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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

• outime 2y ago
  Has there been any company so far that has fired 100% of their programmers to replace them with AI?
  • UndefinedRef 2y ago
    D̴i̴d̴n̴t̴ ̴f̴i̴r̴e̴ ̴a̴n̴y̴o̴n̴e̴ ̴p̴e̴r̴ ̴s̴e̴,̴ ̴b̴u̴t̴ ̴I̴ ̴a̴m̴ ̴a̴ ̴s̴o̴l̴o̴ ̴d̴e̴v̴e̴l̴o̴p̴e̴r̴ ̴a̴n̴d̴ ̴I̴ ̴c̴a̴n̴ ̴d̴o̴ ̴t̴h̴e̴ ̴w̴o̴r̴k̴ ̴o̴f̴ ̴2̴ ̴p̴e̴o̴p̴l̴e̴ ̴n̴o̴w̴ Edit: I am a solo developer and I have to work half the time only now.
    • hassleblad23 2y ago
      Could have been "I am a solo developer and I have to work half the time only now."
      • finnjohnsen2 2y ago
        Why does this never happen? :(
        • kachhalimbu 2y ago
          Because work expands to fill the time. You are more efficient at work and get more done? Awesome, now you have more responsibility.
      • UndefinedRef 2y ago
        I like that better
  • monsieurbanana 2y ago
    There's no serious sources about people wanting to fire 100% of [insert title here] for LLMs. It's more about reducing head-count by leveraging LLMs as a productivity multiplier. I haven't heard of companies successfully doing that at scale though.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • finnjohnsen2 2y ago
    The trick is to call the people who are using the AI to generate code something other than programmers.
  • alkonaut 2y ago
    Has there been any company that has laid off even a nontrivial amount of programmers and replaced them with AI? Here I mean, where developers at said company actually say the process works and is established, and the staff cuts weren't happening anyway. I know there are CEOs that make bold claims about this (E.g. Klarna) but I don't really assign any value to that until I hear from people on the floor.
    • kkapelon 2y ago
      BT news suggest they made announcement to cut jobs back in 2023 and they are actually doing it now https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/133443/03-12-2024/bt-job-cuts-really-stupid-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/133443/03-12-2024... https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecoms-giant-bt-will-cut-55000-jobs-by-2030-and-replace-thousands-of-roles-with-ai/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...
  • kypro 2y ago
    Small companies, yes, absolutely. If you have a small non-tech company with a website you pay a freelance programmer to maintain you should seriously consider replacing your programmer with AI. I work for a company which among other things provides technical support for a number of small tech-oriented businesses and we have lot of problems right now with clients trying to do things on their own with the help of AI. In our case the complexity of some of these projects and the limited ability of AI means that they're typically creating more bugs and tech debt for us to fix and are not really saving themselves any time – and this is certainly going to be true at the moment for any large project. However, if you're paying programmers just to manage the content of a few small websites it probably begins to make sense to use AI instead.
    • penetrarthur 2y ago
      This still implies that the person who is currently paying freelance programmers is 1) good with LLMs 2) knows some html and js 3) can deploy the updated website.
      • kypro 2y ago
        You're probably right that these people still need some baseline technical skills currently, but I'm really not assuming anything here – this is something we've seen multiple of our clients do in recent months. It's funny you say they need to be able to deploy the update to be honest because we had a client just last week email a collect of code snippets to us which they created with the help of AI. This is the problem we have though because we're not just building simple websites which we can hand clients FTP creds for. The best we can do is advise them to learn Git and raise a PR which we can review and deploy ourselves.
        • monsieurbanana 2y ago
          Sounds liked programming with extra steps. And I don't like it when the extra steps involving mailing snippets of code
• honestSysAdmin 2y ago
  [dead]
• Terretta 2y ago
  making tech != using tech
• cranberryturkey 2y ago
  you still need a programmer
  • black_13 2y ago
    [dead]
  • md5crypto 2y ago
    Do we?
    • cranberryturkey 2y ago
      I think so. someone who knows how to build a native mobile app will prompt better than someone who's never done it.
• bryukh 2y ago
  "Let AI replace programmers" is the new "Let’s outsource everything to <some country>." Short-term cost savings, long-term disaster.
  • dogibog 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • isakkeyten 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • MonkeyClub 2y ago
      GP sounds shortsighted on first take, but consider how outsourcing is good and cheap for the companies, but in the long run creates huge unemployment pools in the original country. Negative consequences can also be social, no-one is saying that it's, say, lowering of product quality.
    • bryukh 2y ago
      > So no other country in the world can write code as good as wherever you are from? I didn't say this -- I think it's your take. Even more -- I'm such an "outsource" software developer who is working for US and EU companies. My take is that overusing outsourcing in the long term, you can lose local education because "we can just hire from ... so why do we need to teach ours?" -- I saw it already, even on an "in-country-scale" level.
    • c03 2y ago
      Modern development is not as much about writing "good code", but just as much about good communication. There is a very real risk of losing good communication when outsourcing.
    • Retric 2y ago
      It’s not about the ability to write code, it’s about the ability to communicate ideas back and forth. Even just a few time zones is a real issue let alone any linguistic or cultural issues.
• InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  Everything that is of low value. And its okay. If it is not useful to humanity, it should decay over time and fade away. Low value propositions should be loaded with parasitic computation, that burdens it with costs until it collapses and allows new growth to replace the old system.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  The same reason that outsourcing all your telecom infra to China is a bad idea.
  • frag 2y ago
    true that
• ponector 2y ago
  >>companies aren’t investing in junior developers It was a case before AI as well. Overall it reads the same as "Twitter will be destroyed by mass layoffs". But it is still online
  • vanderZwan 2y ago
    "Destroyed" is not the same as "annihilated from exhistence". Twitter is a shell of its former self.
  • tobyhinloopen 2y ago
    Twitter is, in fact, not online. It redirects to something called X, which is not Twitter.
    • qwertox 2y ago
      Yet there is this: <a href="https://twitter.com/tos">Terms of Service</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/privacy">Privacy Policy</a> <a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170514">Cookie Policy</a> <a href="https://legal.twitter.com/imprint.html">Imprint</a>
    • lxgr 2y ago
      One would hope that hackers understand the distinction between name and referent.
  • adamors 2y ago
    Twitter is essentially losing money even with a bare bones staff https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twitter-bank-debt-stagnant-growth https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit... It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.
    • Zealotux 2y ago
      It's not related to engineering issues but rather the ideological shift and the fact that it became a blatant propaganda machine for its new overlord.
• pyrale 2y ago
  We have fired all our programmers. However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected. We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.
  • thelittleone 2y ago
    I sure empathize.... our AI is fussy and rigid... pedantic even.
    • worthless-trash 2y ago
      Error on line 5: specification can be interpreted too many ways, can't define type from 'thing': Remember to underline the thing that shows the error ~~~~~ | This 'thing' matches too many objects in the knowledge scope.
  • re-thc 2y ago
    > it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected The AI complained that the message did not originate from a programmer and decided not to respond.
  • jakeogh 2y ago
    Local minimum.
  • ryanjshaw 2y ago
    What job title are you thinking of using?
    • pyrale 2y ago
      Speaker With Expertise
    • amarcheschi 2y ago
      Soft Waste Enjoyer
• Frieren 2y ago
  Many people are missing the point. The strategy for AI usage is not a long-term strategy to make the world more productive. If companies can save a buck this year, companies will do it. Period. The average manager has short-term goals that needs to fulfill, and if they can use AI to fulfill them they will do it, future be damned. To reign in on long-term consequences has always been part of government and regulations. So, this kind of articles are useful but should be directed to elected officials and not the industry itself. Finally, what programmers need is what all workers need. Unionization, collective bargaining, social safety nets, etc. It will protect programmers from swings in the job market as it will do it for everybody else that needs a job to make ends meet.
  • javier2 2y ago
    This, we really should have unionized several years ago
    • flanked-evergl 2y ago
      Who is we?
  • ratorx 2y ago
    Software ENGINEERS could benefit from unions once they get start getting replaced by AI, but that’s a fairly indirect way to solve the problem. Governments will eventually need to deal with mass unemployment, but that’s a societal problem bigger than any individual profession. What Software ENGINEERING needs is standards and regulations, like any other engineering discipline. If you accept that software has become a significant enough component in society that the consequences of it breaking etc are bad, then serious software needs standards to adhere to, and people who are certified for them. Once you have standards, the bar to actually replace certified engineers is higher and has legal risk. That way, how good AI needs to be has a higher (and safer) bar, which can properly optimise for the long term consequences. If the software is not critical or important enough to be standardised, then let AI take over the creation. At that point, it’s not really any different to any other learning or creative endeavour.
  • gorbachev 2y ago
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  I remember very uplifted talk here a few years ago about firing truck and taxi drivers for AI. Turned out, programmers are easier to replace :)
  • MonkeyClub 2y ago
    Taxi driving is an antifragile profession apparently, to a degree that computer programming could only aspire to.
• tobyhinloopen 2y ago
  I think AI will thrive in low-code systems, not by writing Javascript.
  • blarg1 2y ago
    It would be cool seeing non programmers using it to automate their tasks, maybe using a scratch like language.
• bigfatkitten 2y ago
  For each programmer who actually spends their time on complex design work or fixing difficult bugs, there are many more doing what amounts to clerical work. Adding a new form here, fiddling with a layout there. It is the latter class who are in real danger.
  • soco 2y ago
    But the question is, are we there yet? I have yet to hear of an AI bot who can eat up a requirement and add said new form in the right place, or fiddle with a layout. Do you know any? So all those big promises you read right now are outright lies. When will we reach that point? I don't do gambling. But we are not there, regardless what the salespeople or fancy journalists might be claiming all day long.
    • fakedang 2y ago
      Cursor already does the latter task pretty well, as I'm sure other AI agents already do. AI struggles only when it's something complex, like dealing with a geometric object, or plugging together infra, or programme logic. Last year, I built a reasonably complicated e-commerce project wholly with AI, using the zod library and some pretty convoluted e-commerce logic. While it was a struggle, I was able to build it out in a couple of weeks. And I had zero prior experience even building forms in react, forget using zod. Now shipping it to production? That's something AI will struggle at, but humans also struggle at that :(
      • franktankbank 2y ago
        > Now shipping it to production? That's something AI will struggle at, but humans also struggle at that :( Why? Just because that's where the rubber hits the road? It's a different skillset but AI can do systems design too and probably direct a knowledgable but unpracticed implementer.
    • greentxt 2y ago
      Pizza maker will not be the first job automated away. Nor will janitor. Form fiddlers are cheap and can be blamed. AI fiddlers can be blamed too but are not cheap, yet.
• Retr0id 2y ago
  I don't have anything against this style of writing in particular, but it's a shame it makes me assume it was written by an LLM
  • natch 2y ago
    It was.
    • Retr0id 2y ago
      My first impressions prevented me from reading more than the first sentence, so I didn't want to state it so confidently ;)
• entropyneur 2y ago
  Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.
  • Zealotux 2y ago
    I would say "soft replacement" is a thing. People may not be getting fired directly, but companies are hiring fewer developers, and freelancers are most likely getting fewer opportunities than before.
  • EZ-E 2y ago
    Agreed, hiring has slowed down but this seems more caused by the end of the zero interest rate era. At most I see low level copywriting and low level translation jobs in danger where it is a simpler input/output job flow
    • awkward 2y ago
      Of course it's just macroeconomics, but AI is serving as an "optimistic" reason for layoffs and cost cutting. It's not the same old spreadsheets putting out different results, it's a new era.
  • kkapelon 2y ago
    "Telecom Giant BT Will Cut 55,000 Jobs By 2030—And Replace Thousands Of Roles With AI" https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecoms-giant-bt-will-cut-55000-jobs-by-2030-and-replace-thousands-of-roles-with-ai/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • Macha 2y ago
      From the article: > The massive cut represents more than 40% of the company’s 130,000-strong workforce—including 30,000 contractors—and it will impact both BT employees and third-party contractors, according to the Financial Times. > BT CEO Philip Jansen told reporters that the cuts are part of the company’s efforts to become “leaner,” but added that he expects around 10,000 of those jobs to be replaced by AI. > Citing an unnamed source close to the company, the FT report added that the cuts will also affect 15,000 fiber engineers and 10,000 maintenance workers Can you replace customer service agents with AI? The experience will be worse, but as with every innovation in customer service in recent decades (phone trees, outsourced email support, "please go browse our knowledge base"), you don't need AI to save money by reducing CS costs. I think this is just a platitude thrown out to pretend they have a plan to stop the service getting worse. You can also see it with the cuts to fiber engineers and maintenence workers. AI isn't laying cables yet or in the near future, so clearly they're hoping to save on these labour costs by doing less and working their existing workers harder (maybe with the threat of AI taking their jobs). Some of that may be cyclical, they're probably nearing the end of areas they can economically upgrade from copper to fiber, and some of that is a business decision that they can milk their existing network longer before looking at upgrades.
• batuhandumani 2y ago
  Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against these computational monsters that are extremely efficient and have access to a vast amount of information. Therefore, instead of such views, it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?
  • baq 2y ago
    Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.
    • snackbroken 2y ago
      Once AI achieves runaway self improvement, it will be subject to natural selection pressures. This does not bode well for any organisms competing in its niche for data center resources.
      • franktankbank 2y ago
        This doesn't sound right, seems like you are jumping metaphors. The computing resources are the limit on the evolution speed. There's nothing that makes an individual desirous of a faster evolution speed.
        • kamaal 2y ago
          >>The computing resources are the limit on the evolution speed. Energy resources too. In fact it might be the only limit to how far this can go.
        • 2y ago
• bloomingkales 2y ago
  I'm sure there is a formal proof someone can flesh out. - Half assed developer can construct a functional program with AI prompts. - Deployed at scale for profit - Many considerations were not considered due to lack of expertise (security, for example) - Bad things happen for users. I have at least two or three ideas that I've canned for now because it's just not safe for users (AI apps of that type require a lot of safety considerations). For example, you cannot create a collaborative AI app without considering how users can pollute the database with unsafe content (moderation). I'm concerned a lot of people in this world are not being as cautious.
  • yodsanklai 2y ago
    Why half-assed developer? It could be high-level developer that take advantage of AI to be more productive. This will reduce team sizes.
    • Draiken 2y ago
      Because a high level developer will still have to fix all the shit the AI gets wrong, and therefore won't be "2x more productive" like I read in many places. If they're that much better with AI, they were likely coding greenfield CRUD boilerplate that nobody uses anyways. When the AI generated crap is actually used, it becomes evident how bad it is. But yes, this will reduce team sizes regardless of it being good or not, because the people making those decisions are not qualified to make them and will always prefer the short-term at the cost of the long-term. The only part of this article I don't see happening is programmers being way more expensive. Capitalism has a way of forcing everyone to accept work for way less than they're worth and that won't change.
      • yodsanklai 2y ago
        I'd say this is a lot of wishful thinking. Personally, I know that I'm more productive with AI. In my personal projects, I can tackle bigger projects than what would have been possible otherwise. Will that reduce the demand for programmers? I hope not, but it's plausible at least.
• thelittleone 2y ago
  1. Work for megacorp 2. Megacorp CEOs gloat about forthcoming mass firings of engineers 3. Pay taxes as always 4. Taxes used to fund megacorp (stargate) 5. Megacorp fires me. The bitter irony.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?). They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting. I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without IRQs and accumulators. As always, ML will become another tool for multiplying the capabilities of humans (not replacing them). CEOs have been dreaming for decades about firing all their employees, and replacing them with some kind of automation. The ones that succeed, are the ones that “embrace the suck,” so to speak, and figure out how to combine humans with technology.
  • BossingAround 2y ago
    What is the actual engineering discipline that goes into creating prompts? Other than providing more context, hacking the data with keywords like "please", etc?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      I am not a prompt engineer, but I have basically been using ChatGPT, in place of where I used to use StackOverflow. It’s nice, because the AI doesn’t sneer at me, for not already knowing the answer, and has useful information in a wide range of topics that I don’t know. I have learned to create a text file, and develop my questions as detailed documents, with a context establishing preamble, a goal-oriented body, and a specific result request conclusion. I submit the document as a whole, to initiate the interaction. That usually gets me 90% of the way, and a few follow-up questions get me where I want. But I still need to carefully consider the output, and do the work to understand and adapt it (just like with StackOverflow). One example is from a couple of days ago. I’m writing a companion Watch app, for one of my phone apps. Watch programming is done, using SwiftUI, which has really bad documentation. I’m still very much in the learning phase for it. I encountered one of those places, where I could “kludge” something, but it doesn’t “feel” right, and there are almost no useful heuristics for it, so I asked ChatGPT. It gave me specific guidance, applying the correct concept, but using a deprecated API. I responded, saying something like “Unfortunately, your solution is deprecated.” It then said “You’re right. As of WatchOS 10, the correct approach is…”. Anyone with experience using SO, will understand how valuable that interaction is. You can also ask it to explain why it recommends an approach, and it will actually tell you, as opposed to brushing you off with a veiled insult.
• penetrarthur 2y ago
  There is only one word worse than "programmer" and it's "coder". If your software developers do nothing but write text in VS Code, you might as well replace them with AI.
• demircancelebi 2y ago
  The post eerily sounds like it is written by the jailbreaked version of Gemini
  • natch 2y ago
    Yes it is obviously LLM generated. The article is full of tells starting with the opening phrase. But this went fact right past most commenters here, which is interesting in itself, and somewhat alarming for what it reveals about critical thinking and reading skills.
• pydry 2y ago
  The thing that is going to lead to programmers being laid off and fired all over has and will continue to be market consolidation in the tech industry. The auto industry did the same thing in the 1950s which destroyed detroit. Market consolidation allows big tech to remain competitive even after the quality of software has been turned into shit by offshoring and multiple rounds of wage compression/layoffs. Eventually all software will end up like JIRA or SAP but you won't have much choice but to deal with it because the competition will be stifled. AI is actually probably having a very positive effect on hiring that is offsetting this effect. The reason they love using it as a scapegoat is that you can't fight the inevitable march of technological progress whereas you absolutely CAN break up big tech.
• nickip 2y ago
  My pessimistic take on it is in the future code will closer to AI where its just a blackbox where inputs go in and outputs come out. There will be no architecture, clean code, design principles. You will just have a product manager who bangs on a LLM till the ball of wax conforms to what they want at that time. As long as it meets their current KPI security be dammed. If they can get X done with as little effort as possible and data leaks so be it. They will get a fine (maybe?) and move on.
• EZ-E 2y ago
  Firing developers to replace by AI, how does that realistically work? Okay I fired half of our engineers. Now what? I hire non engineers to use AI to randomly paste code around hoping for the best? What if the AI makes the wrong assumptions about the requirement input by the non technical team, introducing subtle mistakes? What if I have an error and AI, as it often does, circles around not managing to find the proper fix? I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects. If anything AI empowers to write more code, faster, and with more code running live eventually there are more products to maintain, more companies launched and you need more engineers.
  • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects. I am somewhat confident in dev job prospects, but I am not confident in the qualifications of managers who sing the "AI will replace programmers" gospel.
• netcan 2y ago
  Our ability to predict technological "replacement" is pretty shoddy. Take banking for example. ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking." Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer. Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades. It's actually shocking how little network enabled PCs impacted administrative employment. Universities, for example, employ far more administrative staff than they did before PC automated many of their tasks. At one point (during and after dotcom), PayPal and suchlike were threatening to "turn billion dollar businesses into million dollar businesses." Reality went in the opposite direction. We need to stop analogizing everything in the economy to manufacturing. Manufacturing is unique in its long term tendency to efficiency.other industries don't work that way.
  • Draiken 2y ago
    Yes banks employ less people. In my country there are now account managers handling hundreds of clients virtually. Most of the local managers got fired. I find it easy to say from our privileged position that "tech might replace workers but it'll be fine". Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff. Tech innovation destroys lives in our current capitalist society because only the owners get the benefits. That's always been true.
    • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > Tech innovation destroys lives in our current capitalist society because only the owners get the benefits. If you want to become a (partial) owner, buy stocks. :-)
      • Draiken 2y ago
        Do I really own Intel/Tesla/Microsoft by buying their stock? No I don't. I can't influence anything on any of these companies unless I was already a billionaire with a real seat at the table. Even on startups where, in theory, employees have some skin in the game, it's not really how it works is it? You still can't influence almost anything and you're susceptible to all the bad decisions the founders will make to appease investors. Call me crazy but to say I own something, I have to at least be able to control some of it. Otherwise it's wishful thinking.
• seletskiy 2y ago
  I would say that AI is not to blame here. It just accelerated existing process, but didn't initiate it. We (as a society) started to value quantity over quality some time ago, and, apparently, no-one care enough to change it. Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)? Why design and test hundreds of physical and easy-to-use knobs in the car if you can just plug a touchscreen (see Tesla)? Why write a couple of lines of code if you can just include an `is-odd` library (see bloated npm ecosystem)? Why figure out how to solve a problem on your own if you can just copy-paste answer from somewhere else (see StackOverflow)? Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if you can just strap Android OS on a questionable hardware (look in your own house)? Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB (see your company)? Why spend months to find and hire one good engineer if you can just hire ten mediocre ones (see any other company)? Why spend years educating to identify a tumor on a MRI scans if you can just feed it to a machine learning algorithm (see your hospital)? What more could I name? In my take, which you can say is pessimistic, we already passed the peak of civilization as we know it. If we continue business as usual, things will continue to detiorate, more software will fail, more planes will crash, more people will be unemployed, more wars would be started. Yes, decent engineers (or any other decent specialists) will be likely a winners in a short term, but how the future would unfold when there will be less and less of them is a question I leave for the reader.
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
    You haven't answered those questions. Tesla's touchscreen displays maps, navigation, self-driving's model of the world around the car, reversing camera, distance to car in front, etc. Yes personally I prefer a physical control I can reach for without looking, but the physcial controls in my car cannot do as much as a touchscreen, cannot control as many systems as a modern car has. And that means something like a BMW iDrive running some weird custom OS in amongst the physical controls, and that was not a nice convenient system to use either. Why write a couple of lines of code when you can just include an `is-odd` library? Hopefully one which type checks integers vs floats, and checks for overflows. I'm not stating that I could not write one if/else, I'm asking you to do more than sneer and actually justify why a computer loading a couple of lines of code from a file is the end of the world. Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if people aren't going to buy it, because they are fine with the competitor's much cheaper Android OS on questionable hardware? Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server, and deal with its power requirements and cooling and firmware patching and driver version compatibility and out-of-band management and hardware failures and physical security and supply chain lead times and needing to spec it for the right size up front and commit thousands of dollars to it immediately, if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB and pay $10 to get going right now? I could fill in the answers you are expecting, I have seen that pattern argued, and argued it myself, but it boils down to "I dislike laggy ad-filled Android TV so it shouldn't exist". And I do dislike it, but so what, I'm not world dictator. No company has taken over the market making a responsive Android-free TV, so how/why should they be made to make one, and with what justification? > What more could I name? Why go to a cobbler for custom fitted shoes when you could just buy sneakers from a store? (I assume you wear mass produced shoes?) Why go to a tailor when you could just buy clothes made off-shore for cheaper? (I assume you wear mass produced clothes?) Why learn to play a keyboard, guitar, drums and sing, when you could just listen to someone else's band? (I assume you listen to music?) Why spend months creating characters and scenarios and writing a novel when you could just read one someone else wrote? (I assume you have read books?) Why grow your own food when you could just buy lower quality industrially packaged food from a shop? (I assume you aren't a homesteader?) Why develop your own off-grid power system with the voltage and current and redundancy and storage you need when you could just buy from the mains? (I assume you use mains electricity?) You could name every effort-saving, money-saving, time-saving, thing you use which was once done by hand with more effort, more cost, and less convenience. And then state that the exact amount of price/convenience/time/effort you happened to grow up with, is the perfect amount (what a coincidence!) and change is bad.
• aitchnyu 2y ago
  Tangential, does AI pick up new knowledge of new tools? AI helped me write much better bash since there is tons of content by volunteers and less across-country animosity. Svelte and Fastapi were made/popularized this decade and people dont want to help their AI/offshore replacements with content. Will current AI get good at them?
• nirui 2y ago
  Maybe it's just me boomer reading this, but I think all 3 points listed in the article are more of predictions from the author (with rationals from the author). However, AI today maybe different compare to AI in the future. I'm a programmer, I love my skills, but I really hate to write code (and test etc etc), I don't even want to do system design. If I can just say to a computer "Hey, I got this 55TB change set and I want to synced it up with these listed nodes, data across all node must remain atomicity consistent before, during and after the sync. Now, you make it happen. Also, go pick up my dog from the vax", and then the computer just do that in the best way possible, I'll love it. Fundamentally, programmer are tool creators. If it is possible that a computer can create better tools all by itself, then it looked unwise to just react such technology with emotional rejection. I mean, the worries is real, sure, but I wouldn't just blank out reject the tech.
  • natch 2y ago
    “author.” hah.
• netcan 2y ago
  So... to discuss this for real we should first admit how things look below the super-premium level. Software engineering at Stripe, R&D at Meta and such... these are one end of a spectrum. At the middle of the spectrum is a team spending 6 years on a bullshit "cloud platform strategy" for a 90s UI that monitors equipment at a factory and produces reports required for compliance. A lot of these struggle to get anything at all done.
• osigurdson 2y ago
  It seems that a lot of companies are skating where they hope the puck to go instead of hedging their bets for an uncertain future. Personally I would at least wait until the big AI players fire everyone before doing the same.
  • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    They are skating where bleachers full of hype men are screaming that the puck will go.
    • Gerardo1 2y ago
      I think the common theme is that a lot of people: meaning both people in the community, like here on HN, and people making decisions in industry, are treating AI today as if it's what they hope it will be in five years. That's a very leveraged bet, which isn't always the wrong call, but I'm not convinced they are aware that that's what they're doing. I think this is different from the usual hype cycle.
      • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        Well, it still feels like a form of hype to me. They are being very loudly told by ever AI cloud service, of which there are many, that worker-replacing AI agents are just around the corner so they should buy in with the inferior agents that are being offered today.
        • Gerardo1 2y ago
          Oh it's definitely still driven by hype, I think it's just a slightly more extreme version than your normal tech hype cycle.
      • only-one1701 2y ago
        I genuinely wonder if this is a "too big to fail" scenario though, where mass belief (and maybe a helping hand via govt subsidies/regulations) powers it to a point where everything is just kind of worse but cheaper for shareholders/execs and the economic landscape can't support an actual disruption. That's my fear at least.
• jvanderbot 2y ago
  What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.
  • emseetech 2y ago
    Even if it is a cover, many smaller companies follow the expressed reasoning of the larger ones.
  • makerofthings 2y ago
    Part of my work is rapid prototyping of new products and technology to test out new ideas. I have a small team of really great generalists. 2 people have left over the last year and I didn't replace them because the existing team + chatGPT can easily take up the slack. So that's 2 people that didn't get hired that would have done without chatGPT.
  • 3s 2y ago
    For a lot of tasks like frontend development I’ve found that a tool like cursor can get you pretty far without much prior knowledge. IMO (and experience) many tasks that previously required to hiring a programmer or designer with knowledge of the latest frameworks can now be replaced by one motivated “prompt engineer” and some patience
    • daveguy 2y ago
      The deeper it gets you into code without prior knowledge the deeper it gets you into debug hell. I assume the "motivated prompt engineer" would have to already be an experienced programmer at this point. Do you think someone who has only had an intro to programming / MBA / etc could do this right now with tools like cursor?
    • goosejuice 2y ago
      I love cursor, but yeah no way in hell. This is where it chokes the most and I've been leaning on it for non trivial css for a year or more. If I didn't have experience with frontend it would be a shit show. If you replaced a fe/designer with a "prompt engineer" at this stage it would be incredibly irresponsible. Responsiveness, cohesive design, browser security, accessibility and cross browser compatibility are not easy problems for LLMs right now.
• qoez 2y ago
  Some companies will try to fire as many programmers as possible and will end up struggling bc they have no moats against other companies with access to the same AI, or will hit some kind of AI saturation usefulness threshold. Other companies will figure out a smart hybrid to utilize existing talent and those are probably the ones that will thrive among the competition.
  • lordofgibbons 2y ago
    But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI? The whole point of AI is that it doesn't need an "operator". I'm not talking about GH Copilot or some autocomplete IDE feature, I'm talking about fully autonomous agents 2-3 years in the future. Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years. The next two years will be even faster if the past few months are anything to go by.
    • phito 2y ago
      > Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years. Are we living on the same planet? I haven't seen much real progress since the release of chatGPT. Sure brenchmarks and graphs are going up, but in practice, meh...
      • ctoth 2y ago
        I know you're not supposed to feed the trolls but honestly I was so taken aback by this comment, no progress since ChatGPT? I just had to respond. Are you serious? From reasoning models to multimodal. From code assistants which are actually useful to AIs which will literally turn my silly scribbling into full songs which actually sound good! I am completely blind and I used Gemini Live mode to help me change BIOS settings and reinstall Windows when the installer didn't pick up my USB soundcard. I spoke, with my own voice and completed a task with a computer which could only see my webcam stream. This, to me, is a heck of a lot more than ChatGPT was ever able to do in November 2022. If you continue to insist that stuff isn't improving, well, you can in fact do that... But I don't know how much I can trust you in terms of overall situational awareness if you really don't think any improvements have been made at all in the previous two years of massive investment.
• Havoc 2y ago
  That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway. Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.
  • Espressosaurus 2y ago
    I believe AI is the excuse, but that this is just to cover another wave of outsourcing.
  • rossdavidh 2y ago
    You have a point, all people do like to think they're more irreplaceable than they are, but the last round of offshoring of programmers did in fact end up with the companies trying to reverse course a few years later. GM was the most well-known example of this, but I worked at several organizations that found that getting software done on the other side of the planet was a bad idea, and ended up having to reverse course. The core issue is that the bottleneck step in software development isn't actually the ability to program a specific thing, it's the process of discovering what it is we actually want the program to do. Having your programmers AT THE OFFICE and in close communication with the people who need the software, is the best way to get that done. Having them on the other side of the planet turned out to be the worse way. This is unintuitive (to programmers as well as the organizations that might employ them), and therefore they have to discover it the hard way. I don't think this is something LLMs will be good at, now or ever. There may come a day when neural networks (or some other ML) will be able to do that, but that day is not near.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    > That’s what people said about outsourcing too. And they were right... and a lot of companies fully failed because of it. And the corporate meat grinder kept rolling forward anyway. And the decision makers were all shielded from the consequences of their incompetence anyway. When the market is completely corrupted, nothing means anything.
  • beretguy 2y ago
    I ones worked for a company that used to hire 70 developers from Vietnam to work on their product. Then one day they decided to hire ~5 developers from US. These 5 developers did the job faster, better and cheaper than 70 Vietnamese developers. So they fired all overseas developers and doubled the size of US team to about a dozen.
• jdmoreira 2y ago
  If there will be actual AGI (or super intelligence), none of these arguments hold. The machines will just be better than any programmer money can buy. Of course at that point every knowledge worker is probably unemployable anyway.
  • varsketiz 2y ago
    What if AGI is extremely expensive to run?
    • kaneryu 2y ago
      then we ask AGI how to make itself less expensive to run
      • bdangubic 2y ago
        I'd ask it to run for free
      • varsketiz 2y ago
        The answer to that question is 42. Why do you assume AGI is smarter than some human?
        • jdmoreira 2y ago
          Why would humans be peak intelligence? There is even variation for intelligence within the species. We are probably just stuck on some local maxima that satisfies all the constraints of our environment. Current AI is already much smarter than many humans at many things.
          • varsketiz 2y ago
            I'm not saying humans are peak intelligence.
  • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    True AGI would make every worker unemployable. The only reason why true androids aren't possible yet is software. The mechanics have been pretty much a solved problem.
• dham 2y ago
  There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something other than LLM's. It just doesn't feel right around the corner. Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at.
  • hammock 2y ago
    > It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase The COBOL crisis at Y2K comes to mind.
    • Cascais 2y ago
      Is this the same Cobol crisis we have now? https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366588232/Cobol-knowledge-crisis-threatens-Dutch-financial-systems https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366588232/Cobol-knowledg...
  • lawlessone 2y ago
    Same, LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I think something needs to actually experience the world in 3d in real time to understand what it is actually coding things or doing tasks for.
    • falcor84 2y ago
      > LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I don't think that anyone is advocating for LLMs to be used "on their own". Isn't it like saying that airplanes are useless "on their own" in 1910, before people had a chance to figure out proper runways and ATC towers?
      • dingnuts 2y ago
• lofaszvanitt 2y ago
  Time to wake up and think in terms of 10-20 years ahead. Everyone around NVIDIA dies out... anyone with GPU compute ideas just cannot succeed... 3Dfx full of saboteurs that hinder their progress. Open source takes away the livelihood of programmers and gives it to moneymen for free. They used open source to train AI models. Programmers got back a few stars and a pat in the back. And some recognition, but mostly nothing. All this while big corps use their work without compensation. There is zero compensation options for open source programmers on github. Somehow it's left out. Same bullshit comes up again and again in different forms. Like your ideas worth nothing blablabla. Suuure, but moneymen usually have zero ideas and they like to expropriate others' ideas, FOR FREE. While naive people give away their ideas and work for free, the other side gives back nooothiiiing. It's already too late. So programmers and other areas that will be aiified in the coming decades will be slowly going extinct. AI is a skill appropriation device that in the long term will make people useless, so they don't need an artist, a musician etc. They will just need a capable AI to create whatever they want, without the hassle of the human element. It's the ultimate control tool to make people SLAVES. Hope I'm wrong.
• nerder92 2y ago
  This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions: 1. AI code ability will be the same as is today 2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change to adapt to this. (Already doing) The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs. At the end of the day product is just one area of company development, build the complete e2e ultimate solution with 0 distribution or marketing will not help. This article, in my opinion, is just doomerism storytelling for nostalgic programmers, that see programming only as some kind of magical artistic craft and AI as the villain arrived to remove all the fun from it. You can still switch off Cursor and write donut.c if you enjoy doing it.
  • Madmallard 2y ago
    What makes you think (1) will be true? It is only generating based on training data. In mature code bases there is a massive amount of interconnected state that is not already present in any github repository. The new logic you'd want to add is likely something never done before. As other programmers have stated, it seems to be improving at generating useful boilerplate and making simple websites and such related to what's out there en masse on Github. But it can't make any meaningful changes in an extensively matured codebase. Even Claude Sonnet is absolutely hopeless at this. And the requirement before the codebase is "matured" is not very high.
    • nerder92 2y ago
      > It is only generating based on training data This is not the case anymore, current SOTA CoT models are not just parroting stuff from the training data. And as of today they are not even trained exclusively on publicly (and not so publicly) available stuff, but they massively use synthetic data which the model itself generated or distilled data from other smarter models. I'm using and I know plenty of people using AI in current "mature" codebases with great results, this doesn't mean it does the work while you sip a coffee (yet) *NOTE: my evidence for this is that o3 could not break ARC AGI by parroting, because it's a banchmark made exactly for this reason. Not a coding banchmark per se, but still transposable imo.
• reportgunner 2y ago
  People really believe that companies are firing because AI will replace them ?
• varsketiz 2y ago
  Frankly, I agree with the points in the article, yet I'm triggered slightly by the screaming dramatic writing like "destroy everything".
• WaitWaitWha 2y ago
  "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." - King Solomon Litter, palanquin, and sedan chair carriers were fired. Oarsmen were fired. Horses were fired. . . . [time] . . . COBOL programmers where fired. and, so on. What was the expectation; that programmers will be forever? Lest we forget, barely a century ago, programmers started to push out a large swath of non-programmers. The more important question is what roles will push out whatever roles AI/LLMs create.
  • Mistletoe 2y ago
    I was watching How It’s Made last night and watching how pencils were made, thinking how hard this would be and how expensive a pencil would be if a person had to make them and how an endless supply of them can be made this way. Then I thought about how software has allowed us to automate so many things and scale and I realized AI is the final step where we can automate and remove the programmers. Pencil makers were replaced and so will programmers be replaced. Your best hope is being the person running the pencil machine.
    • WaitWaitWha 2y ago
      > Your best hope is being the person running the pencil machine. Or, see what is coming and hop on that cart for the short lives we have. Pencils. There is a hobby primitive survival, bushcraft, or primitive skills (youtuber John Plant in "Primitive Technology" is best example). I am certain we could come up with a path to create "pencils". We would just need to define what we agree to be a "pencil" first. Is a stick of graphite or even wood charcoal wrapped in sheepskin a "pencil". Would a hollowed juniper branch stuffed with the writing material a "pencil"?
• goosejuice 2y ago
  An agent would be able to replace sales, marketing, customer success, middle management and project managers much better and earlier than any developer of a software company. Nocode and Shopify-like consolidation are/have been much bigger threats imo. These large orgs are just trimming fat that they would have trimmed anyways. But hell what do I know. Probably nothing :)
• deleted 2y ago
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• newAccount2025 2y ago
  One major critique: why do we think junior programmers really learn best from the grizzled veterans? AI coaches can give feedback on what someone is actually seeing and doing, and can be available 24x7. I suspect this can enable the juniors of the future to have a much faster rise to mastery.
  • hennell 2y ago
    I remember being in maths class with a kid next to me who was a maths wiz. He could see what I was doing, was available to help almost the whole lesson, far easier for me to ask then the teacher who had many other students. In theory a much faster rise to mastery. In practice I rarely had to actually do the work because he'd help me if I got stuck, and what made sense when he explained it didn't stick because I wasn't really doing it. I did very badly in my first test that year, and was moved elsewhere.
• deleted 2y ago
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• swiftcoder 2y ago
  Every generation sees a new technology that old timers loudly worry "will destroy programming as a profession". I'm old enough to remember when that new and destructive technology was Java, and the greybeards were all heavily invested in inline assembly as an essential skill of the serious programmer. The exact same 3 steps in the article happened about a decade ago during the "javascript bootcamp" craze, and while the web stack does grow ever more deeply abstracted, things do seem to keep on trucking along...
  • hedora 2y ago
    I'm not old enough to remember these, but they were certainly more disruptive than AI has been so far (reverse chronological order): - The word processor - The assembly line - Trains - Internal combustion engines I do remember some false starts from the 90's: - Computer animation will put all the animation studios out of business - Software agents will replace all middlemen with computers
  • nitwit005 2y ago
    Technically, we automated most programing when we got rid of punch cards and created assembly languages.
• mattfrommars 2y ago
  I read this on Reddit, but it capture in essence where we are headed in the future. "AI won't replace you. Programmers using AI will."
  • bigfishrunning 2y ago
    No they won't. The programmers that are using AI are the ones who are too lazy/untalented to learn to do their jobs; AI makes easy things easy and hard things impossible, and that's not changing any time soon.
• throwaway7783 2y ago
  It has its uses, but often fail at seemingly simple things. The other day,i couldn't get Claude to generate an HTML page, with a logo on the top left, no matter how I prompted.
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  Programmers are not going to go away. But the lavish salaries, benefits packages, and generous work/life balances probably will. I envision software engineering ending up in the same pit of mediocrity as all the other engineering disciplines.
• Pooge 2y ago
  As a software engineer with about 4 years of experience, what can I do to avoid being left behind? The author mentions "systems programming" and "high-performance computing". Do you have any resources for that (whether it be books, videos, courses)?
  • glouwbug 2y ago
    High frequency trading. If you’re talking something more hardware focused, try job searching for the exact term “C/C++”. These jobs are typically standard library deprived (read: malloc, new, etc) and you’ll be making calls to register sets, SPI and I2C lines. Embedded systems, really; think robotics, aviation, etc. If that’s still too little hardware try finding something in silicon validation. Intel (of yesterday), AMD, nvidia, Broadcom, you’ll be doing C to validate FPGA and ASIC spin ups. It’s the perfect way to divorce yourself from conventional x86 desktops and learn SOC programming, which close loops itself back into fields like HFT where FPGA experience is _incredibly_ lucrative. But when anyone says systems programming, thinks hardware: how do I get that additional 15% performance on top of my conventional understanding of big O notation? Cache lines, cache levels, DMAs, branch prediction, the lot.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  I think a more interesting question is what the impact will be on the next generation looking at CS/SWE as a potential profession. It's been considered a pretty "safe" profession for a long time now. That will change over the next 10 years. Will parents advise their kids to avoid CS because the job market will be so much smaller in 10 years' time?
  • sumoboy 2y ago
    I'm sure that's happening right now. On the flipside will companies who hire in 4 years look at those CS/SWE kids as lessor skilled devs because they relied so much on AI to pass classes and didn't really learn?
    • hedora 2y ago
      There was a similar effect during the dot com boom / crash. Everyone and their dog got a CS degree, and the average quality of that cohort was abysmal. However, it also created a huge supply of extremely talented people. The dot-com crash happened, and software development was "over forever", but the talented folks stuck around and are doing fine. People that wanted to go into CS still did. Some of them used stack overflow and google to pass their courses. They were as unemployable as the bottom of the barrel during the dot com boom. People realized there was a shortage of programmers, so CS got hot again for a bit. Now LLMs have hit and are disrupting most industries. This means that most industries need to rewrite their software. That'll create demand for now. Eventually, the LLM bust will come, programming will be "over forever" again, and the cycle will continue. At some point after Moore's law ends the boom and bust cycle will taper off. (As it has for most older engineering disciplines.)
• mdrzn 2y ago
  "The New Generation of Drivers Will Be Useless Without a Horse" is what I read when I see articles like this.
• lawgimenez 2y ago
  AI is cool, until they start going down the client’s absurd requirements.
• dragonwriter 2y ago
  My opinion: tech isn't firing programmers for AI. If is firing peogrammers because of the financial environment, and waving around AI as a fig leaf to pretend that it is not really cutting back in output. When the financial environment loosens again, there’ll be a new wave of tech hiring (which is about equally likely to publicly be portrayed as either reversing the AI firing or exploiting new opportunities due to AI, neither of which will be the real fundamental driving force.)
  • smitelli 2y ago
    I've come to believe it really is this. Everybody got used to the way things worked when interest rates were near zero. Money was basically free, hiring was on a rampage, and everybody was willing to try reckless moonshots with slim chances for success. This went on for like fifteen years -- a good chunk of the workforce has only ever known that environment.
  • coolKid721 2y ago
    most narratives for everything are just an excuse for macro stuff. we had zirp for basically the entire period of 2008 - 2022 and when that stopped there was huge lay offs and less hiring. I see lots of newer/younger devs being really pessimistic about the future of the industry, being mindful of the macro factors is important so people don't buy into the AI narratives (which is just to bump up their stocks). If people can get a safer return buying bonds they aren't going to invest in expansion and hiring. If there is basically no risk free rate of return you throw your money at hiring/new projects because you need to make a return. Lots of that goes into tech jobs.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    No one 0ast sole very small businesses (aka a single person with contractors) is seriously trying to replace programmers with AI right now. I do feel we will hit that phase sometimes down the line (probably in the 30's).so I at least think this is a tale to keep in the back of our minds long term.
  • cootsnuck 2y ago
    It's this. Companies love a smokescreen to tighten their belts without spooking markets and tanking their stock. And workers are the collateral damage.
• arrowsmith 2y ago
  Did ChatGPT write this article? The writing style reeks of it.
• mola 2y ago
  I believe regardless of the validity for the AI can replace programmers now narrative, we will see big co squeezing the labor force and padding the companies bottom line and their pocket. The fact the narrative is false will be the problem of the one who replaces these CEOs, and us workers
• angusb 2y ago
  Did anyone else read this as "Firing programmers for (AI will destroy everything)" or have I been reading too much Yudkowsky
• p0w3n3d 2y ago
  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic ~ Arthur C. Clarke People who make decisions got bamboozled by the ads and marketing of AI companies. They failed to detect a lack of intelligence and got deceived, that they have magical golems for a fraction of the price but eventually, they will get caught with their pants down.
  • jnet 2y ago
    I find the people who promote AI the most are those with vested financial interests in AI. Don't get me wrong, I find it is a useful tool but it's not going to replace programmers any time soon.
• antirez 2y ago
  You can substitute AI with "Some Javascript Framework" and the subtitles still apply very well. Yet nobody was particularly concerned about that.
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    hehehe yea but how many of us were hand-writing JavaScript for a living anyways :)
• coding123 2y ago
  [dead]
• fred_is_fred 2y ago
  What I've seen is less "let's fire 1000 people and replace with AI" but more "let's not hire for 2 years and see what happens as AI develops".
• usrbinbash 2y ago
  Clicked on the Website. Greeted by the message: "Something has gone terribly wrong". It did load correctly at the second attempt, but I have to admit...well played with raising the dramatic effect webserver, well played ;-)
• 999900000999 2y ago
  I have to disagree with this article. Companies as is, particularly larger companies have a lot of fluff. People who do about three or four hours of work a week, and effectively just sit around so senior management can claim they have so many people working on such and such project. With AI, you no longer need those employees to justify your high valuations. You don't need as many juniors. The party is over tell the rest of the crew. I wouldn't advise anyone to get into tech right now. I know personally my wages have been stagnant for about 5 years. I still make fantastic money, and it's significantly more than the average American income, but my hopes and dreams of hitting 300 or 400k total comp in retiring by 40 are gone. Instead I've more or less accepted I'm going to have to keep working my middle class job, and I might not even retiring till my '50s! Tragic.
  • pockmarked19 2y ago
    People who look forward to retiring are like people who look forward to heaven: missing out on life due to the belief their “real” life hasn’t begun yet.
    • 999900000999 2y ago
      I want to spend all day making music, and small games. I haven't figured out a way to do that in a manner that supports myself. Every job is ultimately filing out TPS reports. The reports might look a little different, but it's still a TPS report.
      • renewiltord 2y ago
        Amusingly, I spent years making multiples of your target comp and now I’m home sitting around using AI to make myself toy games. The barrier has dropped so low that I think I’d have been more productive if I were still working.
        • 999900000999 2y ago
          Not like it's going to happen for me, but how did you reach such comp. I'm a simple man. If I hit 2 million in net worth I'm done working. I don't plan on having a family, so I'm just supporting myself. If I really made a ton of money I'd fund interesting open source games. Godot is the most popular open source game engine, and they're making it happen off just 40k a month. I'm a bit surprised Microsoft hasn't filled the void here. What's a few million dollars a year to get new programmers fully invested in a .net first game engine?
• deleted 2y ago
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• iainctduncan 2y ago
  I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question (at risk of deals failing through and being sued to obvilion). Which means we get the hear the real effects of tech debt all time. I call it the silent killer. Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. I'm constantly gobsmacked by how many companies are stuck on way past EOL libraries because of bad architecture decisions. Or can't deal with heinous noisy neighbour issues without spending through the nose on AWS because of bad architecture decisions. Or are spending the farm to rewrite part of the stack that can't perform well enough to land enterprise clients, but the rewrite is going to potentially bankrupt the company... because of bad architecture decisions. This shit happens ALL THE TIME. Even to very big companies! The tech debt situation is going to become so, so much worse. My guess is there will be a whole lot of "dead by year five" companies built on AI.
  • inetknght 2y ago
    > I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question Nice. How do I get into that kind of position? > Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. If nobody hears about it, then how do you hear about it? Moreover, what makes you think it's tech debt and not whatever reason the business told you? And further, if it's tech debt and not whatever reason the business told you, then don't you think the business lied? And didn't you just say they're not allowed to lie? Can you clear that up?
    • iainctduncan 2y ago
      Sure I can clear it up. What happens is once they are into a potential deal, they go into exclusivity with the buyer, and we get brought in for a wack of interviews and going through their docs. Part of that period includes NDAs all around, and the agreement that they give us access to whatever we need (with sometimes some back and forth over IP). So could they lie? Technically yes, but as we ask to see things to demonstrate that what they said is true, and it would break the contract they've signed with the potential acquirer, that would be extremely risky. I have heard of cases where people did, it was discovered after the deal, and it retroactively cost the seller a giant chunk of cash (at risk of even more giant law suit). We typically have two days of interviews with them and we specifically talk about tech debt. Our job is to ask the right questions and ask to see the right things to get the goods. We get to look at code, Jira, roadmap docs, internal dev docs, test runner reports, monitoring and load testing dashboards, and so on. For example, if someone said something vague about responsivness, we'll look into it, ask to see the actual load metrics, ask how they test it and profile, and so on. I got into because I had been the CTO of a startup that went through an acquisition, knew someone in the field, didn't mind the variable workload of being a consultant, and have the (unusual) skill set: technical chops, leadership experience, interviewing and presenting skills, project management, and the ability to write high quality reports. Having now been in the position of hiring for this role, I can say that finding real devs who have all those traits is not easy!
• deleted 2y ago
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• m3kw9 2y ago
  It will destroy your own company, initially but if the AI is proven to do it better than humans, a lot of them will be converted into AI assistants to guide the AI you’d still need to know programming
• skeeter2020 2y ago
  How can this opion piece miss the big thing though? Even if it's an accurate prediction that will be someone else's problem. My last three companies have been Publicly traded, Private Equity, VC and PE. The timelines for decision makers in any of these scenarios maxes out around 4 years, and for some is less than a year. They're not shooting themselves in the foot, rather handicaping the business and moving on. The ones who time it right will have an extra-big payday, while the ones who do poorly will buy all these duds. Meanwhile the vast majority lose either way.
• armchairhacker 2y ago
  Counterpoint: lots of software is relatively very simple at its core, so perhaps we don't need nearly as many employed developers as we have today. Alternatively, we have far more developers today, so perhaps companies are only firing to re-hire for lower salaries. Regarding the first hypothesis: For example, one person can make a basic social media site in a weekend. It'll be missing important things from big social medias: 1) features (some of them small but difficult, like live video), 2) scalability, 3) reliability and security, and 4) non-technical aspects (promotion, moderation, legal, etc.). But 1) is optional; 2) is reduced if you use a managed service like AWS and throw enough compute at it, then perhaps you only need a few sysadmins; 3) is reduced to essentials (e.g. backups) if you accept frequent outages and leaks (immoral but those things don't seem to impact revenue much); and 4) is neither reducible nor optional but doesn't require developers. I remember when the big tech companies of today were (at least advertised as) run by only a few developers. They were much smaller, but still global and handling $millions in revenue. Then they hired more developers, presumably to add more features and improving existing ones, to make profit and avoid being out-competed. And I do believe those developers made features and improvements to generate more revenue than their salaries and keep the companies above competition. But at this point, would more developers generate even more features and improvements to offset their cost, and are they necessary to avoid competition? Moreover, if a company were to fire most of its developers, keeping just enough to maintain the existing systems, and direct resources elsewhere (e.g. marketing), would they make more profit and out-compete better? Related, everyone knows there's lots of products with needless complexity and "bullshit jobs". Exactly how much of that complexity is needless and how many of those jobs are useless is up to debate, and it may be less than we think, but it may really not. I'm confident the LLMs that exist today can't replace developers, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't "augment" developers so fewer developers + LLMs don't maintain the same productivity. But perhaps many programmers are being fired because many programmers just aren't necessary, and AI is just a placebo. Regarding the second hypothesis: At the same time, there are many more developers today than there were 10-20 years ago. Which means that even if most programmers are necessary, companies may be firing them to re-hire later at lower salaries. Despite the long explanations above this may be the more likely outcome. Again, AI is just an excuse here, maybe not even an intentional one: companies fire developers because they believe AI can improve things, it doesn't, but then they're able to re-hire cheaper anyways. (Granted, even if one or both the above hypotheses are true, I don't think it's hopeless for software developers. Specifically because, I believe many developers will have to find other work, but it will be interesting work; perhaps even involving programming, just not the kind you learned in college, and at minimum involving reasoning some of which you learn from development. The reason being that, while both are important to some extent, I believe "smart work" is generally far more important than "hard work". Especially today, it seems most of society's problems aren't because we don't have enough resources, but 1) because we don't have the logistics to distribute them, and 2) because of problems that aren't caused by lack of resources, but mental health (culture disagreements, employer/employee disagreements, social media toxicity, loneliness). Especially 2). Similarly to how people moved from manual labor to technical work, I think people will move from technical work; but not back to manual labor, to something else, perhaps something social.)
• siliconc0w 2y ago
  It's already pretty hard to find engineers that can actually go deep on problems. I predict this will get even worst with AI.
• thro1 2y ago
  What about.. empowering programmers with AI - can it create any useful things ?
• clbrmbr 2y ago
  > the real winners in all this: the programmers who saw the chaos coming and refused to play along. The ones who […] went deep into systems programming, AI interpretability, or high-performance computing. These are the people who actually understand technology at a level no AI can replicate. Is there room for Interpretability outside of major ai labs?
• tomrod 2y ago
  When an organization actively swaps out labor for capital, expecting deep savings and dramatic ROI, instead of incrementally improving processes, they deserve the failure coming. Change management and modernization are actually meaningful, despite the derision immature organizations show towards the processes.
• lenerdenator 2y ago
  Keeping things around doesn't drive shareholder value. Firing employees making six figures does.
• scoutt 2y ago
  What I see when producing code with AI (C/C++, Qt) is that often it gives output for different versions of a given library. It's like it can't understand (or doesn't know) that a given function is now obsolete and needs to use another method. Sometimes it can be corrected. I think there will be a point in which humans will no longer be motivated to produce enough material for the AI to update. Like, why would I write/shot a tutorial or ask/answer a question in a forum if people are now going directly to ask to some AI? And since AI is being fed with human knowledge at the moment, I think the quantity of good material out there (that was used so far for training) is going to slow down. So the AI will need to wait for some repos to be populated/updated to understand the changes. Or it will have to read the new documentation (if any), or understand the changes from code (if any). All this if it wasn't the AI to introduce the changes itself.
• gip 2y ago
  I think that some engineers will still be needed to maintain old codebases for a while yes. But it's pretty clear that the codebases of tomorrow will be leaner and mostly implemented by AI, starting with apps (web, mobile,...). It will take more time for scaling backends. So my bet is that the need for software engineering will follow what happened for stock brokers. The ones with basic to average skills will disappear, automated away (it has already happened in some teams at my last job). Above average engineers will still be employed my comp will eventually go down. And there will be a small class of expert / smartest / most connected engineers will see their comp go up and up. It is not the future we want but I think it what is most likely to happen.
  • msaspence 2y ago
    What makes you think that AI is going to produce leaner codebases? They are trained on human codebases. They are going to end up emulating that human code. It's not hard to imagine some improvement here, but my gut is there just isn't enough good code out there to train a significant shift on this.
    • gip 2y ago
      Good question and I have no strong answer today. But I think we'll find a way to tune models to achieve this very soon. I see such a difference between what is built today and codebases from 10 years ago with indirections everywhere, unnecessary complexity,.. I interviewed for a company with a 13yo RoR codebase recently after a few mins looking at the code decided I didn't want to work there.
• jjallen 2y ago
  I'll just say that AI for coding has been amazingly helpful for finding bugs and thinking things through and improving things like long functions and simplifying code. But it can absolutely not replace entire programmers at this point, and it's a long way of being able to say create, tweak, build and deploy entire apps. That said this could totally change in the next handful of years, and I think if someone worked just on creating a purely JS/React website at this point you could build something that does this. Or at least I think that I could build this. Where the user sort of talks to the AI and describes changes and they eventually get done. Or if not we are approaching that point.
• intrasight 2y ago
  Firing programmers for using AI? I do see people asking on social media how to filter out hire candidates that are using AI in interviews. But if they had meant replacing programmers with AI (bad title), I'm much more concerned about replacing non-programmers with AI. It's gonna happen on a huge scale, and we don't yet have a regulatory regime to protect labor from capital.
• tharmas 2y ago
  Programmers are training their replacement.
• meristohm 2y ago
  Follow the money, all the way down to Mother Earth; which boats are lifted most, and at what cost?
• blibble 2y ago
  ultimately Facebook and Google are completely unimportant, if they disappeared tomorrow the world would keep going however, I for one can't wait for unreliable garbage code in: - engine management systems - aircraft safety and navigation systems - trains and railway signalling systems - elevator control systems - operating systems - medical devices (pacemakers, drug dispensing devices, monitoring, radiography control, etc) - payment systems - stock exchanges maybe AI generated code is the Great Filter?
  • rapind 2y ago
    What irks me the most about AI is the black box mutability. Give it the same question of reasonable complexity and get a slightly different answer every time. I also dislike mass code generation tools. The code generation is basically just a cache of the AIs reasoning right? So it's sort of pre-optimization. Eventually, once cheap enough, I would assume the AI reasons in real time (producing temporary throw-away code for every request). But the mutability issue is still there. I think we need to be able to "lock-in" on the reasoning, but that's a challenge and probably falls apart with enough inputs / complexity.
• ArthurStacks 2y ago
  Total delusion from the author. If tech companies need a human dev, therell be plenty of them across the globe jumping at the chance to do it for peanuts. Youre soon to be extinct. Deal with it.
• dwheeler 2y ago
  Today AI can generate code. Sometimes it's even correct. AI is a useful aid to software developers, but it requires developers to know what they're doing. We need developers to know more, not less, so they can review AI-generated code, fix it when it's wrong, etc.
• giancarlostoro 2y ago
  AI bros are like crypto bros. Really trying to hype it up beyond what its currently capable of and what it will be capable of in the near future. I have all sorts of people telling me I need to learn AI or I will lose my job and get left in the dust. AI is still a tool, not a worker.
• guccihat 2y ago
  When the AI dust settles, I wonder who will be left standing among the groups of developers, testers, scrum masters, project leaders, department managers, compliance officers, and all the other roles in IT. It seems the general sentiment is that developers are in danger of being replaced entirely. I may be biased, but it seems not to be the most likely outcome in the long term. I can't imagine how such companies will be competitive against developers who replace their boss with an AI.
  • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    > I can't imagine how such companies will be competitive against developers who replace their boss with an AI. Me neither, but I think it'll be a gratifying fight to watch.
  • phist_mcgee 2y ago
    Please take the scrum masters first.
• cjoshi66 2y ago
  Knowing the difference between programmers able to generate AI code vs those who can actually explain it matters. If orgs can do that, then firing programmers should be fine. If they can't, things might get ugly for some but not all.
• larve 2y ago
  This is missing the fact that budding programmers will also embrace these technologies, in order to get stuff done and working and fulfill their curiosity. They will in fact grow up to be much more "AI native" than current more senior programmers, except that they are turbocharging their exploration and learning by having, well, a full team of AI programmers at their disposal. I see it like when I came of age in the 90ies, with my first laptop and linux, confronted with the older generation that grew up on punchcards or expensive shared systems. They were advocating for really taking time to write your program out on paper or architecting it up front, while I was of the "YOLOOOO, I'll hack on it until it compiles" persuasion. Did it keep me from learning the fundamentals, become a solid engineer? No. In fact, the "hack on it until it compiles" became a pillar of today's engineering: TDD, CI/CD, etc... It's up to us to find the right workflows for both mentoring / teaching and for solid engineering, with this new, imo paradigm-changing technology.
  • larve 2y ago
    Another aspect this is missing is that, if AI works well enough to fire people (it already does, IMO), there is a whole world of software that was previously out of reach to be built. I wouldn't build a custom photography app for a single individual, nor would I write a full POS system for 3 people bakery. The costs would be prohibitive. But if a single developer/product designer can now be up to the challenge, be it through a "tweak wordpress plugins until it works" or through more serious engineering, there is going to be a whole new industry of software jobs out there. I know that it works because the amount of softwrae I now write for friends, family or myself has exploded. I wouldn't spend 4 weekends on a data cleanup app for my librarian friend. But I can now, in 2-3 h, get something really usable and pretty, and it's extremely rewarding.
  • SkyBelow 2y ago
    AI native like recent digital natives, who have more time using software but far less time exploring how it works and less overall success at using digital tools? AI reminds me of calculators. For someone who is proficient in math, they boost speed. For those learning math, it becomes a crutch and eventually stops their ability to learn further because their mind can't build upon principles fully outsourced to the machine.
• nritchie 2y ago
  It's been noted that LLM's output quality decays as they ingest more LLM generated content in their training. Will the same happen for LLM generated code as more and more of the code on Github is generated by LLMs? What then?
  • jdmoreira 2y ago
    The approach has changed. Its all about test / inference time now and reinforcement learning on top of the base models. There is no end in sight anymore, training data won't be a limiting factor when reasoning and self-play are the approach
• deleted 2y ago
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• nu2ycombinator 2y ago
  Dejavu, Complaints on using AI sounds very similar to early times of offshoring/outsourcing. At the end of the day, corporates go for most profitable solution, so AI is going to replace some percentage of headcount.
• usixk 2y ago
  Agreed - AI agents are simply a form of outsourcing and companies that go all in on that premise will get bonked hard. Getting into cyber security might be a gold mine in spite of all the AI generated code that is going to be churned out in this transition period.
  • Me000 2y ago
    Name one successful company that doesn’t outsource developer labor outside America.
• regnull 2y ago
  This reminds me of the outsourcing panic, many years ago. Hiring cheaper talent overseas seemed like a no brainer, so everyone's job was in danger. Of course, it turned out that it was not as simple, it came with its own costs, and somehow the whole thing just settled. I wonder if the same will happen here. In this line of work, it's almost as when you know exactly what you want to build, you are 90% there. AI helps you with the rest.
• sunami-ai 2y ago
  I agree with the statement in the title. Using AI to write code does two things: 1. Everything seems to go faster at first until you have to debug it because the AI can't seem to be able to fix the issue... It's hard enough to debug code you wrote yourself. However, if you work with code written by others (team environment) then maybe you're used to this, but not being able to quickly debug code you're responsible for will shoot you in the foot. 2. You brain neurons in charge of code production will be naturally re-assigned for other cognitive tasks. It's not like riding a bicycle or swimming which once learned is never forgotten. It's more like advanced math, which if you don't practice you can forget. Short term gain; long term pain.
  • dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    Essentially: people are vastly overestimating AI ability and vastly underestimating HI ability. Humans are supremely adaptable. That's what our defining attribute as a species is. As a group we can adapt to more or less any reality we find ourselves in. People with good minds will use whatever tools they have to enhance their natural abilities. People with less good minds will use whatever tools they have to cover up their inability until they're found out.
    • smeeger 2y ago
      you are objectively wrong because you dismiss out of hand the possibility that AI will not continue to improve. the heuristics are against you and you have no reasoning or evidence behind your assertion that we have already hit the ceiling. youre arrogant. just confront it already
• karaterobot 2y ago
  > The result? We’ll have a whole wave of programmers who are more like AI operators than real engineers. I was a developer for over a decade, and pretty much what I did day-to-day was plumb together existing front end libraries, and write a little bit of job-specific code that today's LLMs could certainly have helped me with, if they'd existed at the time. I agree that the really complicated stuff can't yet be done by AI, but how sure are we that that'll always be true? And the idea that a mediocre programmer can't debug code written by another entity is also false, I did it all the time. In any case, I don't resonate with the idea that the bottom 90% of programmers are doing important, novel, challenging programming that only a special genius can do. They paid us $180k a year to download NPM packages because they didn't have AI. Now they have AI, and the future is uncertain with respect to just how high programmers will be flying ten years from now.
• NicuCalcea 2y ago
  Workers in various industries have pled for their jobs and programmers said "no, my code can replace you". Now that automation is coming for them, it's suddenly "the dumbest mistake". Tech has "disrupted" many industries, leaving some better, but many worse. Now that "disruption" is pointed inwards. Programmers will have to adapt to the new market conditions like everyone else. There will either be fewer jobs to go around (like what happened to assembly line workers), or they will have to switch to doing other tasks that are not as easy to replace yet (like bank tellers).
  • selfmodruntime 2y ago
    The real funny thing is that now we‘re replacers and the replaced at the same time. We plead to ourselves. The wings have begun melting and nothing will stop it. Finally, Icarus has flown too close to the sun.
    • NicuCalcea 2y ago
      Ultimately, it's executives and shareholders who make the decisions, and they will always be able to pay some programmers enough to replace the other ones. I don't think of developers as having a lot of professional or class solidarity.
    • shinycode 2y ago
      I’d like to see stakeholder only talking to an LLM to built a product with millions of lines of code and push all that into production where other companies depend on it to run themselves. Good luck when there’s a critical bug and the LLM keep saying « looks good to me ». If devs are completely replaced then PO, PM, everyone else can be replaced as well. No need to build companies around software
  • jopsen 2y ago
    LLMs might enable us to build things we couldn't build before. It's just as plausible that the market will simply grow.
    • 2y ago
• skirge 2y ago
  No accountant was fired when Microsoft Clippy was introduced. AI is nice for prototyping and code completion but that's all.
• atoav 2y ago
  Meanwhile the newest model is like "Oh just run this snippet" And the snipped will absolutely ruin your corp if you run it.
• arscan 2y ago
  What are these fired programmers going to do? Disappear? They’ll build stuff, using the same plus-up AI tooling that enabled their old boss to fire them. So guess what, their old boss just traded employees for competitors. Congrats, I guess? Zuck declaring that he plans on dropping programmer head-count substantially, to me indicates that they’ll have a much smaller technological moat in the future, and they won’t be paying off programmers to not build competing products anymore. I’m not sure he should be excited about that.
  • Aperocky 2y ago
    What moat did Meta have today? I'd say there is a moat, but it's not on the tech side. Tiktok flew right through the moat, and only a small part of that is about tech. A lot of development on AI is exciting and meta is a big part of that, but there isn't any real moat there either.
    • arminiusreturns 2y ago
      I fear we are about to see refreshed patent trolling conflicts regarding software designs, as it's all in the IP these days, which is the "moat" you are looking for.
    • arscan 2y ago
      Presumably it is going to be easier for increasingly smaller and smaller teams to make highly polished, scalable and stable products that will be appealing and addictive and resonate more with their users than whatever Meta can come up with. I suspect that there will be many, many more viable shots taken at Meta’s incumbent positions than have been taken historically because development costs associated with doing so will simply be so much lower. Meta used to need thousands of talented and expensive software engineers. They are saying they don’t anymore. Well, that means their competitors don’t either, which lowers the bar for competition. I get that it wasn’t just the vast army of talented engineers they kept on staff that formed a moat. But it certainly helped, otherwise they wouldn’t have paid so much to have them on staff. Point taken though, Meta has a lot more going for it than a simple technological advantage.
• booleandilemma 2y ago
  I'm hoping that developers who have entered management positions will be able to talk their fellow managers out of this. I can understand if some non-technical MBA bozo doesn't understand, but former developers must see through the hype.
• osnium123 2y ago
  If you are a junior engineer who just graduated, what would you do to ensure that you learn the needed skills and not be overly reliant on AI?
  • fragmede 2y ago
    I wouldn't, because AI isn't the problem. With machines being able to run deepseek locally, the problem to look out for isn't the possibility that the web service will go down and you have to live without it, it's that, as their capabilities currently stand, they can't fix or do everything. I learned to program some time before AI became big, and back when I was an intern, I'd get stuck in a rut trying to debug some issue. When I got stuck in the rut, it would be tempting to give up and just change variables and "if" statements blindly, just hoping it would somehow magically fix things. Much like I see newer programmers get stuck when the LLM gets stuck. But see, that's where you earn your high paying SWE salary. For doing something that other people can not. So my advice to Jr programmers isn't to avoid using LLMs, it's to use them liberally until you find something or somewhere they're bad at, and look at that as the true challenge. With LLMs, programming easy shit got easy. If you're not running into problems with the LLM, switch it up and try a different language with more esoteric libraries and trickier bugs.
  • jcon321 2y ago
    Well before AI, us old guys had to google our own issues and copy/paste from stackoverflow. When I was a junior I never thought about being overly reliant on "google or stackoverflow", but LLMs are slightly different. I guess it would be like if I googled something and always trusted the first result. Maybe for your question it means not copying/pasting immediately what the LLM gives you and have it explain. Wasting a few mins on asking the LLM to explain, for the sake of learning, still beats the amount of time I used to waste scanning google results.
• ambyra 2y ago
  It's a meme at this point. People who don't know anything about programming (lex fridman): "It's revolutionary. People with no programming skills can create entire apps." People who program for a living: "It can reproduce variants of code that have been implemented already 1000s of times, and... nothing else".
• stpedgwdgfhgdd 2y ago
  Yesterday, using Aider and an openai model, forgot which one it picks by default; i asked it to check some Go code for consistency. It made a few changes, some ok, but also some that just did not compile. (The model did not understand the local scoping of vars in an if-then clause) It is just not reliable enough for mainstream Enterprise development. Nice for a new snake game….
• karxxm 2y ago
  Replacing juniors with AI is stupid because who will be the next senior? AI won't learn anything while performing inference only.
• 827a 2y ago
  > Imagine a company that fires its software engineers, replaces them with AI-generated code, and then sits back, expecting everything to just work. This is like firing your entire fire department because you installed more smoke detectors. It’s fine until the first real fire happens. I feel like this analogy really doesn't capture the situation, because it implies that it would take some event to make companies realize they made a mistake. The reality right now is: You'd notice it instantly. Product velocity would drop to zero. Who is prompting the AI? The AI-is-replacing-programmers debate is honestly kinda tired, on both sides. Its just not happening. It might be happening in the same way that pirated movies "steal" income from hollywood: maybe companies are expanding more slowly, because we're ramping up per-capita productivity because engineers are learning how to leverage it to enhance their own output (and its getting better and better). But, that's how every major tool and abstraction works. If we still had to write in assembly there'd be 30x the number of engineers out there than there are. There's no mystical point where AI will get good enough to replace engineers, not because it won't continue getting better, but because the economic pie is continually growing, and as the AI Nexus Himself, Marc Andreesen, has said several times: Humanity has an infinite demand for code. If you can make engineers 10x more efficient, what will happen in most companies is: we don't want to cut engineering costs by N% and stagnate, we want 10x more code and growth. Maybe we hire fewer engineers going forward. > But with the AI craze, companies aren’t investing in junior developers. Why train people when you can have a model spit out boilerplate? This is not happening. Its fun, pithy reasoning that Good and Righteous White Knight Software Engineers can prescribe onto the Evil and Bad HR and Business Leadership people, but its just not, in any meaningful or broad sense, a narrative that you hear while hiring. The reason why juniors are struggling to find work right now is literally just because the industry is in a down cycle. During down cycles, companies are going to prioritize stability, and seniority is stability. That's it. When the market recovers, and as AI gets better and more prolific, I think there's a reality where juniors are actually a great ROI for companies, thanks to AI. They've been using it their whole career. They're cheaper. AI might be a productivity multiplier for all engineers; but it will definitely be a productivity normalizer for juniors; using it to check for mistakes, learn about libraries and frameworks faster, its such a great upleveling tool for juniors.
• drusha 2y ago
  We are already seeing how the speed of development plays a more important role than the quality of the software product (for example, the use of Electron in the most popular software). Software will become shittier but people will continue to use it. So LLM's will become just another abstraction level in modern programming, like JS frameworks. No company will regret firing real programmers because LLMs will be cheaper and end users don't care about performance.
• Animats 2y ago
  Front-end development should have been automated by now. After all, it once was. Viamall. Dreamweaver. Mozilla Composer. Wix. Humans should not be writing HTML/CSS.
• sangnoir 2y ago
  > The ones who didn’t take FAANG jobs but instead went deep into systems programming, AI interpretability, or high-performance computing I appreciate a good FAANG hatefest, but what the gosh-darn heck is this? Does the author seriously think all FAANG engineers only transform and sling gRPC all day? Or they they blindly stumbled into being hyperscalers? The author should randomly pick a mailing list on any if those topics (systems programming, AI interpretability, HPC) and count the number of emails from FAANG domains
• zoogeny 2y ago
  I'm not sure why people are so sure one way or the other. I mean, we're going to find out. Why pretend you have a crystal ball and can see the future? A lot of articles like this just want to believe something is true and so they create an elaborate argument as to why that thing is true. You can wrap yourself up in rationalizations all you want. There is a chance firing all the programmers will work. Evidence beats argument. In 5 years we'll look back and know. It is actually probably a good idea to hedge your bets either way. Use this moment to trim some fat, force your existing programmers to work in a slightly leaner environment. It doesn't feel nice to be a programmer cut in such an environment but I can see why companies might be using this opportunity.
  • uh_uh 2y ago
    This. Articles like this are examples of motivated reasoning and seem to be coming from a place of insecurity by programmers who feel their careers threatened.
• just-another-se 2y ago
  Though I disagree to most of things said here, I do agree that the new fleet of software engineers won't be that technically adapt. But what if they don't need to? Like how most programmers today don't need to know the machine level instructions to build something useful. I feel there will be a paradgym shift about what programming would be altogether. I think, programmers will more be like artists, painters who would conceptualize an idea and communicate those ideas to AI to implement (not end to end though; in bits and pieces, we'd still need engineers to fit these bits and peices together - think of a new programming language but instead of syntax, there will be natural language prompting). I've tried to pen down this exact thoughts here: https://suyogdahal.com.np/posts/engineering-hacking-and-ai/ https://suyogdahal.com.np/posts/engineering-hacking-and-ai/
• czhu12 2y ago
  I find it interesting that the same community who has questioned for a long time about why companies like Facebook need 60000 engineers, “20 good engineers is all you need”, is now rallying against any cuts at all. AI makes engineers slightly more efficient, so there’s a slightly less of a need for as many. That’s assuming AI is the true cause of any of these layoffs at all
• localghost3000 2y ago
  Reminder to everyone reading FUD like this that tech bro's are trying _very_ hard to convince everyone that these technologies are Fundamentally Disruptive and The Most Important Advancement Since The Steam Engine. When in fact they are somewhat useful content generation machines who's output needs to be carefully vetted by the very programmers this article claims will be out of a job. To be clear: I am not saying this article is written in bad faith and I agree that if its assertions come to pass that what it predicts would happen. I am just urging everyone to stop letting the Sam Altmans of the world tell you how disruptive this tech is. Tech is out of ideas and desperate to keep the money machine printing.
• CrimsonRain 2y ago
  Most programmers are not worth anything. Firing them for ai or no reason at all, will not change anything. Whether ai can do stuff comparable to a competent senior sde, remains to be seen. But current AI definitely feels like a super assistant when I'm doing something. Anyone who says chatgpt/Claude/copilot etc are bad, is suffering a skill issue. I'd go as far as to say they are really bad at working with junior engineers. Really bad as teachers too.
• cromulent 2y ago
  LLMs are good at producing plausible statements and responses that radiate awareness, consideration, balance, and at least superficial knowledge of the technology in question. Even if they are non-committal, indecisive, or even inaccurate. In other words, they are very economical replacements for middle managers. Have at it.
• pipeline_peak 2y ago
  AI will only raise the bar for the expected outcome of future programmers. It's just automated pair programming really. The argument: "The New Generation of Programmers Will Be Less Prepared" is too cynical. Most of us aren't writing algorithms anyway, programmers may, but not Software Engineers which I really think the author is referring to. Core libraries make it so SWE's don't have to write linked lists. Did that make our generation "less prepared" or give us the opportunity to focus our time on what really matters, like delivering products.
• aurizon 2y ago
  I have an image of 10,000 monkeys + typewriter + time = Shakespeare... Of course, these typed pages would engender a paper shortage. So the same 10,000 LLM's will create a similar amount of 'monkeyware' - I can see monkey testers roaming through this chaff for useable gems to be incorporated into a structure operated by humans (our current coder base) to engineer into complex packages?. Will this employ the human crews and allow a greater level of productivity? Look at Win11 = a huge mass full of flaws/errors (found daily). In general increased productivity has worked to increase GDP - will this continue? or will we be over run by smarter monkeys?
• penjelly 2y ago
  I've switched sides on this issue. I do think LLMs will reduce headcount across tech. Smaller teams will take on more features and less code will be written by hand. It'll be easier to run a startup, freelance or experiment with projects.
• elif 2y ago
  You don't fire developers and replace them with AI. This trope is often repeated and causing people to miss the actual picture of what's going on. You use AI to disrupt a market, and that market forces the startup employing the devs to go bankrupt. It's not a "this quarter we made a decision" thing. It's a thing that's happening right now all over the place and snowballing.
• tiku 2y ago
  Doesn't matter, a few minutes after firing the last programmer SkyNet wil become operational.
• tippytippytango 2y ago
  Senior devs have a decade long reinforcement learning loop with the marketplace. That will be a massive advantage until they start RL on agents against the same environment.
• EternalFury 2y ago
  I have been doing this for 30 years now. The software industry is all about selling variations of the same stuff over and over and over. But in the end, the more software there is out there, the more software is needed. AI might take it over and handle it all, but at some point, it would be cruel to make humans do it.
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Tech debt is hard enough when written by the person sitting next to you or no longer at the company It will be impossible to maintain when it’s churned out by endless AI I can’t imagine being a manager tasked with “our banking system lost 30 million dollars can you find the bug” when the code was written by AI and some intern maintains it I’ll be watching with popcorn
  • esalman 2y ago
    I agree. Unfortunately Tesla cannot be held accountable for autopilot crash and OpenAI cannot be held accountable for bugs caused by Copilot code. But that's where we're (forced to be) headed as a society.
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Cursor being a 1 billion dollar company is just ridiculous
• norseboar 2y ago
  Is there actually an epidemic of firing programmers for AI? Based on the companies/people I know, I wouldn't have thought so. I've heard of many companies encouraging their engineers to use LLM-backed tools like Cursor or just Copilot, a (small!) number that have made these kinds of tools mandatory (what "mandatory" means is unclear), and many companies laying people off because money is tight. But I haven't heard of anybody who was laid off b/c the other engineers were so much more productive w/ AI that they decided to downsize the team, let alone replace a team entirely. Is this just my bubble? Mostly Bay Area companies, mostly in the small-to-mid range w/ a couple FAANG.
  • CM30 2y ago
    There are definitely a fair few companies laying off programmers at the moment, though few of the ones I've seen blamed it on AI (usually more either overhiring, the pandemic ending and usage going down, or someone thinking they can outsource everything to save money). Wouldn't be surprised if a few tried to say it was because of AI when it was really for some other reason though.
• groos 2y ago
  A good analogy from not-so-distant past is the outsourcing wave that swept the tech industry. Shareholders everywhere were salivating at the money they would make by hiring programmers in India at 1/10 the cost while keeping their profits. Those of us who have been in the industry a while all saw how that went. I think this new wave wave will go roughly similarly. Eventually, companies will realize that to keep their edge, they need humans with creativity while "AI" will be one more tool in the bag. In the meantime, a lot of hurt will happen due to greed.
  • dyauspitr 2y ago
    What do you mean by see how that went? The corps are at the point now where they stopped using consultancies and instead have their own company divisions in India where they still pay them 1/10th. If anything it’s a more dire situation.
    • dimmuborgir 2y ago
      Yup, they are called GCCs (Global Capability Centers).
    • jajko 2y ago
      In those few (some of them global big players) companies I've been in past 20 years, it was mostly onshore -> max offshore -> near shore -> mix of it all since business kept growing so people ended up everywhere. Focus purely on 100% outsourcing always failed, this is true across all industries. Ignoring it completely was a luxury few companies could keep, ie some small private banks or generally luxury products and services. Conservative optimism was the way to go for long term success without big swings. Even though when offshoring came it was felt as end of days, most of the threat didn't materialize long term. Without time machine we of course don't know real effects. I think it will be similar, not same here. I expect companies will get more work done (backlogs for software changes are often huge in non-tech companies), maybe trim fat a bit but nothing shocking. Lets be a bit smart and not succumb to emotional swings just because others are doing it.
  • smeeger 2y ago
    what if india had programmers that were just as good? that would be a more apt comparison to what we will be facing in the near future. an alien country where the supply of programmers is infinite and they are better than any human. i bet five years ago you would say chatGTP, this very conversation, would be impossible or 1000 years off. you dont know anything
• delichon 2y ago
  I've been programming full time with an LLM in an IDE for the last two weeks, and it's a game changer for me at the end of my career. I'm in future shock. I suddenly can barely live without it. But I'm not fearful for my job, yet. It's amazingly better, and much worse than a junior dev. There are certain instructions, however simple, that just do not penetrate. It gets certain things right 98% of the time, which make me stop looking for the other 2% of the time where it absolutely sabotages the code with breaking changes. It is utterly without hesitation in defeating the entire purpose of the application in order to simplify a line of code. And yet, it can do so much simple stuff so fast and well, and it can be so informative about ridiculously obscure critical details. I have most of those faults too, just fewer enough to be worth my paycheck for a few more AI generations.
  • QuantumGood 2y ago
    "utterly without hesitation in defeating the entire purpose". So many examples, ever-more detailed prompts attempted as a solution. The more I try, the more "AI" seems to be only workable as "experienced prompt engineer with an AI stack".
• klik99 2y ago
  Honestly show junior programmers a little more respect. It's such an old person thing to say they're going to all become prompt engineers or similar. Why does the old always look at the young and claim they're all pulled by the tides of the zeitgeist and not thinking human beings who have their own opinions about stuff. Many smart people have a contrarian streak and won't just dive into AI tools wholesale. Honestly a lot of the comments here are at the level of critique as those facebook memes of crowd of people with iphones for faces. Most people have ALWAYS taken the easy road and don't become the best programmers. AI is just the latest tool for lazier people or people who tend towards laziness. We will continue to have new good programmers, and the number of good programmers will continue to be not enough. None of that is not caused by AI. I'm far from an AI advocate, but it will, someday, make the most boring parts of programming less tedious and be able to put "glue" kind of code in non-professional hands.
• pinoy420 2y ago
  What it’s not good at is anything within the last 2 years (due to training cutoff) all fail at latest remix, svelte and selenium syntax for example. This is an eternity in FE dev terms
• jarsin 2y ago
  There's also the issue of a company doesn't own the copyright to a codebase generated primarily through prompts. So anyone can copy it and reproduce it anywhere. Get paid to prompt ai by a company. Take all code home with you. Then when your tired of them use same code to undercut them.
• gitgud 2y ago
  > The next generation of programmers will grow up expecting AI to do the hard parts for them. This is the opposite of what I’ve seen. AI does the easy parts, only the hard parts are left…
• aaroninsf 2y ago
  I'd like to suggest caution wrt a sentiment in this thread, that actual phase change in the industry i.e. readers here losing their jobs and job prospectcs, "doesn't feel right around the corner." In specific, most of you are familiar with human cognitive error when reasoning with non-linearities. I'm going to assert and would cheerfully put money behind the prospect that this is exactly one of the domains within which nonlinear behavior is most evident and hence our intuitions are most wrong. Could be a year, could be a few, but we're going to hit the 80% case being covered just find thank you by run of the mill automated tools, and then press on into asymptote.
• madrox 2y ago
  I think anyone who is afraid of AI destroying our field just has to look at the history of DevOps. That was a massive shift in systems engineering and how production is maintained. It changed how people did their jobs, required people to learn new skills, and leaders to change how they thought about the business. AI is going to change a lot about software, but AI code tools are coming for SWEs the way Kubernetes came for DevOps. AI completely replacing the job function is unsubstantiated.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    If the job of SWEs after AI is to edit yaml, json, yaml templates, and yaml-templates-in-yaml-templates all day long, while waiting for ArgoCD, I quit.
    • bdangubic 2y ago
      SWEs do something other than this??! :)
• CM30 2y ago
  Generally I agree with the article, and I do feel that trying to replace everyone with AI will backfire in various ways. Lots of big companes will find that out the hard way, especially in the tech industry and other more regulated fields like medicine and finance. But at the same time, it's also worth noting that (somewhat sadly) there are plenty of jobs and companies where an AI created solution could be just what they need, even at this stage in its development. Lots of companies who need sites too complex for Squarespace but too simple for a fully engineered custom solution. The kind who'd use WordPress plugins or small agencies to build out simple CRUD systems. AI could absolutely annihilate that sort of work there and then. If you need a simple PHP or React based system and you don't need anything remotely complex functionality wise, even something like ChatGPT can build it out in about 20 minutes without many extra fixes needed. Of course, that leads to the problems mentioned in the article again, since a lot of people get into programming/engineering through those sorts of companies and roles. AI may not make the folks at Alphabet or Meta obsolete at the moment (or even be a good fit for the kind of work many large tech companies do), but it could replace whole teams at small and medium sized organisations that don't need anything complex.
• megablast 2y ago
  I have been able to program stuff using AI that I could not do before. I never managed 3d before, but can now do advanced 3d stuff. I wrote an Apple watch application in a few hours instead of the week it took me before, in swift a language I have never used before.
• r33b33 2y ago
  Real talk. We are a small theme of people running an online game app. We use XCode swift language and python for server. We need to develop a website where this game can be played live and implement many features. Current AIs are smart. There is DeepSeek R-1. Has anyone actually figured out how to implement this in coding environment and get it to actually CORRECTLY implement the tickets and features without messing everything up? How can it know if the feature actually works in the game? It can't test it, right? How can it take into account the ENTIRE database of code with folders and directories and files and all that stuff + resources uploaded? I don't think even DeepSeek can do that. Which tool is best as of now?
  • consumer451 2y ago
    > How can it take into account the ENTIRE database of code with folders and directories and files and all that stuff + resources uploaded? Tools like Codeium's Windsurf and Cursor can help with some of that part.
• tete 2y ago
  In my experience the majority of people believing in AI replacing people are people who are horrible in their jobs and who mostly BS their way through, which is the major skill that LLMs are really good at: Hallucinating with confidence. Can be devs, can be managers, can be the board. And hey, if LLMs and other "AI" ever do a better job at something valuable, I think that has the potential to lead to a bright future. Currently the biggest risk is someone using LLMs to do something actually critical. Also waiting for the first contract negotiations done with AI summaries to blow up into someone's face.
• sirsinsalot 2y ago
  Reminds me of the outsourcing rush in the 2000s. I made good money cleaning that up.
• gitprolinux 2y ago
  A problem is the group think of programmers. Many of them view themselves as investors as a side track instead of a union shop worker because there are so few union employers. Their thinking being to maximize revenue for owners and shareholders during and from software development efforts, services, and software products created. Almost every other industry that there's money has sensibly created AI limitations from unions and trade groups, from Hollywood strikes, entry level knowledge requirements from lawyers and judges preventing AI generated research and briefs, and construction workers and shipyard unions preventing automated and AI machinery such as AI cranes cargo and other AI automation of logistics. Programmers seem to get a new trend software assistant every few years and now AI, then the first thing is the programmer group think their investors thinking to recommend attrition of the non 10x, elite, non-coding high wizards, instead of more jobs the merrier from an economic perspective.
• gantrol 2y ago
  When a company announces layoffs: people suspect there's something wrong with their growth, cash flow, etc. When a company announces layoffs because AI is making things more efficient: people start arguing about whether AI can really replace humans. If you were in company management and had to do layoffs, which would you choose?
• liampulles 2y ago
  The strange thing is that AI tools would be used a lot more if they weren't being positioned as an alpha stage for AGI. There are things that LLMs are genuinely useful for, but they seem to get used in these large scale agent style tools which regularly fail and are thus not used very widely. Give me some smaller focused tools with high accuracy and everyone wins.
• InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  Its a opportunity. Programmers contain internal architecture information. If they leak - and you collect the full set, you can reconstruct a similar product fresh from scratch for cheap- and then take over the business of a failing behemoth with ai-rot. The eternal death-wish to cut the coding dependency murders yet another set of companies. So many where there before- Outsourcing, UML, node-based programming, no-codes in all variations and colours. Generations of managers have marched into this abyss and none-came back alive, the skulls of the ego-dream of "only business management is irreplaceable crunching beneath the boots" trying to cut the knowledge worker dependency out of the equation. And deep down, they feel the tingle of things going wrong- even now.
• bradley13 2y ago
  There is a lot of demand for crap code (quick'n'dirty apps, websites, web services, etc.). Look at the apps for a lot of IoT devices: it's mostly boilerplate, kinda-sorta works, and obviously has been produced by programmers of...limited skill. AI may well be able to take over a lot of that coding, or at least increase the productivity of the semi-competent (thus reducing the number of such jobs available).
• smeeger 2y ago
  circular argument. literally “heres why you will regret it: 1) you will regret it” lol. nobody will regret firing their high-salary programmer within a year or two. its over. what happened to all the enthusiasm for the idea that technology doesnt steal jobs, it just creates new ones?!
• gradientsrneat 2y ago
  LLMs are not programming tools. They are general-purpose pattern matchers and stereotype generators. They lack the determinism or epistemological guarantees of a compiler, an IDE, a linter, or a manual. They can best be described as a supplement to a search engine.
• biohcacker84 2y ago
  Copilot to me is a multiplier, just like compilers and GUI editors and languages above machine language. And possibly the biggest multiplier. But anything times zero is zero. Someone who does not understand the code Copilot writes is too dangerous to do anything. But I worry what Copilot will do to future developers. And knowing what universally available spell checking has done to me, destroyed my ability to spell correctly without it, I even worry how Copilot might deskill me over the coming years.
• up2isomorphism 2y ago
  It will be extremely naive to believe that recent tech layoff is because of AI. Obviously Wall Street and big tech like people to think this way.
• xinan 2y ago
  What the AI bull Wall Street analysts didn’t realize is that AI will replace their job much sooner than replacing programmers.