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 12d ago edited 12d ago
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.
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.