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Replaceable or replaceable by AI? Already today standard CRUD web development is largely automateable. I already have my own specialized scripts from years of

Replaceable or replaceable by AI? Already today standard CRUD web development is largely automateable. I already have my own specialized scripts from years of experience, targeting backend, front end, design components, that generate most of what I want with some basic inputs. I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too. This kind of approach already does replace programmers, and could do so a lot more. But what do you mean by replaceable by AI? How would that work?

pedalpete 10y ago
I hadn't strictly thought this out, but I guess what I'm thinking is that your basic CRUD scripts on steroids. What if it didn't need your domain knowledge to run the scripts? What if the styled output of the scripts was high-quality UI? - Not to shame your scripts, but I'm thinking back to my Rails days and though I could 'generate' everything, I then would have to manually go in and edit the code so that it did what we really wanted. What if the person requesting whatever function (report, process, notification, etc) could have this system built without a developer? That make developers replaceable. I'm not suggesting this is happening in the short-term, but as you say yourself, you use scripts for your basic CRUD development. What is stopping those scripts from moving up market to the point where you are not needed. Front-end devs who used to write HTML and CSS would have said they where always needed because a computer can't make a webpage. But look at SquareSpace, Wix and the like. Again, this isn't every job, but this is a portion of the market which is no longer served by a person, and that will continue. The new jobs will be in training and building these systems, which I think is historically how industrialization has progressed.
learc83 10y ago
>I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too. I don't think that's true at all unless you're talking about 3rd party tools like rails scaffolding. What languages / frameworks are you using by the way? The boilerplate stuff that can be replaced by scripts is maybe 10-15% of my time anyway. The rest of my time is spent at a much higher level either trying to interpret client requests, trying to help the client decide what they want, making high level design decisions, or adding features that require way to much customization to use automated code generators. This is much different if we're talking about a language like C where a much higher percentage of my time is spent on boilerplate code. However with newer languages and frameworks I think we're reaching diminishing returns for what can be automated by either the language itself or generator scripts/frameworks. There is a huge productivity difference between using C and raw PHP when writing a CRUD app. There's less of a productivity boost (still huge though) when moving from raw PHP to something like Rails. And there's even less of a jump between Rails and something newer like Phoenix. I expect that the next 10 years will give us even smaller incremental improvements.

pedalpete 10y ago

I hadn't strictly thought this out, but I guess what I'm thinking is that your basic CRUD scripts on steroids. What if it didn't need your domain knowledge to run the scripts? What if the styled output of the scripts was high-quality UI? - Not to shame your scripts, but I'm thinking back to my Rails days and though I could 'generate' everything, I then would have to manually go in and edit the code so that it did what we really wanted. What if the person requesting whatever function (report, process, notification, etc) could have this system built without a developer? That make developers replaceable. I'm not suggesting this is happening in the short-term, but as you say yourself, you use scripts for your basic CRUD development. What is stopping those scripts from moving up market to the point where you are not needed. Front-end devs who used to write HTML and CSS would have said they where always needed because a computer can't make a webpage. But look at SquareSpace, Wix and the like. Again, this isn't every job, but this is a portion of the market which is no longer served by a person, and that will continue. The new jobs will be in training and building these systems, which I think is historically how industrialization has progressed.

learc83 10y ago

>I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too. I don't think that's true at all unless you're talking about 3rd party tools like rails scaffolding. What languages / frameworks are you using by the way? The boilerplate stuff that can be replaced by scripts is maybe 10-15% of my time anyway. The rest of my time is spent at a much higher level either trying to interpret client requests, trying to help the client decide what they want, making high level design decisions, or adding features that require way to much customization to use automated code generators. This is much different if we're talking about a language like C where a much higher percentage of my time is spent on boilerplate code. However with newer languages and frameworks I think we're reaching diminishing returns for what can be automated by either the language itself or generator scripts/frameworks. There is a huge productivity difference between using C and raw PHP when writing a CRUD app. There's less of a productivity boost (still huge though) when moving from raw PHP to something like Rails. And there's even less of a jump between Rails and something newer like Phoenix. I expect that the next 10 years will give us even smaller incremental improvements.