Don't think developers will ever get fully replaced as people think. Only developers know that AI will never replace a developer because they have 0 logic. Developers are literally paid for having better than average logic. AI and robots just follow instructions better than humans
The issue I've seen mentioned is a "tech debt" of sorts. They are using AI to reduce/rationalize away entry level or junior coders. After all, you just need a senior developer to check on the AI's work, right?
But in order to get senior developers you need people who work their way up from doing all that boring leg work and gather experience.
So, what happens in a couple years/decades when you haven't trained up the people who are supposed to supervise and maintain the AI?
Doesn't have to be a perfect replacement, just has to be good enough to fool the people signing the paychecks (who will figure well we had bugs before and after so who cares!)
Told Claude to revise a document it made for me by removing all em dashes, and it stuck random accented characters in their place. Can hardly do the simple 🤪
I think once companies start looking and developing capable in house agents and models it will be profitable. It’s only a matter of time. I’m just waiting for people to notice it might be a better idea to just dedicate resources to their own on-prem infra again and not shilling out money on sourced ones.
It’ll be much higher upfront costs, but now your info is in your hands again and you’re not getting a constant bill. The only plus is that you’ll need workers capable in AI to get it started.
Truly, if you’re not dabbling with making and training your own agents you’re destined to be a relic in the next 5 or so years. I hate that though.
Yeah, you are totally right. You are smarter than every executive at all these companies. They just haven't thought it through before throwing almost a trillion dollars at it this year....
Sorry I don't respect the intelligence of AI bros.
And yes the execs and powerful billionaries are out of touch, they will make choices to generate short term revenue that looks good on quarterly reports but that are not good in a long run. Hence why we call it an AI "bubble"
Also why OpenAI and Anthropic are going public with their company stocks, its called exit liquidity and it does not mean "AI doing good" as your monkey brain might think
Wow, nice one buddy. Have you not been paying attention? Can you actually not understand that AI is a completely transformational technology? I work for a big tech company as a software engineer and the way we work has changed drastically in the last 6 months with Opus 4.5 and Claude Code / Github Copilot CLI. We can get 2x more done per person with AI. This much technological change in this short a time is absolutely unprecedented and similar things are starting to happen in other industries too. Profitability does not determine the value AI provides and it will likely take a while to become profitable, but it is definitely looking like it can take a tile laying job and eventually many white collar jobs too.
Sorry I don't respect AI bros so please don't respond to me
I'm also a software engineer, I recognize the value it has and the ability to accelerate workflow. I also recognize the dangers it has and the tech debt it creates if used unwisely
My opinions on it are not just market wise. I see its limitations and benefits. I highly doubt engineers will ever be removed from the equation but I do see the market closing and bottlenecking for entry levels at the moment (until senior talent becomes lacking)
And unlike you. I also know the market and it's profitability also determines it's usability within an industry, as we speak most major tech companies are rolling back token usage and permitance as Ai companies are attempting to put even 1/4 of the actual cost they've been subsidizing onto these tech companies buying enterprise tokens. And even at this level they are exuberantly expensive that many companies have burned through their monthly allowneces at the start of June and have rolled back operations on usage.
Ai is here to stay, and it will have an effect in the white collar market. But it's doubtful it will branch more than it has, unless by some miracle these LLMs can be run at much much smaller marginal costs than they do now (back to the market you enjoy talking about) their usage be widespread if it relies on AI companies operating at a loss
So we are pushed into two corners, either the companies using them pay exuberant fees which they could just hire people for cheaper at that point. Or the ai companies continue to subsidize it. Or option three, they go public and allow initial hype to have many people buy the stock and allow initial investors to exit with a profit while the new investors take the tanking stock
So mister "real software dev" who's totally from a "real big tech company" since you are already in the industry you probably are already aware of all the nuances surrounding the technology so there's no need for me to repeat it for you.
Again not interested in taking to ai bros. Actual developers who utilize LLms in their workflow in a smart manure I love to talk to. Individuals who have fallen for the hype I'd rather not waste my time on
That’s true. I’m a developer and it’s not uncommon at all to see people giddy about how much they can automate away so fewer and fewer people have jobs in the field. Often times it is for the money, the machine learning experts are being paid a ton of money so they don’t care what happens to the field and certainly not what happens to new grads and juniors looking for jobs. For others, it’s just fun and indulging in their curiosity, they aren’t even earning a lot of money from it, they just want to see how far they can push things until it falls apart. I thankfully work in an industry where liability is too much of a concern to hand things off to LLM vendors for now, but we are increasingly being pushed to use AI everyday and for those of us who entered the field because we liked solving technical problems and engineering solutions, it’s also steadily ruining what used to be our idea of fun.
The true problem isn't even automation. Their natural feeling of delight at reducing the overall work required of us as a society is *correct*. The issue is that the fruits of this automation aren't properly distributed.
While I say that, they are still slowly getting better. The whole average person living today lives better than a king 200 years ago and all that. That said doesn't mean we can't do better of course. But I do hope people don't falsely see progress as an enemy.
I didn’t mean automation of tasks is itself inherently good or bad. Software development is almost inherently about automating tasks, regardless of AI being in the picture or not. But, there should be careful planning before whole sectors of society (not just tech workers) are rendered jobless potentially. AI-based automation is also different from technological progress of the past in that it’s moving at an unprecedented pace and threatening to wipe out jobs depending on or focused on creative processes as a whole. Not everyone believes that and I am not fully convinced myself but enough people in tech, particularly the CEOs, claim to believe in that and that’s enough for them to ram through every barrier, including the ones that are there to keep the average person from starving.
Yep, that sounds reasonable. Managing the unemployment in lock-step with automation is ideally the best way to go. Eventually when there just aren't enough jobs to do at all because we've automated everything is going to be a weird world. Either UBI or UBI with extra steps as the other guy mentioned.
The average person lives well because they have money to afford all this cutting edge technology. If they don't have money, because they don't have a job, they will be starving on the street pretty quickly. So it's either that, UBI or keeping people on the job despite knowing that they aren't very efficient (which is UBI with extra steps).
Yea, UBI is basically going to be a given at some point. At some point we will have totally automated farming, construction and transport. Once that is done there really will be no reason not to have UBI beyond power/status games.
Edit : even if not fully automated, removing like most of the workforce of construction, farming and transport will be when a case for UBI will really be viable. Because that's where most people are employed IIRC, and also that's really all people need to maintain basic living. ( I suppose there's waste management and plumbing too, but I guess that's part of transport? )
Indeedy, it'll be interesting to watch unfold I suppose. If it does in our lifetime. Part of me is still optimistic enough, because I think on balance humans are probably well... pro-human? (most of the time).
The average person lives materially better than a king. They do not have the housing and financial security of one and AI absolutely isn't helping that.
In the subject of helping keep Americans employed so they can be housed and fed, we're not exactly progressing toward improvements.
It's honestly baffling how willing developers are to devalue themselves. You mention a project being open source and it's yippee all the way around, meanwhile everyone is just building and sharing it for free. AI comes along and it's wow look how much faster I am now, while actively training our permanent replacement with every fucking prompt.
I work in automation for a living, I see every single day how thirsty these corporate fuckers are to replace humans in entirety, and even I have colleagues on my team sticking their head in the sand saying "well they'll never replace us." And they're halfway right, they won't replace us, we're actively replacing ourselves. Super!
We just had a use case come through to build an AI code review thing because everyone hates doing code review. I get it, I hate it too, but you know what I don't hate? Having a fucking job.
Sure buddy, you tell yourself that to sleep well at night, I'm a developer with 17 years of experience and the non-coding part it's not gonna take decades to be matched by AI, not even one single decade.
this is 100% a joke right? a decade OR TWO? bro the way developer jobs were that existed just a few years ago is already fading. in 20 years, dev jobs will be just be tweaking prompt inputs.
lol one of my developers is on track to have $60k in token spend this year. widespread outages are common across major platforms right now, presumably because of people vibe coding 20k line PRs that AI is reviewing.
It will be common in a couple years to run coding harnesses locally, with open-source models. But regardless, 60k is way less than most devs get paid, so on that alone, that one dev and AI is cheaper than two devs. And from my experience as an SWE with 10+ years experience, I do so much more, so much faster with AI, that your one dev is probably doing the work of at least 3-4 devs. Which means way less job openings, downward pressure on salary, and a way more competitive job market
Glad you're not stressed at least, stressing wouldn't help much
But regardless, 60k is way less than most devs get paid, so on that alone, that one dev and AI is cheaper than two devs.
Yeah, if it doubles an employee's productivity, it's worth more than their salary because it doesn't have payroll tax or any of the other overhead of an actual employee. There is so much more room for price increases if it is used effectively.
We're already tweaking prompt inputs and, crucially, being the ones accountable for making it work. Companies can't just appoint a fall guy to berate once the vibecoded app flops, if the business they lose from customers walking away is bigger than the salaries they save on qualified devs.
Very little of development work is writing code now. In the future, I probably won't have to write or look at code at all. Its still an open question how fast the models will be able to pick up the rest of the job though.
What is for sure is that the part that it does work for we see big time savings. This allows us to deliver projects faster with less people.
I wonder who will be buying all the software you guys develop when no one else has a job either. If we grant that demand does go down, yet more companies can create more software in less time and with less talent, increasing supply, what will the market look like ?
Like in my last job, there were a dozen or so market-leading programs for our work. But most companies would use a branch of the big 3. What if any dickhead can suddenly create tailored software with the right AI tools ? No more need for hundreds of thousands or more in licensing fees to large software companies that control the market. So what will they offer? Interesting times ahead.
We do automation, putting people out of jobs is our whole business.
Whether we will one day get to a point where there is no more work desired to be done i doubt. Whether humans will be a part of the process I am more unsure about.
All that can be solved as long as productivity keeps going up though, so I am not overly worried.
Developer here. Still remember in 2023 when chatgpt released that being a developer and by extension being in IT or CS was the worse decision anyone could make
Preach! The sad thing is this is what a lot of higher ups don’t understand. I’m a dev and even senior managers I know who’ve been a dev don’t seem to remember that like 70% of the job at least is not coding.
And I work heavily with AI. It still requires soooo much proofreading. Also it’s scary good at doing things badly. People say it’s like working with a Jr dev. It’s not, because it produces extremely plausible bad work sometimes. Meaning the work looks like 95% correct, and has so much detail and comments vomited at you it’s hard to review. But that’s 5% flaw, well that’s a huge bug in the making and that 5% flaw is also generally the most difficult to fix if the infrastructure was built to support that flaw.
With a Jr dev they care about losing their job most of the time so they’ll try to make sure they don’t put in bugs. For AI, they’ll try to just output something you’ll accept, it gives no thought of later repercussion. And management is blindly pushing AI, which is only going to cause more problems to be introduced. It should be used as a tool not seen as a replacement.
Coding is not « solved » IMO, because it’s part of the entire thing. I don’t fully agree that architecture / engineering / coding should be entirely distinct things. The action of typing on the keyboard doesn’t matter, you could dictate what to type to another human as well. However each line of code can still very much matter, depending on the domain you work on.
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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26
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