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As an aside, people say AI will eliminate coding jobs, but then who will configure these hooks? Or think about adding such a feature? These kinds of tooling an

As an aside, people say AI will eliminate coding jobs, but then who will configure these hooks? Or think about adding such a feature? These kinds of tooling and related work will still be there unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this and announces this to all other AI entities and they also implement it properly etc.

mrmincent 1y ago
To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools. You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  I like this metaphor because power tools didn’t lead to more sophisticated craftspeople despite the increase in efficiency and potential. I think it will be the same with code. More outputs, not necessarily more refined or better in any way, but not innately bad either.
- SkepticalWhale 1y ago
  Great analogy. Although I still wonder how long we're in this phase and how ubiquitous it will be, because didn't power tools coincide with improved automation in factories eliminating manufacturing jobs?
- otterley 1y ago
  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- forgotoldacc 1y ago
  And we may get an ugly transitory period where a lot of programs go from being clearly hand made with some degree of care and some fine details that show the developer's craftsmanship, to awful prefab and brutalist software that feels inhuman, mass-produced, and nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough. People go to museums to admire old hand-carved furniture and travel to cities to admire the architecture of centuries past made with hand-chiseled blocks. While power tools do let people make things of equal quality faster, they're instead generally used to make things of worse quality much, much faster and the field has gone from being a craft to simply being an assembly line job. As bad as software is today, we're likely to hit even deeper lows and people will miss the days where Electron apps are good compared to what's yet to come. There's already been one step in this direction with the Cambrian extinction of 90s/early 2000s software. People still talk about how soulful Winamp/old Windows Media Player/ZSNES/etc were.
  - torginus 1y ago
    I kinda feel differently - it's more like how nowadays you have access to high-quality power tools at cheap prices, and tons of tutorials on Youtube that teach you how to do woodworking, and even if you can't afford the masterwork furniture made by craftsmen, you don't have to buy the shitty mass produced stuff - sure yours won't be as good, but it will be made to your spec. Moving on into a concrete software example, thanks to AI productivity, we replaced a lot of expensive and crappy subscription SaaS software with our homegrown stuff. Our stuff is probably 100x simpler (everyone knows the pain of making box software for a diverse set of customer needs, everything needs to be configurable, which leads to crazy convoluted code, and a lot of it). It's also much better and cheaper to run, to say nothing of the money we save by not paying the exorbitant subscription fee. I suspect the biggest losers of the AI revolution will be the SaaS companies whose value proposition was: Yes you can use open source for this, but the extra cost of an engineer who maintains this is more than we charge. As for bespoke software, 'slop' software using Electron, or Unity in video games exists because people believe in the convenience of using these huge lumbering monoliths that come with a ton of baggage, while they were taught the creed that coding to the metal is too hard. LLMs can help with that, and show people that they can do bespoke from scratch (and more importantly teach people how to do that). Claude/o3/whatever can probably help you build a game in WebGL you thought you needed a game engine for.
- floriferous 1y ago
  Great metaphor, exactly how it feels to me too!
- conception 1y ago
  Feels more like photography. Everyone will “soon” have a tool that lets you take pretty great photos - surpassing professional of thirty years ago. If you want professional work done you’ll still hire someone but that person will also use a lot of professional grade computer tooling with it. But there definitely won’t be as many jobs as before - especially on the low skill end.
energy123 1y ago
If programmers become 10x more productive but demand only grows by 5x, what will happen?
- lambdaba 1y ago
  No one can tell what the exact multipliers are, but history has shown us that what happens is everyone gets richer.
- falcor84 1y ago
  Obviously there will still be as many programmers, each working 2.5 days a week. </wishful-thinking>
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    And surely each programmer will still earn just as much income but only work half as much
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  in my experience software demand never slows, its just priced out. Remember a decade ago we were developing a lot slower due to hardware constraints and other things, now we develop much faster but the features we develop are more complex and there are more of them. I'm not convinced there is a limiter on software demand as it seems to grow alongside development speed. We all have huge backlogs in any non-trivial system.
wastewastewaste 1y ago
Yea man, people say combine harvesters will eliminate agriculture jobs, but then who will operate these combine harvesters? Obviously every single manual farm laborer will just switch to being an operator of those. God, will we never move this discussion past this worthless argument? What value would there be in any of these automatization tools, be in in agriculture or AI, if it just made every single worker switch to being an [automatization tool] operator?
- ath92 1y ago
  Barring population growth, there is essentially fixed demand for agriculture. For software we don’t know what the market will look like once everything about making it gets automated. Either we will churn out the same amount of software with fewer people, or the same amount of people will churn out larger amounts of software. Or maybe there will be even more people working on creating enormous amounts of software. I’d say the likely answer is somewhere between the first and second option, but time will tell.
  - yes_man 1y ago
    If software becomes cheaper to make it’s not like every IT company in the world is running a cartel where they agree to just cut costs and leave the output the same. Someone will come and smash the competition with more or better features and the ones who didn’t invest into development will face pressure to acquire more talent again. There really isn’t a diminishing return on executing great ideas. Almost all software projects have an essentially endless backlog of items that could be done. So I think it will be between 2. and 3. with people who really understand how software is built being even more in demand than ever since they act as multipliers in making sure the increased output is evolvable and maintainable.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Only a few lucky ones will get the operator jobs, everyone else will queue at the job center.
  - danielbln 1y ago
jonathanstrange 1y ago
> unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this The #1 goal of every AI company is to create an AI that is capable of programming and improving itself to create the next, more powerful AI. Of course, these kind of configuration jobs will be outsourced to AI as soon as possible, too.
falcor84 1y ago
Like in the story about cosmologist and the old lady, you seem to be asking "What is the AI standing on?", and the reply here is of course "You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's AIs all the way down!" Many already let Claude Code update its own CLAUDE.md, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't (dangerously-skipping-permissions) let it edit its own hooks. And as in Jurassic Park, the question of whether we should seems to be left by the wayside.
nikita2206 1y ago
You can already ask Claude Code to modify its own settings
yoavm 1y ago
I generally agree that "we" will still be needed, but OTOH, who needs prettier if no human is ever going to read the code?
- oldsecondhand 1y ago
  How can you do quality assurance on code no one can understand?
  - Lord_Zero 1y ago
    You just have AI do the QA.
pjmlp 1y ago
Except that for most people this is not coding, is administration work, DevOps kind of stuff. I already do lots of "coding" in SaaS products, that have very little to do with what most HNers think of proper coding.
paulddraper 1y ago
> people say AI will eliminate coding jobs Yes. > then who will configure these hooks? It will also create jobs. > unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this and announces this to all other AI entities and they also implement it properly Also yes. --- People think that technology is some sort of binary less jobs/more jobs thing. Technology eliminates some jobs and creates others.

mrmincent 1y ago

To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools. You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.

steve_adams_86 1y ago
I like this metaphor because power tools didn’t lead to more sophisticated craftspeople despite the increase in efficiency and potential. I think it will be the same with code. More outputs, not necessarily more refined or better in any way, but not innately bad either.
SkepticalWhale 1y ago
Great analogy. Although I still wonder how long we're in this phase and how ubiquitous it will be, because didn't power tools coincide with improved automation in factories eliminating manufacturing jobs?
otterley 1y ago
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
forgotoldacc 1y ago
And we may get an ugly transitory period where a lot of programs go from being clearly hand made with some degree of care and some fine details that show the developer's craftsmanship, to awful prefab and brutalist software that feels inhuman, mass-produced, and nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough. People go to museums to admire old hand-carved furniture and travel to cities to admire the architecture of centuries past made with hand-chiseled blocks. While power tools do let people make things of equal quality faster, they're instead generally used to make things of worse quality much, much faster and the field has gone from being a craft to simply being an assembly line job. As bad as software is today, we're likely to hit even deeper lows and people will miss the days where Electron apps are good compared to what's yet to come. There's already been one step in this direction with the Cambrian extinction of 90s/early 2000s software. People still talk about how soulful Winamp/old Windows Media Player/ZSNES/etc were.
- torginus 1y ago
  I kinda feel differently - it's more like how nowadays you have access to high-quality power tools at cheap prices, and tons of tutorials on Youtube that teach you how to do woodworking, and even if you can't afford the masterwork furniture made by craftsmen, you don't have to buy the shitty mass produced stuff - sure yours won't be as good, but it will be made to your spec. Moving on into a concrete software example, thanks to AI productivity, we replaced a lot of expensive and crappy subscription SaaS software with our homegrown stuff. Our stuff is probably 100x simpler (everyone knows the pain of making box software for a diverse set of customer needs, everything needs to be configurable, which leads to crazy convoluted code, and a lot of it). It's also much better and cheaper to run, to say nothing of the money we save by not paying the exorbitant subscription fee. I suspect the biggest losers of the AI revolution will be the SaaS companies whose value proposition was: Yes you can use open source for this, but the extra cost of an engineer who maintains this is more than we charge. As for bespoke software, 'slop' software using Electron, or Unity in video games exists because people believe in the convenience of using these huge lumbering monoliths that come with a ton of baggage, while they were taught the creed that coding to the metal is too hard. LLMs can help with that, and show people that they can do bespoke from scratch (and more importantly teach people how to do that). Claude/o3/whatever can probably help you build a game in WebGL you thought you needed a game engine for.
floriferous 1y ago
Great metaphor, exactly how it feels to me too!
conception 1y ago
Feels more like photography. Everyone will “soon” have a tool that lets you take pretty great photos - surpassing professional of thirty years ago. If you want professional work done you’ll still hire someone but that person will also use a lot of professional grade computer tooling with it. But there definitely won’t be as many jobs as before - especially on the low skill end.

energy123 1y ago

If programmers become 10x more productive but demand only grows by 5x, what will happen?

lambdaba 1y ago
No one can tell what the exact multipliers are, but history has shown us that what happens is everyone gets richer.
falcor84 1y ago
Obviously there will still be as many programmers, each working 2.5 days a week. </wishful-thinking>
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  And surely each programmer will still earn just as much income but only work half as much
Quarrelsome 1y ago
in my experience software demand never slows, its just priced out. Remember a decade ago we were developing a lot slower due to hardware constraints and other things, now we develop much faster but the features we develop are more complex and there are more of them. I'm not convinced there is a limiter on software demand as it seems to grow alongside development speed. We all have huge backlogs in any non-trivial system.

wastewastewaste 1y ago

Yea man, people say combine harvesters will eliminate agriculture jobs, but then who will operate these combine harvesters? Obviously every single manual farm laborer will just switch to being an operator of those. God, will we never move this discussion past this worthless argument? What value would there be in any of these automatization tools, be in in agriculture or AI, if it just made every single worker switch to being an [automatization tool] operator?

ath92 1y ago
Barring population growth, there is essentially fixed demand for agriculture. For software we don’t know what the market will look like once everything about making it gets automated. Either we will churn out the same amount of software with fewer people, or the same amount of people will churn out larger amounts of software. Or maybe there will be even more people working on creating enormous amounts of software. I’d say the likely answer is somewhere between the first and second option, but time will tell.
- yes_man 1y ago
  If software becomes cheaper to make it’s not like every IT company in the world is running a cartel where they agree to just cut costs and leave the output the same. Someone will come and smash the competition with more or better features and the ones who didn’t invest into development will face pressure to acquire more talent again. There really isn’t a diminishing return on executing great ideas. Almost all software projects have an essentially endless backlog of items that could be done. So I think it will be between 2. and 3. with people who really understand how software is built being even more in demand than ever since they act as multipliers in making sure the increased output is evolvable and maintainable.
pjmlp 1y ago
Only a few lucky ones will get the operator jobs, everyone else will queue at the job center.
- danielbln 1y ago

jonathanstrange 1y ago

> unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this The #1 goal of every AI company is to create an AI that is capable of programming and improving itself to create the next, more powerful AI. Of course, these kind of configuration jobs will be outsourced to AI as soon as possible, too.

falcor84 1y ago

Like in the story about cosmologist and the old lady, you seem to be asking "What is the AI standing on?", and the reply here is of course "You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's AIs all the way down!" Many already let Claude Code update its own CLAUDE.md, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't (dangerously-skipping-permissions) let it edit its own hooks. And as in Jurassic Park, the question of whether we should seems to be left by the wayside.

nikita2206 1y ago

You can already ask Claude Code to modify its own settings

yoavm 1y ago

I generally agree that "we" will still be needed, but OTOH, who needs prettier if no human is ever going to read the code?

oldsecondhand 1y ago
How can you do quality assurance on code no one can understand?
- Lord_Zero 1y ago
  You just have AI do the QA.

pjmlp 1y ago

Except that for most people this is not coding, is administration work, DevOps kind of stuff. I already do lots of "coding" in SaaS products, that have very little to do with what most HNers think of proper coding.

paulddraper 1y ago

> people say AI will eliminate coding jobs Yes. > then who will configure these hooks? It will also create jobs. > unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this and announces this to all other AI entities and they also implement it properly Also yes. --- People think that technology is some sort of binary less jobs/more jobs thing. Technology eliminates some jobs and creates others.