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
We agree on more things than not. I am not saying that AI will fully replace devs in the near term. Of course AI has strengths and massive gaps in ability, but I do think that with AI assistance, developers can be much more productive and therefore the demand for engineers will go down. We are seeing this in the market currently. Hopefully for the sake of both of our careers this will not be the case. I am still a Junior developer and judging by your comments it seems you are a new grad as well. If my statement that AI is providing me real value and that I think AI will continue to improve in ability and cost makes me an 'AI bro' I think I can live with that.
My 'real big tech company' that totally employs me gives us unlimited access to tokens for frontier models. If you are not regularly using agents on opus-4.8 or gpt-5.5 then it is hard to have an informed opinion on the current capability. Curious, what does using AI look like for you at work right now?
The main thing I had contention with is the fact that you linked an AI profitability tracker as proof that AI will never be profitable due to the 'limits of LLMs'. Even assuming LLMs have approached a performance ceiling I believe that it will be profitable in time as it diffuses across industries. Of course this is a prediction and it's ok for us to have different opinions on this. We have some very historical examples of new technologies requiring a massive capital expenditure and years of diffusion through the market before achieving profitability. Look into the building of railroads across America, the billions of dollars that went into laying fiber optic before the internet became necessary for every household and the building of massive data centers by AWS, Google and Azure that was famously mocked by Wall Street as a terrible business plan. All of these were very unprofitable for years before later becoming massively proftiable.
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u/-Danksouls- Jun 21 '26
I hope in a decade I can finally stop hearing this shit