9 ms·

AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

64 points by ceohockey60 3y ago

kfarr 3y ago
I agree, related story I lurk on a few dev community discords and I’m seeing more people come in to ask questions to help debug code created by gpt. My optimistic side thinks it is bringing more people in to the communities who are empowered to try things out. A counterpoint is they wouldn’t have to ask for help on buggy ai code if they had used stack overflow instead :)
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  They probably would, it's just that the question would be immediately closed as a duplicate of something almost completely unrelated.
- lnsru 3y ago
  Tried using such code generation for simple things in VHDL. It looked like VHDL, but failed badly. Maybe for more popular languages with more training Dara it works better.
stuckinhell 3y ago
I agree. However it will increase the bimodal distribution between normal developers and the extremely skilled developers. Salaries on the whole will drop, and we likely see an increase in outsourcing. AI can reduce the barriers between languages and cultural customs as well.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  > AI can reduce the barriers between languages and cultural customs as well. Languages, maybe, but cultural customs? I highly doubt that. Perhaps the perfunctory sort (e.g.: "vous"-ing and "usted"-ing), but there are real differences between cultures in both the work place and and personally that AI can't help you with. Nothing but compassion and a willingness to learn will help you with that one.
  - yamazakiwi 3y ago
    It won't remove ALL barriers obviously, but AI can explain quirks, significance, reference, and cultural trends in speech. An AI can dive deep to further comprehension, which will facilitate more cultural understanding through linguistic relativity.
    - jszymborski 3y ago
      I'm sorry, but I'm really not seeing anything here you can't get from a quick web search. LLMs are not a panacea, and there's no way for them to mainline a Comparative Cultures class into you in 5 minutes. There really is no shortcut to compassion and understanding... so much of it is simply taking the time to inform yourself. You can get an LLM to summarize a wiki page on some culture's customs, but there is better content written, edited, and curated by humans on the topic.
      - yamazakiwi 3y ago
        No one is claiming what you're arguing against. We're simply saying that AI can give you more cultural understanding through deep diving into language. Not that opening chatgpt makes you understand everything about a culture or a group of people. No one here was saying LLM's are a panacea for cultural misunderstanding and it's bizarre you think anyone on HN would believe that. You've created an imaginary argument for the sake of positing your opinion. You did however bring up willingness, which is an important consideration.
        jszymborski 3y ago
        > You've created an imaginary argument for the sake of positing your opinion. You did however bring up willingness, which is an important consideration. This is getting rather pointed and I ask you to consider whether it's just to be questioning my motives for posting. It's clear you think I've not addressed your argument, the civil thing is to attribute that to a perceived misunderstanding and not some desire to speak past you with my own opinion.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  I bet AI-reliant developers are going to be more reviled than PHP developers way back during peak PHP-hate times.
  - jstx1 3y ago
    Maybe but only if you're imagining completely new and inexperienced people who wouldn't be able to get anything done without AI entering the field - I can see how that can cause an emotional reaction. But if you compare two experienced developers - one of them uses AI, the other doesn't - I don't see what's there to be reviled, one of them just found a tool that makes them more productive.
    - adventured 3y ago
      The reviled part of it is going to come from the bottom 2/3 of people writing code today getting brutalized economically (permanent job destruction and the lowering of income for those in that segment that manage to find jobs writing code and or managing AI that writes the code). The median software developer in the US is solidly earning six figures. That's going away, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to be angry about it. Their previously solid path up and out of the middle class is about to vanish. They were betting on that. A large number of people are in school today thinking that median software developer job, writing code, paying $110k per year + great benefits, is still going to be there in 2033.
      - sangnoir 3y ago
        Developers who'll use AI as a crutch will be no different to entry-level, PHP-only developers of yore who relied on StackOverflow and will be reviled for the same reason: their code will be buggy & inconsistent. I was an experienced polyglot developer and I occasionally used PHP for rapid prototyping, but the hate knew no nuance on HN and elsewhere.
        adventured 3y ago
        It's not going to be a crutch. It's going to be a large segment of lower paid grunts, doing work that will be less difficult and more mind numbing. The requirements will still be modestly high, you'll need a degree, and you'll get paid less than today's software developers (in some cases far less). A software developer in the future will be someone who only interfaces with AI centric tools, with the AI writing essentially all the code. It'll be rare to directly tweak code for the typical software developer. It will no longer mean someone who writes code to develop software, it will mean someone who uses AI tools to develop software. What you think of as a software developer today, isn't what people will know them as in another 15 years. It'll happen fast. The code is going to get abstracted away. An 18 year old in 2040 that is looking to become a software developer will go to school for how to build software, which will mean using AI tools to do it; they won't go to school to learn how to program. In fact they won't know much about writing code at all. In several decades it will be a far more rare skill, that will be viewed as a bit archaic, to still directly write software code. Stories will abound about the old times when millions of people used to directly write code, and they got paid ridiculously well to do it. That problem got solved. One of the great benefits of AI will be abstracting away complexity (complexity as far as the human mind is concerned), and writing software code is a big juicy target that won't be difficult to abstract away (for something like GPT version 13).
- zabzonk 3y ago
  yeah, people seem to have forgotten all those derided developers that spent their time copy/pasting code from stack overflow into their project. which is basically what gpt is doing.
napsec 3y ago
The talk around AI and developers makes me think of Jevons Paradox [0] where more efficient use of a resource increases it's consumption rather than decreases it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  We should wish for technological progress causing more efficient (and in turn less) use of resources. It does not seem to be the case.
  - rednalexa 3y ago
    Yeah. My worry with Fusion eventually being solved is it will make energy so abundant that we will find novel ways to waste it. Ideally it is used to solve things like our climate crisis - but who knows.
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
Sure, just as growth of new tech will always create more jobs. But there is a twist: a whole generation of people get fucked over. Or maybe multiple generations. Sure, they can always learn new skills, right? RIGHT? Downvote me as you wish, plesbians.
- switchbak 3y ago
  What's your argument? Why will they get fucked over?
  - hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
    I mean bro read some history.
    - switchbak 3y ago
      So your argument is to read other people's opinions? That's still not an argument. Bro.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Well, in the fullness of time, that's still a happy ending, no? That's the story of life itself: whole generations of people die, ideally while planting ever-bigger trees for future generations to enjoy the shade under. This happens over and over, drips of tragedy in an ocean of comedy. :D
epolanski 3y ago
They said that AI would've disrupted the language translation industry, it actually helped it a ton.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  It's been disrupted, though. A lot of translators are now being offered MTL editing work instead, which pays worse and produces lower quality (but takes less time).
  - re-thc 3y ago
    And there are less roles (in numbers)
  - epolanski 3y ago
    That is not true, one of my closest friends has a translating agency, he often says the sector has boomed with stuff like google translate. Essentially professional translations are now much more accessible to people that would've not been able to afford them in the first place. Yes, it pays less per page, depends on the type of translation actually, but it is also much faster to do and there's more business.
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      You're talking about the POV of the owner of a translation agency, and how he's getting more business because he can charge less and deliver "translations" faster via MTL. I'm talking about the job market for translators. These are different things.
      - epolanski 3y ago
        Yes, they have much more work now, that is the point. Does it pays less on per page basis? It mostly does (but it highly depends on the type of translations: legal, medical, etc have the same fees) but it is more than compensated by being able to churn much more work by focusing on reviewing and interpreting the author's meaning and context.
wokwokwok 3y ago
> AI-assisted coding products drastically reduce the barrier to entry to becoming a “developer.” Regardless of the “random person thinking out loud with nothing but their own opinion as evidence” aspect to this article, they really are on the money with this one little fragment of their post. Lots and lots of developers, and no meaningful difference between someone who took a two week “how do I write prompts” course and someone who spent 4 years at university. Learning programming. Or law. Or business. Or teaching. Or writing. That’s the future I see coming, in probably the next 3 years. However, as great that might be for companies who like cheap ass labour, it may not be great for individuals… I think it’s fair to say it’ll be disruptive, that’s for sure.
- jstx1 3y ago
  There's still a big difference between someone with experience and someone without, LLMs haven't bridged that gap. Knowing how to use an LLM, having access to a good one, using it regularly anywhere you can, you would still get, what - 10%, 20% increase in productivity? It's significant but it's not "your experience and education don't matter" level of significant. And on the other side of the room some people are still arguing whether these things are useful for anything at all.
  - wokwokwok 3y ago
    > There's still a big difference between someone with experience and someone without, LLMs haven't bridged that gap Yet.
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      > Yet. (c) 1960–
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
> AI-assisted coding products drastically reduce the barrier to entry to becoming a “developer.” Only reason FANG employees are not paid McDonalds salary is because of the barrier to entry. The barrier will go down yes, but so will wages.
- jsunderland323 3y ago
  It’s not like the FANG dev lives in a separate universe devoid of the same AI developments as everyone else. If anything I’d imagine the barrier to producing the FANG products of today goes down but the interview process of FANG is still mostly on a curve relative to whatever technology is available at the time. I sort of expect their operating expenses to drop with more AI development, meaning a FANG job becomes more coveted since less employees are required to produce same revenues but you would expect the wages of those fewer employees to increase, no?
  - 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
    yes but i don't think those will be dev jobs. it will either be a much broader, complex job title, requiring much more responsibilities - or it will just be some kind of non meritocratic type of job that isn't reasonably open to everyone...
vannevar 3y ago
>I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less. While this is a great argument that there will be more software in the future (something that I don't think anyone disputes), it's not an argument in favor of the proposition that there will be more developers, because the whole point of AI-driven development is to automate what a developer does. One reason there are a lot of businesses still using antiquated systems is that 1) the systems work for their purposes, so their need is not acute; and 2) custom software development is expensive. Your local gym can't afford to pay someone thousands of dollars for a custom app (or even hundreds of dollars for a customized version of an existing app). But AI-driven development promises an order of magnitude drop in cost. So yes, we should see a lot more digitization as it becomes available. I do agree in the short term that it won't drive the number of developers down, since for the foreseeable future skilled people will be needed to oversee the AI product. But it will vastly increase productivity. Unfortunately, if history is any guide developers will not reap any of the rewards for the increased productivity, and their real wages may actually decline.
- BobbyJo 3y ago
  Author's argument also rests on developers being the bottleneck. I think a lot of things that could be digitized, aren't for reasons that have little to do with software.
- throw_pm23 3y ago
  I look around sometimes and see digitized/software-ized products I wish weren't. So the number can be negative. One example: restaurant menus. Second example: car audio volume buttons/knobs.
  - dwaltrip 3y ago
    This is a good point. However, even if we account for this and subtract all products that are currently digitized poorly, I think we still get a very large positive number. The number of useful digital products that don’t yet exist is enormous. We can’t fathom the vast array of creations that future generations will dream up. P.s. very strong agree about digital menus… so annoying to use!
kevingadd 3y ago
Why is more quantity good? Why is "developer growth" good? Isn't it important whether these developers all have good quality of life, and whether they're building quality software? Is it a good thing if we have a hundred thousand new developers, all building low quality software on top of Copilot output, and then a few years from now all of that stuff starts breaking and we don't have enough expert developers around to come in and clean up the mess? I think opening doors for more people to enter the career is good, and making it easier for developers to do their jobs is good. But I don't think quantity over quality is the right model to apply to software development, because history is full of examples of how just shipping something that works can mean massive expensive consequences down the road.
rvz 3y ago
Exactly. Everyone is a 'developer' without needing the expensive bootcamps and 24 hour scam courses and there will be less highly paid ones, including juniors and seniors. So in reality it is less developers needed (and being hired and being highly paid) and an abundance of 'developers' which is effectively everyone using AI and LLMs for almost for free to drive it all the way down to zero.
ultrablack 3y ago
Demand for developers is endless. If AI can help more people be developers, and or help developers be more productive, it just means the supply of developers goes up. I would guess that this will not result in a downward pressure on wages, the demand will simply skyrocket.
- tombert 3y ago
  I agree. I think people are looking at this through an "Amdahl's Law" lens [1] when I think it's more realistically a "Gustafson's Law" problem. It's not like we will ever get to a point where we say "oh, all the potential things that can be done have been done", we simply will find out how to do more stuff. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law
littlecranky67 3y ago
I am believing that, too. Just imagine this: Take a Laptop with WinXP+Office 98 from the 2000 era and travel back in time to the 60s or 70s using a time machine. Show the power of Excel to any of those developers punching holes into a punch card, feeding room-sized "computers". Tell them that this "Excel" tool is used by business and sales people without any programming skills. Those developers would clearly tell their children to learn other professions, as no one will need developers in the future because this "Excel" and "Access" make it so easy. But the opposite become true, we needed more devs than ever at that time. Our field will change, the way we develop software did change and will continue to do so - maybe using AI all day.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  It does seem that every advance in productivity has led to more software jobs, but I see no reason this must continue forever. I can tell that I have no fear for my job from Copilot and ChatGPT, both of which I use constantly. But the next generation of tools, marrying low-code, integration platforms and AI generation of those applications could really be a game changer.
- rcme 3y ago
  I disagree. Think about it like this: Excel can do more than punch cards can, but it's also harder to learn. So you can put in more effort and get more out, e.g. you might need 130% of the knowledge, but you get 150% of the result. These new generative AI algorithms make things easier, but they produce worse results. E.g. you can put in 50% of the effort and get 80% of the result. By lowering the amount of knowledge required to build something, you open up the labor pool to more unskilled labor. So while technically the "number of developers" will increase, the ranks will be increased with unskilled labor and the profession will cease to be desirable knowledge work. This is very similar to how craftsmen and tradespeople were replaced with automation. For example, "Luddites" are known as people who dislike technological progress, but they were really textile workers who opposed having their high-skill jobs replaced by low-skill laborers with the factory owners pocketing the difference between the high and low skill pay.
  - 3y ago
jrumbut 3y ago
If this article is right, great. If this article is not right, the consequences for those of us without independent means could be dire. The time to create a safety net for those displaced by AI is now.
byyyy 3y ago
>I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less. What? How does this logic work out? Is this not considering how AIs can software-ize products and services in place of a software developer? How about talking about how AI can empower a single developer to do the job of 10 people? These logical implications obviously point to "less developers". I mean it seems really really obvious to me. Whether you agree with the potential of AI or not you need your "lens" to include this angle. The problem I'm seeing is a lot of "simplification" to the point of blindness. Certain Software engineers don't want to face a world where a machine completely trivializes the skills they spent to much time cultivating so they self induce blindness. They lie to themselves the same way tobacco execs and big oil execs had to lie to themselves before lying to the world. The main problem is this: While we made significant progress with LLMs in producing an intelligent AI, We don't know if the current problems with LLMs (hallucinations, occasional logic errors, etc..) are technological dead ends... That's it. That's the main crux everyone is debating about. Even the big experts in AI like Hinton are divided on this fact so there is actual controversy here.
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  > How about talking about how AI can empower a single developer to do the job of 10 people? I think you missed some of the nuance of the article. You’re talking about how many jobs there will be, and they’re (also) talking about how many people will qualify as “developers”. Will the number of jobs go up or down or stay the same? Who knows? Probably down. …but that’s only half the story. Will the number of “developers” able to do what only “developers” can do now go up down or stay the same? Well, since my mom told me she put some php on her Wordpress site from chat-gpt last week, I’m gonna sit in the “a considerable number more developers will materialise” camp. I.e. a huge glut in the number of people competing for that (probably shrinking) pool of jobs.
cube2222 3y ago
I have a friend who needed to generate 400 random qr codes. Did the first half in 4 hours, going one by one through an online website. Learning about it mid through that process I told her to try asking chatgpt to write a python script for it (she knows a bit of python, knows how to run a script etc.). Needed a pip install of the qr code lib, but other than that worked right away. ChatGPT turned the next 4 hours of menial work into 10 minutes. This is the true incoming disruption. People who just vaguely know how to program, getting a powerful tool that can assist them 95% of the way for simple automations like this.
- throwaway2203 3y ago
  > People who just vaguely know how to program This is a very absurdly small minority of people.
  - cube2222 3y ago
    It's becoming increasingly more common for people in various stem areas, social sciences, economics, etc. Basics of Python courses are very common everywhere, now.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > ChatGPT turned the next 4 hours of menial work into 10 minutes. This is the true incoming disruption. Problem is how do you know if it's correct? If you have to verify it all it may take even longer. And when it's wrong it's back to square 1. > People who just vaguely know how to program, getting a powerful tool that can assist them 95% of the way for simple automations like this. Is assuming it's correct.
  - jallen_dot_dev 3y ago
    It doesn't take 4 hours to code review a few lines of code for generating random QR codes.
    - adventured 3y ago
biztos 3y ago
I think there will be more developers, not fewer -- but they might not be the same kind of people. If a subject-matter expert plus an AI Wrangler can create software as well as two programmers, why shouldn't they? But I also think that if, like the author, your optimistic scenario is that things will be better "software-ized," you're in for a disappointing century. The incentives that lead to most software being crap are not going to change in the slightest. Instead, more things will get software. Some of it will be good, most of it will not.
bern4444 3y ago
The benefit of AI is it will make workers more efficient and free up workers and thus businesses to focus on additional projects and problems, create new tools, grow, etc. One real issue I hope we resolve is to then see workers benefit from their increased efficiency in regards to their compensation. Pay has not kept pace with increased workers efficiency historically. The efficiency gains technology produces tend to go to the top (C Suite and shareholders). While I, like many, am a shareholder of many companies (so I do benefit as equity markets go up) - the vast majority of Americans own very little if any equity in any equities and this is what leads to absurd wealth disparity. It'd be nice if this time were different and we could create a system that avoids all the extra cash this generates from being funneled up like regulatory capture - I suspect it won't be.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
> I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” What about the ones that are already digitized and despite their unavoidable convenience for being so, are less enjoyable than they used to be and more loaded with surveillance and advertising?
bitL 3y ago
That assumes human brains will be able to cope with intelligence tuned beyond their reach. We are already at the stage where many PhDs aren't capable of producing outputs coming from LLMs in some areas. The only approach regular humans used when meeting "superintelligence" were belief systems.
woeirua 3y ago
There certainly will be more developers because coding will be more accessible to people without software backgrounds. So that's a net positive for the world. Also, I think that software engineers in general will get more productive because there will be almost no reason to spend hours pouring over docs anymore. That's a big productivity enhancement. Also, if want to work in a framework or language that you're not an expert in? That's easy peasy now. AI will be a boon to companies that have legacy systems that they were previously struggling to find engineers to work on. I think the big issue for software is going to be that engineers are no longer the bottleneck and the focus is going to shift from _how_ we build things to _what_ we're building and even more importantly _why_. Engineers should be rejoicing over that because it means that software development is going to be a lot more focused on building and creativity than the mechanical details of how do you get framework X to work with data Y.
iamwpj 3y ago
It's just the process of converting every cost center role into a more efficient half-IT and half-HR/Accounting/OPs role. No one will train anyone so what's the next best thing? Automate stuff; or at least pretend to and pay lot's of money to back the idea up.
kristopolous 3y ago
The daguerreotype wasn't great news for portrait painters. It didn't kill painting, it just changed it. It also opened up a new field of the professional photographer. I can't stress this enough this is exactly what's going on. AI is a tool for simple boring repetitive tedium that takes too long. Abstract art came because after photography, painting the exact same painting of yet another rich person didn't pay the bills anymore. And frankly, thank goodness for that. Work in the future is not going to look like it does now. It's going to mutate. Ok, that's fine, it always does.
adventured 3y ago
There will be a lot more developers using AI to create software, and fewer software developers writing actual code (those that do will continue to be paid very well). Heavily using AI to create software will become a new layer of development that will broaden the field and a lot of tools will be built just for that purpose, to simplify and dumb it down. The developers not writing code will not be paid nearly so well. To get a job using AI to create software (but not writing code) will require a degree and it'll pay sub six figures most commonly. A large share of developers making six figures today, that are in the middle ~15-25% group (in terms of skill), will often not be good enough to cut it in the future as the field narrows for writing code, the gravy train for the median and below will end and the pay will drop below six figures (in today's dollar). The entire bottom 1/3 or more of the code writing software field (people which are earning $75k-$85k+ today in the US) will largely be obliterated. There are around 1.1-1.2 million software developers in the US today, earning roughly a median of $110k-$115k before benefits. Until recent developments, those people were almost all writing code directly (with some standard copy-pasting from Stack of course). At least half of those jobs are going away and quickly. Most will transition over to creating software using AI, but rarely or never writing code directly, as few people write machine code today. AI will similarly propogate a new layer, with fewer writing code directly (and that field may perpetually shrink for decades as it gets squeezed ever tighter by ever better AI approaches). The number of people directly writing code has or is close to peaking. This is the end of that era. People in the emerging software world (eg parts of Eastern Europe or Latin America, etc) will have a potent economic ladder largely pulled away from them (this part sucks big time, but nothing can stop what's coming). The opportunities to use AI to create software will still be there for those people (it won't pay nearly as well as writing code does today); it'll become a lot more rare for rich corporations to pay well to write code directly off-shore and the job numbers will dwindle substantially.
crimsonpowder 3y ago
LLMs can't replace most developers, not yet. If they get much better, maybe. But they have limited context. They make up APIs that don't exist. For me, it's a great starting point that reduces carpal tunnel, but not much more.
fxj 3y ago
One thing that is often overlooked in the discussionis that GPT is just extracting the information from sites like stackoverflow and such and distills its knowledge to write new code. But what happens if the main source of coding knowledge - stack overflow etc - suddenly falls dry? No new information for GPT. We all know that unmaintained code starts rotting and this is what will happen to the GPT generated code. GPT needs the fresh blood of human devs to do its job. And this is even more true for new languages and toolkits. First the tutorials and docs have to be written in order for GPT to learn the new code.
- jallen_dot_dev 3y ago
  It can learn from it's own users. People paste their code into GPT for context, so it'll see new patterns that way. People paste the error message that results from some bad code GPT spit out, it learns from context plus the error text what the correct code should be.
  - fxj 3y ago
    yes, but it also sees a lot of buggy code this way, because users are no longer experts and write lots of buggy code. Remember, GPT cannot decide whether code is correct or not, it is just a parrot that tells you the code that it sees most often. Try to ask it about some esotheric language like supercollider or J. It will just hallucinate some code that it thinks looks like the one you want. GPT need a certain critical mass of information to give reliable results.
neotrope 3y ago
I’m not sure this is a good metric. > look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less. Even before LLMs, fully digitized markets are regularly disrupted by better iterations of software. More developers will be needed because AI is increasing the addressable market of software.
randyrand 3y ago
At much lower cost! :(
xk_id 3y ago
* fewer

64 points by ceohockey60 3y ago

I agree, related story I lurk on a few dev community discords and I’m seeing more people come in to ask questions to help debug code created by gpt. My optimistic side thinks it is bringing more people in to the communities who are empowered to try things out. A counterpoint is they wouldn’t have to ask for help on buggy ai code if they had used stack overflow instead :)

sebzim4500 3y ago
They probably would, it's just that the question would be immediately closed as a duplicate of something almost completely unrelated.
lnsru 3y ago
Tried using such code generation for simple things in VHDL. It looked like VHDL, but failed badly. Maybe for more popular languages with more training Dara it works better.

stuckinhell 3y ago

I agree. However it will increase the bimodal distribution between normal developers and the extremely skilled developers. Salaries on the whole will drop, and we likely see an increase in outsourcing. AI can reduce the barriers between languages and cultural customs as well.

jszymborski 3y ago
> AI can reduce the barriers between languages and cultural customs as well. Languages, maybe, but cultural customs? I highly doubt that. Perhaps the perfunctory sort (e.g.: "vous"-ing and "usted"-ing), but there are real differences between cultures in both the work place and and personally that AI can't help you with. Nothing but compassion and a willingness to learn will help you with that one.
- yamazakiwi 3y ago
  It won't remove ALL barriers obviously, but AI can explain quirks, significance, reference, and cultural trends in speech. An AI can dive deep to further comprehension, which will facilitate more cultural understanding through linguistic relativity.
  - jszymborski 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but I'm really not seeing anything here you can't get from a quick web search. LLMs are not a panacea, and there's no way for them to mainline a Comparative Cultures class into you in 5 minutes. There really is no shortcut to compassion and understanding... so much of it is simply taking the time to inform yourself. You can get an LLM to summarize a wiki page on some culture's customs, but there is better content written, edited, and curated by humans on the topic.
    - yamazakiwi 3y ago
      No one is claiming what you're arguing against. We're simply saying that AI can give you more cultural understanding through deep diving into language. Not that opening chatgpt makes you understand everything about a culture or a group of people. No one here was saying LLM's are a panacea for cultural misunderstanding and it's bizarre you think anyone on HN would believe that. You've created an imaginary argument for the sake of positing your opinion. You did however bring up willingness, which is an important consideration.
      - jszymborski 3y ago
        > You've created an imaginary argument for the sake of positing your opinion. You did however bring up willingness, which is an important consideration. This is getting rather pointed and I ask you to consider whether it's just to be questioning my motives for posting. It's clear you think I've not addressed your argument, the civil thing is to attribute that to a perceived misunderstanding and not some desire to speak past you with my own opinion.
sangnoir 3y ago
I bet AI-reliant developers are going to be more reviled than PHP developers way back during peak PHP-hate times.
- jstx1 3y ago
  Maybe but only if you're imagining completely new and inexperienced people who wouldn't be able to get anything done without AI entering the field - I can see how that can cause an emotional reaction. But if you compare two experienced developers - one of them uses AI, the other doesn't - I don't see what's there to be reviled, one of them just found a tool that makes them more productive.
  - adventured 3y ago
    The reviled part of it is going to come from the bottom 2/3 of people writing code today getting brutalized economically (permanent job destruction and the lowering of income for those in that segment that manage to find jobs writing code and or managing AI that writes the code). The median software developer in the US is solidly earning six figures. That's going away, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to be angry about it. Their previously solid path up and out of the middle class is about to vanish. They were betting on that. A large number of people are in school today thinking that median software developer job, writing code, paying $110k per year + great benefits, is still going to be there in 2033.
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      Developers who'll use AI as a crutch will be no different to entry-level, PHP-only developers of yore who relied on StackOverflow and will be reviled for the same reason: their code will be buggy & inconsistent. I was an experienced polyglot developer and I occasionally used PHP for rapid prototyping, but the hate knew no nuance on HN and elsewhere.
      - adventured 3y ago
        It's not going to be a crutch. It's going to be a large segment of lower paid grunts, doing work that will be less difficult and more mind numbing. The requirements will still be modestly high, you'll need a degree, and you'll get paid less than today's software developers (in some cases far less). A software developer in the future will be someone who only interfaces with AI centric tools, with the AI writing essentially all the code. It'll be rare to directly tweak code for the typical software developer. It will no longer mean someone who writes code to develop software, it will mean someone who uses AI tools to develop software. What you think of as a software developer today, isn't what people will know them as in another 15 years. It'll happen fast. The code is going to get abstracted away. An 18 year old in 2040 that is looking to become a software developer will go to school for how to build software, which will mean using AI tools to do it; they won't go to school to learn how to program. In fact they won't know much about writing code at all. In several decades it will be a far more rare skill, that will be viewed as a bit archaic, to still directly write software code. Stories will abound about the old times when millions of people used to directly write code, and they got paid ridiculously well to do it. That problem got solved. One of the great benefits of AI will be abstracting away complexity (complexity as far as the human mind is concerned), and writing software code is a big juicy target that won't be difficult to abstract away (for something like GPT version 13).
zabzonk 3y ago
yeah, people seem to have forgotten all those derided developers that spent their time copy/pasting code from stack overflow into their project. which is basically what gpt is doing.

napsec 3y ago

The talk around AI and developers makes me think of Jevons Paradox [0] where more efficient use of a resource increases it's consumption rather than decreases it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

avgcorrection 3y ago
We should wish for technological progress causing more efficient (and in turn less) use of resources. It does not seem to be the case.
- rednalexa 3y ago
  Yeah. My worry with Fusion eventually being solved is it will make energy so abundant that we will find novel ways to waste it. Ideally it is used to solve things like our climate crisis - but who knows.

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

Sure, just as growth of new tech will always create more jobs. But there is a twist: a whole generation of people get fucked over. Or maybe multiple generations. Sure, they can always learn new skills, right? RIGHT? Downvote me as you wish, plesbians.

switchbak 3y ago
What's your argument? Why will they get fucked over?
- hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  I mean bro read some history.
  - switchbak 3y ago
    So your argument is to read other people's opinions? That's still not an argument. Bro.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Well, in the fullness of time, that's still a happy ending, no? That's the story of life itself: whole generations of people die, ideally while planting ever-bigger trees for future generations to enjoy the shade under. This happens over and over, drips of tragedy in an ocean of comedy. :D

epolanski 3y ago

They said that AI would've disrupted the language translation industry, it actually helped it a ton.

kevingadd 3y ago
It's been disrupted, though. A lot of translators are now being offered MTL editing work instead, which pays worse and produces lower quality (but takes less time).
- re-thc 3y ago
  And there are less roles (in numbers)
- epolanski 3y ago
  That is not true, one of my closest friends has a translating agency, he often says the sector has boomed with stuff like google translate. Essentially professional translations are now much more accessible to people that would've not been able to afford them in the first place. Yes, it pays less per page, depends on the type of translation actually, but it is also much faster to do and there's more business.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    You're talking about the POV of the owner of a translation agency, and how he's getting more business because he can charge less and deliver "translations" faster via MTL. I'm talking about the job market for translators. These are different things.
    - epolanski 3y ago
      Yes, they have much more work now, that is the point. Does it pays less on per page basis? It mostly does (but it highly depends on the type of translations: legal, medical, etc have the same fees) but it is more than compensated by being able to churn much more work by focusing on reviewing and interpreting the author's meaning and context.

wokwokwok 3y ago

> AI-assisted coding products drastically reduce the barrier to entry to becoming a “developer.” Regardless of the “random person thinking out loud with nothing but their own opinion as evidence” aspect to this article, they really are on the money with this one little fragment of their post. Lots and lots of developers, and no meaningful difference between someone who took a two week “how do I write prompts” course and someone who spent 4 years at university. Learning programming. Or law. Or business. Or teaching. Or writing. That’s the future I see coming, in probably the next 3 years. However, as great that might be for companies who like cheap ass labour, it may not be great for individuals… I think it’s fair to say it’ll be disruptive, that’s for sure.

jstx1 3y ago
There's still a big difference between someone with experience and someone without, LLMs haven't bridged that gap. Knowing how to use an LLM, having access to a good one, using it regularly anywhere you can, you would still get, what - 10%, 20% increase in productivity? It's significant but it's not "your experience and education don't matter" level of significant. And on the other side of the room some people are still arguing whether these things are useful for anything at all.
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  > There's still a big difference between someone with experience and someone without, LLMs haven't bridged that gap Yet.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    > Yet. (c) 1960–

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

> AI-assisted coding products drastically reduce the barrier to entry to becoming a “developer.” Only reason FANG employees are not paid McDonalds salary is because of the barrier to entry. The barrier will go down yes, but so will wages.

jsunderland323 3y ago
It’s not like the FANG dev lives in a separate universe devoid of the same AI developments as everyone else. If anything I’d imagine the barrier to producing the FANG products of today goes down but the interview process of FANG is still mostly on a curve relative to whatever technology is available at the time. I sort of expect their operating expenses to drop with more AI development, meaning a FANG job becomes more coveted since less employees are required to produce same revenues but you would expect the wages of those fewer employees to increase, no?
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  yes but i don't think those will be dev jobs. it will either be a much broader, complex job title, requiring much more responsibilities - or it will just be some kind of non meritocratic type of job that isn't reasonably open to everyone...

vannevar 3y ago

>I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less. While this is a great argument that there will be more software in the future (something that I don't think anyone disputes), it's not an argument in favor of the proposition that there will be more developers, because the whole point of AI-driven development is to automate what a developer does. One reason there are a lot of businesses still using antiquated systems is that 1) the systems work for their purposes, so their need is not acute; and 2) custom software development is expensive. Your local gym can't afford to pay someone thousands of dollars for a custom app (or even hundreds of dollars for a customized version of an existing app). But AI-driven development promises an order of magnitude drop in cost. So yes, we should see a lot more digitization as it becomes available. I do agree in the short term that it won't drive the number of developers down, since for the foreseeable future skilled people will be needed to oversee the AI product. But it will vastly increase productivity. Unfortunately, if history is any guide developers will not reap any of the rewards for the increased productivity, and their real wages may actually decline.

BobbyJo 3y ago
Author's argument also rests on developers being the bottleneck. I think a lot of things that could be digitized, aren't for reasons that have little to do with software.
throw_pm23 3y ago
I look around sometimes and see digitized/software-ized products I wish weren't. So the number can be negative. One example: restaurant menus. Second example: car audio volume buttons/knobs.
- dwaltrip 3y ago
  This is a good point. However, even if we account for this and subtract all products that are currently digitized poorly, I think we still get a very large positive number. The number of useful digital products that don’t yet exist is enormous. We can’t fathom the vast array of creations that future generations will dream up. P.s. very strong agree about digital menus… so annoying to use!

kevingadd 3y ago

Why is more quantity good? Why is "developer growth" good? Isn't it important whether these developers all have good quality of life, and whether they're building quality software? Is it a good thing if we have a hundred thousand new developers, all building low quality software on top of Copilot output, and then a few years from now all of that stuff starts breaking and we don't have enough expert developers around to come in and clean up the mess? I think opening doors for more people to enter the career is good, and making it easier for developers to do their jobs is good. But I don't think quantity over quality is the right model to apply to software development, because history is full of examples of how just shipping something that works can mean massive expensive consequences down the road.

rvz 3y ago

Exactly. Everyone is a 'developer' without needing the expensive bootcamps and 24 hour scam courses and there will be less highly paid ones, including juniors and seniors. So in reality it is less developers needed (and being hired and being highly paid) and an abundance of 'developers' which is effectively everyone using AI and LLMs for almost for free to drive it all the way down to zero.

ultrablack 3y ago

Demand for developers is endless. If AI can help more people be developers, and or help developers be more productive, it just means the supply of developers goes up. I would guess that this will not result in a downward pressure on wages, the demand will simply skyrocket.

tombert 3y ago
I agree. I think people are looking at this through an "Amdahl's Law" lens [1] when I think it's more realistically a "Gustafson's Law" problem. It's not like we will ever get to a point where we say "oh, all the potential things that can be done have been done", we simply will find out how to do more stuff. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law

littlecranky67 3y ago

I am believing that, too. Just imagine this: Take a Laptop with WinXP+Office 98 from the 2000 era and travel back in time to the 60s or 70s using a time machine. Show the power of Excel to any of those developers punching holes into a punch card, feeding room-sized "computers". Tell them that this "Excel" tool is used by business and sales people without any programming skills. Those developers would clearly tell their children to learn other professions, as no one will need developers in the future because this "Excel" and "Access" make it so easy. But the opposite become true, we needed more devs than ever at that time. Our field will change, the way we develop software did change and will continue to do so - maybe using AI all day.

jeremyjh 3y ago
It does seem that every advance in productivity has led to more software jobs, but I see no reason this must continue forever. I can tell that I have no fear for my job from Copilot and ChatGPT, both of which I use constantly. But the next generation of tools, marrying low-code, integration platforms and AI generation of those applications could really be a game changer.
rcme 3y ago
I disagree. Think about it like this: Excel can do more than punch cards can, but it's also harder to learn. So you can put in more effort and get more out, e.g. you might need 130% of the knowledge, but you get 150% of the result. These new generative AI algorithms make things easier, but they produce worse results. E.g. you can put in 50% of the effort and get 80% of the result. By lowering the amount of knowledge required to build something, you open up the labor pool to more unskilled labor. So while technically the "number of developers" will increase, the ranks will be increased with unskilled labor and the profession will cease to be desirable knowledge work. This is very similar to how craftsmen and tradespeople were replaced with automation. For example, "Luddites" are known as people who dislike technological progress, but they were really textile workers who opposed having their high-skill jobs replaced by low-skill laborers with the factory owners pocketing the difference between the high and low skill pay.
- 3y ago

jrumbut 3y ago

If this article is right, great. If this article is not right, the consequences for those of us without independent means could be dire. The time to create a safety net for those displaced by AI is now.

byyyy 3y ago

>I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less. What? How does this logic work out? Is this not considering how AIs can software-ize products and services in place of a software developer? How about talking about how AI can empower a single developer to do the job of 10 people? These logical implications obviously point to "less developers". I mean it seems really really obvious to me. Whether you agree with the potential of AI or not you need your "lens" to include this angle. The problem I'm seeing is a lot of "simplification" to the point of blindness. Certain Software engineers don't want to face a world where a machine completely trivializes the skills they spent to much time cultivating so they self induce blindness. They lie to themselves the same way tobacco execs and big oil execs had to lie to themselves before lying to the world. The main problem is this: While we made significant progress with LLMs in producing an intelligent AI, We don't know if the current problems with LLMs (hallucinations, occasional logic errors, etc..) are technological dead ends... That's it. That's the main crux everyone is debating about. Even the big experts in AI like Hinton are divided on this fact so there is actual controversy here.

wokwokwok 3y ago
> How about talking about how AI can empower a single developer to do the job of 10 people? I think you missed some of the nuance of the article. You’re talking about how many jobs there will be, and they’re (also) talking about how many people will qualify as “developers”. Will the number of jobs go up or down or stay the same? Who knows? Probably down. …but that’s only half the story. Will the number of “developers” able to do what only “developers” can do now go up down or stay the same? Well, since my mom told me she put some php on her Wordpress site from chat-gpt last week, I’m gonna sit in the “a considerable number more developers will materialise” camp. I.e. a huge glut in the number of people competing for that (probably shrinking) pool of jobs.

cube2222 3y ago

I have a friend who needed to generate 400 random qr codes. Did the first half in 4 hours, going one by one through an online website. Learning about it mid through that process I told her to try asking chatgpt to write a python script for it (she knows a bit of python, knows how to run a script etc.). Needed a pip install of the qr code lib, but other than that worked right away. ChatGPT turned the next 4 hours of menial work into 10 minutes. This is the true incoming disruption. People who just vaguely know how to program, getting a powerful tool that can assist them 95% of the way for simple automations like this.

throwaway2203 3y ago
> People who just vaguely know how to program This is a very absurdly small minority of people.
- cube2222 3y ago
  It's becoming increasingly more common for people in various stem areas, social sciences, economics, etc. Basics of Python courses are very common everywhere, now.
re-thc 3y ago
> ChatGPT turned the next 4 hours of menial work into 10 minutes. This is the true incoming disruption. Problem is how do you know if it's correct? If you have to verify it all it may take even longer. And when it's wrong it's back to square 1. > People who just vaguely know how to program, getting a powerful tool that can assist them 95% of the way for simple automations like this. Is assuming it's correct.
- jallen_dot_dev 3y ago
  It doesn't take 4 hours to code review a few lines of code for generating random QR codes.
  - adventured 3y ago

biztos 3y ago

I think there will be more developers, not fewer -- but they might not be the same kind of people. If a subject-matter expert plus an AI Wrangler can create software as well as two programmers, why shouldn't they? But I also think that if, like the author, your optimistic scenario is that things will be better "software-ized," you're in for a disappointing century. The incentives that lead to most software being crap are not going to change in the slightest. Instead, more things will get software. Some of it will be good, most of it will not.

bern4444 3y ago

The benefit of AI is it will make workers more efficient and free up workers and thus businesses to focus on additional projects and problems, create new tools, grow, etc. One real issue I hope we resolve is to then see workers benefit from their increased efficiency in regards to their compensation. Pay has not kept pace with increased workers efficiency historically. The efficiency gains technology produces tend to go to the top (C Suite and shareholders). While I, like many, am a shareholder of many companies (so I do benefit as equity markets go up) - the vast majority of Americans own very little if any equity in any equities and this is what leads to absurd wealth disparity. It'd be nice if this time were different and we could create a system that avoids all the extra cash this generates from being funneled up like regulatory capture - I suspect it won't be.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

> I propose a simple lens to settle this debate: look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” What about the ones that are already digitized and despite their unavoidable convenience for being so, are less enjoyable than they used to be and more loaded with surveillance and advertising?

bitL 3y ago

That assumes human brains will be able to cope with intelligence tuned beyond their reach. We are already at the stage where many PhDs aren't capable of producing outputs coming from LLMs in some areas. The only approach regular humans used when meeting "superintelligence" were belief systems.

woeirua 3y ago

There certainly will be more developers because coding will be more accessible to people without software backgrounds. So that's a net positive for the world. Also, I think that software engineers in general will get more productive because there will be almost no reason to spend hours pouring over docs anymore. That's a big productivity enhancement. Also, if want to work in a framework or language that you're not an expert in? That's easy peasy now. AI will be a boon to companies that have legacy systems that they were previously struggling to find engineers to work on. I think the big issue for software is going to be that engineers are no longer the bottleneck and the focus is going to shift from _how_ we build things to _what_ we're building and even more importantly _why_. Engineers should be rejoicing over that because it means that software development is going to be a lot more focused on building and creativity than the mechanical details of how do you get framework X to work with data Y.

iamwpj 3y ago

It's just the process of converting every cost center role into a more efficient half-IT and half-HR/Accounting/OPs role. No one will train anyone so what's the next best thing? Automate stuff; or at least pretend to and pay lot's of money to back the idea up.

kristopolous 3y ago

The daguerreotype wasn't great news for portrait painters. It didn't kill painting, it just changed it. It also opened up a new field of the professional photographer. I can't stress this enough this is exactly what's going on. AI is a tool for simple boring repetitive tedium that takes too long. Abstract art came because after photography, painting the exact same painting of yet another rich person didn't pay the bills anymore. And frankly, thank goodness for that. Work in the future is not going to look like it does now. It's going to mutate. Ok, that's fine, it always does.

adventured 3y ago

There will be a lot more developers using AI to create software, and fewer software developers writing actual code (those that do will continue to be paid very well). Heavily using AI to create software will become a new layer of development that will broaden the field and a lot of tools will be built just for that purpose, to simplify and dumb it down. The developers not writing code will not be paid nearly so well. To get a job using AI to create software (but not writing code) will require a degree and it'll pay sub six figures most commonly. A large share of developers making six figures today, that are in the middle ~15-25% group (in terms of skill), will often not be good enough to cut it in the future as the field narrows for writing code, the gravy train for the median and below will end and the pay will drop below six figures (in today's dollar). The entire bottom 1/3 or more of the code writing software field (people which are earning $75k-$85k+ today in the US) will largely be obliterated. There are around 1.1-1.2 million software developers in the US today, earning roughly a median of $110k-$115k before benefits. Until recent developments, those people were almost all writing code directly (with some standard copy-pasting from Stack of course). At least half of those jobs are going away and quickly. Most will transition over to creating software using AI, but rarely or never writing code directly, as few people write machine code today. AI will similarly propogate a new layer, with fewer writing code directly (and that field may perpetually shrink for decades as it gets squeezed ever tighter by ever better AI approaches). The number of people directly writing code has or is close to peaking. This is the end of that era. People in the emerging software world (eg parts of Eastern Europe or Latin America, etc) will have a potent economic ladder largely pulled away from them (this part sucks big time, but nothing can stop what's coming). The opportunities to use AI to create software will still be there for those people (it won't pay nearly as well as writing code does today); it'll become a lot more rare for rich corporations to pay well to write code directly off-shore and the job numbers will dwindle substantially.

crimsonpowder 3y ago

LLMs can't replace most developers, not yet. If they get much better, maybe. But they have limited context. They make up APIs that don't exist. For me, it's a great starting point that reduces carpal tunnel, but not much more.

fxj 3y ago

One thing that is often overlooked in the discussionis that GPT is just extracting the information from sites like stackoverflow and such and distills its knowledge to write new code. But what happens if the main source of coding knowledge - stack overflow etc - suddenly falls dry? No new information for GPT. We all know that unmaintained code starts rotting and this is what will happen to the GPT generated code. GPT needs the fresh blood of human devs to do its job. And this is even more true for new languages and toolkits. First the tutorials and docs have to be written in order for GPT to learn the new code.

jallen_dot_dev 3y ago
It can learn from it's own users. People paste their code into GPT for context, so it'll see new patterns that way. People paste the error message that results from some bad code GPT spit out, it learns from context plus the error text what the correct code should be.
- fxj 3y ago
  yes, but it also sees a lot of buggy code this way, because users are no longer experts and write lots of buggy code. Remember, GPT cannot decide whether code is correct or not, it is just a parrot that tells you the code that it sees most often. Try to ask it about some esotheric language like supercollider or J. It will just hallucinate some code that it thinks looks like the one you want. GPT need a certain critical mass of information to give reliable results.

neotrope 3y ago

I’m not sure this is a good metric. > look around you and count how many products or services you use regularly that you wish are better digitized or “software-ized.” Unless and until that number is 0, there will be more developers, not less. Even before LLMs, fully digitized markets are regularly disrupted by better iterations of software. More developers will be needed because AI is increasing the addressable market of software.

randyrand 3y ago

At much lower cost! :(

xk_id 3y ago

* fewer