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I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution. I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles it in house'

ido 1y ago
Historically imporvments in programmer productivity (e.g. via better languages, tooling and hardware) didn't correlate to a decrease in demand for programemrs, but quite the opposite.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  This is completely different - said as someone who has been in the industry professionally for 30 years and as a hobbyist before then for a decade. There are projects I lead now that I would have at least needed one or maybe two junior devs to do the grunt work after I have very carefully specified requirements (which I would have to do anyway) and diagrams and now ChatGPT can do the work for me. That’s never been the case before and I’ve personally gone from programming in assembly, to C, to higher level languages and on the hardware side, personally managing the build out of a data center that had an entire room dedicated to a SAN with a whopping 3TB of storage to being able to do the same with a yaml/HCL file.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- torginus 1y ago
  Imo historically there was no connection between the two - demand for programmers increased, while at the same time, better tools came along. I remember Bill Gates once said (sometime in the 2000s) that his biggest gripe, is during his decades in the software industry, despite dramatic improvements in computing power and software tools, there has only been a modest increase in productivity. I started out programming in C for DOS, and once you got used to how things were done, you were just as productive. The stuff frameworks and other stuff help with, is 50% of the job at max, which means due to Amdahls law, productivity can at most double. In fact, I'd argue productivity actually got reduced (comparing my output now, vs back then). I blame this on 2 factors: - Distractions, it's so easy to d*ck around the internet, instead of doing what you need to do. I have a ton of my old SVN/CVS repos, and the amount of progress I made was quite respectable, even though I recall being quite lazy. - Tooling actually got worse in many ways. I used to write programs that ran on the PC, you could debug those with breakpoints, look into the logs as txt, deployment consisted of zipping up the exe/uploading the firmware to the uC. Nowadays, you work with CI/CD, cloud, all sorts of infra stuff, debugging consists of logging and reading logs etc. I'm sure I'm not really more productive.
MangoCoffee 1y ago
I've done a vibe coding hobby project where I simply give AI instructions on what I want, using a persona-based approach for the agent to generate or fix the code. It worked out pretty well. Who knows how the software engineering landscape will change in 10 to 20 years? I enjoyed Andrej Karpathy's talk about software in the era of AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ
- bcrosby95 1y ago
  As an aside, his talk isn't about using AI to write code, it's about using AI instead of code itself.
simianwords 1y ago
What you are saying is not intuitive. Software engineers are a cost to software companies. With automation the profits would increase so I’m not sure how it can lead to recession.
- graeme 1y ago
  They used the word in an irregular way. They meant a decline in software company revenue, not an economic recession. You might well see more software profits if costs go down but less revenue. Depends on Jevon's paradox really
  - simianwords 1y ago
    No this doesn’t make sense either. Why would Amazon‘s profits go down if their engineers are cheaper?
    - torginus 1y ago
      In AWS's case - if AI can replicate what AWS offers as a value add - then you migh go with a cheaper cloud provider. Like, you have the option of either using AWS RDS, or hiring a DBA and devops who administer your DB, and set up backups, replication and networking. If AI (or a regular dev with the help of AI) can do that, it might mean your company decides to take the administrative burden on, and save the money.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - graeme 1y ago
      I didn't say profits down. The OP was talking about revenue for some companies potentially declining.
- golol 1y ago
  More middlemen = more revenue/GDP, right?

ido 1y ago

Historically imporvments in programmer productivity (e.g. via better languages, tooling and hardware) didn't correlate to a decrease in demand for programemrs, but quite the opposite.

scarface_74 1y ago
This is completely different - said as someone who has been in the industry professionally for 30 years and as a hobbyist before then for a decade. There are projects I lead now that I would have at least needed one or maybe two junior devs to do the grunt work after I have very carefully specified requirements (which I would have to do anyway) and diagrams and now ChatGPT can do the work for me. That’s never been the case before and I’ve personally gone from programming in assembly, to C, to higher level languages and on the hardware side, personally managing the build out of a data center that had an entire room dedicated to a SAN with a whopping 3TB of storage to being able to do the same with a yaml/HCL file.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
torginus 1y ago
Imo historically there was no connection between the two - demand for programmers increased, while at the same time, better tools came along. I remember Bill Gates once said (sometime in the 2000s) that his biggest gripe, is during his decades in the software industry, despite dramatic improvements in computing power and software tools, there has only been a modest increase in productivity. I started out programming in C for DOS, and once you got used to how things were done, you were just as productive. The stuff frameworks and other stuff help with, is 50% of the job at max, which means due to Amdahls law, productivity can at most double. In fact, I'd argue productivity actually got reduced (comparing my output now, vs back then). I blame this on 2 factors: - Distractions, it's so easy to d*ck around the internet, instead of doing what you need to do. I have a ton of my old SVN/CVS repos, and the amount of progress I made was quite respectable, even though I recall being quite lazy. - Tooling actually got worse in many ways. I used to write programs that ran on the PC, you could debug those with breakpoints, look into the logs as txt, deployment consisted of zipping up the exe/uploading the firmware to the uC. Nowadays, you work with CI/CD, cloud, all sorts of infra stuff, debugging consists of logging and reading logs etc. I'm sure I'm not really more productive.

MangoCoffee 1y ago

I've done a vibe coding hobby project where I simply give AI instructions on what I want, using a persona-based approach for the agent to generate or fix the code. It worked out pretty well. Who knows how the software engineering landscape will change in 10 to 20 years? I enjoyed Andrej Karpathy's talk about software in the era of AI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ

bcrosby95 1y ago
As an aside, his talk isn't about using AI to write code, it's about using AI instead of code itself.

simianwords 1y ago

What you are saying is not intuitive. Software engineers are a cost to software companies. With automation the profits would increase so I’m not sure how it can lead to recession.

graeme 1y ago
They used the word in an irregular way. They meant a decline in software company revenue, not an economic recession. You might well see more software profits if costs go down but less revenue. Depends on Jevon's paradox really
- simianwords 1y ago
  No this doesn’t make sense either. Why would Amazon‘s profits go down if their engineers are cheaper?
  - torginus 1y ago
    In AWS's case - if AI can replicate what AWS offers as a value add - then you migh go with a cheaper cloud provider. Like, you have the option of either using AWS RDS, or hiring a DBA and devops who administer your DB, and set up backups, replication and networking. If AI (or a regular dev with the help of AI) can do that, it might mean your company decides to take the administrative burden on, and save the money.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - graeme 1y ago
    I didn't say profits down. The OP was talking about revenue for some companies potentially declining.
golol 1y ago
More middlemen = more revenue/GDP, right?