Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
Fixing broken software some robot pushed to prod
Ai-herder or Robot-farmer or Llama-raiser etc etc
devs still needed to ensure code is sane and not some insane hallucination.
You have to understand what software can do, how to design it, and how it should interact with other systems in order to write software and not just code, and AI can’t do that. If you tell it to make you A, and what you really want is B, you’ll never get what you want.
Only about 10-20 percent of my job as a software engineer is writing code. AI can be really amazing at writing code, but unless it can do the other 80-90% of my job without me, I’ll be safe.
Now, whether middle and upper management will know this is an entirely different question. A lot of them think that lines of code written is a good measure of productivity, when in fact it’s often the opposite.
I foresee there being a big struggle for management to come to grips with the fact that AI is better suited at their job than ours.
My best days as a software dev are negative line days.
NegaSLOCS are the best SLOCS.
Hear, hear!
The plan is to rehire them back temporarily to babysit the AI and fix all the AI generated crap. Then realize it was cheaper to actually just have the devs make code. Then hire them back at a reduced rate on a more permanent basis with the understanding that they believe the code will still be partially generated by AI and cleaned up by the same people and they aren’t paying top tier for third hand AI slop.
They’ve been doing the same thing in IT for decades, just replace AI with outsourcing.
Same in a lot of other industries too. This is literally how capitalism functions. This is how they reduce costs when they can’t find any other way.
Except it is often more costly to do this in the long run, so it’s a fiscally stupid move that corporations seem to make over and over again.
I think part of what perpetuates it is, the people making the decisions don’t stay there long term, so they never really face the repercussions.
Some more stable places seem like they may have realized this though and keep things all or mostly in house.
Retire. All I ever wanted to be was a programmer. If I can’t do that anymore I’ll just retire. I’m saving/investing every penny I can just in case.
Same. If I can retire before my job is irrelevant, I’ll work on my own projects on my own terms. If I don’t, at least I have a nice pile of assets and can coast with another job.
That said, I don’t think people like you and I will have problems, because we’ll adapt. It’s the “programming is just a job” crowd that would have a lot of issues.
I’m not a programmer, but I don’t think I’d pay for code that was 95% accurate. That sounds buggy af
You don’t have to pay for it. The billionaires do, and they will do it without hesitation
I am a programmer, and I also wouldn’t stand for that either. We also introduce bugs and are probably around that 95% rate, but at least we know the most important uses are correct and the person who introduced them can usually fix them quickly. With AI, there’s no guarantee where the bugs will occur.
Nor has any person built up the mental modal to read it properly let alone fix it
You seem like someone who hasn’t really worked in software development.
Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.
You’ll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
That’s still a lot of software engineers displaced in the hypothetical scenario. That means you only need the devops and qa engineers, and a solution architect or principal engineer or whatever your company calls that sort of role for the analysis and design part.
Finally free from the Golden Handcuffs, I’d use my extra time to do something I’ve always wanted, like music production, which would also inevitably be taken over by AI.
As a dev, there’s still quite a bit ai can’t do and will most likely not be able to do.
AI is good at solving old problems but it’s not trained on anything new. Its good at boilerplate and templates, but not good at original material. If it gets tremendously better, and really does get to the point where it’s better than we are at development, then the industry will shift into prompt engineering. But I can see a huge reduction of jobs.
Coding is just a part of the overall “programming” problem. Most problematic areas are in translating what the customer wants into code (requirements analysis), modifying code to overcome specific constraints, integration, etc and etc
Don’t forget testing the code to make sure what is delivered actually matches what the customer wants.
There are a lot of dumb takes here in the comments
Developer displacement works the same way it does for any other technology
The problem is not that the job is eliminated but that fewer are needed per unit of output
My startup only has 4 engineers because we don’t need 5
This trend will continue until the SV hiring bubble bursts
Even if we stipulate that, I’m not convinced it’s a big deal. The software field continues to grow like crazy and we can never find enough people to hire. If ai gets good enough to take the place of some of that hiring, fantastic!
Thats a whole lot of heavy assumptions, doing some really heavy lifting.
That’s something that we’re probably going to have to figure out quickly. We won’t though given the lack of accountability of those in power.
If SWEs are losing their jobs you can imagine a lot of other white collar workers will be as well. This would mean you will be competing with many other people in other fields. The large number of unemployed will reduce demand for goods produced by those companies that are also laying off workers due to automation.
This is a bit of a tragedy of the commons where companies adopt the technology to increase profits but actually disrupt the economy, potentially leading to their own collapse.
It’s impossible to really prepare for this scenario because it requires you to simultaneously be ready for retirement in the next few years but also riots. I’m just hoping for the best for now.
We won’t though given the lack of accountability of those in power.
That is not an inevitable condition.
Spend their days (and some nights) tweaking and refining AI prompts to get the stupid thing to generate the software that the dumbass product manager wants and the user does not.
You know…
Pretty much the same thing they do now.
Yeah. The whole job is figuring out just the right away to say “pretty please” to the computer. The ways it’s done changes every decade or so. The fact that it’s a huge pain in the ass has yet to change, in spite of decades of marketing promises.
That will never happen, or at least with how ai currently works. It’s basically a glorified autocorrect, it uses the same technology underneath.
But presuming it does, yes. We will have to go to another industry, like AI prompting. Coding is a tiny part of professional software development.
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What are you using to get Claude to write for you? I’ve been using it to write a full stack Go/javascript app but it needs a lot of handholding.
I’m using Cursor. It’s done some very impressive things for me. https://www.cursor.com/features
There will always need to be a human operator to guide the machine.
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Lots of my colleagues in SWE use full blown AI development tools.
We all use full blown AI development tools. Before that we had other tricks that did the same thing.
We must beware mistaking the instrument for the musician, or we get sold a broken old instrument that doesn’t perform miracles outside it’s master’s hand.
Some days, all I do is code.
So your instincts are correct. You need to learn the rest of the job, before the part you are doing is replaced by robots.
I even used Claude AI to write an entire C# application, I did ZERO coding, yes, literally nothing! I have NEVER coded in C# before, I gave it all requirements, worked with it like a project manager… it created a full blown working application that was beyond my expectations.
I achieved the same in 2000 with a home grown framework, and again in 2006 with Ruby on Rails.
Astonishingly fast prototyping is a quarter of a centrury old.
- How are you enjoying maintaining this app in production? (Or is it not there yet, because it’s just very nice for a prototype?)
- How did Claude AI do at deploying it?
- Are you satisfied with Claude AIs answers to your boss’ traffic analytics and load balancing questions?
- When will Claude AI let you know how the A/B tests proved out for optimizing sales?
- Or doesn’t it do those things yet?
Computers are replacing us. They’ve been at it since their inception.
Keep learning the trade and you’ll find there’s a metric ton more that computers cannot help with, than that they can help with. That will get better. I’m working at making it get better.
I figure that my learning how to train the computers is job security. I didn’t count on it being a harsh lesson in how long it’s going to be before computers get not stupid.
I do have a plan for when I automate myself out of a job. It’s just not a plan I’m really counting on, because I’ve been trying for decades and I only have so many decades left of doing this.
I’ve been constantly advised to have an exit plan, for when the computers replaced me, for the entirety of those same decades.
Most often by the same people who want me to charge less.
Funny thing, that. Take care who you listen to on this topic, and what their motives are.
My motive is to (continue to) charge the rest of you a shit ton of money before the AI finally replace us.
It does help me if you all don’t buy into the bullshit that CEOs have been spouting about replacing us all.
We’ve all been undercharging for about 3 years due to it.
AI hasn’t accomplished jack shit, but a lot of you have accepted lower pay than you probably should.
I make very good money, but I can’t help but notice that it would be a bit more, if the rest of you would wise to the scam and raise your own prices.
Yes, exactly this.
When compilers came along, some people honestly thought it would dumb down programming so much that anyone could do it.
When high level programming languages came along, they rejoiced again - now finally anyone can make software.
When Intellisense meat you no longer had to remember variable names, write your own imports and could guess how most libraries work, the bells rang out once again in celebration.
And now we have AI, it’s cool but really just another step like all those steps before. For me, it’s a replacement for the documentation I never read anyway. I can ask an AI a stupid question rather than bothering a human developer.
These days it’s my job to manage a small team of developers - when I ask them why they wrote a stupid thing that makes no sense, 90% of the time, the answer is that an AI wrote it for them.
Glorified autocorrect… YES! It’s a really good analogy that i will use to temper the expectation of my boss. Also: AI hallucination is just a fancy way to say ’it’s a wrong answer’.
And if it’s going to be full-blown AGI then we’ll become AI psychologists.
