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?
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They’ll get jobs as contractors fixing shitty AI code
I’m actually anxious this is where it’s going.
If we end up there, I’m going to charge so much money, and I’m going to have all kinds of pain-in-the-ass clauses in my contract.
If I have to clean up the stupid again, everyone else is going to be doing doing some stupid shit that I find funny, in exchange for my help cleaning up their mess.
Yep, you better charge these assholes up the wazoo, they more than earned it! Write that shit up so you’re taken care of. Make them understand that their stupidity is costly and their greed is short-sighted.
Plan? The CEOs plan to buy another yacht. These people are only interested in short term profits, not the long term well-being of their employees.
Who tells the AI what to create? And how well does the AI understand the exact thing the person is attempting to do?
It would be no different than prompt engineers now knowing exactly what the say/type in order to get the image output they want.
That prompt work would be a kind of programming code in upon itself.
That will never happen, or at least with how ai currently works. It’s basically a glorified autocorrect, it uses the same technology underneath.
But presuming it does, yes. We will have to go to another industry, like AI prompting. Coding is a tiny part of professional software development.
Yes, exactly this.
When compilers came along, some people honestly thought it would dumb down programming so much that anyone could do it.
When high level programming languages came along, they rejoiced again - now finally anyone can make software.
When Intellisense meat you no longer had to remember variable names, write your own imports and could guess how most libraries work, the bells rang out once again in celebration.
And now we have AI, it’s cool but really just another step like all those steps before. For me, it’s a replacement for the documentation I never read anyway. I can ask an AI a stupid question rather than bothering a human developer.
These days it’s my job to manage a small team of developers - when I ask them why they wrote a stupid thing that makes no sense, 90% of the time, the answer is that an AI wrote it for them.
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’.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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And if it’s going to be full-blown AGI then we’ll become AI psychologists.
Riot.
How’s that working for everyone in the USA? How many “riots” or protests have we done that yield nothing?
https://stacker.com/business-economy/30-victories-workers-rights-won-organized-labor-over-years
Here’s a half decent starting point.
Turn up the heat. Asking nicely has never worked.
I was going to learn how to give a really good handjob but the AI robots will probably take over that too.
Welcome to being a luddite.
It’s not actually about hating the progression of technology, it’s realizing that your labor has been leveraged against you. You will not bear any of the true fruits, because your bosses will use the fruits of your labor to purchase the AI to replace you.
It’s because the labor market is fucked and developers needed unions 20 years ago instead of thinking because they were “rockstars” and “made the big bucks” that they didn’t need anybody else.
We wouldn’t have to ask these kind of questions if the fruits of our labor were being equitably distributed.
Basically in the scenario described, this is what’s happening to developers:
Unions in the us have ruined any interest in joining. Other countries have different imblementations. If I could start from scratch but laws favor the existing taking over.
Capitalism is an auto-immune disease of society.
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.
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.
Ultimately we need to prepare for a future where the majority of jobs have been automated and need a way to keep the economy going. Everyone being employed full time is just something that is not sustainable on the long term as technology progresses. We’ll eventually need UBI because otherwise all the money will be transferred to nearly fully automated companies controlling basically everything. We just won’t be able to keep everyone employed without creating a massive amount of bullshit jobs nobody really wants to do. The better way is UBI and people going into research or creative works, and aim higher like space travel.
We’re not quite ready yet and people are way too invested in capitalism for this to work just yet. But it will become a necessity eventually. It’s not just affecting IT, it’s affecting all sectors: we can basically 3D print houses now, we’re not far off automating farming either. We will reach a point where most of society has been automated, we can feed everyone effortlessly.
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.
The same thing that devs displaced by all the CMSs are doing - their jobs, just with another tool in their toolkit.
On a related note, what happens when the number of different CMS’s exceeds the number of devs? And why is it that every intermediate-level dev seems to write another shitty CMS rather than learning to use a good one?
On a related note, what happens when the number of different CMS’s exceeds the number of devs?
You mean they haven’t already?
Job security. It’s 4d chess baby!
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.
Well before that level of complexity is achieved, the jobs of CEOs and Managers will be gone. Question is, will the Ai CEO really want to risk the safety of a review, knowing that it IS the company. Pump and Dump won’t do it any more. Then CEOs need to actually work for their money. (Or well… get replaced by an Ai)
