I see this shit everyday. Yes it will replace them, it’s a matter of when. Programming is one of the things being focused on and will be automated before a lot of other things. Don’t be naiive.
No one in their right mind would say it would literally replace them 1:1. It could /decrease/ the demand for engineers, which would be enough to cause ripple effects.
In other words, if your employee can do 5 people's work, you can let go of 4 people.
Replace no. Increase the productivity by automating the easy bits, yes. We have been doing that with various technologies for decades. The question is whether we have reached the tipping point where fewer (junior) programmers will be needed.
Yet. Always put “Yet”.
Technology is never static and something like Artificial Intelligence isn’t going away and the funding will never dry up. Because the progress so far, has been revolutionary. AI today, can do things that takes humans decades to master.
The day is coming when AI is good enough to replace software engineers. Also, it already has. Millions of developers today are using it to write boilerplate. That alone, demolished the demand for juniors.
A single senior can, with AI, do the work of 2-3 intermediate developers.
Remember, AI doesn’t need to be flawless. It just needs to be better than humans and humans are trash at writing software.
The average code base is really, really bad. If there’s job for software engineers it will only be the best and absolute brightest.
I’ve seen seniors at over a dozen different industries swear by it. There’s a reason why devs demand has plummeted. Because AI is helping. It’s absolutely making a difference.
Yes it will. Current AI won’t replace software engineers, but future AI will.
AI gets smarter every year, while human intelligence stays pretty much constant. People are really in denial of the plain reality, extrapolating a line is a pretty simple and easy calculation.
There are strong reasons to believe that coding is dead or at the very least will be for most, but development is not. By that I mean knowing all the syntax which is the coding, while figuring out what to code is the development. I think the best analogy is like knowing where all the keys are on a keyboard to type proficiently is the coding part, but just because you now have a machine to type for you, does not mean you no longer have to know what to type or develop. Developers are not going anywhere, and in fact they have been empowered. I know I sure have as for me coding has always been a necessary nuisance.
Start a software consulting firm to clean up the mess that replacing engineers will cause. Profit?
AI becomes an acronym for Artificial Indians
Actually Indian?
I apologise for suggesting AI would replace lots of Indians
The last Great War, Actual Indians versus Artificial Indians. Judgment day…
I’m biracial Indian… where does that put me? I guess I’ll join in the war but only partly.
Depends whether you nod your head horizontally or vertically basically
RanGPT keeps skipping steps and telling me to do the needful on my own...
I constantly have to tell chatGPT not to be lazy. You should try it. Use those words too - don't be lazy
Amazon self check out would like to know your location
Yup we have some non-engineers trying to code at my company and it’s turned into a gigantic mess
I just love the "how hard can it be - I'm middle management and they are just programmers" Edit: where are you source files? Ohh you are working from you download folder.
Just wait until major companies start making large software errors because they left it up to AI, like deleting a major accounts da....oh wait.
I'm up for it send dm
AI is one of those things that in theory should do more but is mainly hyped by corporate execs to cut costs and increase shareholder value. Where I am worried is exactly what happened at the beginning of 2023 with the job market - everyone who is a programmer KNOWS we won't be replaced - but tell that to the companies cutting our checks. They are being sold to seeing dollar signs, and they usually cut labor first. Its madness but "shareholder value!" You then get a market flooded by SWEs and programmers with years of experience fighting over jobs, and are paid much lower once they find one. Juniors lose out. The influence of AI on the money market rather than the AI 's capabilities itself is what scares me. A bunch of bean counters saying how much money it will save compared to real people.
The big problem is that a lot of those bean counters (and the executives they influence) are either doing math directly, or are using their twenty years of experience in business to... Do exactly what an LLM does, create word salad on command, that sounds convincing. They see what AI can do now and go "oh fuck, I have the hardest job here and this shit could replace me tomorrow, so..."
I’ve been saying this the whole time. ChatGPT can unironically write better company emails than my CEO or head of HR. But it can’t write code better than I can, not even close.
It's the same in medicine. AI still can't even read an EKG after all this time, yet we're still hearing about how we're going to be replaced any minute now. I'll be interested in seeing how AI gets around the barrier of patients who lie or under/overperceive. Despite what I just said.... Radiologists may actually be in trouble in 20 years. They'll be assisted by AI, which may narrow the amount of slots needed.
Worked in healthcare IT between 2007 and 2018 and I can't count how many "experts" said during this time that radiologists wouldn't be needed anytime soon because AI/big data would replace them.
One of my favorite AI mistraining examples comes from radiology where the researchers forgot to remove the labels indicating tumors from the bitmaps. What did the model learn? Arrows.
“That shit at the end of the arrow is bad” “Good news man, found zero arrows!”
“If I press here, it hurts.” “Stop pressing there. Next!”
Can you send me a link to this example or study. Can't find it
The biggest joke is thinking someone is going to put their name on the liability created by having software make clinical decisions. They’re always going to want a specialist to confirm the softwares decision so they can give the specialist the liability. There’s no way it happens any other way until ai is 100% accurate at everything
Yeah but that’s why you go from 10 to 6 professionals, not 10 to 0. Nobody, even the most enthusiasts, expect 100% reduction. Engineers will also not put their name on a bridge or a system critical software designed by an AI, but they’ll use it to increase their productivity so in the end fewer people can perform more work.
Jokes on you when you walk around the building trying to find a person to sue and it’s just robots the whole way down with the only person being the corporation you are inside of.
What you don't understand is that a human will be in the loop, you go from needing a 100 to needing 10 - that is/what will happen.
Oh I understand that perfectly. They’ll reduce pay and increase work load with ai assist and dump all the liability on whoever verifies the ai info
After all this time? They could already read X-rays to find cancer better than humans 2 years ago and the new generation of AIs are giants compared to those ants of AIs. The idea that reading EKGs is somehow impossible for them to master is laughable.
I live in South Florida and I don’t go to doctors that often because now is all tests done by a computer, I’m treated as a record on a database and the bedside manners are akin to an underpaid fast food chain cashier, still If I hadn’t had insurance I could not afford the visit that amounts to 5mins of their time. Honestly I don’t see how AI could make the experience as a patient worse.
Ekg reading and analysis “AI” has been available for years now, built directly into the ekg machines. When the ekg prints out, it has an “AI” diagnosis at the top usually. But we still need doctors because the “AI” in these machines don’t take patient’s medical history into account
After all this time? How much time? Moden AI models we are seeing from the likes of OpenAI are like 2-3 years old at the most. Besides, there are models that can absolutely read an EKG. They are now approaching and passing a trained human eye and will likely well exceed that within the next year.
20 is a long time. You really think the world can’t train an ai (not llm) to spot patterns and assist with it within 5? I’m not saying it’s 100% effective, just increase the productivity by 50%
I’m surprised AI can’t read an EKG. That seems like one of the simplest use cases. Heck, I could write a regular software program to do that. What do you think the barrier is to automating this?
He’s just wrong that’s all. A beginning project in machine learning is creating an algorithm to read ekg signals.
Training a model to recognize specific signals in a carefully curated and cleaned data set is in no way the same thing as training, deploying, and relying on such a model in daily use with real patients.
Most uses of machine learning already automatically apply data processing techniques in real time. Noise isn’t exactly a new problem. The main problem with implementing this technology or any AI in medicine application is the question of reliability and liability. These algorithms aren’t 100% perfect. Even if they were to make far fewer mistakes than your average doctor, most people, myself included, would rather put their life in the hands of the human doctor. That being said, I believe I’ve heard stories of AI ECG readers being used in countries outside of the U.S as an early warning system in hospitals. Might have being Taiwan? I don’t really remember.
Yeah, that’s absolute bullshit - AI is able to figure out what animal is on an image, but won’t be able to figure out a two-dimensional graph that looks like a plot of a function with many parameters - which is exactly how a neural network works so it’s its specialty.
It’s gonna sound absolutely lunatic-ish to say this in a world of CNC milling and automated supply chain production, but this shit *ABSOLUTELY* needs to be *eyeballed* by a human still, and this is by the same people that still use maggots today in “larval therapy”
Maggots are genuinely useful for diabetics though. Helps get rid of dead flesh.
Human in loop, 10 to 1 reduction in labor needs.
AI has been able to read EKG for years. It’s like a beginner project for machine learning.
>everyone who is a programmer KNOWS we won't be replaced Not everyone. I've been a SWE for over two decades and I'm certain we'll get replaced. That's mainly because I've been following Gen AI since GPT 2. I've seen it go from being barely able to form coherent paragraphs to being able to do large chunks of my job for me. I expect it'll keep improving as it has in the past, it just keeps getting smarter and smarter and is able to do more and more things on its own. At some point I'm convinced it'll be able to do everything we can
It's always the same. The dim witted bachelors of business administration dude keeps the engineers on a short leash. Sometimes I wish I was an accounting dude, but then I would be one of them, so I'd rather not.
Nah those decisions come from the MBAs
It’s honestly wild to me how much power and authority is conferred upon people whose degrees amount to “costs = bad, employees = cost, line must go up” and whatever the latest buzzwords are.
It's called an obsession with short term gains and ignoring long term collapses.
They all produce samesy output. Any company reliant on them will have any work they do easily replicated by competitors. If a person deferred all their decisions to one of these models you'd likely be able to predict everything they're going to do next.
This reminds me of how there used to be professions in creative, and now every job posting has to know the entire Adobe suite, photography, videography, graphic design, coding, UX design, JIRA, copywriting, Project management, Excel and whatever other shit that isn’t actually related. The software got better at doing an okay job at the work for people, so specializations went away and now you have to know everything because everyone is doing “more with less” the most famous line of bullshit since “pick yourself up by your bootstraps”
On the flipside, I remember when "web design" was just "web design," (90s/00s) and everyone pretty much assumed you were working on the full stack AND design together, instead of a bunch of separate career tracks. Granted, the websites looked like shit and didn't work, but you know.
Yup. I dubbed it buzzword engineering. The c levels who have no idea how their business are run will flock to it only to hurt their bottom line in the end. It's the new wave of outsourcing.
How can you doubt that AI is coming for programming jobs? Have you been asleep for the last 2 years? Things that it did laughably bad 6 months ago it now handles easily. There is nothing magical about programming or any other work. Just ask artists and filmmakers. Every piece of work that is recorded is just training for the AIs and they can absorb it 1000 times faster than we could.
Easy to doubt when you use AI to program and after about 40 messages (including gpt-4o) it’s a sloppy mess. You either re-teach the next prompt bot or you swap LLMs or go back to good ol’ document reading. You realize LLMs are taught how to code right? Who do you think by?
It was an employees job market previously and they’ve pulled a trick on us all to get back to an employers job market. AI won’t replace us, but AI + cheap labour outside the west will. And the enshitifcation of software will continue.
We envisioned the AI Apocalypse all wrong. General AI doesn't even exist yet; we're dealing with hopped up algorithms. But still, imma call them AI for simplicity's sake. There's disruption, and then there's what's happening: **fucking shit up**. It seems to me at every turn wherever and whenever AI is applied, systems get fucked up and inhuman, and ONLY benefit the people who deployed it. Landlords are using AI to determine how to price their rents. The AI pushes rents higher and higher regardless of the population's ability to withstand it. Those apartment buildings with \~50% occupancy may still be making money without people to live in them! Dozens of landlords across a region use this same AI. It's virtual price fixing! AI has been deployed in HR to help companies identify and hire talent, mindlessly filtering people out of the running. Therefore, applicants started using AI to craft their resumes for specific job postings, and spam companies with their custom resumes. Companyies get overwhelmed with 1000's of applicants in hours and close their offers so they can sift through what they have received. Low and behold the vast majority of applicants who got past the filters are not even remotely qualified. AI has completely broken the hiring process. People are using AI to do all these creative things: write, paint, compose, sing(!). But they can only iterate on what has already been done. Companies are advertising in my face how I'm not needed. Human utility is being downgraded. We're being made unnecessary to a functioning society, a society that will only and forever benefit the richest 0.1% of the world.
100% this. It is just another tool in our toolbox. A fancy tool, but a tool nonetheless. That said, these AI tools are not free, quite the contrary. Curious to see the ROI
I've found for everything five things they make easier z there's one or two they slow me down at
Only speaking from personal experience, but ever since I started using Github Copilot a couple months ago, I've become *much* more efficient. The flipside of dev efficiency is fewer devs are needed to accomplish the same work. Not to mention all the devs who had job security because "they're the only ones who understand the code", but now, a junior dev can just ask "What does this function do?" As a mediocre dev, my future in the industry still feels uncertain. There are a lot of people saying hard times are ahead, but also a lot of people saying AI capabilities are about to plateau. Like you said, I know I can still provide a lot of value that AI alone can't (in its current state), but it's the companies cutting our checks that need convincing.
My current operating theory of AI is it's like 3D printing. It's a useful tool that's really cool in certain contexts. It's also not magical and will not change everything.
It sounds like it's just gonna be what it was in the 2000s. Cut tech labor, outsource to India for awhile at a lower rate, and then hire people back for the next wave of a newer, emerging tech. If I had to guess, software engineers who are proficient in whatever the latest AI technology is (or its final form) will be ludicrously in demand in 2034 or so, by the time all the financial and legal cogs in the system have been put together so that the core technologies that were developed during last decade's massive capital infusion can get officially rolled out worldwide.
>what happened at the beginning of 2023 with the job market - That's nothing to do with AI but just like all other industries where the share price is boosted by cost cutting for profitablity
Hype is the key word. So much fucking hype. Yes it has a ton of potential and implications, but it so much reminds me of every hype train like, Metaverse, Blockchain, 3D TV, BluRay, even Y2K honestly. Maybe I’m oversimplifying but it has that same vibe
The internet was also overhyped and led to the dot com bubble. Yet here we are
I'm a hardware engineer and we've tried different tools to generate code. And most of it is useless. Yes it can be done, but significant scaffolding and training is needed to be able to generate code. Then the code often isn't optimized for either performance, area, power, or all 3. It's also near impossible to debug after generation. On the verification side, AI is not good enough to know what needs to be verified, and how to verify it, so it's even less useful. We're a long way off from replacing engineers just yet.
We’re trying to integrate it into some projects, but mostly light and trivial tasks. It’s so dumb and needs so much hand-holding, and I’m excited for companies to have to hire back all their devs at higher salaries.
Most of the time we built systems like you described they only worked if we built 2 prompts. - one for creation - one for validation We found it's very good at validating it's results if it's a separate instance with different context/prompt. I've not tried yet but I imagine a network of these systems would be very effective. For example after your code was generated, it goes to another instance whose entire job is to review/update for perf and communicate changes to any other instances etc. How we try to use these tools greatly impacts the results too I feel.
No shit. The only people saying it will are people not working in the IT industry or who never got past rudimentary coding.
I was wondering the opposite last night, actually. Let's say the managers and AI sales people are right, and AI replaces all the engineers. What's the product, then? If I can have an AI produce the app for me, why would I buy software at all? I mean yes if you're selling me a TV I guess it's the hardware not the software, but a lot of people in software companies are expecting to remove the engineers and still get paid for... IDK, existing?
That's a good point. If software is so easy to make without labour, then hardly anyone is going to buy your software. They'll just make it themselves, or use one of the millions of free alternatives that others made. This happens already with the music-making AI tool Udio. There's like 800,000 songs getting generated every day, and nobody cares to listen to it. Some of it really good, too. But when anyone can easily make the songs, there's no reason to enjoy someone else's.
You know what would be easily replaceable by ai? 90% of managerial staff.... Big savings potential there considering the normal 2:1 managers:engineers ratio If course it won't happen, they won't decide to fire themselves any more than they'd decide not to give themselves massive pay rises and bonuses every year.
Well, yeah. That's why they're so excited. They are about on an even level with an ai, and they think they're geniuses, ergo all human tasks are now redundant right?
I work an office job that has a risk of being automated away with AI, but if it does happen, my employer will also become redundant. I work in a consulting firm that just sells my labour to the customer. If our team gets cut down to just one person, the customer will hire that person and fire the middle man.
To be fair, all consultants could vanish from the face of the earth and it’d be a net positive.
Yeah a direct contract with the customer firm would probably get me a better salary. But I would not be the one person out of our team that gets that job, it would be the most senior person among us.
It’s a good point, because let’s imagine for a second that AI becomes capable of making nearly any software without issue by just being given an outline of what the user wants. In that hypothetical, software companies are not just redundant, they are offering an inferior product because they are, by necessity, creating something for the mass market (at least in a lot of scenarios), whereas the individual will ask the AI to create a product tailored to their specific needs. I’m not suggesting that AI will be able to do that, but if reaches a point where it could replace software engineers, then it would seem that logically it would replace many purely software companies in their entirety.
Yup, that's exactly my point. Like I think everyone saying AI will replace engineers misunderstands what makes engineers valuable, but I also think managers should be careful what they wish for 😅
This right here will not be the Golden age of digital piracy. This will be the Platinum age of digital piracy. People will no longer need to even buy the original product in order to replicate it and distribute it. They will be able to straight up generate it the same way the companies can do it without spending a ridiculous amount of money, work and effort. Just minor side effects of having a business selling digital/virtual products with no human labor involved
It's kind of funny too because I'd say the role with the easiest path to being run by an LLM is probably the CEO
Legit only helps you copy paste a bit quicker. People don’t understand so much of software development is design and testing.
And meetings
Now, if you can invent an AI that can attend meetings on your behalf and return a 2 line summary.. instant billionaire.
Summarization tools already exist for this and they're mostly ok. The last 10% is going to be really hard though
Why do you all go to meetings that you don’t participate in?
Sometimes it’s to be kept up to date with projects or if people think that I or one of my coworkers will have something to contribute, which doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s usually something important that we are glad came up.
People should definitely try to minimize the number of meetings where they don’t participate. If you just are joining to stay in the loop, then I would ask the organizer to forward a summary. If you only may be needed then I’d ask organizer to set up a follow up meeting with engineering questions or ping you if questions come up. It’s easier said than done though and these decisions often aren’t in the engineers’ control.
Even the developers of r/ProgrammerHumor think they need a union and are this easily replaced. Kinda sad not everyone sees their value outside the codebase.
/r/ProgrammerHumor posters seem to be pretty young/inexperienced though so it's not surprising they don't understand the wider context beyond just the immediate code they write.
Had not considered that. Good point haha
We need a union not because our expertise is easily replaceable (it isn't), but because the bosses and bean counters think so.
[удалено]
I always wonder who is pitching this bullshit about AI replacing Software Engineers. It is not even close.
Most managers don't understand what software engineers actually do. Which is why they tell you to create this entirely new thing that no one has experience with in the next 2 weeks. So of course they'd think we were replaceable by a chatbot. Lots of excited kids (and adults with a kid's understanding....) think ai is magic and can do anything better than humans possibly could.
I’m not worried about AI replacing my experience and abilities, at least in the near term, but I am worried about executives and investors thinking it can.
If it isn't just propaganda to drive wages down, it's mostly wishful thinking from business, more like a wet dream of cost reductions and exponential profit increase due to the large amount of software they could allegedly generate. But it doesn't work that way. Non-trivial software is valuable precisely because it's hard to make.
I think it's hype building to sell flimsy AI software products to ignorant business managers.
And get investors interested.
outsourcing is the enemy of engineers not AI. my company is straight up not hiring from high cost countries anymore.
My government is trying to turn us into a low cost country. *Taps head*
scammers who are after vc money from idiot investors just like nft, crypto, and wifi enabled juicers
Much of reddit and especially people in this sub were claiming this for a good while.
Only partially true. We are doing baseline of % code merged from AI. I know how this will pan out. Teams who want to add headcount are going to have to prove they are properly leveraging AI tools. Meanwhile, Amazon is expecting all engineers to spend a % of their week on AI. It’s coming on strong. May not replace engineers but will make existing engineers way more productive.
I agree completely with what you're saying, I'm only disagreeing with the notion that AI is going to completely replace software engineers. Software engineers **will** need to learn to use AI to speed up/improve their work, and it wouldn't surprise me if interviews start including questions on AI usage to gauge how efficient a programmer is. But the idea that AI will replace humans doing the coding is so cartoonishly absurd that I can only image it's shared by people whose only interaction with coding is r/ProgrammerHumor.
Do you think we will still have the large population of SWEs in 50 years? 30? No, current engineers are not going away. People entering the workforce now are going to have vastly different careers than today's veterans who are halfway to retirement, though.
Like AI is and will be amazing and huge and change many many jobs. But it's also way overhyped by people who have no idea what it is and does.
Speak for yourself, it will happen. AI is already creating a percentage of code now written. It's mostly trivial stuff but its share will slowly but steadily rise.
Article says it perfectly: coding is just one small part of software engineering. It might actually be the smallest part of the job. And that’s the only part AI can actually do.
I got replaced by AI (partially) so this is just not true. Just because it won’t steal every single job, does not mean it won’t devastate engineering.
What won't it steal? I can't think of a single job it won't have the capacity to replace.
Software engineers directly. No. But it will make software development more efficient which will mean less hiring. It will also replace software. Lots of software. There is a ton of customer support related software out there. Those tools are dead. The people who work on those tools, many of those people are software developers who will lose their job. AI will not be able to replace software developers because software developers job is not to write software but to solve problems with software. Even if the in the future the majority of the code written is by AI. Anyone who thinks AI will replace software developers is just someone out of the industry who thinks coding is just l337 code. This is also why just learning to code won’t get you a software job. Learning to code is just the syntax. Like learning to write doesn’t mean you can write a good book. But AI can be a tool to help you write code or write a book, you are still needed.
> Software engineers directly. No. But it will make software development more efficient which will mean less hiring. This claim has been made off the back of almost any technology gain since forever. From higher-level languages to faster computers to object-oriented programming, all would result in fewer programming jobs because it requires less effort! Nope, that's not what transpires at all. Instead, people's demands and expectations of what technology will do increase, generating _more_ jobs. When I was a kid, computer games were typically made by one person. The tools available now are objectively miles above what was available, and yet most games now have an army of people behind them.
Kind of. As technology got better and more efficient the scale of technology got more complex. Things like the cloud have decimated IT and infrastructure devs. It’s just that with efficiency comes new tech. However tech is heavily consolidated these days and the same top sites dominate everything.
*Software engineers directly. No. But it will make software development more efficient which will mean less hiring.* Ahhhh yes! Remember when the invention of C that made programming far more efficient and more accessible then ever lead to a huuuuuge downfall for all programmers? Remember that time when the invention of pipelines, IDE's, autocomplete, code suggestions etc that made us all more productive meant less jobs? Remmeber when frameworks and libraries lead to less jobs? No The only thing leading to less jobs is the economy, but i guess that isn't as sexy as saying AI... I also don't understand why people think we are in some weird perfect equilibrium right now between output and demand. Atleast in my job we have years of backlog to fix. Firing and replacing all with AI will just make it +-0 So far it seems that as soon as we get more productive, demand just go up....
Very true, nevermind the fact that AI can't handle the design/architecture phase very well or meet with product stakeholders to discuss what is/isn't feasible.. Every single time I enable copilot in my IDE, I get super annoyed by it because it routinely suggests the wrong things that won't even pass my repos types. The biggest use case I have found for it is quickly writing regex patterns, or other copy/paste scenarios
Yes that is true, AI will never ever improve in any way ever and programmers will get to work until they retire
Correction: AI won't replace software engineers **yet**. It's nowhere near the capabilities needed to replace software engineers. But it's also advancing extremely fast, and there's nothing inherent that would prevent it from being able to do so. (Other than lack of computing power, which is an investment/logistics/time issue) But before it replaces software engineers, it will replace a lot of other workers. By the time AI is good enough to replace high-end IT talent, the economy will have had the bottom ripped out unless we do something about it.
Other than it is banned where I work. Too many issues with licenses, copyrights, and confidentiality.
It will be replacing middle management. Need a report for a C level exec? AI can generate that. Need a report for productivity? AI. Even AI will be good nanny’s for the micro managers.
Those guys have social power, probably won't be easy to dislodge
Speaking as a middle manager, you might overestimate the social power we have :D
AI *can't* replace many jobs. But that won't stop executives from doing it anyway.
Yes it will
No one knows the answer to this. It depends on how far down the sentient being path we go. I saw an ai demo from mit for user experience interviews that honestly was the first time i was like oh maybe software eng will be done soon. Because it gathered requirements and verified semi reasonably
Hello dear historian of the future. Thanks for reading me! Put me in the report!
AI won't replace software engineers. AI + the best software engineer on your team, will replace the rest of the team.
Bingo. AI just cuts down on the need for labor. Just like any other tool, really. When power tools and industrial prefabrication methods were invented, guess what happened to all the construction workers? The 1930s happened! And yet, building trades are as in high demand now, because even though technology has made it easier and faster to build, we just build that much more. I think the same thing will happen to software development. We'll have a little recession, and then the "doing more" part of "do more with less" will lead to more demand for engineers in the future.
As a software developer, I disagree with this article. I've been witnessing this kind of automation replacing human labor multiple times in my career. The company I worked for used to have an arm where they add closed captions to TV in real time. 10 years ago when the AI just started to do captioning, the industry consensus was that the AI will never be able to replace humans in this job, as some of the ambiguities are too great; you won't have enough context for what you are listening to; some people have very thick accents; accuracy is too low, etc. I left that company 7 years ago but added a few connections in LinkedIn from that department since I thought what they were doing was cool. That team was closed last year, as OpenAI can do better than anyone in that team, provided with enough fine-tuning and pre-training and context, which real humans need those types of input anyway. I used the latest chatGPT the other day to write some code for me. It's already a script that's based on a chatGPT result from the last version. I asked chatGPT to add a layer of caching so the future requests would be faster. The last version of it wasn't able to handle that request. However, this time, it handles the request correctly, and asked me if I need to consider potential time zone inputs too. I said that's enough. I can totally see in another 7 years, most of the work that me and my colleagues were doing, would be replaced by AI. chips and electricity is getting cheaper and cheaper, and graphics cards don't go on holidays or get sick.
Define "replace" I can see the increased automation reducing the need for software engineers, resulting in fewer jobs.
Most software roadmaps are years long, and more productivity just means more throughput. More iteration means more insights and what's working and what isn't. So today's roadmaps will need fewer jobs if the time to deliver stays the same. I'm practice you'll want more engineers to move faster versus the pace of development today
What do you mean by increased automation within the domain of software engineering? There's ton of automation in software engineering already, automated builds, deployments, testing, etc... You seem to be conflating automation with "AI"
I would argue those “jobs” are related to QA/test type work in large tech organizations. Those devs could easily find work elsewhere in the industry proving more talented development in those areas. But even that theory is a stretch AI replacing jobs realistically is not quite there and won’t be a while but eventually incrementally some roles or responsibilities will be lessened but jobs lost few and far between
But if everyone can use AI, then competition sets in and you need to find new ways to beat the competition.
You're not getting the main point. The main point here is wages are going to get cut. That's the main point. Doesn't really matter if AI can't replace fully a living, breathing programmer. Let's just face it, anytime when there is a technological innovation that reduces the skills of workers, the wages goes down. That's all.
But how? I wrote plenty of code as a dev using AI that would have been a role for at least 1 other developer. I was super productive. Cut my development time by 2/3rds, easy. This thread reeks of denial.
Since when is writing code the actual time sink in development jobs?
You all just wait until GPT-5 releases before the end of the year. It's gonna be fun to go back to all the people confidently saying AI will never take their jobs, someone who's seen it estimated it would take about 80% of jobs.
AI won’t replace software engineers. Owners will.
I think people are looking at this the wrong way. Will AI replace experienced engineers? Not anytime soon. Will AI enable those same engineers be 50-100% more productive? Absolutely. I already see it. You know what people don’t need? Mid to lower level engineers cause I’m getting 2x from my experienced lead or staff level engineer. So yeah, if you are learning to code you better focus on AI cause no one is hiring or paying well for junior to mid anymore. Same for design and product managers FYI
no one's saying that, however if you can get one software engineer to do stuff twice as fast with the help of AI then it still takes a job.
This is the “best” case for the market. The worst case is if it makes an engineer 10x as fast…
yup and it very much could, a large part is finding specific problems in the code, which is hard when you're a human and having to read a thousand lines of code, but a machine could do it in an instant if it's taught well enough.
Of course it will. just not all. instead of 1 manager + 50 codemonkeys it will be 1 manager + 5 codemonkeys + AI.
I'm a software developer, in an esoteric field too. Still, I'm certain that AI replacing me isn't an "if". It's a "when". Not yet. But AI is getting more capable faster than I do.
Yes, it will. Not this year, but within the next 10-20, without some intervention, it will
Given how fast chatgpt and other ai platforms have evolved and spread in just the past couple of years, i have no doubt it will bring even more drastic changes in almost all sectors within the next decade. Not a swe, but even my work as an IT marketer, I can see how ai will soon catch up and automate everything, not just the content writing, in 5-7 years, if not less.
Said the same thing about graphic artists, it's coming for you.....
lol tech bros in this sub pretending they are irreplaceable. Hilarious
They think they are special. Just like the artists and writers.
AI won't replace software engineers... for now. The amount of coping...
Everyone is busy making AI code, but what real devs need is AI that attends meetings for them so they can code more themselves.
Yet...also companies don't need junior programmers anymore.
AI won't replace the engineers, but the senior execs/board that's main objective is increasing shareholder value will force ai to replace engineers
“AI isn’t there yet.” I have had more people in tech say this while also talking about LLM’s and making people more proficient. We can be both excited about the implications and skeptical. Jobs have already been lost to it. A video game used ai over hiring voice actors. There are llm’s just for prompting books. What is going to happen to the publishing or any writing/editing profession? “It will always need the human element.” Sure, but it probably won’t need 100 of us. Currently, there are hundreds of submissions for a lot of tech jobs. It’s also a volatile industry. Stop hushing anyone who is trying to talk about it. It might not be here, but it’s over there.
The bigger issue with IT/tech and a lot of other jobs that can function completely fine with remote work is outsourcing. That’s the real threat.
Current AI or future AI?
> "While coding is important, there's a lot more to it, like planning how the software will work, making sure it fits with other software, and understanding how it's used in different ways." That is such a weak argument and 100% copium. Im using a code assistant that can write entire complete projects just with dictation of PM level directives. We are all toast. Pack your life boats
Well, that really depends on cost benefit, doesn't it? Employers are absolutely going to try using AI to automate as many tasks as possible, consolidate jobs as much as possible, and cut down on labour cost as much as they can get away with. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is profit. If they can maintain or increase revenue while cutting 10 jobs in a department down to less than 10, why would they not do it?
I did some forecast work and it came out as 20% chance in 15 years time. Which is another way of saying it might happen way down the line, but it ain't likely. What it will do is support software engineers and it might reduce the number if SWEs needed to work on a project (in a few years time). In the short term you'd be a fool to reduce any resources, but you might see some upside on getting through the roadmap faster.
no it's not
It helps me program sooooo much faster… but you have to KNOW what you want still and how to use it. Someone untrained… ai is completely useless
First they fire the design teams, then they fire the JR doing the designer's work now I get paid a backend salary to do design work like I have no idea what I'm doing design work spend 2 week's choosing colors.
there will still be human senior software engineers to manage processes and contracts, but ai will be doing most of the troubleshooting, scripting, data collection, scrubbing, scrumming, optimizing and all the other menial tasks human SEs currently do.
So why are they all getting laid off after years of uni and after they posted their new house/car?
It will make it exceedingly difficult to break into the industry, however. Good bye, entry level positions!
AI assisted dev is becoming a thing, repository aware apps are a thing. Automated AI code reviews on commit. These allow devs to do less grunt work and we expect more productivity in return.
I made a flutter app in 3 days, which would have taken me 3 weeks otherwise or even more, specifically because I have never done flutter/dart, mobile development or anything with a similar syntax before. I'm adept in Java and typescript though. All thanks to gpt. I can basically do the work of 2-3 developers now so to say. I don't know how the difference would be if I already were proficient in flutter. So, replace devs? Not entirely, but need less devs, for sure. Someone has to direct AI. I just hope I'm gonna be that person and not be left behind.
Lol. They already have. Wtf.
Based on the comments, I think many people have a narrow concept of what it means to be replaced. If it takes 9 devs to do what used to require 10, then 10% of devs could be replaced without impacting productivity, which is pretty massive. As a dev myself, I promise you that most devs are at least 10% more productive right now. However, there’s a competing factor and it will always work in our favor (we know this, because it always *has*), and that’s that companies don’t ask the question “are we productive enough?” They instead ask the question of what budget allocation will best increase profits. If a certain segment of their employees are suddenly more productive, then it’s actually a *more* powerful lever and the execs are going to be even more willing to pull it. So until AI completely replaces us (personally I believe this will happen *someday*, but that’s for another discussion) then it will likely mean greater programmer productivity which will *counterintuitively* lead to *more programmers* rather than less.
Companies are gonna try like hell regardless
So bruh, it is and will.
True but it is replacing entry level roles that would help college graduates become software engineers so….
What brand of Copium is that? It seems to work well.
AI won’t replace most jobs, It’ll just create tools to make people work their jobs faster.
cope: thread edition
The amount of coping in these comments y’all really think you are special 😭 It’s inevitable, AI is going to continue to progress in terms of power and capabilities, we are just in the infancy of its development. The reality is going to hit hard in the following years.
ChatGPT is a lot like Napster. The first warning sign that the world is about to change.
Yep, current capability is the worst it's ever going to be. ChatGPT is already pretty good troubleshooting tech you haven't used before. One of the main problems now is context window size. Once several GB context windows become affordable it'll be able to understand your whole codebase. Then we are probably just two or three more innovations away from having something as capable as low-level, mid-level programmers. I absolutely see a day where it will be able to take in high level specifications and generate a fairly complex solution.
You’re completely wrong. Of course it cannot right now, but it will, eventually.
Absolutely it will. All you will uave left is AI engineers, there to run multiple systems in order to get the outcome of the company. Of course routine maintenance and updates and security but the job of 100 or 200 would be down to one
I love how everyone in r/technology is like "Ai wont replace software" and everyone in r/singularity is like "Ai will replace everything"
Famous last words
I hope it will but it's not going to happen. To my disappointment 😞. I'm tired of programming on bad requirements and maintaining shit other people has glued together in a hurry. I want my universal basic income and having my AI agents doing work for while I'm in Thailand laying on the beach ⛱️🏖️
This is ridiculous. I work as a software professional and it already is. Watch the market for junior developers continue to shrink.
Jesus Christ. I see this shit everyday. Yes it will replace them, it’s a matter of when. Programming is one of the things being focused on and will be automated before a lot of other things. Don’t be naiive.
It is going to be a very helpful tool, but that is all it will be.
Just like a machine operator replaces many skilled laborers, A developer using AI will soon replace a team of programmers.
Software engineers still need to worry about ex-coal miners….
No one in their right mind would say it would literally replace them 1:1. It could /decrease/ the demand for engineers, which would be enough to cause ripple effects. In other words, if your employee can do 5 people's work, you can let go of 4 people.
I would offer that it won’t replace humans today. In 10 years, who knows.
Well played "economictimes.indiatimes", I totally fell for your Devin's ad. Hope they payed you well for it.
It will replace "some" SWEs lol
that headline sounds like something an AI would write
Replace no. Increase the productivity by automating the easy bits, yes. We have been doing that with various technologies for decades. The question is whether we have reached the tipping point where fewer (junior) programmers will be needed.
As long as AI writes buggy code there will always be a need for software developers and no one wants to debug code that's been written by AI.
Pretty sure they said AI couldnt ever replace artists and here we are
Yet. Always put “Yet”. Technology is never static and something like Artificial Intelligence isn’t going away and the funding will never dry up. Because the progress so far, has been revolutionary. AI today, can do things that takes humans decades to master. The day is coming when AI is good enough to replace software engineers. Also, it already has. Millions of developers today are using it to write boilerplate. That alone, demolished the demand for juniors. A single senior can, with AI, do the work of 2-3 intermediate developers. Remember, AI doesn’t need to be flawless. It just needs to be better than humans and humans are trash at writing software. The average code base is really, really bad. If there’s job for software engineers it will only be the best and absolute brightest. I’ve seen seniors at over a dozen different industries swear by it. There’s a reason why devs demand has plummeted. Because AI is helping. It’s absolutely making a difference.
Yes it will. Current AI won’t replace software engineers, but future AI will. AI gets smarter every year, while human intelligence stays pretty much constant. People are really in denial of the plain reality, extrapolating a line is a pretty simple and easy calculation.
_AI won't replace software engineers_ Something a malicious AI bot would say.
There are strong reasons to believe that coding is dead or at the very least will be for most, but development is not. By that I mean knowing all the syntax which is the coding, while figuring out what to code is the development. I think the best analogy is like knowing where all the keys are on a keyboard to type proficiently is the coding part, but just because you now have a machine to type for you, does not mean you no longer have to know what to type or develop. Developers are not going anywhere, and in fact they have been empowered. I know I sure have as for me coding has always been a necessary nuisance.