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I really do think its basically over for most software engineers. There's obviously still challenges in writing code, but you can already get 80% of the way the

I really do think its basically over for most software engineers. There's obviously still challenges in writing code, but you can already get 80% of the way there, and with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai, most peoples hard won skills are completely commoditized. It will take time for the tooling to catch up and be implemented, but I am operating as if I wont have stable employment in 3 years. Also people are not looking at the math of it. If 40% of software engineering gets automated, thats a massive reduction in demand, and with the glut of engineers on the market, will crater salaries. It doesnt all need to be automated for it to basically crush SWE as a good career AI changes the type of labor required to produce working software, which will result in a downward shift in wages

TypingOutBugs 2y ago
I’ll work in tech for as long as it’s fun. But seriously, what’s a single good app out there that’s been written by AI with no developers involved? I don’t know of any. Not play apps, but real apps serving real users, with billing, subscriptions, some traffic, etc… Anyone know of one?
- codingwagie 2y ago
  Its not about generating a full app with AI. Its about the commoditization of coding as a skill set.
  - TypingOutBugs 2y ago
    But what does that really even mean. What does 'commoditization of coding' literally look like? If you can't do a full app, what can you do?
    - 9rx 2y ago
      > What does 'commoditization of coding' literally look like? Presumably something like the 'commoditization of elevator operating' that we once saw. The elevator operator never went away, but operating elevators was simplified to the point that anyone could do it. At which time everyone started doing it, commoditizing the job. In other words, it looks like programming languages that become increasingly approachable to any old random person on the street who can jump in without any meaningful past experience or special knowledge. You know doubt already what that looks like because we're already using those programming languages (e.g. GPT) in narrow domains to great effect. They have yet to prove themselves as complete general purpose programming languages, but they have made great strives towards that and it is, by many accounts, now only a matter of time.
      - TypingOutBugs 2y ago
        I can see it for simple toys, I just can't see it for more complex projects. I have no idea how you could use natural language to describe some complex business rules, and once you start having to write in a more logical language it's verging on the precision of code. And to then be able to audit the system, make minor changes and regression test, etc... I can see it speeding engineers up, I can't see the guy on the clapham omnibus building a complex line of business app (or an operating system, flight computer, financial engine, MRI sequencer, etc...). And once it can't be your average Joe and it's someone who requires training, suddenly we're back to it not being a commodity.
        9rx 2y ago
        > I can see it speeding engineers up While in recent memory the engineer and the coder have oft been the same person, that wasn't always the case (historically there was a clear divide between the engineers and coders) and isn't always the case. I see no mention of engineers around this discussion. Is there a reason for its introduction?
        TypingOutBugs 2y ago
        I introduce professionals because I believe the real benefit will be speeding them up, not replacing them with laymen who suddenly have commoditised access to programming skills
        9rx 2y ago
        ? "Professional" was set out right from the onset. The question was about engineers, which, while it is true that coding and engineering is sometimes done by the same person, there is no reason why it has to be that way and, especially historically, coding is a separate job. The context is specifically about the job of coding, not the job of engineering. There is nothing to suggest engineers are being commoditized and never was.
        2y ago
  - marssaxman 2y ago
    Commoditization of coding as a skill set happened decades ago. When was the last time you wrote any assembly language? Nobody writes any actual code anymore - machines do it all for us, according to the loosey-goosey high-level instructions we now call "coding". Somehow, we all still have more work to do than ever... but that's just the Jevons paradox in action. If AI makes programmers more efficient, demand for programming services will only increase.
- thiht 2y ago
  There’s none.
jihadjihad 2y ago
> but you can already get 80% of the way there, and with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai Getting to a demo, an MVP, or an early-stage company are probably all doable with a skeleton crew of software engineers plus LLMs. But it is difficult to imagine scenarios where 1) customers are paying you real amounts of money and 2) the technical problems the company faces remain solvable "with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai." It feels like a recipe for disaster--when (not if) things go awry, there is no slack in the system, nothing to absorb the shock. It's brittle. Maybe we will see lots of companies in the next few years with successful exits who are using a model like this! But I doubt many are durable businesses.
- codingwagie 2y ago
  honestly, highly highly doubt this. there is nothing revolutionary in most engineering, and its even easier when the product is already robust and just needs to be maintained
  - klabb3 2y ago
    This has been the argument for every CMS and no-code solution ever. 80% of apps are just crud. 90% maybe! We can just anticipate all the needs and have plugins and drag and drop builders. Coding will be restricted to just a small set of senior engineers working on core framework development. Just watch! Any moment now.. And they were right, in a way. Frameworks excel in the early stages of application development. Drag and drop, click to create a database, it all works. But ask even small sized companies if they keep using it after 1 year, and the answer is often no. If it is yes, it’s usually all building custom things to work around the limitations of the framework. Or, it is a simple product/site with no further needs (but they are rare). Anyway, AI for the full development cycle! Any moment now..
    - codingwagie 2y ago
      This is completely different than past technology, and is a novel human advancement on the level of the internet
pkaye 2y ago
The best part is if the software is easy to write through AI, someone could implement a similar system and put Replit out of business. Or ask the AI to write a clone of Oracle or Microsoft Windows for example.
- actsasbuffoon 2y ago
  Yeah, the value of software as a whole seems like it is about to greatly decrease. You’d think tech companies and investors would be a lot more nervous about destroying the value of software, but I’m not sure if they’re thinking that far ahead. Hooray, in a few years you can type a prompt and get a complete app you can sell to customers! But the customer can also type a prompt and get a complete app that meets their expectations even better than yours. Your generated app is worthless. Your entire company is just a middle man between the customer and ChatGPT, and the customer can write a prompt just as well as you. Software as an entire industry is pretty much going to cease to exist if AI enthusiasts get their way. We already see this with music. Have you ever had someone give you a link to a song they generated with AI? Do you really want to spend 4 minutes listening to a thing they made in 15 seconds? If I wanted an AI song about coffee then I’d generate one myself, not listen to yours. The faster and easier it gets to generate apps, the more we’re going to end up with people just generating their own. You won’t be able to sell your generated apps to anyone.
  - TypingOutBugs 2y ago
    > But the customer can also type a prompt and get a complete app that meets their expectations even better than yours. Your generated app is worthless. Your entire company is just a middle man between the customer and ChatGPT, and the customer can write a prompt just as well as you. What sort of apps do you work on where this is the case? I just can’t fathom how a 10mloc financial engine that follows global regulations, has latency requirements, and tons of complex business logic that’s propriety, is going to be built via natural language. Or how about flight computers for rockets? Or sequences for MRI machines? These might be obviously hard, but where’s the limit between viable and not viable?
    - 2y ago
mjr00 2y ago
Getting 80% of the way there wasn't hard to begin with. If you had an idea, you could outsource it to someone on Fiver/Upwork/etc for a few hundred bucks and get 80% of the way there. The challenge for 99% of software projects is getting the other 80% of the way there, which is maintenance and integrations. There's definitely a small chance a simple hit app could be made by a non-technical "ideas guy" and an LLM -- something like Wordle would be a good example. But Wordle wasn't the one paying engineers 6 figure salaries to begin with.
- codingwagie 2y ago
  I'm not talking about ideas guys. I'm talking about if you spent 3 years on React, now I can just go use an LLM and start writing react as if I have 3 years experience. Same with AWS CDK deploying to Java lambda. I can just start using the LLM, and mostly get up to speed. All your hard won knowledge is just not that valuable
  - mjr00 2y ago
    > I'm talking about if you spent 3 years on React, now I can just go use an LLM and start writing react as if I have 3 years experience. er, no, you can't -- I don't know why you would think this unless you're junior and can't actually tell (which turns out to be one of the dangers of LLMs).
    - pkkkzip 2y ago
      I disagree with both of your extreme black & white thinking. The true answer is somewhere in the middle but now its definitely leaning further from your view.
    - svachalek 2y ago
      If your job is writing small snippets of code to solve clearly defined problems, AI can replace you today. If the main challenge to overcome in your job is figuring out how to get React to render a form, AI can replace you today. This is definitely true for some software engineers, even some with senior titles. But it's so far from what my job actually looks like that I can't begin to feel threatened.
Barrin92 2y ago
>If 40% of software engineering gets automated, thats a massive reduction in demand This is your daily reminder that the lump of labor fallacy is incorrect. There is no fixed amount of demand, and software development has become more productive, by vastly more than 40%, since its inception as a profession.
- codingwagie 2y ago
  Its about the type of person now required to write software. You dont need some ultra math brain autist to write code if the LLM can do it with some human assistance from someone of much less ability. Coding may see more demand, but the skill set itself sees a reduction in the base quality bar required by the engineers, dropping wages and changing the profession. Ofcourse there are exceptions, but not for most businesses
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    Yes, the profession is going to change, as it always has but this is still bad economics. Wages don't fall when productivity increases, or otherwise you'd be poorer every year since the industrial revolution. When software developers become more productive their value goes up, not down. A web or game developer in 2015 was not a "ultra math brain autist" compared to a 1980s CS whiz kid writing video games in assembly, but financially better off. Software developers, like everyone else, aren't paid for their calculus skills, they're paid for the market value of their output, entirely independent of how much brainy skills that requires. When Guido and Mats invented Python and Ruby, or you get a really fancy debugger, did you think the wage apocalypse is upon us because you got a more productive tool and more people can write software?
    - codingwagie 2y ago
      Engineers are paid for their scarcity, and AI is going to make them much less scarce for line of business software
      - lupinglade 2y ago
jazzyjackson 2y ago
Hard to know. It may be that reducing the friction to get to 80% increases demand for the autists that know the system through and through to productionalize the MVP, as there are now 100x as many superjuniors producing glitchy code that works most of the time. BTW when GPT4 came out I started a study group with a few friends who never wrote code before. Understanding how to step through python and understand what was happening within the code wasn't the hard part, the basics of the tooling and debugging how python was borked on that particular person's laptop was the hard part. Maybe GPT5 will be able to debug and run shell commands to fix that sort of mundane garbage that engineers deal with as a matter of course, but IMO it will take a whole new environment, possibly along the lines of what Replit is building as far as taking care of all the tooling for you and presenting you with a code window with a Play button.
makk 2y ago
As software engineering gets automated the demand for it goes _up_ because the problem spaces that were previously uneconomic to tackle become economic. We're going to see a further proliferation of software, and that's going to require care and feeding. So, now you need software engineers _everywhere_. You could say, no, that's not how it's going to work because now everyone can just talk to a computer and get the software they want. But there's so many non-technical reasons why that doesn't put software engineers out of work. People are lazy and don't want to write (even if just by talking) their own software. People can't clearly describe what they want, so they won't be able to put to words the software they want. Most people just accept things as they are and don't think to change things with software. What is clear is, if you're a run-of-the-mill, take-a-ticket work-a-ticket software engineer, with no interface to the business other than that, then yeah that shit is ripe to get automated away. But if you get out into the real world, man, it's the best time ever to have software engineering skills. Opportunities are _everywhere_.
- codingwagie 2y ago
  Youre missing something, it changes the type of labor required to produce working software, which results in a shift in wages. As an enterprising software engineer, its never been easier to strike out on your own. I do agree with you on that
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
>It doesnt all need to be automated for it to basically crush SWE as a good career Let's be real, even at $60k, the WFH makes it tolerable, but you'll need lifestyle changes like selling your house if your mortgage is too much. Plenty of people working hospital jobs making around $40k and we don't deal with medical sharps and patients that bite you. It could always be worse. If companies don't see the value with human engineers, let them suffer the consequences. If they can run a business with only AI coding, there probably isn't a significant moat there, and then they'll have lots of competition as a lot of bored SWEs use AI as well and start companies to stay in the game.

TypingOutBugs 2y ago

I’ll work in tech for as long as it’s fun. But seriously, what’s a single good app out there that’s been written by AI with no developers involved? I don’t know of any. Not play apps, but real apps serving real users, with billing, subscriptions, some traffic, etc… Anyone know of one?

codingwagie 2y ago
Its not about generating a full app with AI. Its about the commoditization of coding as a skill set.
- TypingOutBugs 2y ago
  But what does that really even mean. What does 'commoditization of coding' literally look like? If you can't do a full app, what can you do?
  - 9rx 2y ago
    > What does 'commoditization of coding' literally look like? Presumably something like the 'commoditization of elevator operating' that we once saw. The elevator operator never went away, but operating elevators was simplified to the point that anyone could do it. At which time everyone started doing it, commoditizing the job. In other words, it looks like programming languages that become increasingly approachable to any old random person on the street who can jump in without any meaningful past experience or special knowledge. You know doubt already what that looks like because we're already using those programming languages (e.g. GPT) in narrow domains to great effect. They have yet to prove themselves as complete general purpose programming languages, but they have made great strives towards that and it is, by many accounts, now only a matter of time.
    - TypingOutBugs 2y ago
      I can see it for simple toys, I just can't see it for more complex projects. I have no idea how you could use natural language to describe some complex business rules, and once you start having to write in a more logical language it's verging on the precision of code. And to then be able to audit the system, make minor changes and regression test, etc... I can see it speeding engineers up, I can't see the guy on the clapham omnibus building a complex line of business app (or an operating system, flight computer, financial engine, MRI sequencer, etc...). And once it can't be your average Joe and it's someone who requires training, suddenly we're back to it not being a commodity.
      - 9rx 2y ago
        > I can see it speeding engineers up While in recent memory the engineer and the coder have oft been the same person, that wasn't always the case (historically there was a clear divide between the engineers and coders) and isn't always the case. I see no mention of engineers around this discussion. Is there a reason for its introduction?
        TypingOutBugs 2y ago
        I introduce professionals because I believe the real benefit will be speeding them up, not replacing them with laymen who suddenly have commoditised access to programming skills
        9rx 2y ago
        ? "Professional" was set out right from the onset. The question was about engineers, which, while it is true that coding and engineering is sometimes done by the same person, there is no reason why it has to be that way and, especially historically, coding is a separate job. The context is specifically about the job of coding, not the job of engineering. There is nothing to suggest engineers are being commoditized and never was.
        2y ago
- marssaxman 2y ago
  Commoditization of coding as a skill set happened decades ago. When was the last time you wrote any assembly language? Nobody writes any actual code anymore - machines do it all for us, according to the loosey-goosey high-level instructions we now call "coding". Somehow, we all still have more work to do than ever... but that's just the Jevons paradox in action. If AI makes programmers more efficient, demand for programming services will only increase.
thiht 2y ago
There’s none.

jihadjihad 2y ago

> but you can already get 80% of the way there, and with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai Getting to a demo, an MVP, or an early-stage company are probably all doable with a skeleton crew of software engineers plus LLMs. But it is difficult to imagine scenarios where 1) customers are paying you real amounts of money and 2) the technical problems the company faces remain solvable "with a senior engineer guiding a junior using genai." It feels like a recipe for disaster--when (not if) things go awry, there is no slack in the system, nothing to absorb the shock. It's brittle. Maybe we will see lots of companies in the next few years with successful exits who are using a model like this! But I doubt many are durable businesses.

codingwagie 2y ago
honestly, highly highly doubt this. there is nothing revolutionary in most engineering, and its even easier when the product is already robust and just needs to be maintained
- klabb3 2y ago
  This has been the argument for every CMS and no-code solution ever. 80% of apps are just crud. 90% maybe! We can just anticipate all the needs and have plugins and drag and drop builders. Coding will be restricted to just a small set of senior engineers working on core framework development. Just watch! Any moment now.. And they were right, in a way. Frameworks excel in the early stages of application development. Drag and drop, click to create a database, it all works. But ask even small sized companies if they keep using it after 1 year, and the answer is often no. If it is yes, it’s usually all building custom things to work around the limitations of the framework. Or, it is a simple product/site with no further needs (but they are rare). Anyway, AI for the full development cycle! Any moment now..
  - codingwagie 2y ago
    This is completely different than past technology, and is a novel human advancement on the level of the internet

pkaye 2y ago

The best part is if the software is easy to write through AI, someone could implement a similar system and put Replit out of business. Or ask the AI to write a clone of Oracle or Microsoft Windows for example.

actsasbuffoon 2y ago
Yeah, the value of software as a whole seems like it is about to greatly decrease. You’d think tech companies and investors would be a lot more nervous about destroying the value of software, but I’m not sure if they’re thinking that far ahead. Hooray, in a few years you can type a prompt and get a complete app you can sell to customers! But the customer can also type a prompt and get a complete app that meets their expectations even better than yours. Your generated app is worthless. Your entire company is just a middle man between the customer and ChatGPT, and the customer can write a prompt just as well as you. Software as an entire industry is pretty much going to cease to exist if AI enthusiasts get their way. We already see this with music. Have you ever had someone give you a link to a song they generated with AI? Do you really want to spend 4 minutes listening to a thing they made in 15 seconds? If I wanted an AI song about coffee then I’d generate one myself, not listen to yours. The faster and easier it gets to generate apps, the more we’re going to end up with people just generating their own. You won’t be able to sell your generated apps to anyone.
- TypingOutBugs 2y ago
  > But the customer can also type a prompt and get a complete app that meets their expectations even better than yours. Your generated app is worthless. Your entire company is just a middle man between the customer and ChatGPT, and the customer can write a prompt just as well as you. What sort of apps do you work on where this is the case? I just can’t fathom how a 10mloc financial engine that follows global regulations, has latency requirements, and tons of complex business logic that’s propriety, is going to be built via natural language. Or how about flight computers for rockets? Or sequences for MRI machines? These might be obviously hard, but where’s the limit between viable and not viable?
  - 2y ago

mjr00 2y ago

Getting 80% of the way there wasn't hard to begin with. If you had an idea, you could outsource it to someone on Fiver/Upwork/etc for a few hundred bucks and get 80% of the way there. The challenge for 99% of software projects is getting the other 80% of the way there, which is maintenance and integrations. There's definitely a small chance a simple hit app could be made by a non-technical "ideas guy" and an LLM -- something like Wordle would be a good example. But Wordle wasn't the one paying engineers 6 figure salaries to begin with.

codingwagie 2y ago
I'm not talking about ideas guys. I'm talking about if you spent 3 years on React, now I can just go use an LLM and start writing react as if I have 3 years experience. Same with AWS CDK deploying to Java lambda. I can just start using the LLM, and mostly get up to speed. All your hard won knowledge is just not that valuable
- mjr00 2y ago
  > I'm talking about if you spent 3 years on React, now I can just go use an LLM and start writing react as if I have 3 years experience. er, no, you can't -- I don't know why you would think this unless you're junior and can't actually tell (which turns out to be one of the dangers of LLMs).
  - pkkkzip 2y ago
    I disagree with both of your extreme black & white thinking. The true answer is somewhere in the middle but now its definitely leaning further from your view.
  - svachalek 2y ago
    If your job is writing small snippets of code to solve clearly defined problems, AI can replace you today. If the main challenge to overcome in your job is figuring out how to get React to render a form, AI can replace you today. This is definitely true for some software engineers, even some with senior titles. But it's so far from what my job actually looks like that I can't begin to feel threatened.

Barrin92 2y ago

>If 40% of software engineering gets automated, thats a massive reduction in demand This is your daily reminder that the lump of labor fallacy is incorrect. There is no fixed amount of demand, and software development has become more productive, by vastly more than 40%, since its inception as a profession.

codingwagie 2y ago
Its about the type of person now required to write software. You dont need some ultra math brain autist to write code if the LLM can do it with some human assistance from someone of much less ability. Coding may see more demand, but the skill set itself sees a reduction in the base quality bar required by the engineers, dropping wages and changing the profession. Ofcourse there are exceptions, but not for most businesses
- Barrin92 2y ago
  Yes, the profession is going to change, as it always has but this is still bad economics. Wages don't fall when productivity increases, or otherwise you'd be poorer every year since the industrial revolution. When software developers become more productive their value goes up, not down. A web or game developer in 2015 was not a "ultra math brain autist" compared to a 1980s CS whiz kid writing video games in assembly, but financially better off. Software developers, like everyone else, aren't paid for their calculus skills, they're paid for the market value of their output, entirely independent of how much brainy skills that requires. When Guido and Mats invented Python and Ruby, or you get a really fancy debugger, did you think the wage apocalypse is upon us because you got a more productive tool and more people can write software?
  - codingwagie 2y ago
    Engineers are paid for their scarcity, and AI is going to make them much less scarce for line of business software
    - lupinglade 2y ago

jazzyjackson 2y ago

Hard to know. It may be that reducing the friction to get to 80% increases demand for the autists that know the system through and through to productionalize the MVP, as there are now 100x as many superjuniors producing glitchy code that works most of the time. BTW when GPT4 came out I started a study group with a few friends who never wrote code before. Understanding how to step through python and understand what was happening within the code wasn't the hard part, the basics of the tooling and debugging how python was borked on that particular person's laptop was the hard part. Maybe GPT5 will be able to debug and run shell commands to fix that sort of mundane garbage that engineers deal with as a matter of course, but IMO it will take a whole new environment, possibly along the lines of what Replit is building as far as taking care of all the tooling for you and presenting you with a code window with a Play button.

makk 2y ago

As software engineering gets automated the demand for it goes _up_ because the problem spaces that were previously uneconomic to tackle become economic. We're going to see a further proliferation of software, and that's going to require care and feeding. So, now you need software engineers _everywhere_. You could say, no, that's not how it's going to work because now everyone can just talk to a computer and get the software they want. But there's so many non-technical reasons why that doesn't put software engineers out of work. People are lazy and don't want to write (even if just by talking) their own software. People can't clearly describe what they want, so they won't be able to put to words the software they want. Most people just accept things as they are and don't think to change things with software. What is clear is, if you're a run-of-the-mill, take-a-ticket work-a-ticket software engineer, with no interface to the business other than that, then yeah that shit is ripe to get automated away. But if you get out into the real world, man, it's the best time ever to have software engineering skills. Opportunities are _everywhere_.

codingwagie 2y ago
Youre missing something, it changes the type of labor required to produce working software, which results in a shift in wages. As an enterprising software engineer, its never been easier to strike out on your own. I do agree with you on that

hnthrow90348765 2y ago

>It doesnt all need to be automated for it to basically crush SWE as a good career Let's be real, even at $60k, the WFH makes it tolerable, but you'll need lifestyle changes like selling your house if your mortgage is too much. Plenty of people working hospital jobs making around $40k and we don't deal with medical sharps and patients that bite you. It could always be worse. If companies don't see the value with human engineers, let them suffer the consequences. If they can run a business with only AI coding, there probably isn't a significant moat there, and then they'll have lots of competition as a lot of bored SWEs use AI as well and start companies to stay in the game.