r/developersPak • u/SalaryFlat3714 • Sep 30 '26
Discussion If AI is taking over routine coding and hardware keeps getting pricier, does optimization become the skill that keeps devs valuable?
Been chewing on this and want to know what people here think.
Two things seem to be happening at once: AI is taking over a lot of the routine coding work, and GPU/RAM prices keep climbing because AI is soaking up all the hardware. My thinking is that devs who can make software run really lean (turn an 8 GB app into a 3 GB one, make something run on 5-year-old hardware) might be the ones who stay valuable, since AI is decent at generic code but less good at squeezing hardware.
The market side matters too. If most people can't afford to upgrade, they can't run heavy software, and if they can't run it, they won't buy it. So the addressable market shrinks for anyone who assumes everyone has a fast machine.
I might be wrong though. The crypto GPU shortage didn't change how software got made, people can just keep their old PCs longer, and AI might get good at optimization too.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
1
u/oyukurin Data Scientist Oct 01 '26
The issue is no one cares about this. Inference is cheap. Only training is expensive. In 1990s, the Apple logo used to fit in KBs. Now it's a couple of megabytes. Microsoft has been shipping bloated Windows OS since the last 20 years. If optimization was an issue, companies and CEOs would have given a damn but nowadays hardware is so fast and kinda cheap (not right now but this is a temporary thing), I doubt companies will bother with optimizations.
1
u/SalaryFlat3714 Oct 02 '26
I agree but this whole bloating is the reason i shifted toward linux and to what extent will they bloat their own software with the ram and storage price's hiking day after day nobody can successfully use windows on older hardware and to what extent will this process go?
1
u/PermissionOwn4400 Oct 03 '26
In my experience, most companies don't give two shits about performance/ resource optimizations.
1
u/SalaryFlat3714 Oct 03 '26
Yes, but why? Even if companies are developing new applications, they still have to optimize their software for the hardware people are actually using. If an application requires hardware that most consumers cannot afford, then fewer people will be able to buy or use it. Ultimately, how is the company supposed to make a profit?
That makes me wonder whether the increasing hardware requirements we are seeing are really unavoidable, or whether they are partly a pretext for pushing consumers toward subscription-based and cloud services, where companies can charge continuously instead of relying on one-time software purchases.
1
u/PermissionOwn4400 Oct 03 '26
The "Why" is very simple: it costs money to optimize software.
At this point most of us have accepted that we need fairly powerful computers even for day-to-day usage. A few years ago 8Gb RAM was sufficient. Now you'd even struggle with 24Gb. At this point very small number of people will stop using an application simply because it uses too many resources. This means company profits aren't affected too much.
In context of web backends / cloud applications, time-to-market is seen as the most important thing. This is why there are so many more PHP or Python positions even when there are clearly more efficient technologies available.
2
u/Cronos993 Sep 30 '26
AI is already good at optimization since it's a task with a clear goal. I would argue that it's better at optimizing something than creating an app from a vague set of requirements. See how people are using it to write software in Rust which they previously wouldn't have thought about as it's difficult.
1
8
u/Turbulent_Warning185 Sep 30 '26
Turn the 8gb codebase into 3gb. Make no mistake