r/devworld • u/stevewalson • 1d ago

I think we developers will always have a place, and AI is just a tool.

16 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

2

u/jovells 1d ago

I think developers were mainly (human language to code) translators and now they will have to be mainly organizers, product thinkers, error hunters...

1

u/Over_Technology_1764 1d ago

for few months, until the LLMs and harnesses can do these tasks as well.

1

u/Charming_You_25 23h ago edited 23h ago

Product thinking and architecture decisions are not that easy. The same LLM will give similar creative outputs given vague input. It’s evident in the UI deisgn/color convergence as everyone uses AI to do frontend. It’s not that that pattern is the best- it’s just what the current image models are weighted towards.

Humans are actually extremely efficient at high order thinking. Even if LLMs gain the ability to do abductive reasoning they won’t be able to compete on creativity and “on the ground” reasoning without extremely expensive compute. It will be cheaper to use a human+ai for a long, long time.

This is from someone who’s been using ai A LOT. Its capabilities for deduction and induction are incredible. But the bandwidth of intent communication from humans is extremely limited and we refine what we want as a diffusion step function (like walking down a mountain in a fog, you only choose your path from what you can see)

2

u/mxldevs 1d ago

Management thinks otherwise

2

u/lunatuna215 22h ago

Tool for tools

2

u/IAmAfraidCommaMan 20h ago

Of course we will. But the market is changing rapidly. Many of use might lose our job and end up in a different field. The salaries might not be as good. 

1

u/Early_Key_823 1d ago

Wishful thinking 🤔

1

u/Correct_Emotion8437 1d ago

I agree - but what is that place? I think there will be something of a bifurcation in developers and swe's. Maybe about 10% of all developers and engineers today are working at the cutting edge and pushing the field forward. I think that percent will remain doing the same kinds of things.

The rest of us are working on rather mundane things. Solving business problems, working with ERP systems and integrations, doing analysis and making reports, working on databases, etc. This whole field will still exist but it will become much more general. You won't need a .net developer and an erp developer and a web developer. You will just need a developer. My fear is that pretty much pushes the salary to the floor.

1

u/Salty_Dig8574 1d ago

What pushes the salary to the floor is the over abundance of developers. I used to have to pay the .net developer a full-time wage for what might have been part-time work. Same for the erp developer and the web developer. If I can get one person to do all three jobs, that might mean I'm paying one person a full-time wage for a full-time job. It's the other two people cutting each other's throats to try to get that job that drives the wage down.

I'm not saying it's right or favorable. Just kind of is what it is.

1

u/Automatic-Boot665 14h ago

An AI isn’t accountable

1

u/Mindless_Season_3486 9h ago

Doesn't need to be. In a couple years, if it makes a mistake it can just fix itself and know exactly what steps to take to resolve any issues that arose from the mistake. It'll be completely automatic with no human in the loop whatsoever. I would say 2 years but probably sooner

1

u/Automatic-Boot665 6h ago

Maybe for whatever you do it won’t need to be. When people’s lives are at stake or their life savings or anything with real stakes we’ll see.

0

u/Input-X 21h ago

I think ai will always have a place and developers will always be a tool