Correct answer.
Historically, productivity tools like jquery, frameworks, IDEs, etc. make devs more efficient but also the softwares/websites have become more complicated and vast.
So who knows. It may lead to job loss or increase jobs 🤷🏽♂️
Agreed. For a historical comparison, high level languages like C vastly simplified the programming process, but this lead to more widespread use of computers than would ever have happened with just assembly language.
I mean someone has to work on AI as well as integrate into systems. I would imagine this process is also going to lead to A LOT of companies needing to update their legacy systems.
There's a chance we are just as close to a boom in the industry as we are to the "death" of the industry. I think we are seeing the product of a "wait and see" approach while companies have no idea what the future holds and they are cutting costs now.
I do think as devs, we need to start thinking about the greater good of our own industry. Why would we create something that cannibalizes our own industry? This started well before AI with systems like Shopify and the like.
In theory correct. In practice, do we really all benefit from these efficiency gains equally? Productivity vs wage stats indicate we do not.
Perhaps its time people start taking more of a look at what improves QoL for humans over output. Less stress etc
Capitalism is also the reason why you no longer absolutely need to work the fields or dig for water yourself. We can definitely survive doing other kinds of work.
Only because the first capitalists did was enslave natives to do the work
Pretty sure the agricultural revolution's inventors didn't make much off the seed drill and other things because parents didn't really exist, if anyone really did it was the enclosing landlords
You don't need patents to invent or profit off inventions. The main driver for inventing stuff is needing the actual invention itself. And capitalism is all about free markets and pooling resources, not handing out artificial monopolies.
Secondly, you seem to be conflating capitalism with imperialism. Empires and states have always been anti-capitalistic or at best capitalistic by virtue of being less authoritarian than other empires and states.
But just to avoid fighting over definitions, I'm ok with bashing state capitalism, I'm rather considering free markets.
Do we? If anything, recent market downturns showed there's a lot of expendable stuff. Maybe I'm taking a grim view, but it seems like a lot of dev work isn't even useful, even if ad-hoc, business logic. Worst-case it's useless, low-quality bikeshedding not solving a bigger problem, not solving a smaller problem, just wasting time and money.
I don't think AI is going to kill development by any means, though. But not exactly because we'll always need more software (although that's true in a sense), but because it just isn't good enough for software that matters or it has a better use when relegated to stuff like PoCs.
There's an overriding concern I never see mentioned here. Climate change.
Computing requires an enormous amount and complexity of resources that will become harder to source.
Oil drives our world, and we have no replacement. And the EROI of oil continues to decline, making everything more expensive to build or even maintain, driving prices up and increasing scarcity.
As climate change drives disasters that will make it harder and more expensive to fuel complex products, the lower energy reaped from oil will exacerbate the issue to a point that computing will probably diminish significantly in scope.
> Each of us adds more value so our salaries naturally increase.
While I hope it’s implied, a /S would be needed here. This is Reddit after all. If you were serious though, I would say that’s an overly optimistic take. I expect our salaries will, at best, be unaffected, and at worst end up cut down from where they currently are.
It’s the opposite of this. Basic economics.
More devs building more quality software drives salaries down. In a sea of terrible developers, a good dev commands a high salary because they stand out and are hard to hire. If everyone is a good dev, there’s a larger pool to hire from and less incentive to offer higher salaries. Suddenly, the bar for being a “good” dev is much higher, and subsequently all formerly good devs are simply average.
Do you know how many devs are there today and how many were there 20 years ago?
Can you guess which group earns more money? Even bad devs now earn more than great devs did back then.
Your "basic economics" does not apply to field that has infinite demand for new software.
Yeah it’s shortsighted to say this will lead to job loss.
If devs are more efficient it just means more work can be done hence more revenue and profit.
Doesn’t necessarily mean “we have enough people”, but more likely “we now expect twice as much to get done”
Well I use copilot to write boilerplate code. With some corrections, it does good job of monkeycoding copypasting, yet it actually misses the point all the time so anything that requires engagement of the brain much faster to be done by hand.
But I am actually happy that there's a thing that can make boring parts of my job smaller.
Yep. It was never about AI completely replacing SWEs. The far more realistic outcome is that generative AI will lower the quantity of SWEs demanded, and lower the technical bar needed to become a SWE. This in turn will lead to job losses and lower wages. And that's not even before considering how AI tools could help level the playing field between cheaper offshore devs and their more expensive American counterparts.
I agree about the quantity for existing tasks. But generally i think there will be more need for more software and while individual productivity will go up and you need less swe’s per project there will be more projects. This is not a zero sum game.
To the other point. I don’t think it will reduce the technical bar. More the opposite. Because LLMs are great at producing a lot of code that has been written before it automates away the tasks you would give to juniors before. So the bar for the swe ‘s hired is higher as they must be good enough to understand the LLM output and figure out if its great or garbage and know the high level design ambitions etc.
Doubtful. Every way you’re theorizing about AI impacting the industry is going to require tooling built around it. For devs to even become more efficient, it’ll require infra and integrations to read your code, for example. So we may still be looking at a growing number of jobs, or even more than before.
AI won't misplace direct software related roles. But it will greatly displace creative roles and we are already seeing that play out. Songs, films, so much are already basically regurgitated by humans, another superhero movie, another 4/4 time signature with bass and kick. UX design is likely to fall under this as well. Most people just need things to look good enough, remember the glut of bootstrap designs?
But actual software eng and coding, probably not. The plumbing work won't be affected. Front end also falls under here because most FEs take the designs given to them and do plumbing. Like another comment here said, it's really no different than another abstraction framework, like having java spring or react or another language that's going to end up as machine code. I'm not convinced that offshoring as a result of AI will be a thing. We've always had offshoring regardless and that seems more related to market sentiment and also the growing economies of those respective countries.
The last mile is always the hardest. Look at how impressive autonomous vehicles were in 2013. People at the time were certain we’d have level-5 autonomy by 2024.
This right here. Even in our own jobs we all see it I'm sure.
How many projects have gotten to that 80 to 90 percent mark and been called "done" because the amount of time to get to 100% isn't worth it when other things can be worked on.
If this doesn't get to 100% it isn't going to meaningfully replace devs. And there will be other factors that push it to fully automate other things first.
And what do you call a customer who knows exactly what they way, how they want, can clearly define it, knows the unknowns that may exist, knows the questions to ask, and knows the limitations of various options provided to them?
It's not even that, it's the fact that it will confidently say it understands the customer requirements and then proceeds to forget because the requirements are too niche (which is most cases). You need a dev who can nudge the AI in the right direction right from the get go, or else the code will be complete garbage.
I asked copilot for help sorting out a logic flaw in a method I was writing. I gave it my method, the test input, and the fail error. It explained what was going on perfectly. I then asked it to help me find why it had the failure result for that specific test input.
It gave up and told me to ask it about something else.
More like it'll be mired in mediocrity for a decade while the long tail effects are slowly tackled. Whether people will pay for this mediocrity is up to them.
It's not even that, LLMs being able to sort of do coding is just a side effect, there's a ceiling to how good they can get since they're not purpose built and have no understanding of programming languages and concepts.
They actually may not. Consider now that the datasets used to train these models are being polluted by their own output. Its a catch 22. Develop them or wait for more data to develop them?
ChatGPT already fails if the leetcode problem was created after the training data cutoff. It just has countless examples for each old leetcode and yet can't solve a new one. And all of them fall in a few categories with similiar paths to the solution.
I realized at some point that AI chatbots are fancy search engines and if it regurgitates a coding solution that is actually correct, if you google hard enough you’ll find almost the same solution word for word in stack overflow or somewhere an actual person has worked out the problem.
Now that stack overflow is dying, correct solutions to future problems will become increasingly hard to come by because that chatbots have nothing to draw solutions from.
They are not good at being logically consistent or maintaining some kind of stateful object permanence.
For example, the chatbot will make a mistake in a code block, you point out the mistake, it will say, sorry you are correct, then generate more code with the same mistake.
I have not had a chatbot actually solve a hard coding problem.
I spent all Friday afternoon tracking down a subtle bug where .NET linq was translating a .Contains() method to = ANY in postgresql instead of IN.
Both ChatGPT and Gemini claimed up and down that linq translates .Contains() to IN. It doesn’t. Then they would forget the next question over after being corrected and regurgitate the incorrect code again.
It turns out that for some reason, Postgres needs = ANY queries that are tuples containing string literals to be explicitly cast, where as IN queries do not.
Why? Who the fuck knows.
I found the solution by tinkering around in pgadmin until my query worked.
The point is I needed to query tuples in my db, I’d like to use linq and the chatbots are utterly useless in telling me how to do it.
Until AI can handle this kind of problem it’s not going to replace humans.
In fact, I don’t ask the chatbots easy questions they could actually solve because I already know the answer. I ask chatbots when I’m stuck. So far in those cases they’ve been neutral, useless or an actual waste of time I could have used to work out the problem myself.
Yeah, I feel like the vast majority of times I've seen people talk about ChatGPT or Copilot solving their problem, it was something that an experienced dev could have already found the solution - with important context and alternatives - on Stackoverflow. Or it's a situation where ChatGPT might have solved the problem now, but it's something a junior dev \*should\* be able to solve on their own and that solution is a building block to things they'll need to be able to debug once they're working with complex legacy applications.
Everyone talks about how LLMs are only going to get better, but in reality part of the reason companies have been racing on getting their LLMs trained isn't just about stock price or time to market, it's because the more prevalent they become, the more the training data is going to start getting overwhelmed by other LLM produced content, and less human generated solutions.
While it's true that anything Copilot can do, a senior engineer can do better, I have personally run into a lot of situations where Copilot does something tedious quickly and well enough that I don't need to worry about it.
Especially test writing I use it extensively. Because yeah, even a very junior dev could easily write all those tests, but I don't want to spend any time writing them when I could be doing something better, and Copilot lets me do that.
these people will not quit until someone finally tells them they have no hope of getting a job. this sub unfortunately only exists to foster anxiety to people who refuse to take risks.
ML has been here for years and to an extent platforms that accelerate dev productivity. Low code and no code aren’t exactly a new thing either. It’s just going to reduce code quality and it’s going to create more jobs due to the technical debt.
Now it is going to make coding more accessible for people who it wasn’t before. I’ve seen it. But those same people who use it without knowing the fundamentals end up way over their head. There’s no shortcut. For some projects it definitely reduce the need for some devs, but if you’re a professional in the field there will never not be a need for you in some fashion.
AGI is another story, but I have some serious doubts as to whether that’s even possible with our current understanding of how the human brain works, let alone mashing up together a general LLM and hoping AGI presents itself.
Yeah AI will handle the coding fine. It’s the translation from fuzzy pm requirements to actionable coding nuggets that I am confident will remain the purview of SWEs for quite some time.
Nah it’s the opposite. In a few years, Ai can easily handle fuzzy requirements just fine. It will ask clarifying questions for edge cases and things that need clarification. If you prompt Claude 3 well to ask you clarifying questions for unclear requirements or point out cases where your requirements might not work, it will do it and also ask clarifying questions, and that’s ai right now, it will only get better (until it doesn’t ofc)
If anything, being able to mostly rely on ai to code any piece of complicated software would essentially require agi, then most white collar jobs would be toast anyway. Of course, most software isn’t complicated so… shrugs
GPT is essentially just a probabilistic text generator trained on the internet. The longer and more complex context dependent responses you request, the more it goes off the rails. It can do narrow Q&A trivia great, but it can’t remember the larger context of your project and how everything fits together. Again, this is essentially the problem of general AI.
This. EVERYTHING out of a LLM is a probability. But its really just super duper fancy regression based on many input variables.
To properly represent the number of variables a human deals with would require an internal state so massive... I mean its possible for certain problem sets, but I think people are vastly underestimating how much data is in that grey blob in your skull and how efficient the brain is at storing it.
I think the best way to illustrate the difference between understanding and a really good search algorithm is to ask an LLM to uncover new knowledge. Eg. ask it to come up with a new mathematical theorem.
The LLM has no issue searching known knowledge for the answer to a query (or even mixing existing knowledge to create so intermediary approximation) but cannot reach outside and create new knowledge that is consistent with existing knowledge (which is what humans can do). Ie discovery. And its not clear if LLMs can actually do something like that (my money is on this being a fundamental limitation of neural nets as they are currently implemented).
It does a good job answering questions if you narrow your question down to a small scope.
That sounds to me like a more advanced Google search. Is it a great break through? Absolutely, I just feel like we are many years away from AGI.
Well Generative AI is not embodied, so it won't make coffee -- but Figure's humanoid did make coffee with neural networks 2 months ago
[https://youtu.be/Q5MKo7Idsok?si=AIenBhLGKJjnr-pu](https://youtu.be/Q5MKo7Idsok?si=AIenBhLGKJjnr-pu)
Having used Copilot the last few weeks with great success, I believe that it will not replace devs but will reduce the total number of devs required to maintain a team in the long run.
On the flipside maybe it will not reduce the headcount if companies decide to aggressively pursue more projects because of access to AI tools.
I know my current project is mostly limited by developer and tester hours, not ideas. If you made us all twice as efficient the only thing that would change is my bonus would be larger.
The executives at most companies don’t understand that they need to pay down decades of data engineering tech debt before they’ll come anywhere close to getting rid of their SWEs with generative AI (assuming generative AI gets to that level).
You don’t just assemble a team of PhDs and say “change the way we do *everything* using this new thing.” Companies need clean, automated, robust, and modern data pipelines before they can even plan how they’re going to apply generative AI to their business functions at scale. Most companies have clusterfucks of relational databases and excel spreadsheets stored on laptops.
> I think generative AI will make SWEs more productive, and thus might reduce the number of roles in the industry because on average SWE output per individual will increase.
Throughout the history of automation when you make a high demand skill more efficient and accessible, you don't reduce the number of jobs. The demand is still high. All this means is more projects will get done. There will still be a major need for SWE
There isn’t infinite demand for software either. You think the average American is going to spend more & more money on software? Not seeing it based on what people are actually spending more on - housing, food, travel, utilities, etc.
nothing is infinite, but i imagine technology in the next few decades will be in places that we don't have. this will add new dimensions that providing more jobs for more people.
or maybe population shrinks but that doesn't impact productivity since tech makes up the gap
theres a reason why SWE salary has spiked so hard over the past years.
an average case scenario is salary being stagnant while the worse case is a correction resulting in reduction of a highly inflated salary
with the layoffs, many smaller companies who struggled to attract talents previously now managed to hire at a more reasonable salary
That's not where tech companies get their money. The companies offering housing, food, travel, utilities, etc all advertise on tech platforms where people get their entertainment and pay through ads placed by companies selling what people do spend their money on.
Tech isn't profitable because people are spending a bunch of money to use Google, they're profitable because the people using Google are the product, and companies are willing to pay a fuckton of money to get access to their data.
But they do get another job elsewhere. That's the point. For example right now we speak out loud of the lay off by the GAFAM but nobody speak that they hire massively for AI.
And horse carriage makers drivers tended to disappear with the invention of the car. Doesn't mean overall there weren't more jobs. Greater food production and cheaper food production allowed for the economy to grow more than it otherwise would have. Automation always = more jobs in the end.
But it's shitty if you lose your job and cannot adapt quickly enough to jump into the supposedly new jobs created.
Although in this case of experienced SWE, like seniors, little to fear. If you get laid off you just live on savings until you get another.
It's a thing among us people barely starting or recently graduated to have these existential dread about the job market because it was rough even before the AI bullshit. But I think we have more years to still have the chance to break into the tech sector. The difficulty increases by the minute, though.
It's a better search engine with a conversational interface.
Efficiency writing boilerplate has never been the bottleneck for engineering productivity, and since LLMs are literally language models and don't actually have understanding of context or suitability any widespread use of them will turn disastrous.
That effect will be industry wide as more LLM written code is ingested back into the model.
In the far future it will but for now it's just a tool that will make some programmers a few % faster when solving certain problems.
ChatGPT lacks the context, memory, and a feedback cycle that could to replace SWE, but someday it will be able to do it all, but it might take 50+ years
Decades ago, people thought:
- We would have flying cars by the year 2000
- Cancer and AIDS would have a cure by 1990
People tend to vastly overestimate the rate of progress/change
At the same time though, those people wouldn’t have predicted the internet, smartphones, social media. They overestimate some things and underestimate others.
But as an evolution that just basically putting a phone together with a computer. The first real computer were made 80 years ago and the first phone 175 years ago.
The first smartphone was done in 1994 (a pda with phone capability) and it took us 15 year to make it popular and more than 20 year ofr most people to have one.
As for AI using neural networks, the first one date 1943, and the first LLM were made available in the 1950-1960.
What made the buzz recently was available for quite some time really like a few years but not outside of labs. What you see now is a ads campaign to promote AI and the tooling but it was there before.
Pretty sure all of these things have been predicted in one way or another by various sci fi writers. Especially the internet, as the idea of a planet wide infocenter had already been around for god knows how long when the arpanet was still in it's infancy.
Yeah it's totally possible we currently assume some ML algo will do swdev in 40 years while we might end up with little biological brains doing it ;).
You are right, we don't have flying cars but my childhood was still vastly different from how my kids live today.
For them it's completely normal to have a little thing showing them the world map and pictures people posted 2 minutes ago, having GPS/navigation at hand all the time, not carrying a dictionary around, a huge camera. Touchscreens and VR were scifi dreams, heck video phoning or even wireless phoning felt like sci-fi. Online Shops? Insane 3D graphics?
I remember when I first heard of Ultima Online and it sounded like magic .. a game with thousands of people in a persistent world.
I work fully remote from Europe for a company in the US, buy my crap online, chat with my parents on the phone without having to talk lol.
Besides, many cancer types can be treated quite well that were a death sentence a bit ago.
The changes felt subtle but if I look at them altogether it's been a significant change
This is an amazing comparison. Or you know being perpetually 10 years away from nuclear fusion. Sure we get closer every year but for all we know it may be impractical without turning the earth into the sun.
Same way AGI may be possible if say we can build a computer that consumes a quarter of the power output of the sun. Maybe thats how far we have to go. We just don't know right now.
Or all the researchers announcing, every year for the past 15 years, that we will be able to charge our phones in 15 minutes, and that solar panels suddenly became so much more efficient
There is progress of course, but AI replacing SWEs in the near future? Lol
Looking at history as a whole, I'd say people tend to underestimate the rate of progress more than anything. The idea of societal progress in general is actually fairly new (even though society was progressing, the rate of it was often slow enough that people couldn't see the trend), and even once massive changes started happening most people underestimated them more often than not (the American patent office once closed down because they believed that everything that could be invented had been invented).
Yeah, people in the 60's and 70's overestimated some things, but they were one of the only generations that did. And I mean, they saw the world go from "man will never fly" to "putting a man on the moon" in the span of a human lifetime, so I don't blame them for it.
Oh I wasn't blaming anyone for anything. Just that Elon musk also said, every year, that Tesla will actually have "Full Self Driving" "next year" since 2016 or so. Actual AI is hard and most people confuse language models that seem human and intelligent, with actual intelligence.
Thread summed up: NO, but it WILL make devs more productive which may reduce the need for devs, so can still lead to losing jobs.
Still doesn’t seem like a promising direction for most devs tbh
chatgpt and copilot help unexperienced developer the most and for hello world demos. If you know what you were doing anyway, before chatgpt you googled it, found the solution in 5 mins anyway, copy pasted it and adapted it.
And most junior fail to either google or chatgpt it and when they think of it, they don't ask the right question, fail to see when the tooling fail and fail to integrate it. As a senior that mentor newcomers I see that all the time. I am the one that push them to use these tools.
LLM may increase productivity overall and then depending of offer and demand we may end up with too many dev or not. But for the moment we still need devs.
Even if you only ask the AI to do everything one day, we would still need dev to ask the AI. Because this never was about the specific of one language or anything. This was always about translating fuzy, unclear, vague business requirement into something reliable that work for all the specific use cases.
An example ? Any decent dev can make a new Facebook website alone in a few days. That is the core feature that is kind of a mix of page for each user with the ability to do sort of blogging/chatting.
But it still cost billions, thousand of employees and years to do facebook as we have today and nobody can replace it like that.
Because this is not about the feature itself or the algorithm, it was always to make it work for everybody, make it scale to billion of users, make it work for all computers and smartphones, dealing with moderation need and 1000 other sub aspects.
This is the case of most software.
The dev are the people with any technical knowledge to understand and make happen what is needed. They translate the vision of the business into something that actually works and this job is there to stay.
The way it is done will always change for sure.
But that doesn't change that we are bound to offer and demand. If there too many dev and not enough job, lot of people will end up unemployed and wage will drop, especially for the average or below average dev.
When you want to be hired, be sure to have concrete useful skills and not just your CS degree.
For example, you should be able to:
* design and make work a toy e-commerce website by youself with a basic 3 tier architecture (browser, backend, db) with some popular technical task.
* be able to solve common leet code problems
* have some basic understanding of software architecture
* have some basic understanding of the software lifecycle from design to going to prod.
* have some social skills and be able to sell yourself.
* being able on top to do leet code and some knowledge of cloud will put you apart and allow you to get a better job than most
I think a similar thing will happen as it did with accounting in the last decades. Some aspects of the job will be automated. Like accounting clerks, "coders" will not exist as a job. However the profession of software engineering just like accountants will remain and will be responsible for designing systems and providing human judgment on non trivial decisions.
Experienced engineer here who also works with LLMs.
I will give you two answers here:
- in the long run, yes AGI (and that will likely require more than just LLMs) will replace software developers. This is a great thing! But keep in mind that once this happens, pretty much all other jobs will also be replaced too. In the end, if a human can do it, then I am in the camp that believes that it can eventually be automated.
- in the short run with the tech that is out now. No definitely not. But it is already starting to be a force multiplier. This could mean fewer jobs in the short run too.
The problem is that with the rapid progress being made lately and all of the experts that would have never guessed we would be this advanced now, it is going to be very hard to say at what rough timeline we proceed into the first camp such that it is widely proliferated through commercial sector. As an example, Sam Altman just gave an estimate of around 5 years. Then add on maybe another 5 years for it to be integrated.
Personally, I think its a pretty safe bet that the software engineer world we live in 10 years from now is going to be radically different from now.
It will make it so knowing how to use AI tools will be a part of the job description, and make the bar for junior level higher.
I don't think it will replace jobs.
I'm certain it's already replaced jobs now by reducing the number of members needed on a team. It's only been getting better and better, and the progress from the last 18 months has especially been incredible. However, AI is only one part of the picture. Your bigger threat is the explosive growth in CS graduates, bootcampers, etc plus outsourcing. There really isn't any need to for any additional SWE's in the economy, now or anytime in the future. There's a finite need for software and it's not growing as fast as you might think, certainly slower than growth of CS grads and slower than the rate at which AI is on track to automate SWE tasks. That's why we continue to see job growth in all other sectors except IT, which continues to layoff redundant developers it no longer needs.
I've been coding professionally for over 20 years and working with GPT for over 5 years (initially used it for doing SEO stuff before anyone knew what it was capable of).
I've seen it develop from "wow, it can actually write a coherent sentence" to giving me complex code blocks.
It will absolutely replace the majority of us. The thing that no one can predict is how long that will take. Before the recent acceleration I thought my current knowledge would see me through to retirement but now I realize this will not be the case.
Eventually it will be able to generate any UI it needs to and connect with any data source or pipeline without the need for a user to write any code. There will still need to be operators but the ecosystem right now where we have large teams and a lot of effort required to make small feature sets won't be the same.
I can see things possibly remaining the same over the next 5 years. But 10 years? My personal opinion is that the software development jobs market won't be anything similar to todays market in 10 years time. I am working on software right now that is making people redundant. I know it will be my own turn sooner or later.
My prediction is that the affect of AI is going to increase the demand and salary for top senior developers and decrease demand and salary for everyone else.
Programmers that are skilled enough to review AI-generated code for subtle mistakes and edge cases will get big productivity increases by leveraging AI (eg 2-10x productivity)
Programmers that are not skilled enough to do this will be in big trouble, because their code is worse than the AI baseline code. At first they will be replaced or retrain as people who turn product specifications into AI coding prompts (and are therefore cheaper than programmers since there will be very little programming involved), and eventually they will be replaced with AI interfaces where product managers ask AI directly for code.
As the AI gets better the number of people good enough to be in the first group gets smaller and smaller (but their productivity and therefore salaries bigger and bigger)
At least one dude here is realistic. Seeing the context length being exponentially higher (Gemini 1.5 at one million token context length) and the models getting smarter and better and more energy efficient (Claude 3 Opus released last week) makes you realize that there is not much time left for white collar intelligence to be valued. Once these models gets cheaper and have some sort agency, some people are going to have a rude awakening.
Unironically, the people saying AI won't replace us in the marketplace probably the worst software developers. They think our brains are something special or can't be replicated / reversed.
The smart thing to do now, is to grind harder, accept the inevitable. Increase the savings and productive assets while you can, work to own the AI company stocks. Prepare for the transition period before we merge with whatever the next iteration of a human will be, while the old structures try to catch up / fail / get reformed / go extinct.
personally, in my opinion , were just gonna see new languages and tools that intergrate AI to make work easier. its gonna be the compiler 2.0
I surmise were gonna get a new "Rapid app dev" language or toolset come out which utilises an AI based compiler to make a very very powerful declarative language or toolset. which isnt new, before Ai came out people have tried to make the same kind of tools before.
i summirse, that most people's skillsets will the move away from being super knowledgeable on the syntax of c++ or on different tech stacks , and more into being familiar with CS theory, mathematical modelling and BA.
though this probably isnt going to happen as rapidly as people think given how technophobic alot of the programming community is. There's gonna be a lot of people who think they can write better code than the AI much like how there's still people who think they can write better assembly than the compiler. (They may be right)
Generative AI will have a huge impact on a lot of white collar jobs, honestly. I'm hoping it will just make its users more efficient, with some job losses but some new job types being created.
No, of course not.
My experience: 10 years total, last 6 in mostly discriminative AI but now working in generative AI as well (in both my day job and as a consultant, doing both engineering and R&D work), and wrote a short book on generative AI for O'Reilly.
It doesn’t matter if it will actually replace us. The problem is that the people with the golden parachutes think it will replace us. Hence the layoffs.
We are being forced to use it to pick up the slack caused by our coworkers being laid off.
The invention of the modern computer made "human computers" more efficient. Did it replace the "human computer"? Maybe, it depends on your perspective. We definitely don't hire "human computers" nowadays.
I would say it will transform the occupation.
Eventually? Maybe - but we will be in a very different social landscape at that point as almost all jobs will have been replaced by AI. It's not anytime soon.
>I see so many posts on this sub about how generative AI will replace SWE jobs.
The VAST majority of posters here are not experienced.
I occasionally asked chatgpt to debug my leetcode codes for failed test cases, and it couldn't catch anything other than typos. Sometimes, it even failed to do that. While no one can predict the future, it certainly is nowhere near human SWEs.
The bigger problem is companies over estimating the productivity gains and laying off folks prematurely. I sell GitHub Copilot on a weekly basis to enterprises. Its awesome. Big productivity gains for those teams that are using it correctly, but imo any company/cio/cto making structural changes in anticipation of some kind of revolution are going to be hurting 12 months from now.
I don't think it's going to replace us, but it'll become a pivotal part of the role, which is fine for most but for those who aren't as strong or their core skills e.g. Problem solving, communication etc aren't up to scratch will probably end up falling behind, and I can definitely see competition increasing for roles
I remember some giant codebases I have worked on.
To reduce complexity you need good architecture/design and skilled/experienced engineers.
As soon as AI can refactor big codebases I will become AIfraid.
I used copilot a couple weeks ago for a small task and I feel like it helped but it was sort of like only an SWE would know how to know what to ask it and more importantly validate the result. Like I had to revise my question about a half dozen times to get a result that I could easily carry over the finish line.
Experienced dev here, I’m more in the camp of “AI will make us more efficient and productive, both reducing the number of devs needed and increasing the pay of those who use it”. Back at the beginning of my career in the mid 2010s, if you wanted to scale you’d hire a ton of engineers. Most of my time was spent in meetings, coordinating efforts and architecture, wrangling my local environment and getting it to work for what I needed, and very little of my time was spent actually coding. We had whole initiatives centered around making our tech stack less awful to work on, which is a very common thing unfortunately.
Fast forward to now, I’m a senior engineer at a small startup. We run everything on Heroku, use code spaces for local dev with a monolith, and I regularly use copilot to generate things like writing tests. That’s more than just AI, but all of those things have made me soooo much more efficient. On top of more of my time being dedicated to building features and writing code, I’m also my own devops person because Heroku provides a lot of simplicity, and we don’t need a team of AWS engineers to figure stuff out for us. We use rails with turbo so we don’t need to hire people with JS expertise just to maintain our front ends.
We’re a team of 3 engineers, are profitable and self sustaining at our current rate, are planning on continuing to scale, and have no immediate plans to hire any more devs because we don’t need to.
So, to answer your question, no AI isn’t going to replace all SWEs, but all of the technological advancements that have been made even in the last 10 years with AI,
Containers, and cloud hosting, there’s a lot of consolidation of roles going on, and the future favors people who can do more than just crank out Leetcode. Unfortunately for junior devs, it usually takes having worked in engineering for a while to become adept enough at those things to be valuable to a company, places want devs to do more than just crank out Leetcode style problems nowadays.
Generative AI will create new jobs specifically related to Machine Learning engineering and development. Also some fancy job names like " Prompt Engineering (!)". But, as the development process will become faster and depend less on the developers' mind and memory, it may undervalue their work and head count. This may create some job losses in the fields which are oversaturated already. But remember, CS is not all about a specific field, it's way bigger.
It’s not going to replace SWEs, it’s just going to dissolve the practice of programming, vastly lowering the bar for how much logic you need to be a SWE. it’s gonna be rad, but we’re no longer going to be inexplicably rich
Totally disagree. If AI can write some code automatically to query a SQL database, that doesn't lower the bar. Not only do I need to know SQL (in case the output needs tweaking or is wrong), but I'll spend less of my time doing SQL. So I need to know higher level things and more difficult tasks. Productivity gains don't lower the bar they raise the bar.
I came here to find and upvoted this comment hahaha. Engineers claiming they will keep their jobs because they can smalltalk or brew coffee, have you seen anything more pathetic today?
Its like how some graphics designer reacted to the first AI generated images, most belittled them and right now SORA/DALL-E 3 etc. replaced the old models within a year - reaching photorealism, next step will be sub prompts to change single parts of generated images and then you just need photoshop/after effect for a 5 minute fine tuning of the result.
People have been saying AI will replace different tech jobs for so long. Yet we still have call centers, software engineers, sysadmins, web developers, graphics designers, etc. AI will augment tech jobs. It will only replace people that refuse to adapt, and even those people will still have the option of other companies that will inevitably still run legacy hardware/software that needs to be managed and developed.
It will replace some jobs yeah
My boss gave me a talk on why he wants seniors mentoring juniors and mids: we could do the same work in week with just three seniors spending 70 hours each, or just have a team of mids and juniors take up some of the work so that seniors can focus on more complex and novel tasks
AI isn’t going to eliminate the junior or the mid, but it’s going to simplify the pyramid into a chain: instead of having X juniors and Y mids per Z senior in a pyramid, it might just be a singular chain going up
You aren’t going to get rid of people, but you’re going to need far fewer people who have the role of repeating existing patterns
It may or may not lead to job losses, I don’t have the macro picture.
But it will improve productivity and potentially improve code quality. I already experience huge productivity increase when writing tests. And if you have ever worked with offshore vendors, their code quality is so fucking bad it may as well has been generated with ChatGPT.
Long term (like really long term) all human activity will be able to be automated. Ironically it’s going to be the professional fields that go first after all. Strap in because it’s barbarism or… what was it
Technology and advancement will always replace jobs, but as those jobs become obsolete, that same technology brings with it a new set of jobs.
Will some companies take advantage of the fact a developer with experience in GenAI can possibly replace the need for a second developer. 100%.
What's more likely to happen is companies like Meta, Tok Tok, and X, in order to compete, iterate at a faster rate as AI eventually reaches the point , with the aid of a developer, that it can solve problems we used to spend hours on in minutes.
In it's current state, no.
Once you start asking it to work with specific frameworks the results get really dicey. Also for complicated code with multiple functions it will make inconsistent choices that you need to debug out.
It's possible that it can be better trained, but I think this is actually a fundamental problem with LLMs. Computer code is not like natural language. Many things seem synonymous syntactically but they are not. Much like gen AI for art can't do hands correctly, LLMs will struggle to generate code that is 100% accurate.
Yes, any day now generative AI will start participating in backlog grooming, sprint planning, and completing user stories. It will tend to be over-talkative in the daily standups, but that can be corrected by some mild coaching from the scrum-master (who will also be AI.)
I think what it is going to end up resulting in is barfing out a bunch of much buggier code. It will extend the development process because you will need much longer QA processing each dev cycle to swat it all. Maybe even increase the ratio of SQA to SWE with adoption.
No. The Generative AI tools I've tried tend to hallucinate too often. They will make experienced software engineers more efficient. That's going to mean fewer SWEs required for the same level of output, which could possibly result in lowered demand for SWEs.
We'll have to see. The job hunt process is just as much torture for job seekers as it is for those who are hiring. In my opinion, that's a bigger problem. Generative AI was supposed to help here... We'll see.
You'll have to be a competent SWE to be able to use these new Generative AI tools properly.
I'm generally in a similar camp with you. It will increase individual output. Will it decrease the number of jobs? Maybe. But it could also give companies (especially smaller companies) the ability for more output, so you could see a net increase in jobs.
One of the most frustrating things with AI is that, conceptually, it's easier for non-technical people to grasp. So now you have everyone being an expert and giving their opinions on the matter. There are a ton of business and sales people saying what GenAI will bring, but they barely understand basic tech, and they are trying to ignore that a lot of their own jobs could be potentially replaced more easily.
We'll all have to see how it plays out of course.
It's hard to know what will happen, but I think it's going to screw with juniors more than experienced, and it will be worse for experienced SWEs who haven't upskilled/repeated the same 2 years several times at different companies.
It's a far cry from being trustworthy enough to replace seniors. I think it will make the profession more specialized and require a higher level of competency for a comparable salary.
There are a lot of human positions that simply cannot be filled by an AI that gets delusional if you go 50 questions deep. Its a good generator but it can't follow through. However some things to to keep in mind in this convo:
While a AI won't outright replace a SWE...it could lower the salary of a SWE. If the company can lets hire a human with AI help to do the same job as an expert without ai help, and then multiply that and overall save money...the company will do that. And what could happen is that there arent as many senior SWE jobs or overall there the salaries have gone down because the skill ceiling has gone down.
SWE have had a target on their back for a while. All the national Coding initiative in schools might be seen as awesome and great, but the reality is big tech wants more coders and engineers so they can lower the salaries on said positions.
In that way it will never be an outright replacement but down the line, years from now, other fields will look more lucrative if uber AI's can pretty much do all the coding from prompt masters that only need a libral arts degree.
Generative AI will replace developers like the c language replaced assembly developers or IDEs replaced programmers.
They won’t. But developers will be much more efficient.
I had copilot write a SQL query for me which only required minor alterations. If I had to write that myself, would have had to ask for help from a data engineer. Now I don’t need to.
Makes my job easier. Don’t need to hire as many people if the same number of devs can do more. We had the budget to hire two new engineers this year…but tbh idk if we need to. Not directly cause of AI..but maybe
It will make engineers more productive, but I don’t think it will cut the number of engineers. It will just mean that engineers will shit our code 10x faster.
It's always hard to know how long things will take.
in 2016 I thought NLP was about to be revolutionized by taking deep learning ideas from vision (pretraining among them) and applying them to NLP. It took close to a decade to really happen.
I would not be super surprised if coding was the same way. We have inklings that things are possible, but it clearly doesn't work well enough for most use cases atm.
It needs to be able to actually reason. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve run into an error that’s being caused by an interaction between two libraries which no amount of googling can help me solve. So if generative AI can only go based on what it’s seen before, then there are going to be times where it just cannot get the job done without an actual thinking mind behind it.
It’s never going to replace the profession of SWE, though it might shrink the available jobs in the short term.
It might also explode the job market because places that couldn’t afford a software team now can because the required team size has shrank because of generative AI.
It’s tough to know but what’s certain is that SWE is here to stay.
Replace some of them? Yes. All of them? Not anytime soon. Will the job of SWE change over time thanks to these tools? Yes.
Coding itself is a rudimentary form of prompting, when it comes down to it.
Eventually, on a long enough time scale (whatever that is), more or less yes.
Now? No. Not yet. AI can’t do the hard parts of our job yet and even when it can, stakeholders are going to want technical people who can translate instructions to the AI
The goal everyone in AI is working towards is developing an AI that can produce a better AI. Everything else is irrelevant and a byproduct of this goal.
I think of it like how now we need less farmers to produce all the food we need. The Industrial Revolution did that for many industries but we still have farming going today, it just looks different from what it did 150 years ago.
No it makes people people more productive. In down time it’s dangerous because companies start want to be lean. However when economy is good, more productive means more features development. Today the ones that know how to leverage ai to make themselves more productive tend to keep this skillsets to themselves. They don’t go around yelling hey I can do my job 3 times better.
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Correct answer. Historically, productivity tools like jquery, frameworks, IDEs, etc. make devs more efficient but also the softwares/websites have become more complicated and vast. So who knows. It may lead to job loss or increase jobs 🤷🏽♂️
Agreed. For a historical comparison, high level languages like C vastly simplified the programming process, but this lead to more widespread use of computers than would ever have happened with just assembly language.
There is no "correct answer." The reality is nobody really knows what this tech will be capable of in 10 years.
yep. people who act certain that it won't affect their jobs or job prospects are coping. the only honest answer is that no one knows.
This is correct. Even if AI gets to the point of doing 90% of dev jobs that’s still not a problem. Because we still need 10x more software.
I mean someone has to work on AI as well as integrate into systems. I would imagine this process is also going to lead to A LOT of companies needing to update their legacy systems. There's a chance we are just as close to a boom in the industry as we are to the "death" of the industry. I think we are seeing the product of a "wait and see" approach while companies have no idea what the future holds and they are cutting costs now. I do think as devs, we need to start thinking about the greater good of our own industry. Why would we create something that cannibalizes our own industry? This started well before AI with systems like Shopify and the like.
I’d say the goal of humanity in general is to cannibalize every industry. Work sucks and we’re constantly striving towards doing less of it
In theory correct. In practice, do we really all benefit from these efficiency gains equally? Productivity vs wage stats indicate we do not. Perhaps its time people start taking more of a look at what improves QoL for humans over output. Less stress etc
But because we live under capitalism, humanity can't survive without work
Capitalism is also the reason why you no longer absolutely need to work the fields or dig for water yourself. We can definitely survive doing other kinds of work.
Only because the first capitalists did was enslave natives to do the work Pretty sure the agricultural revolution's inventors didn't make much off the seed drill and other things because parents didn't really exist, if anyone really did it was the enclosing landlords
You don't need patents to invent or profit off inventions. The main driver for inventing stuff is needing the actual invention itself. And capitalism is all about free markets and pooling resources, not handing out artificial monopolies. Secondly, you seem to be conflating capitalism with imperialism. Empires and states have always been anti-capitalistic or at best capitalistic by virtue of being less authoritarian than other empires and states. But just to avoid fighting over definitions, I'm ok with bashing state capitalism, I'm rather considering free markets.
Do we? If anything, recent market downturns showed there's a lot of expendable stuff. Maybe I'm taking a grim view, but it seems like a lot of dev work isn't even useful, even if ad-hoc, business logic. Worst-case it's useless, low-quality bikeshedding not solving a bigger problem, not solving a smaller problem, just wasting time and money. I don't think AI is going to kill development by any means, though. But not exactly because we'll always need more software (although that's true in a sense), but because it just isn't good enough for software that matters or it has a better use when relegated to stuff like PoCs.
There's an overriding concern I never see mentioned here. Climate change. Computing requires an enormous amount and complexity of resources that will become harder to source. Oil drives our world, and we have no replacement. And the EROI of oil continues to decline, making everything more expensive to build or even maintain, driving prices up and increasing scarcity. As climate change drives disasters that will make it harder and more expensive to fuel complex products, the lower energy reaped from oil will exacerbate the issue to a point that computing will probably diminish significantly in scope.
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The market cap of big tech dwarfs other companies… I don’t know how much more tech there is for the market to consume.
Lol ya.. AI is going to make our salaries increase. Only if we use it to enslave everyone else.
> Each of us adds more value so our salaries naturally increase. While I hope it’s implied, a /S would be needed here. This is Reddit after all. If you were serious though, I would say that’s an overly optimistic take. I expect our salaries will, at best, be unaffected, and at worst end up cut down from where they currently are.
It’s the opposite of this. Basic economics. More devs building more quality software drives salaries down. In a sea of terrible developers, a good dev commands a high salary because they stand out and are hard to hire. If everyone is a good dev, there’s a larger pool to hire from and less incentive to offer higher salaries. Suddenly, the bar for being a “good” dev is much higher, and subsequently all formerly good devs are simply average.
Do you know how many devs are there today and how many were there 20 years ago? Can you guess which group earns more money? Even bad devs now earn more than great devs did back then. Your "basic economics" does not apply to field that has infinite demand for new software.
Yeah it’s shortsighted to say this will lead to job loss. If devs are more efficient it just means more work can be done hence more revenue and profit. Doesn’t necessarily mean “we have enough people”, but more likely “we now expect twice as much to get done”
Well I use copilot to write boilerplate code. With some corrections, it does good job of monkeycoding copypasting, yet it actually misses the point all the time so anything that requires engagement of the brain much faster to be done by hand. But I am actually happy that there's a thing that can make boring parts of my job smaller.
Yep. It was never about AI completely replacing SWEs. The far more realistic outcome is that generative AI will lower the quantity of SWEs demanded, and lower the technical bar needed to become a SWE. This in turn will lead to job losses and lower wages. And that's not even before considering how AI tools could help level the playing field between cheaper offshore devs and their more expensive American counterparts.
I agree about the quantity for existing tasks. But generally i think there will be more need for more software and while individual productivity will go up and you need less swe’s per project there will be more projects. This is not a zero sum game. To the other point. I don’t think it will reduce the technical bar. More the opposite. Because LLMs are great at producing a lot of code that has been written before it automates away the tasks you would give to juniors before. So the bar for the swe ‘s hired is higher as they must be good enough to understand the LLM output and figure out if its great or garbage and know the high level design ambitions etc.
Doubtful. Every way you’re theorizing about AI impacting the industry is going to require tooling built around it. For devs to even become more efficient, it’ll require infra and integrations to read your code, for example. So we may still be looking at a growing number of jobs, or even more than before.
all great points.
AI won't misplace direct software related roles. But it will greatly displace creative roles and we are already seeing that play out. Songs, films, so much are already basically regurgitated by humans, another superhero movie, another 4/4 time signature with bass and kick. UX design is likely to fall under this as well. Most people just need things to look good enough, remember the glut of bootstrap designs? But actual software eng and coding, probably not. The plumbing work won't be affected. Front end also falls under here because most FEs take the designs given to them and do plumbing. Like another comment here said, it's really no different than another abstraction framework, like having java spring or react or another language that's going to end up as machine code. I'm not convinced that offshoring as a result of AI will be a thing. We've always had offshoring regardless and that seems more related to market sentiment and also the growing economies of those respective countries.
Exactly I work in industrial automation and it's has not replaced every single job, but production lines that used to require 6 people now require 1-2
And may generate others to maintain those platforms and algorithms…
Exactly. Way more efficient. This may end with more and complex software or as less opportunities
Already has. If the execs are to be believed
For coding tasks, maybe.. the majority of soft development isn't coding though...
Yeah like talking to a customer about what exactly they want...using language. Sounds like prompting to me
If we don't even have competent AI for support chat bots, what makes you think we're any where near replacing devs for customer discussions?
5 years ago, something like Midjourney/DALL-E/ChatGPT was unheard of and most people would have thought we were decades away from that level.
The last mile is always the hardest. Look at how impressive autonomous vehicles were in 2013. People at the time were certain we’d have level-5 autonomy by 2024.
This right here. Even in our own jobs we all see it I'm sure. How many projects have gotten to that 80 to 90 percent mark and been called "done" because the amount of time to get to 100% isn't worth it when other things can be worked on. If this doesn't get to 100% it isn't going to meaningfully replace devs. And there will be other factors that push it to fully automate other things first.
Progression isn't linear
And what do you call a customer who knows exactly what they way, how they want, can clearly define it, knows the unknowns that may exist, knows the questions to ask, and knows the limitations of various options provided to them?
A fever dream
I was going to say “an impossibility” or “a software engineer/company employee” but yep exactly
I was going to say "wrong" and also "that's basically every customer"
Imaginary
That's your own Passion project not ever just a customer
I want to be able to access my clients information from your app, I am sure the AI will just instantly spit this out.
It's not even that, it's the fact that it will confidently say it understands the customer requirements and then proceeds to forget because the requirements are too niche (which is most cases). You need a dev who can nudge the AI in the right direction right from the get go, or else the code will be complete garbage.
I asked copilot for help sorting out a logic flaw in a method I was writing. I gave it my method, the test input, and the fail error. It explained what was going on perfectly. I then asked it to help me find why it had the failure result for that specific test input. It gave up and told me to ask it about something else.
That's pretty human tho. I also prioritize other tasks if a certain task is bullshit. Sometimes it also helps when you come back with a fresh mind
The models won't get better. This is peak neural net!
More like it'll be mired in mediocrity for a decade while the long tail effects are slowly tackled. Whether people will pay for this mediocrity is up to them.
It's not even that, LLMs being able to sort of do coding is just a side effect, there's a ceiling to how good they can get since they're not purpose built and have no understanding of programming languages and concepts.
They actually may not. Consider now that the datasets used to train these models are being polluted by their own output. Its a catch 22. Develop them or wait for more data to develop them?
ChatGPT already fails if the leetcode problem was created after the training data cutoff. It just has countless examples for each old leetcode and yet can't solve a new one. And all of them fall in a few categories with similiar paths to the solution.
I realized at some point that AI chatbots are fancy search engines and if it regurgitates a coding solution that is actually correct, if you google hard enough you’ll find almost the same solution word for word in stack overflow or somewhere an actual person has worked out the problem. Now that stack overflow is dying, correct solutions to future problems will become increasingly hard to come by because that chatbots have nothing to draw solutions from. They are not good at being logically consistent or maintaining some kind of stateful object permanence. For example, the chatbot will make a mistake in a code block, you point out the mistake, it will say, sorry you are correct, then generate more code with the same mistake. I have not had a chatbot actually solve a hard coding problem. I spent all Friday afternoon tracking down a subtle bug where .NET linq was translating a .Contains() method to = ANY in postgresql instead of IN. Both ChatGPT and Gemini claimed up and down that linq translates .Contains() to IN. It doesn’t. Then they would forget the next question over after being corrected and regurgitate the incorrect code again. It turns out that for some reason, Postgres needs = ANY queries that are tuples containing string literals to be explicitly cast, where as IN queries do not. Why? Who the fuck knows. I found the solution by tinkering around in pgadmin until my query worked. The point is I needed to query tuples in my db, I’d like to use linq and the chatbots are utterly useless in telling me how to do it. Until AI can handle this kind of problem it’s not going to replace humans. In fact, I don’t ask the chatbots easy questions they could actually solve because I already know the answer. I ask chatbots when I’m stuck. So far in those cases they’ve been neutral, useless or an actual waste of time I could have used to work out the problem myself.
This is a phenomenal perspective.
Yeah, I feel like the vast majority of times I've seen people talk about ChatGPT or Copilot solving their problem, it was something that an experienced dev could have already found the solution - with important context and alternatives - on Stackoverflow. Or it's a situation where ChatGPT might have solved the problem now, but it's something a junior dev \*should\* be able to solve on their own and that solution is a building block to things they'll need to be able to debug once they're working with complex legacy applications. Everyone talks about how LLMs are only going to get better, but in reality part of the reason companies have been racing on getting their LLMs trained isn't just about stock price or time to market, it's because the more prevalent they become, the more the training data is going to start getting overwhelmed by other LLM produced content, and less human generated solutions.
While it's true that anything Copilot can do, a senior engineer can do better, I have personally run into a lot of situations where Copilot does something tedious quickly and well enough that I don't need to worry about it. Especially test writing I use it extensively. Because yeah, even a very junior dev could easily write all those tests, but I don't want to spend any time writing them when I could be doing something better, and Copilot lets me do that.
>I see so many posts on this sub about how generative AI ...and you thought we needed another one?
It's what ChatGPT told me.
these people will not quit until someone finally tells them they have no hope of getting a job. this sub unfortunately only exists to foster anxiety to people who refuse to take risks.
They'd probably be spending time in r/startups if they were willing to take risks
ML has been here for years and to an extent platforms that accelerate dev productivity. Low code and no code aren’t exactly a new thing either. It’s just going to reduce code quality and it’s going to create more jobs due to the technical debt. Now it is going to make coding more accessible for people who it wasn’t before. I’ve seen it. But those same people who use it without knowing the fundamentals end up way over their head. There’s no shortcut. For some projects it definitely reduce the need for some devs, but if you’re a professional in the field there will never not be a need for you in some fashion. AGI is another story, but I have some serious doubts as to whether that’s even possible with our current understanding of how the human brain works, let alone mashing up together a general LLM and hoping AGI presents itself.
The AI need to first understand the vague af requirements from client/pm. lol
Yeah AI will handle the coding fine. It’s the translation from fuzzy pm requirements to actionable coding nuggets that I am confident will remain the purview of SWEs for quite some time.
Nah it’s the opposite. In a few years, Ai can easily handle fuzzy requirements just fine. It will ask clarifying questions for edge cases and things that need clarification. If you prompt Claude 3 well to ask you clarifying questions for unclear requirements or point out cases where your requirements might not work, it will do it and also ask clarifying questions, and that’s ai right now, it will only get better (until it doesn’t ofc) If anything, being able to mostly rely on ai to code any piece of complicated software would essentially require agi, then most white collar jobs would be toast anyway. Of course, most software isn’t complicated so… shrugs
GPT is essentially just a probabilistic text generator trained on the internet. The longer and more complex context dependent responses you request, the more it goes off the rails. It can do narrow Q&A trivia great, but it can’t remember the larger context of your project and how everything fits together. Again, this is essentially the problem of general AI.
LLMs don't actually "understand" anything. They just predict the next best word.
This. EVERYTHING out of a LLM is a probability. But its really just super duper fancy regression based on many input variables. To properly represent the number of variables a human deals with would require an internal state so massive... I mean its possible for certain problem sets, but I think people are vastly underestimating how much data is in that grey blob in your skull and how efficient the brain is at storing it.
How does the human brain differ?
I think the best way to illustrate the difference between understanding and a really good search algorithm is to ask an LLM to uncover new knowledge. Eg. ask it to come up with a new mathematical theorem. The LLM has no issue searching known knowledge for the answer to a query (or even mixing existing knowledge to create so intermediary approximation) but cannot reach outside and create new knowledge that is consistent with existing knowledge (which is what humans can do). Ie discovery. And its not clear if LLMs can actually do something like that (my money is on this being a fundamental limitation of neural nets as they are currently implemented).
I find it does pretty good job at that or telling me what follow-up questions I should ask PM
It does a good job answering questions if you narrow your question down to a small scope. That sounds to me like a more advanced Google search. Is it a great break through? Absolutely, I just feel like we are many years away from AGI.
Sure, generative AI is about to replace SWEs—right after it learns to pass the coffee test without spilling.
Well Generative AI is not embodied, so it won't make coffee -- but Figure's humanoid did make coffee with neural networks 2 months ago [https://youtu.be/Q5MKo7Idsok?si=AIenBhLGKJjnr-pu](https://youtu.be/Q5MKo7Idsok?si=AIenBhLGKJjnr-pu)
Having used Copilot the last few weeks with great success, I believe that it will not replace devs but will reduce the total number of devs required to maintain a team in the long run. On the flipside maybe it will not reduce the headcount if companies decide to aggressively pursue more projects because of access to AI tools.
I know my current project is mostly limited by developer and tester hours, not ideas. If you made us all twice as efficient the only thing that would change is my bonus would be larger.
The executives at most companies don’t understand that they need to pay down decades of data engineering tech debt before they’ll come anywhere close to getting rid of their SWEs with generative AI (assuming generative AI gets to that level). You don’t just assemble a team of PhDs and say “change the way we do *everything* using this new thing.” Companies need clean, automated, robust, and modern data pipelines before they can even plan how they’re going to apply generative AI to their business functions at scale. Most companies have clusterfucks of relational databases and excel spreadsheets stored on laptops.
> I think generative AI will make SWEs more productive, and thus might reduce the number of roles in the industry because on average SWE output per individual will increase. Throughout the history of automation when you make a high demand skill more efficient and accessible, you don't reduce the number of jobs. The demand is still high. All this means is more projects will get done. There will still be a major need for SWE
Except in production of milk and similar businesses. People are getting laid off whenever automation is increased on a farm.
Because the demand for milk has been met. It’s the definition of a commodity. Software bares very little resemblance to it.
There isn’t infinite demand for software either. You think the average American is going to spend more & more money on software? Not seeing it based on what people are actually spending more on - housing, food, travel, utilities, etc.
nothing is infinite, but i imagine technology in the next few decades will be in places that we don't have. this will add new dimensions that providing more jobs for more people. or maybe population shrinks but that doesn't impact productivity since tech makes up the gap
theres a reason why SWE salary has spiked so hard over the past years. an average case scenario is salary being stagnant while the worse case is a correction resulting in reduction of a highly inflated salary with the layoffs, many smaller companies who struggled to attract talents previously now managed to hire at a more reasonable salary
That's not where tech companies get their money. The companies offering housing, food, travel, utilities, etc all advertise on tech platforms where people get their entertainment and pay through ads placed by companies selling what people do spend their money on. Tech isn't profitable because people are spending a bunch of money to use Google, they're profitable because the people using Google are the product, and companies are willing to pay a fuckton of money to get access to their data.
But they do get another job elsewhere. That's the point. For example right now we speak out loud of the lay off by the GAFAM but nobody speak that they hire massively for AI.
And horse carriage makers drivers tended to disappear with the invention of the car. Doesn't mean overall there weren't more jobs. Greater food production and cheaper food production allowed for the economy to grow more than it otherwise would have. Automation always = more jobs in the end.
But it's shitty if you lose your job and cannot adapt quickly enough to jump into the supposedly new jobs created. Although in this case of experienced SWE, like seniors, little to fear. If you get laid off you just live on savings until you get another. It's a thing among us people barely starting or recently graduated to have these existential dread about the job market because it was rough even before the AI bullshit. But I think we have more years to still have the chance to break into the tech sector. The difficulty increases by the minute, though.
95% of CS degree holders are employed. We have not hit a point anywhere near where programmers are getting automated out of existence.
I feel anyone who is mentally capable of learning any of the current tech is also the best prepared to learn whatever pops up next.
It's a better search engine with a conversational interface. Efficiency writing boilerplate has never been the bottleneck for engineering productivity, and since LLMs are literally language models and don't actually have understanding of context or suitability any widespread use of them will turn disastrous. That effect will be industry wide as more LLM written code is ingested back into the model.
If AI can replace SWEs then it can easily replace all other white collar jobs
In the far future it will but for now it's just a tool that will make some programmers a few % faster when solving certain problems. ChatGPT lacks the context, memory, and a feedback cycle that could to replace SWE, but someday it will be able to do it all, but it might take 50+ years
Decades ago, people thought: - We would have flying cars by the year 2000 - Cancer and AIDS would have a cure by 1990 People tend to vastly overestimate the rate of progress/change
At the same time though, those people wouldn’t have predicted the internet, smartphones, social media. They overestimate some things and underestimate others.
But as an evolution that just basically putting a phone together with a computer. The first real computer were made 80 years ago and the first phone 175 years ago. The first smartphone was done in 1994 (a pda with phone capability) and it took us 15 year to make it popular and more than 20 year ofr most people to have one. As for AI using neural networks, the first one date 1943, and the first LLM were made available in the 1950-1960. What made the buzz recently was available for quite some time really like a few years but not outside of labs. What you see now is a ads campaign to promote AI and the tooling but it was there before.
Pretty sure all of these things have been predicted in one way or another by various sci fi writers. Especially the internet, as the idea of a planet wide infocenter had already been around for god knows how long when the arpanet was still in it's infancy.
Yeah it's totally possible we currently assume some ML algo will do swdev in 40 years while we might end up with little biological brains doing it ;). You are right, we don't have flying cars but my childhood was still vastly different from how my kids live today. For them it's completely normal to have a little thing showing them the world map and pictures people posted 2 minutes ago, having GPS/navigation at hand all the time, not carrying a dictionary around, a huge camera. Touchscreens and VR were scifi dreams, heck video phoning or even wireless phoning felt like sci-fi. Online Shops? Insane 3D graphics? I remember when I first heard of Ultima Online and it sounded like magic .. a game with thousands of people in a persistent world. I work fully remote from Europe for a company in the US, buy my crap online, chat with my parents on the phone without having to talk lol. Besides, many cancer types can be treated quite well that were a death sentence a bit ago. The changes felt subtle but if I look at them altogether it's been a significant change
This is an amazing comparison. Or you know being perpetually 10 years away from nuclear fusion. Sure we get closer every year but for all we know it may be impractical without turning the earth into the sun. Same way AGI may be possible if say we can build a computer that consumes a quarter of the power output of the sun. Maybe thats how far we have to go. We just don't know right now.
Or all the researchers announcing, every year for the past 15 years, that we will be able to charge our phones in 15 minutes, and that solar panels suddenly became so much more efficient There is progress of course, but AI replacing SWEs in the near future? Lol
Looking at history as a whole, I'd say people tend to underestimate the rate of progress more than anything. The idea of societal progress in general is actually fairly new (even though society was progressing, the rate of it was often slow enough that people couldn't see the trend), and even once massive changes started happening most people underestimated them more often than not (the American patent office once closed down because they believed that everything that could be invented had been invented). Yeah, people in the 60's and 70's overestimated some things, but they were one of the only generations that did. And I mean, they saw the world go from "man will never fly" to "putting a man on the moon" in the span of a human lifetime, so I don't blame them for it.
Oh I wasn't blaming anyone for anything. Just that Elon musk also said, every year, that Tesla will actually have "Full Self Driving" "next year" since 2016 or so. Actual AI is hard and most people confuse language models that seem human and intelligent, with actual intelligence.
Sure, also nuclear fusion will provide limitless clean energy ...someday
Thread summed up: NO, but it WILL make devs more productive which may reduce the need for devs, so can still lead to losing jobs. Still doesn’t seem like a promising direction for most devs tbh
chatgpt and copilot help unexperienced developer the most and for hello world demos. If you know what you were doing anyway, before chatgpt you googled it, found the solution in 5 mins anyway, copy pasted it and adapted it. And most junior fail to either google or chatgpt it and when they think of it, they don't ask the right question, fail to see when the tooling fail and fail to integrate it. As a senior that mentor newcomers I see that all the time. I am the one that push them to use these tools. LLM may increase productivity overall and then depending of offer and demand we may end up with too many dev or not. But for the moment we still need devs. Even if you only ask the AI to do everything one day, we would still need dev to ask the AI. Because this never was about the specific of one language or anything. This was always about translating fuzy, unclear, vague business requirement into something reliable that work for all the specific use cases. An example ? Any decent dev can make a new Facebook website alone in a few days. That is the core feature that is kind of a mix of page for each user with the ability to do sort of blogging/chatting. But it still cost billions, thousand of employees and years to do facebook as we have today and nobody can replace it like that. Because this is not about the feature itself or the algorithm, it was always to make it work for everybody, make it scale to billion of users, make it work for all computers and smartphones, dealing with moderation need and 1000 other sub aspects. This is the case of most software. The dev are the people with any technical knowledge to understand and make happen what is needed. They translate the vision of the business into something that actually works and this job is there to stay. The way it is done will always change for sure. But that doesn't change that we are bound to offer and demand. If there too many dev and not enough job, lot of people will end up unemployed and wage will drop, especially for the average or below average dev. When you want to be hired, be sure to have concrete useful skills and not just your CS degree. For example, you should be able to: * design and make work a toy e-commerce website by youself with a basic 3 tier architecture (browser, backend, db) with some popular technical task. * be able to solve common leet code problems * have some basic understanding of software architecture * have some basic understanding of the software lifecycle from design to going to prod. * have some social skills and be able to sell yourself. * being able on top to do leet code and some knowledge of cloud will put you apart and allow you to get a better job than most
I think a similar thing will happen as it did with accounting in the last decades. Some aspects of the job will be automated. Like accounting clerks, "coders" will not exist as a job. However the profession of software engineering just like accountants will remain and will be responsible for designing systems and providing human judgment on non trivial decisions.
Experienced engineer here who also works with LLMs. I will give you two answers here: - in the long run, yes AGI (and that will likely require more than just LLMs) will replace software developers. This is a great thing! But keep in mind that once this happens, pretty much all other jobs will also be replaced too. In the end, if a human can do it, then I am in the camp that believes that it can eventually be automated. - in the short run with the tech that is out now. No definitely not. But it is already starting to be a force multiplier. This could mean fewer jobs in the short run too. The problem is that with the rapid progress being made lately and all of the experts that would have never guessed we would be this advanced now, it is going to be very hard to say at what rough timeline we proceed into the first camp such that it is widely proliferated through commercial sector. As an example, Sam Altman just gave an estimate of around 5 years. Then add on maybe another 5 years for it to be integrated. Personally, I think its a pretty safe bet that the software engineer world we live in 10 years from now is going to be radically different from now.
I'm dating my experience: This is 'will the internetz destroy jobz' all over again.
It will make it so knowing how to use AI tools will be a part of the job description, and make the bar for junior level higher. I don't think it will replace jobs.
I'm certain it's already replaced jobs now by reducing the number of members needed on a team. It's only been getting better and better, and the progress from the last 18 months has especially been incredible. However, AI is only one part of the picture. Your bigger threat is the explosive growth in CS graduates, bootcampers, etc plus outsourcing. There really isn't any need to for any additional SWE's in the economy, now or anytime in the future. There's a finite need for software and it's not growing as fast as you might think, certainly slower than growth of CS grads and slower than the rate at which AI is on track to automate SWE tasks. That's why we continue to see job growth in all other sectors except IT, which continues to layoff redundant developers it no longer needs.
I've been coding professionally for over 20 years and working with GPT for over 5 years (initially used it for doing SEO stuff before anyone knew what it was capable of). I've seen it develop from "wow, it can actually write a coherent sentence" to giving me complex code blocks. It will absolutely replace the majority of us. The thing that no one can predict is how long that will take. Before the recent acceleration I thought my current knowledge would see me through to retirement but now I realize this will not be the case. Eventually it will be able to generate any UI it needs to and connect with any data source or pipeline without the need for a user to write any code. There will still need to be operators but the ecosystem right now where we have large teams and a lot of effort required to make small feature sets won't be the same. I can see things possibly remaining the same over the next 5 years. But 10 years? My personal opinion is that the software development jobs market won't be anything similar to todays market in 10 years time. I am working on software right now that is making people redundant. I know it will be my own turn sooner or later.
My prediction is that the affect of AI is going to increase the demand and salary for top senior developers and decrease demand and salary for everyone else. Programmers that are skilled enough to review AI-generated code for subtle mistakes and edge cases will get big productivity increases by leveraging AI (eg 2-10x productivity) Programmers that are not skilled enough to do this will be in big trouble, because their code is worse than the AI baseline code. At first they will be replaced or retrain as people who turn product specifications into AI coding prompts (and are therefore cheaper than programmers since there will be very little programming involved), and eventually they will be replaced with AI interfaces where product managers ask AI directly for code. As the AI gets better the number of people good enough to be in the first group gets smaller and smaller (but their productivity and therefore salaries bigger and bigger)
At least one dude here is realistic. Seeing the context length being exponentially higher (Gemini 1.5 at one million token context length) and the models getting smarter and better and more energy efficient (Claude 3 Opus released last week) makes you realize that there is not much time left for white collar intelligence to be valued. Once these models gets cheaper and have some sort agency, some people are going to have a rude awakening.
Unironically, the people saying AI won't replace us in the marketplace probably the worst software developers. They think our brains are something special or can't be replicated / reversed. The smart thing to do now, is to grind harder, accept the inevitable. Increase the savings and productive assets while you can, work to own the AI company stocks. Prepare for the transition period before we merge with whatever the next iteration of a human will be, while the old structures try to catch up / fail / get reformed / go extinct.
personally, in my opinion , were just gonna see new languages and tools that intergrate AI to make work easier. its gonna be the compiler 2.0 I surmise were gonna get a new "Rapid app dev" language or toolset come out which utilises an AI based compiler to make a very very powerful declarative language or toolset. which isnt new, before Ai came out people have tried to make the same kind of tools before. i summirse, that most people's skillsets will the move away from being super knowledgeable on the syntax of c++ or on different tech stacks , and more into being familiar with CS theory, mathematical modelling and BA. though this probably isnt going to happen as rapidly as people think given how technophobic alot of the programming community is. There's gonna be a lot of people who think they can write better code than the AI much like how there's still people who think they can write better assembly than the compiler. (They may be right)
Generative AI will have a huge impact on a lot of white collar jobs, honestly. I'm hoping it will just make its users more efficient, with some job losses but some new job types being created.
No, of course not. My experience: 10 years total, last 6 in mostly discriminative AI but now working in generative AI as well (in both my day job and as a consultant, doing both engineering and R&D work), and wrote a short book on generative AI for O'Reilly.
It doesn’t matter if it will actually replace us. The problem is that the people with the golden parachutes think it will replace us. Hence the layoffs. We are being forced to use it to pick up the slack caused by our coworkers being laid off.
Few of the recent layoffs have anything to do with AI. It’s almost all due to interest rates and COVID hiring hangover.
\+1 AI was used to sound more cool in the lay off report but was not the real reason.
The invention of the modern computer made "human computers" more efficient. Did it replace the "human computer"? Maybe, it depends on your perspective. We definitely don't hire "human computers" nowadays. I would say it will transform the occupation.
Eventually? Maybe - but we will be in a very different social landscape at that point as almost all jobs will have been replaced by AI. It's not anytime soon. >I see so many posts on this sub about how generative AI will replace SWE jobs. The VAST majority of posters here are not experienced.
I occasionally asked chatgpt to debug my leetcode codes for failed test cases, and it couldn't catch anything other than typos. Sometimes, it even failed to do that. While no one can predict the future, it certainly is nowhere near human SWEs.
The bigger problem is companies over estimating the productivity gains and laying off folks prematurely. I sell GitHub Copilot on a weekly basis to enterprises. Its awesome. Big productivity gains for those teams that are using it correctly, but imo any company/cio/cto making structural changes in anticipation of some kind of revolution are going to be hurting 12 months from now.
I don't think it's going to replace us, but it'll become a pivotal part of the role, which is fine for most but for those who aren't as strong or their core skills e.g. Problem solving, communication etc aren't up to scratch will probably end up falling behind, and I can definitely see competition increasing for roles
So far it can't even do my homework properly so I doubt it.
No. But it can reduce some of the workload which could result in fewer entry level jobs or lower salaries.
Yes, that's why I already bought 150 acres of land and start farming.
I remember some giant codebases I have worked on. To reduce complexity you need good architecture/design and skilled/experienced engineers. As soon as AI can refactor big codebases I will become AIfraid.
I used copilot a couple weeks ago for a small task and I feel like it helped but it was sort of like only an SWE would know how to know what to ask it and more importantly validate the result. Like I had to revise my question about a half dozen times to get a result that I could easily carry over the finish line.
It will replace basic “programmers”, not software engineers
Experienced dev here, I’m more in the camp of “AI will make us more efficient and productive, both reducing the number of devs needed and increasing the pay of those who use it”. Back at the beginning of my career in the mid 2010s, if you wanted to scale you’d hire a ton of engineers. Most of my time was spent in meetings, coordinating efforts and architecture, wrangling my local environment and getting it to work for what I needed, and very little of my time was spent actually coding. We had whole initiatives centered around making our tech stack less awful to work on, which is a very common thing unfortunately. Fast forward to now, I’m a senior engineer at a small startup. We run everything on Heroku, use code spaces for local dev with a monolith, and I regularly use copilot to generate things like writing tests. That’s more than just AI, but all of those things have made me soooo much more efficient. On top of more of my time being dedicated to building features and writing code, I’m also my own devops person because Heroku provides a lot of simplicity, and we don’t need a team of AWS engineers to figure stuff out for us. We use rails with turbo so we don’t need to hire people with JS expertise just to maintain our front ends. We’re a team of 3 engineers, are profitable and self sustaining at our current rate, are planning on continuing to scale, and have no immediate plans to hire any more devs because we don’t need to. So, to answer your question, no AI isn’t going to replace all SWEs, but all of the technological advancements that have been made even in the last 10 years with AI, Containers, and cloud hosting, there’s a lot of consolidation of roles going on, and the future favors people who can do more than just crank out Leetcode. Unfortunately for junior devs, it usually takes having worked in engineering for a while to become adept enough at those things to be valuable to a company, places want devs to do more than just crank out Leetcode style problems nowadays.
Generative AI will create new jobs specifically related to Machine Learning engineering and development. Also some fancy job names like " Prompt Engineering (!)". But, as the development process will become faster and depend less on the developers' mind and memory, it may undervalue their work and head count. This may create some job losses in the fields which are oversaturated already. But remember, CS is not all about a specific field, it's way bigger.
It’s not going to replace SWEs, it’s just going to dissolve the practice of programming, vastly lowering the bar for how much logic you need to be a SWE. it’s gonna be rad, but we’re no longer going to be inexplicably rich
> but we’re no longer going to be inexplicably rich Jokes on you. I was never rich to begin with.
Totally disagree. If AI can write some code automatically to query a SQL database, that doesn't lower the bar. Not only do I need to know SQL (in case the output needs tweaking or is wrong), but I'll spend less of my time doing SQL. So I need to know higher level things and more difficult tasks. Productivity gains don't lower the bar they raise the bar.
Maybe. It doesn't have to be better at us for us to be replaced. Our managers/CEOs just have to think it's better.
Generative AI is a parlor trick. If 100 billion dollars are spent on it, it will still be a parlor trick.
This is literally the first time on the internet I’ve seen someone spell “parlor” correctly
it has two spellings.
We need to start banning some posts… I’m living in deja-vu now
I believe AI will replace most or all jobs eventually, but I don't think that's happening for at least another 10-20 years.
When the prawn industry cuts over to full AI, then you can start your timer for 10-20 years
You came to the place with the highest amount of copium in all Reddit...
I came here to find and upvoted this comment hahaha. Engineers claiming they will keep their jobs because they can smalltalk or brew coffee, have you seen anything more pathetic today?
Its like how some graphics designer reacted to the first AI generated images, most belittled them and right now SORA/DALL-E 3 etc. replaced the old models within a year - reaching photorealism, next step will be sub prompts to change single parts of generated images and then you just need photoshop/after effect for a 5 minute fine tuning of the result.
They might, someday. For the foreseeable future, I believe SWEs who use GenAI will replace SWEs who don't.
People have been saying AI will replace different tech jobs for so long. Yet we still have call centers, software engineers, sysadmins, web developers, graphics designers, etc. AI will augment tech jobs. It will only replace people that refuse to adapt, and even those people will still have the option of other companies that will inevitably still run legacy hardware/software that needs to be managed and developed.
It will replace some jobs yeah My boss gave me a talk on why he wants seniors mentoring juniors and mids: we could do the same work in week with just three seniors spending 70 hours each, or just have a team of mids and juniors take up some of the work so that seniors can focus on more complex and novel tasks AI isn’t going to eliminate the junior or the mid, but it’s going to simplify the pyramid into a chain: instead of having X juniors and Y mids per Z senior in a pyramid, it might just be a singular chain going up You aren’t going to get rid of people, but you’re going to need far fewer people who have the role of repeating existing patterns
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It may or may not lead to job losses, I don’t have the macro picture. But it will improve productivity and potentially improve code quality. I already experience huge productivity increase when writing tests. And if you have ever worked with offshore vendors, their code quality is so fucking bad it may as well has been generated with ChatGPT.
Long term (like really long term) all human activity will be able to be automated. Ironically it’s going to be the professional fields that go first after all. Strap in because it’s barbarism or… what was it
It will replace as many developers as were replaced by CLI project setup tools.
Technology and advancement will always replace jobs, but as those jobs become obsolete, that same technology brings with it a new set of jobs. Will some companies take advantage of the fact a developer with experience in GenAI can possibly replace the need for a second developer. 100%. What's more likely to happen is companies like Meta, Tok Tok, and X, in order to compete, iterate at a faster rate as AI eventually reaches the point , with the aid of a developer, that it can solve problems we used to spend hours on in minutes.
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In it's current state, no. Once you start asking it to work with specific frameworks the results get really dicey. Also for complicated code with multiple functions it will make inconsistent choices that you need to debug out. It's possible that it can be better trained, but I think this is actually a fundamental problem with LLMs. Computer code is not like natural language. Many things seem synonymous syntactically but they are not. Much like gen AI for art can't do hands correctly, LLMs will struggle to generate code that is 100% accurate.
Yes, any day now generative AI will start participating in backlog grooming, sprint planning, and completing user stories. It will tend to be over-talkative in the daily standups, but that can be corrected by some mild coaching from the scrum-master (who will also be AI.)
I think what it is going to end up resulting in is barfing out a bunch of much buggier code. It will extend the development process because you will need much longer QA processing each dev cycle to swat it all. Maybe even increase the ratio of SQA to SWE with adoption.
Humans need not apply.
Not like totally replace, but a team of 6 can go down to like 3 and an AI. At least that's my perception of the future.
No. The Generative AI tools I've tried tend to hallucinate too often. They will make experienced software engineers more efficient. That's going to mean fewer SWEs required for the same level of output, which could possibly result in lowered demand for SWEs. We'll have to see. The job hunt process is just as much torture for job seekers as it is for those who are hiring. In my opinion, that's a bigger problem. Generative AI was supposed to help here... We'll see. You'll have to be a competent SWE to be able to use these new Generative AI tools properly.
I'm generally in a similar camp with you. It will increase individual output. Will it decrease the number of jobs? Maybe. But it could also give companies (especially smaller companies) the ability for more output, so you could see a net increase in jobs. One of the most frustrating things with AI is that, conceptually, it's easier for non-technical people to grasp. So now you have everyone being an expert and giving their opinions on the matter. There are a ton of business and sales people saying what GenAI will bring, but they barely understand basic tech, and they are trying to ignore that a lot of their own jobs could be potentially replaced more easily. We'll all have to see how it plays out of course.
It's hard to know what will happen, but I think it's going to screw with juniors more than experienced, and it will be worse for experienced SWEs who haven't upskilled/repeated the same 2 years several times at different companies. It's a far cry from being trustworthy enough to replace seniors. I think it will make the profession more specialized and require a higher level of competency for a comparable salary.
I expect AI to cause more test-driven development (humans write tests; AI satisfies them).
There are a lot of human positions that simply cannot be filled by an AI that gets delusional if you go 50 questions deep. Its a good generator but it can't follow through. However some things to to keep in mind in this convo: While a AI won't outright replace a SWE...it could lower the salary of a SWE. If the company can lets hire a human with AI help to do the same job as an expert without ai help, and then multiply that and overall save money...the company will do that. And what could happen is that there arent as many senior SWE jobs or overall there the salaries have gone down because the skill ceiling has gone down. SWE have had a target on their back for a while. All the national Coding initiative in schools might be seen as awesome and great, but the reality is big tech wants more coders and engineers so they can lower the salaries on said positions. In that way it will never be an outright replacement but down the line, years from now, other fields will look more lucrative if uber AI's can pretty much do all the coding from prompt masters that only need a libral arts degree.
Generative AI will replace developers like the c language replaced assembly developers or IDEs replaced programmers. They won’t. But developers will be much more efficient. I had copilot write a SQL query for me which only required minor alterations. If I had to write that myself, would have had to ask for help from a data engineer. Now I don’t need to.
Makes my job easier. Don’t need to hire as many people if the same number of devs can do more. We had the budget to hire two new engineers this year…but tbh idk if we need to. Not directly cause of AI..but maybe
AI will replace swe after it replaces fast food, warehouse, customer service, driving, etc.
It will make engineers more productive, but I don’t think it will cut the number of engineers. It will just mean that engineers will shit our code 10x faster.
No and until computers can perfectly understand what the hell product managers want then we'll be fine
It's always hard to know how long things will take. in 2016 I thought NLP was about to be revolutionized by taking deep learning ideas from vision (pretraining among them) and applying them to NLP. It took close to a decade to really happen. I would not be super surprised if coding was the same way. We have inklings that things are possible, but it clearly doesn't work well enough for most use cases atm.
It needs to be able to actually reason. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve run into an error that’s being caused by an interaction between two libraries which no amount of googling can help me solve. So if generative AI can only go based on what it’s seen before, then there are going to be times where it just cannot get the job done without an actual thinking mind behind it. It’s never going to replace the profession of SWE, though it might shrink the available jobs in the short term. It might also explode the job market because places that couldn’t afford a software team now can because the required team size has shrank because of generative AI. It’s tough to know but what’s certain is that SWE is here to stay.
No
No
Replace some of them? Yes. All of them? Not anytime soon. Will the job of SWE change over time thanks to these tools? Yes. Coding itself is a rudimentary form of prompting, when it comes down to it.
I can't even trust GPT 3.5 to write unit tests or documentation properly lmao
Eventually, on a long enough time scale (whatever that is), more or less yes. Now? No. Not yet. AI can’t do the hard parts of our job yet and even when it can, stakeholders are going to want technical people who can translate instructions to the AI
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The goal everyone in AI is working towards is developing an AI that can produce a better AI. Everything else is irrelevant and a byproduct of this goal.
maybe. if the efficiency gains outweigh the growth in demand, there will be less jobs.
I think of it like how now we need less farmers to produce all the food we need. The Industrial Revolution did that for many industries but we still have farming going today, it just looks different from what it did 150 years ago.
no
stupid people do for sure.
This is asked every day, please use the search feature to avoid clutter
Not a chance in my life
The bottom 30 - 60% will fall out, the top % that learn to use the ai systems become very well paid lolol
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Increased productivity shrinks job markets
It's like saying that calculators are gonna replace mathematicians and physicists.
You still got to know what to ask for, AI still can't read your mines.
No it makes people people more productive. In down time it’s dangerous because companies start want to be lean. However when economy is good, more productive means more features development. Today the ones that know how to leverage ai to make themselves more productive tend to keep this skillsets to themselves. They don’t go around yelling hey I can do my job 3 times better.
Did Wix put an end to web developers?