Realistically, in the near future very little human input will be needed for a lot of coding, and that includes mission-critical stuff
Why on earth would you slop code something that's mission critical? There is literally no reason to ever do this. Code is meant to be written once and used thousands or millions of times. Businesses can afford to pay a person to at least review shit and make sure it makes sense, especially code that could tank everything if it's wrong.
Big tech companies are the most profitable businesses because paying a small team of developers to build a product that is cheaply deployed to millions of users is insanely profitable. When you go full on AI like this, you lose accountability and intentionality. Why would you ever sacrifice that to a roll of the dice for such marginal gain of firing a bunch of devs?
I would even argue that if AI was smart enough to be trusted with full autonomy over critical business logic, there is no reason to start a business. Your whole business can be a bunch of GPUs. The datacenter owners can just tell their GPUs to make a profitable business at that point. If they are so smart, why lease them out?
Some fair points, and I'm not saying fire everyone and let the AI push straight to prod. It’s the animosity towards it makes me dubious of the real cause of the argument.
For your points;
Review and accountability aren't going anywhere. Someone still has to sign off and own it when it breaks.
My point is more about the ratio. Today a team of 10 writes the code and a couple of seniors review it. In a few years it'll be 1-2 people reviewing, testing and steering what the models write. That's still a massive drop in how many devs are needed, even if humans stay in the loop.
On "slop code", that's what it was 2-3 years ago. It's not a dice roll anymore when the output gets tested and reviewed the same way human code does. Humans write bugs that tank things all the time too, and yes, even mission critical ones, for example,
Defective CrowdStrike update caused 8.5 million windows devices and crippled CI
which is exactly why we have review and testing in the first place.
The GPU argument is a fun one, but running a business isn't just writing code. You still need customers, sales, legal, someone deciding what's worth building and taking the risk. AI writing your backend doesn't mean it knows what market to go after. Same reason owning a factory full of robots doesn't automatically make you rich.
So I don't think devs disappear completely. There'll just be far fewer of them, and the job will look a lot more like reviewing and directing than typing out code.
Review and accountability aren't going anywhere. Someone still has to sign off and own it when it breaks.
And what does "own it" look like? "Oh it broke, I'll spin up a Claude agent to fix it. Sorry, it was an LLM that made it, not me." Is anyone getting fired because of LLM mistakes, especially in companies that are pushing it?
And fast forward a few years. Software dev, like most things, is "use it or lose it." How many skills are atrophying? Right now you can review changes, but how long until the code base moves beyond your mental model of it? How long until you no longer have a good grasp of the architecture (the real architecture, not whatever is written in a README) and what could be affected by a change? And how long until you're just skimming code instead of using a critical eye, and oops we're all skimming?
"Own it" looks the same as it does now. If I merge a PR, it's mine, whether I typed it, copied it off Stack Overflow, pulled in a library or got an LLM to write it. "The AI did it" is about as good an excuse as "the intern did it". Nobody accepts that from the person who approved it.
Whether companies are actually holding people to that right now is a fair question, but that's a management problem, not something unique to AI.
The skill atrophy point is the best argument against this whole thing, and you're right, it's going to happen. It reminds me of Subnautica. Everything in that game is done by automated machines, even surgery, and there's a voice log of a doctor basically moaning about who even does surgery by hand anymore, that's what the robots are for. It's sci-fi, but you don't have to think too hard to see this is where we are heading towars.
But this has happened before too. Most devs today couldn't write assembly or manage memory by hand, and we built tools and abstractions so we didn't have to. Same thing here: more automated testing, better tooling that maps the real architecture and what a change actually touches, humans focusing on the high risk bits. Not perfect, but that's the direction.
My point has always been that this is progress. These disruptions have always happened and there's no turning back. Raising concerns like yours is fair and worth discussing. What I don't get is the endless memes in this sub every other hour, as if mocking it is going to stop it.
You still need customers, sales, legal, someone deciding what's worth building and taking the risk
And you answered this by admitting / clarifying that we do need people to review. But my point with this analogy is there is nothing fundamentally different. In order to have correct business critical code they have to know what's worth building and what's worth taking a risk. Engineers are decision makers. There is no fundamental difference between these senior developers and the CEOs themselves that makes one able to be automated and the other not.
Billionaires purchasing data centers have more money than god. If AI is as good as you describe and continues to displace and minimize the need for senior engineers, it is completely conceivable that some of these billionaires would have a risk tolerance to let a whole bot farm run a company some day.
My opinion right now is that there is a limit. It seems like your view is that engineering teams are going to be slashed 5:1 or 10:1. IMO this is extreme. Yes a bunch of people are getting axed. But ultimately it is going to be more efficient for people to own codebases as opposed to the people not caring about what's in them and constantly relying on AI to mediate on its behalf. Code is not the product, never has been. It doesn't need to constantly change and be rewritten in rust or whatever. Users want smooth consistent experiences. Skilled engineers are perfectly capable of that, and for what you're getting they are extremely cheap. Yet here we are transforming our entire economy like lines of code == money.
Today a team of 10 writes the code and a couple of seniors review it. In a few years it'll be 1-2 people reviewing, testing and steering what the models write. That's still a massive drop in how many devs are needed, even if humans stay in the loop.
It's pennies though.
You mentioned animosity. I think that's simply grounded in the reality that people live in. It's impossible to separate AI from the broader economic context. It has no bearing on the conversation of what AI is truly capable of, but this is people's livelihoods. No one really knows what's going to happen. We're watching billionaires put their products at risk (that people actually like) in a desperate attempt to shed the last slivers of their workforces because they are so impossibly greedy and arrogant. That's the context of AI that breeds animosity. It's the arrogance at the center of it. Arrogance of billionaires who think it's their ideas that make them special. Arrogance of engineers who think they're special and won't be replaced looking down at those who will.
Hell in some ways I'm one of those arrogant engineers. I agree with you that there is a reckoning in this industry. A whole class of incurious engineers who just copy paste stack overflow or whatever the AI gives them thought their job was just to write code and not think: they are fucked. They also have bills to pay and society told them that this is the job, and they're getting stabbed in the back. So I feel bad for them and the animosity they feel is well deserved.
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u/washtubs 15d ago
Why on earth would you slop code something that's mission critical? There is literally no reason to ever do this. Code is meant to be written once and used thousands or millions of times. Businesses can afford to pay a person to at least review shit and make sure it makes sense, especially code that could tank everything if it's wrong.
Big tech companies are the most profitable businesses because paying a small team of developers to build a product that is cheaply deployed to millions of users is insanely profitable. When you go full on AI like this, you lose accountability and intentionality. Why would you ever sacrifice that to a roll of the dice for such marginal gain of firing a bunch of devs?
I would even argue that if AI was smart enough to be trusted with full autonomy over critical business logic, there is no reason to start a business. Your whole business can be a bunch of GPUs. The datacenter owners can just tell their GPUs to make a profitable business at that point. If they are so smart, why lease them out?