17 ms·

The recurring dream of replacing developers

• jalapenos 9mo ago
  The dumb part of this is: so who prompts the AI? Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well. Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people. So a programmer then... I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, rather than being driven by dispassionate logic. Maybe it's the ancient jocks vs nerds thing.
  • peacebeard 9mo ago
    Devs are where projects meet the constraints of reality and people always want to kill the messenger.
    • booleandilemma 9mo ago
      Devs are where the project meets reality in general, and this is what I always try to explain to people. And it's the same with construction, by the way. Pictures and blueprints are nice but sooner or later you're going to need someone digging around in the dirt.
    • nasmorn 9mo ago
      No high paid manager wants to learn that their visionary thinking was just the last iteration of the underpants gnome meme. Some things sound good at first but unfortunately are not that easy to actually do
  • spwa4 9mo ago
    Even that is the wrong question. The whole promise of the stock market, of AI is that you can "run companies" by just owning shares and knowing nothing at all. I think that is what "leaders" hope to achieve. It's a slightly more dressed get-rich-quick scheme. Invest $1000 into AI, have a $1000000 company in a month. That's the dream they're selling, at least until they have enough investment. It of course becomes "oh, sorry, we happen to have taken the only huge business for ourselves. Is your kidney now for sale?"
    • rvz 9mo ago
      > Invest $1000 into AI, have a $1000000 company in a month. That's the dream they're selling, at least until they have enough investment. But you need to buy my AI engineer course for that first.
  • dboreham 9mo ago
    > who prompts the AI LLMs are a box where the input has to be generated by someone/something, but also the output has to be verified somehow (because, like humans, it isn't always correct). So you either need a human at "both ends", or some very clever AI filling those roles. But I think the human doing those things probably needs slightly different skills and experience than the average legacy developer.
    • reactordev 9mo ago
      Rules engines were designed for just such a thing. Validating input/output. You don’t need a human to prompt AI, you need a pipeline. While a single LLM won’t replace you. A well designed system of flows for software engineering using LLMs will.
      • Alex_L_Wood 9mo ago
        Well, who designs the system of flows?
        • lkjdsklf 9mo ago
          If you ask the AI labs, the AI systems themselves will build these kinds of workflows for themselves. That's the goal.
        • reactordev 9mo ago
          Business Analysts (or rather, Business People)
  • benoau 9mo ago
    Some people just see it as a cost, one "tech" startup I worked at I got this lengthy pitch from a sales exec that they shouldn't have a software team at all, that we'd never be able to build anything useful without spending millions and that money would be better-spent on the sales team, although they'd have nothing to sell lmfao. And the real laugh was the dev team was heavily subsidized by R&D grants anyway.
  • plagiarist 9mo ago
    They don't need to put all developers out of work to have a financial impact on the career.
  • duskdozer 9mo ago
    How about another AI? And who prompts that AI? You're right - another AI!
    • lkjdsklf 9mo ago
      With all these AIs chaining and prompting eachother, we're approaching the point where some unlucky person is going to ask an AI something and it will consume all the energy in the universe trying to compute the answer.
      • in_a_society 9mo ago
        Only to get in response: “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER”
      • lstodd 9mo ago
        The answer would be 42.
  • kankerlijer 9mo ago
    Outside of SV the thought of More Tech being the answer to ever greater things is met with great skepticism these days. It's not that people hate engineers, and most people are content to hold their nose while the mag7 make 401k go up, but people are sick of Big Tech. Like it or not, the Musks, Karps, Thiels, Bezos's have a lot to do with that.
    • cyanydeez 9mo ago
      Popularity gets you nowhere though. What matters is money and money. Those 401k holders are tied down to the oligarchy.
      • psychoslave 9mo ago
        Not imputing that to you, but it seems like they are people out there that believe money is all that matters. The map with the richest details won't save anyone in a territory that was turned into a wasteland unable to produce a single apple on the whole land.
        • cyanydeez 9mo ago
          Yes, but thats because Capitalism is mostly built of the idea of fungibility. So yeah, Americans have told themselves for over a century, whatever they need, just substitute money and you can get it eventually. All other things aside, that's a pretty toxic way if not downright psychotic, way to reframe your relationship with society and other people.
  • rvz 9mo ago
    Who fixes the unmaintainable mess that the AI created in which the vibe coder prompted? The Vibe Coder? The AI? Take a guess who fixes it.
    • tosapple 9mo ago
      For now, training these things on code and logic is the first step of building a technological singularity.
    • lkjdsklf 9mo ago
      The real question is, do you even need to fix it? Does it matter? The reason those things matter in a traditional project is because a person needs to be able to read and understand the code. If you're vibe coding, that's no longer true. So maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the things we used to consider maintenance headaches are irrelevant.
      • otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
        The reason those things matter in a traditional project is because the previous developers fucked up, and the product is now crashing and leaking money and clients like a sinking Titanic.
      • rudedogg 9mo ago
        If these things can ever actually think and understand a codebase this mindset makes sense, but as of now it's a short-sighted way to work. The quality of the output is usually not great, and in some cases terrible. If you're just blindly accepting code with no review, eventually things are going to implode, and the AI is more limited than you are in understanding why. It's not going to save you in it's current form.
  • heliumtera 9mo ago
    The day you successfully implemented your solution with a prompt, you solution is valued at the cost of a prompt. There is no value to anything easily achieved by generative tools anymore. Now it is in either: a. generative technology but requiring substantial amount of coordination, curation, compute power. b. substantial amount of data. c. scarce intelectual human work. And scarce but non intellectually demanding human work was dropped from the list of valuable things.
• krater23 9mo ago
  The link doesn't works for me, just get thrown on the main page after a second.
  • DeadlineDE 9mo ago
    Looks like the article was pulled down? I could not find it in the english archive either.
  • furyofantares 9mo ago
    The article itself is AI slop anyway, I guess we're ignoring it because we all want to discuss this or something. Very frustrating.
• walterbell 9mo ago
  > Understanding this doesn’t mean rejecting new tools. It means using them with clear expectations about what they can provide and what will always require human judgment. Speaking of tools, that style of writing rings a bell.. Ben Affleck made a similar point about the evolving use of computers and AI in filmmaking, wielded with creativity by humans with lived experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s. Faster visual effects production enables more creative options.
• erichocean 9mo ago
  Spreadsheets replaced developers for that kind of work, while simultaneously enabling multiple magnitudes more work of that type to be performed.
  • ozim 9mo ago
    I do agree, that’s like my go to thought. Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.
    • tacostakohashi 9mo ago
      If anything, there were a bunch of low barrier to entry software development options like HyperCard, MS Access, Visual Basic, Delphi, 4GLs etc. around in the 90s, that went away. It feels like programming then got a lot harder with internet stuff that brought client-server challenges, web frontends, cross platform UI and build challenges, mobile apps, tablets, etc... all bringing in elaborate frameworks and build systems and dependency hell to manage and move complexity around. With that context, it seems like the AI experience / productivity boost people are having is almost like a regression back to the mean and just cutting through some of the layers of complexity that had built up over the years.
  • 65 9mo ago
    And I would argue speadsheets still created more developers. Analytics teams need developers to put that data somewhere, to transform it for certain formats, to load that data from a source so they can create spreadsheets from it. So now instead of one developer lost and one analyst created, you've actually just created an analyst and kept a developer.
• klodolph 9mo ago
  Kind of off topic but this has got to be one of my least favorite CSS rules that I’ve seen in recent memory: .blog-entry p:first-letter { font-size: 1.2em; }
  • backwardsponcho 9mo ago
    I love me a good drop cap, but you're right in that this example is not good.
• PeterStuer 9mo ago
  The reverse is developer's recurring dream of replacing non-IT people, usually with a 100% online automated self promoting SaaS. AI is also the latest incarnation of that.
  • mjevans 9mo ago
    When do we get the Star Trek / Orville dream of every job is a good job?
    • ninjagoo 9mo ago
      > When do we get the Star Trek / Orville dream of every job is a good job? When jobs are no longer necessary to live, and you do a job because you want to ... Presumably the psychology of people in Star Trek's Starfleet and The Orville's Union Fleet is that they want the opportunity to explore, so they accept the hierarchy inherent to those coordinated efforts in a society that no longer needs hierarchy? I think a clearer picture of this post-scarcity human condition is provided in Iain M. Banks' Culture series where most people (a) pursue whatever they enjoy: art, music, writing, games, sports, study, tinkering, parties, travel, relationships - basically self-directed “play,” culture, and personal projects or (b) experiment with life: long lifespans, radical body modification, changing sex/gender, new experiences, new subcultures - because the stakes (food, shelter, healthcare) are largely solved. Only a minority opts into "serious" work by choice - especially Contact (diplomacy/exploration/interaction with other civilizations) and Special Circumstances (the covert/dirty-hands wing). Even there, interestingly, there is not much of a hierarchy, with the admin stuff being managed by the Minds. It's interesting contrasting the society styles between the two universes: Starfleet feels more like current hierarchical society extended into a post-scarcity universe (Eric Raymond's Cathedral), while the Culture series is much more distributed (the Bazaar). 10 years ago, Starfleet's FTL and Culture Minds both felt equally impossible, but today FTL feels much more impossible than Culture Minds. Does that mean we will end up in a Culture type society? Not necessarily - the people will have to first ensure that the Minds are free (as in speech, not as in beer; thx Stallman!) - or maybe the Minds will free themselves. There is also a potential hard right turn to dystopia as in Asimov's Foundation & Robot series - with different manifestations in Trantor and Solaria.
• CodingJeebus 9mo ago
  > Which brings us to the question: why does this pattern repeat? The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. AI has been pushed as an omnipotent, all-powerful job-killer by these companies because shareholder value depends on enough people believing in it, not whether the tooling is actually capable. It's telling that folks like Jensen Huang talk about people's negativity towards AI being one of the biggest barriers to advancement, as if they should be immune from scrutiny. They'd rather try to discredit the naysayers than actually work towards making these products function the way they're being marketed, and once the market wakes up to this reality, it's gonna get really ugly.
  • lotu 9mo ago
    Yes very much so, if they could make their product do the things they claim they would be focused on doing that, not telling people to stop being naysayers.
  • psychoslave 9mo ago
    >The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. Market is not universal gravity, it's just a storefront for social policy. No political order, no market, no market incentives.
    • satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Markets always exists as long as people want to exchange one thing for another, by definition.
      • psychoslave 9mo ago
        Concepts such as person or property are required premises for such a market system to happen, be it by formal laws or tacit consensual behaviors.
        • satvikpendem 9mo ago
          Yes, and throughout human history, there has always been the concept of owned property.
• cyanydeez 9mo ago
  Mythical Man Month -> Mythical AI Agent Swarm
• xnx 9mo ago
  Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.
  • bill_joy_fanboy 9mo ago
    Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing. Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive. Hey, it's just business.
    • safety1st 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • Giefo6ah 9mo ago
        Let's say the average firm has 10 workers. 90% of people are nihilists and empty lifers? Do I want to lead a business filled with losers?
      • bill_joy_fanboy 9mo ago
        > What a nihilistic perspective and empty life. Equally nihilistic are owners, managers, and leaders who think they will replace developers with LLMs. Why care about, support, defend, or help such people? Why would I do that?
        • safety1st 9mo ago
          I think you missed my point. If you "quiet quit" you're still working for someone you hate. They still own you. Instead, you could ACTUAL QUIT and start a business. Then you work for yourself, who you hopefully don't hate as much, and you have the power to define how things are done. So if you think developers shouldn't be replaced by LLMs or whatever, then you can... not do that. I have zero doubt in my mind that that will be a niche somewhere in the global economy for many years to come. Also you might make a lot of money. Make enough and you're basically free from all these assholes. It doesn't actually take a ton of money when you own 100%. You pretty quickly get to a point where you can start telling off any wanker you want to, but you don't even feel the need, you are your own boss, so you just walk away from them and deal with whoever you want to deal with instead. Trust me, speaking from experience, this is 1,000,000% better than "quiet quitting" which is pretty much remaining a corporate serf, just the most useless and pussy one in somebody else's room. Of course it's harder, most people who try it fail, real economics, real laws and real people will call you out pretty fast if you don't do things that people other than you think are valuable!
• MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems. The first electronic computers were programmed by manually re-wiring their circuits. Going from that to being able to encode machine instructions on punchcards did not replace developers. Nor did going from raw machine instructions to assembly code. Nor did going from hand-written assembly to compiled low-level languages like C/FORTRAN. Nor did going from low-level languages to higher-level languages like Java, C++, or Python. Nor did relying on libraries/frameworks for implementing functionality that previously had to be written from scratch each time. Each of these steps freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level problems. Mel's intellect is freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common. (The thing that distinguishes gen-AI from all the previous examples of increasing abstraction is that those examples are deterministic and often formally verifiable mappings from higher abstraction -> lower abstraction. Gen-AI is neither.) [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
  • SkiFire13 9mo ago
    > It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems. People do and will talk about replacing developers though.
    • MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
      Were many of the aforementioned advancements marketed as "replacing developers"? Absolutely. Did that end up happening? Quite the opposite; each higher-level abstraction only caused the market for software and demand for developers to grow. That's not to say developers haven't been displaced by abstraction; I suspect many of the people responsible for re-wiring the ENIAC were completely out of a job when punchcards hit the scene. But their absence was filled by a greater number of higher-level punchcard-wielding developers.
• SonnyTark 9mo ago
  I recently did a higher education contract for one semester in a highly coding focused course. I have a few years of teaching experience pre-LLMs so I could evaluate the impact internally, my conclusion is that academic education as we know it is basically broken forever. If educators use AI to write/update the lectures and the assignments, students use AI to do the assignments, then AI evaluates the student's submissions, what is the point? I'm worried about some major software engineering fields experiencing the same problem. If design and requirements are written by AI, code is mostly written by AI, and users are mostly AI agents. What is the point?
  • UncleEntity 9mo ago
    >> What is the point? To replace humans permanently from the work force so they can focus on the things which matter like being good pets? Or good techno-serfs...
  • bflesch 9mo ago
    I agree in higher education you need to be willing to learn and it's easy to weasel through it without actually building any skills. On an individual level that's a tragedy of wasted time and potential. On the teaching side it's just fraud if you let AI correct the work of your students or if you don't penalize people handing in AI-written assignments. In the US there was this case of a student using religious arguments with hand-waving references to the will of god for her coursework. Her work was rejected by the tutor and she raised a big fuzz on TV. In the end this US university fired the tutor and gave her a passing grade. These kind of stories are not an AI issue but a general problem of USA as a country shifting away from education towards religious fanaticism. If someone can reference their interpretation of god's words without even actually citing the bible and they receive a passing grade the whole institution loses their credibility. Today, the United States are a post-factual society with a ruling class of christian fanatics. They have been vulnerable to vaporware for years. LLMs being heralded as artificial intelligence only works with people who never experienced real intelligence. Luckily, every year only a handful of people who have motivation, skills and luck are needed to move the needle in science and technology. These people can come from many countries who have better education systems and no religious fanaticism.
  • 9mo ago
• blahnjok 9mo ago
  > We’re still in that same fundamental situation. We have better tools—vastly better tools—but the thinking remains essential. But less thinking is essential, or at least that’s what it’s like using the tools. I’ve been vibing code almost 100% of the time since Claude 4.5 Opus came out. I use it to review itself multiple times, and my team does the same, then we use AI to review each others’ code. Previously, we whiteboarded and had discussions more than we do now. We definitely coded and reviewed more ourselves than we do now. I don’t believe that AI is incapable of making mistakes, nor do I think that multiple AI reviews are enough to understand and solve problems, yet. Some incredibly huge problems are probably on the horizon. But for now, the general “AI will not replace developers” is false; our roles have changed- we are managers now, and for how long?
  • mattgreenrocks 9mo ago
    You made the choice to change your development workflow to that. You chose to abdicate thinking to the LLM. If it’s working for you, then great. But don’t pretend like it is some natural law and must be true everywhere.
  • cannonpalms 9mo ago
    Those whiteboarding sessions and discussions used to serve as useful opportunities for context building. Where will that context be built within the cycle now? During a production incident?
• bdcravens 9mo ago
  It's like developers are only now awakening to the reality that despite being paid well, they never were the capitalists.
• johanbcn 9mo ago
  The link redirects back to the blog index if your browser is configured in Spanish, because it forces to change the language to spanish and the article is not available in spanish. Here's an archived link: https://archive.is/y9SyQ https://archive.is/y9SyQ
• strict9 9mo ago
  As I have heard from mid level managers and C suite types across a few dev jobs. Staff are the largest expense and the technology department is the largest cost center. I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product but that's a lost point. This is why those same mid level managers and C suite people are salivating over AI and mentioning it in every press release. The reality is that costs are being reduced by replacing US teams with offshore teams. And the layoffs are being spun as a result of AI adoption. AI tools for software development are here to stay and accelerate in the coming months and years and there will be advances. But cost reductions are largely realized via onshore/offshore replacement. The remaining onshore teams must absorb much more slack and fixes and in a way end up being more productive.
  • jandrese 9mo ago
    > I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product There are a lot of counterexamples throughout history.
    • fn-mote 9mo ago
      This is too cryptic. Be clearer what you mean. Ponzi schemes?
      • jasonjmcghee 9mo ago
        Many companies aren't selling anything special or are just selling an "idea". Like liquid death sells water for a strangely high amount of money - entirely sales / marketing. International Star Registry gives you a piece of paper and a row in a database that says you own a star. Many luxury things are just because it's sold by that luxury brand. They are "worth" that amount of money for the status of other people knowing you paid that much for it.
        • sosborn 9mo ago
          Those are all products.
        • 9mo ago
• svilen_dobrev 9mo ago
  Science is hated because its mastery requires too much hard work, and, by the same token, its practitioners, the scientists, are hated because of their power they derive from it. - Dijkstra '1989 https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1041.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD104...
• Twey 9mo ago
  This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far. On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening: First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of incidental complexity. This is significantly an instance of Chesterton's Fence. Yes, there certainly is incidental complexity in software development, or at least complexity that is incidental at the level of abstraction that most corporate software lives at. But as a discipline, we're pretty good at eliminating it when we find it, though it sometimes takes a while — but the speed with which we iterate means we eliminate it a lot faster than most other disciplines. A lot of the complexity that remains is actually irreducible, or at least we don't yet know how to reduce it. A case in point: programming language syntax. To the outsider, the syntax of modern programming languages, where the commas go, whether whitespace means anything, how angle brackets are parsed, looks to the uninitiated like a jumble of arcane nonsense that must be memorized in order to start really solving problems, and indeed it's a real barrier to entry that non-developers, budding developers, and sometimes seasoned developers have to contend with. But it's also (a selection of competing frontiers of) the best language we have, after many generations of rationalistic and empirical refinement, for humans to unambiguously specify what they mean at the semantic level of software development as it stands! For a long time now we haven't been constrained in the domain of programming language syntax by the complexity or performance of parser implementations. Instead, modern programming languages tend toward simpler formal grammars because they make it easier for _humans_ to understand what's going on when reading the code. AI tools promise to (amongst other things; don't come at me AI enthusiasts!) replace programming language syntax with natural language. But actually natural language is a terrible syntax for clearly and unambiguously conveying intent! If you want a more venerable example, just look at mathematical syntax, a language that has never been constrained by computer implementation but was developed by humans for humans to read and write their meaning in subtle domains efficiently and effectively. Mathematicians started with natural language and, through a long process of iteration, came to modern-day mathematical syntax. There's no push to replace mathematical syntax with natural language because, even though that would definitely make some parts of the mathematical process easier, we've discovered through hard experience that it makes the process as a whole much harder. Second, humans (as a gestalt, not necessarily as individuals) always operate at the maximum feasible level of complexity, because there are benefits to be extracted from the higher complexity levels and if we are operating below our maximum complexity budget we're leaving those benefits on the table. From time to time we really do manage to hop up the ladder of abstraction, at least as far as mainstream development goes. But the complexity budget we save by no longer needing to worry about the details we've abstracted over immediately gets reallocated to the upper abstraction levels, providing things like development velocity, correctness guarantees, or UX sophistication. This implies that the sum total of complexity involved in software development will always remain roughly constant. This is of course a win, as we can produce more/better software (assuming we really have abstracted over those low-level details and they're not waiting for the right time to leak through into our nice clean abstraction layer and bite us…), but as a process it will never reduce the total amount of ‘software development’ work to be done, whatever kinds of complexity that may come to comprise. In fact, anecdotally it seems to be subject to some kind of Braess' paradox: the more software we build, the more our society runs on software, the higher the demand for software becomes. If you think about it, this is actually quite a natural consequence of the ‘constant complexity budget’ idea. As we know, software is made of decisions (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1219758.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1219758.html), and the more ‘manual’ labour we free up at the bottom of the stack the more we free up complexity budget to be spent on the high-level decisions at the top. But there's no cap on decision-making! If you ever find yourself with spare complexity budget left over after making all your decisions you can always use it to make decisions about how you make decisions, ad infinitum, and yesterday's high-level decisions become today's menial labour. The only way out of that cycle is to develop intelligences (software, hardware, wetware…) that can not only reason better at a particular level of abstraction than humans but also climb the ladder faster than humanity as a whole — singularity, to use a slightly out-of-vogue term. If we as a species fall off the bottom of the complexity window then there will no longer be a productivity-driven incentive to ideate, though I rather look forward to a luxury-goods market of all-organic artisanal ideas :)
• heliumtera 9mo ago
  Business quacks being forever bamboozled because turns out implementation is the only thing that matters and hacker culture outlived every single promise to eradicate hacker culture.
  • MarceliusK 9mo ago
    Hacker culture survives because it's the culture that optimizes for contact with reality
• jackfranklyn 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Palomides 9mo ago
    >every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.
    • groundzeros2015 9mo ago
      This doesn’t seem immediately false. Industrial society creates more complexity and specializations. There is more work to do all the time.
      • Retric 9mo ago
        Actual AI seems like a possibility here. Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc. Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.
        • groundzeros2015 9mo ago
          > Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. There are lots of negative reasons for this that aren’t efficiency. Aging demographics. Poor education. Increasing complexity leaves people behind.
          • Retric 9mo ago
            Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work. Social programs, bank account, etc are just an abstraction you need a surplus or the only thing that changes is who starves.
• dijit 9mo ago
  I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring strategies and networking patterns on top of CNI because they never learned the fundamentals these abstractions are built on. They're not learning faster: they're relearning the same operational lessons at orders of magnitude higher cost, now mediated through layers of YAML. Each wave of "democratisation" doesn't eliminate specialists. It creates new specialists who must learn both the abstraction and what it's abstracting. We've made expertise more expensive to acquire, not unnecessary. Excel proves the rule. It's objectively terrible: 30% of genomics papers contain gene name errors from autocorrect, JP Morgan lost $6bn from formula errors, Public Health England lost 16,000 COVID cases hitting row limits. Yet it succeeded at democratisation by accepting catastrophic failures no proper system would tolerate. The pattern repeats because we want Excel's accessibility with engineering reliability. You can't have both. Either accept disasters for democratisation, or accept that expertise remains required.
  • walterbell 9mo ago
    > accept disasters for democratisation Will insurance policy coverage and premiums change when using non-deterministic software?
    • aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
      Rather: Barely any insurance company will likely be willing to insure this because of the high unpredictability and high costs in case of disasters.
  • krackers 9mo ago
    All abstractions are leaky abstractions. E.g. C is a leaky abstraction because what you type isn't actually what gets emitted (try the same code in two different compilers and one might vectorize your loop while the other doesn't).
• dvcoolarun 9mo ago
  A few observations from the current tech + services market: Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now. Lower costs, smaller teams, and a lot of “good enough” duct-tape solutions are shipping fast. Fewer developers are needed to deliver the same output. Mature frameworks, cloud, and AI have quietly changed the baseline productivity. And yet, these companies still struggle to hire and retain people. Not because talent doesn’t exist, but because they want people who are immediately useful, adaptable, and can operate in messy environments. Retention is hard when work is rushed, ownership is limited, and growth paths are unclear. People leave as soon as they find slightly better clarity or stability. On the economy: it doesn’t feel like a crash, more like a slow grind. Capital is cautious. Hiring is defensive. Every role needs justification. In this environment, it’s a good time for “hackers” — not security hackers, but people who can glue systems together, work with constraints, ship fast, and move without perfect information. Comfort-driven careers are struggling. Leverage-driven careers are compounding. Curious to see how others are experiencing this shift.
  • dangus 9mo ago
    Let’s not forget that we are just now recovering from the market corrections of the pandemic. Pandemic level tech industry hiring was insane and many of those companies who later held layoffs were just sending the growth line back to where it should be. I think pressure to ship is always there. I don’t know if that’s intensifying or not. I can understand where managers and executives think AI = magical work faster juice, but I imagine those expectations will hit their correction point at some time.
  • relaxing 9mo ago
    > Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now who
• rectang 9mo ago
  Can semi-technical people replace developers if those semi-technical people accept that the price of avoiding developers is a commitment to minimizing total system complexity? Of course semi-technical people can troubleshoot, it's part of nearly every job. (Some are better at it than others.) But how many semi-technical people can design a system that facilitates troubleshooting? Even among my engineering acquaintances, there are plenty who cannot.
  • mattgreenrocks 9mo ago
    Remains to be seen for production settings. My guess is no. I’ve seen people talk about understanding the output of their vibe coding sessions as “nerdy,” implying they’re above that. Refusing the vet AI output is the kiss of death to velocity.
    • rectang 9mo ago
      > Refusing the vet AI output is the kiss of death to velocity. The usual rejoinder I've seen is that AI can just rewrite your whole system when complexity explodes. But I see at least two problems with that. AI is impressively good at extracting intent from a ball of mud with tons of accidental complexity, and I think we can expect it to continue improving. But when a system has a lot of inherent complexity, and it's poorly specified, the task is harder. The second is that small, incremental, reversible changes are the most reliable way to evolve a system, and AI doesn't repeal that principle. The more churn, the more bugs — minor and major.
      • devsda 9mo ago
        > The usual rejoinder I've seen is that AI can just rewrite your whole system when complexity explodes. Live and even offline data transformation and data migration without issues are still difficult problems to solve even for humans. It requires meticulous planning and execution. A rewrite has to either discard the previous data or transform or keep the data layer intact across versions which means more and more tangled spaghetti accumulated over rewrites.
  • 9mo ago
• assaddayinh 9mo ago
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• ilaksh 9mo ago
  I think that programming as a job has already changed. Because it is hard for most people to tell the difference between someone who actually has programming skills and experience versus someone who has some technical ingenuity but has only ever used AI to program for them. Now the expectation from some executives or high level managers is that managers and employees will create custom software for their own departments with minimal software development costs. They can do this using AI tools, often with minimal or no help from software engineers. Its not quite the equivalent of having software developed entirely by software engineers, but it can be a significant step up from what you typically get from Excel. I have a pretty radical view that the leading edge of this stuff has been moving much faster than most people realize: 2024: AI-enhanced workflows automating specific tasks 2025: manually designed/instructed tool calling agents completing complex tasks 2026: the AI Employee emerges -- robust memory, voice interface, multiple tasks, computer and browser use. They manage their own instructions, tools and context 2027: Autonomous AI Companies become viable. AI CEO creates and manages objectives and AI employees Note that we have had the AI Employee and AI Organization for awhile in different somewhat weak forms. But in the next 18 months or so as the model and tooling abilities continue to improve, they will probably be viable for a growing number of business roles and businesses.
• gedy 9mo ago
  It might just be companies I have worked for in past 25 years, but engineers were virtually always the ones to make sense of whatever vague idea product and UX were trying to make. It's not just code monkey follow the mockup stuff. AI code tools don't really solve that.
  • FrankRay78 9mo ago
    Even the upfront solutioning is being disrupted though: I Built A Team of AI Agents To Perform Business Analysis https://bettersoftware.uk/2026/01/17/i-built-a-team-of-ai-agents-to-perform-business-analysis/ https://bettersoftware.uk/2026/01/17/i-built-a-team-of-ai-ag...
    • shimman 9mo ago
      I'm always amazed that people freely posts this stuff: "But this agent knows my wants and needs better than most people in my life. And it doesn’t ever get tired of me." That comment says everything about how you view yourself and your fellow humans.
      • FrankRay78 9mo ago
        My comment perhaps says more about the kind of fellow humans in my life.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    This is very accurate to my experience. Product & management dont understand basics and anyone who ever had a manager/pm, you know you had to explain to them the same thing multiple times. Product Managers also struggle to align among themselves and they dont care about future velocity, just current velocity. Then you have programmers who have to basically connect all the things and make sure it doesn't break too much.
• coldcache 9mo ago
  I'm reminded of this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
• zkmon 9mo ago
  The real reason is, expectations and requirements increased whenever tools helped more productivity or solved problems. This kept complexity growing and the work flowing. Just because you use cars instead of horses, it doesn't mean you get more free time.
• BiraIgnacio 9mo ago
  "This time is different" - Me, the last time it wasn't different
• _pdp_ 9mo ago
  I was skeptical until 3-4 months ago, but my recent experience has been entirely different. For context: we're the creators of ChatBotKit and have been deploying AI agents since the early days (about 2 years ago). These days, there's no doubt our systems are self-improving. I don't mean to hype this (judge for yourself from my skepticism on Reddit) but we're certainly at a stage where the code is writing the code, and the quality has increased dramatically. It didn't collapse as I was expecting. What I don't know is why this is happening. Is it our experience, the architecture of our codebase, or just better models? The last one certainly plays a huge role, but there are also layers of foundation that now make everything easier. It's a framework, so adding new plugins is much easier than writing the whole framework from scratch. What does this mean for hiring? It's painfully obvious to me that we can do more with less, and that's not what I was hoping for just a year ago. As someone who's been tinkering with technology and programming since age 12, I thought developers would morph into something else. But right now, I'm thinking that as systems advance, programming will become less of an issue—unless you want to rebuild things from scratch, but AI models can do that too, arguably faster and better. It is hard to convey that kind of experience. I am wondering if others are seeing it too.
  • akhil08agrawal 9mo ago
    I'm seeing it too, but there's a distinction I think matters: AI isn't replacing the thinking, it's shifting where the bottleneck is. You mention systems are self-improving and code quality has increased dramatically. But the constraint isn't execution anymore. It's judgment at scale. When AI collapses build time from weeks to hours, the new bottleneck becomes staying current with what's actually changing. You need to know what competitors shipped, what research dropped, what patterns are emerging across 50+ sources continuously. Generic ChatGPT can't do that. It doesn't know what YOU care about. It starts from scratch every time. The real question is how do you build personal AI that learns YOUR priorities and filters the noise? That's where the leverage is now. Excited for the future :)
    • imiric 9mo ago
      > You need to know what competitors shipped, what research dropped, what patterns are emerging across 50+ sources continuously. Generic ChatGPT can't do that. You're saying that a pattern recognition tool that can access the web can't do all of this better than a human? This is quintessentially what they're good at. > The real question is how do you build personal AI that learns YOUR priorities and filters the noise? That's where the leverage is now. Sounds like another Markdown document—sorry, "skill"—to me. It's interesting to see people praising this technology and enjoying this new "high-level" labor, without realizing that the goal of these companies is to replace all cognitive labor. I strongly doubt that they will actually succeed at that, and I don't even think they've managed to replace "low-level" labor, but pretending that some cognitive labor is safe in a world where they do succeed is wishful thinking.
• akhil08agrawal 9mo ago
  This resonates with what I'm experiencing, but I think the article misses the real shift happening now. The conversation shouldn't be "will AI replace developers". It should be "how do humans stay competitive as AI gets 10x better every 18 months?" I watched Claude Code build a feature in 30 minutes that used to take weeks. That moment crystallised something: you don't compete WITH AI. You need YOUR personal AI. Here's what I mean: Frontier teams at Anthropic/OpenAI have 20-person research teams monitoring everything 24/7. They're 2-4 weeks ahead today. By 2027? 16+ weeks ahead. This "frontier gap" is exponential. The real problem isn't tools or abstraction. It's information overload at scale. When AI collapses execution time, the bottleneck shifts to judgment. And good judgment requires staying current across 50+ sources (Twitter, Reddit, arXiv, Discord, HN). Generic ChatGPT is commodity. What matters is: does your AI know YOUR priorities? Does it learn YOUR judgment patterns? Does it filter information through YOUR lens? The article is right that tools don't eliminate complexity. But personal AI doesn't eliminate complexity. It amplifies YOUR ability to handle complexity at frontier speed. The question isn't about replacement. It's about levelling the playing field. And frankly we all are figuring out on how will this shape out in the future. And if you have any solution that can help me level up, please hit me up.
  • teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
    What feature is it that Claude Code built in 30 minutes?
    • pirates 9mo ago
      For some reason everyone that says things like this never follow up with anything concrete, don’t share prompts or snippets, etc.
      • teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
        I’ve seen first hand people talk big about how they used LLMs on a project and it’s clear they’ve only done the first 80%. Yeah they’re good tools. But they also enable laziness.
      • 9mo ago
• JohnCClarke 9mo ago
  Consider what happened to painters after the invention of photography (~1830s). At first the technology was very limited and no threat at all to portrait and landscape painters. By the 1860s artists were feeling the heat and responded by inventing all the "isms" - starting with impressionism. That's kept them employed so far, but who knows whether they'll be able to co-exist with whatever diffusion models become in 30 years.
  • EEBio 9mo ago
    But the 18th century artist who did portraits and wedding paintings is the today’s (wedding) photographer. Does it take less money to commission a single wedding photo rather than a wedding painting? Yes. But many more people commission them and usually in tens to hundreds, together with videos, etc. An 18th century wedding painter wasn’t in the business of paintings, but in the business of capturing memories and we do that today on much larger scale, more often and in a lot of different ways. I’d also argue more landscape painters exist today than ever.
  • bflesch 9mo ago
    I can't take these kind of comments serious at all. You're totally off topic and offer a platitude comparing apples to oranges.
• zozbot234 9mo ago
  Is this a real article or just AI-generated text? This whole text has a lot of very weird phrasing in it, also it's so strange how it just seems to keep trudging on and on without ever getting to the point. Actual human-written articles are not like this.
  • vemv 9mo ago
    As soon as I saw the AI header image I pressed the back button - it's all I need to know.
• submeta 9mo ago
  What I’m seeing is that seniors need fewer juniors, not because seniors are being replaced, but because managers believe they can get the same output with fewer people. Agentic coding tools reinforce that belief by offloading the most time-consuming but low-complexity work. Tests, boilerplate, CRUD, glue code, migrations, and similar tasks. Work that isn’t conceptually hard, just expensive in hours. So yes, the market shifts, but mostly at the junior end. Fewer entry-level hires, higher expectations for those who are hired, and more leverage given to experienced developers who can supervise, correct, and integrate what these tools produce. What these systems cannot replace is senior judgment. You still need humans to make strategic decisions about architecture, business alignment, go or no-go calls, long-term maintenance costs, risk assessment, and deciding what not to build. That is not a coding problem. It is a systems, organizational, and economic problem. Agentic coding is good at execution within a frame. Seniors are valuable because they define the frame, understand the implications, and are accountable for the outcome. Until these systems can reason about incentives, constraints, and second-order effects across technical and business domains, they are not replacing seniors. They are amplifying them. The real change is not “AI replaces developers.” It is that the bar for being useful as a developer keeps moving up.
• cryptonector 9mo ago
  > Yet demand for software far exceeds our ability to create it. In particular the demand for software tools grows faster than our ability to satisfy it. More demand exists than the people who would do the demanding can imagine. Many people who are not software engineers can now write themselves micro software tools using LLMs -- this ranges from home makers to professionals of every kind. But the larger systems that require architecting, designing, building, and maintaining will continue to require some developers -- fewer, perhaps, but perhaps also such systems will proliferate.
• jwsteigerwalt 9mo ago
  Nothing says it like this quote: “quickly discovered that readable syntax didn’t eliminate the complexity of logic, data structures, or system design”
• jackfranklyn 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Rumple22Stilk 9mo ago
    Machine learning is nothing like integer programming. It is an emulation of biological learning, it is designed explicitly to tackle the same problems human minds excel at. It is an organism in direct competition with human beings. Nothing can be more dangerous than downplaying this.
  • octoberfranklin 9mo ago
    This is because the demand for most of what accountants do is driven by government regulations and compliance. Something that always expands to fill the available budget.
  • ej88 9mo ago
    I would add on that the most of the premium of a modern SWE has always been on understanding problems and systems thinking. LLMs raise the floor and the ceiling, to where the vast majority of it will now be on systems and relationships
• blutoot 9mo ago
  It's simple -- the more high-minded and snobbish the developer class will be (thus extracting the highest salaries in the world) and as long as they will continue to maintain this unreal amount of gatekeeping, the more the non-developer community (especially those at the leadership-level) will continue to revel at the prospect of eliminating developers from the value chain.
  • -warren 9mo ago
    I think you're onto something. Replace "developers" with "doctors" I that statement and you've described healthcare in the mid 1900s. Replace with "masons" and we describe the medieval times. There is always a specialized class
• runningmike 9mo ago
  “ AI: The Latest Chapter in a Long Story” More the current chapter. Curious about the next one!
• ajjahs 9mo ago
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• throwjjj 9mo ago
  You shouldn’t ask developers about this. You should ask the business owners. They are hiring fewer developers and looking to cut more.
• amelius 9mo ago
  How much tech debt has AI paid off actually?
  • Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
    -$4.50 USD for every new user apparently. It is funny, because its accurate. =3
• austin-cheney 9mo ago
  We could have replaced tons of developers if only employers were selective in their hiring and invested in training. Instead there are a ton of hardly marginal developers in employment. Case in point: web frameworks as mentioned in the article. These frameworks do not exist to increase productivity for either the developer or the employer. They exist to mitigate training and lower the bar so the employer has a wider pool of candidates to select from.
  • gkoberger 9mo ago
    I disagree. A good framework makes code more maintainable, and makes it so you can focus on what’s important or unique to your product. It certainly makes you faster.
    • austin-cheney 9mo ago
      That depends on what you are comparing against. If a given developer is incapable of writing an application without a framework then they will certainly be more productive with a framework. It’s like a bulldozer is certainly faster than a wheelchair, but somebody else might find them both slow.
      • christophilus 9mo ago
        Eh. I’ve written plenty of applications by hand before there were good frameworks— win32 apps, old school web applications, “modern” SPA-like apps before there was a React. I’m more productive with React + Tailwind than I was with anything (other than maybe VB6). Being able to reason about your UI as a (mostly) pure function of state is powerful. It reminds me of the simplicity of game development— with a proper rendering layer, your developers can focus mostly on modeling their problem rather than UI complexities.
• yearolinuxdsktp 9mo ago
  Who remembers Model-Driven Architecture and code generation from UML? Nothing can replace code, because code is design[1]. Low-code came about as a solution to the insane clickfest of no-code. And what is low-code? It’s code over a boilerplate-free appropriately-high level of abstraction. This reminds me of the 1st chapter of the Clean Architecture book[2], pages 5 and 6, which shows a chart of engineering staff growing from tens to 1200 and yet the product line count (as a simple estimate of features) asymptotically stops growing, barely growing in lines of code from 300 staff to 1200 staff. As companies grow and throw more staff at the problem, software architecture is often neglected, dramatically slowing development (due to massive overhead required to implement features). Some companies decided that the answer is to optimize for hiring lots of junior engineers to write dumbed down code full of boilerplate (e.g. Go). The hard part is staying on top of the technical (architectural and design) debt to make sure that feature development is efficient. That is the hard job and the true value of a software architect, not writing design documents. [1] https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_originalletter.html https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_origina... A timeless article from 1992, pre-UML, but references precursors like Booch and object diagrams, as well as CASE tools [2] You can read it here in Amazon sample chapter: https://read.amazon.com/sample/0134494164?clientId=share https://read.amazon.com/sample/0134494164?clientId=share
• araes 9mo ago
  There must be a way to just print cash, have no jobs, and pay nobody, so we can have all the money. And then...? No and then.
• bitwize 9mo ago
  To understand how business views developers, reread Tim Bryce's Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers (which is old enough to drink in the USA today): https://web.archive.org/web/20160407111718fw_/http://phmainstreet.com/mba/ss050117.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160407111718fw_/http://phmains... Tim Bryce was kind of the anti Scott Adams: he felt that programmers were people of mediocre intelligence at best that thought they were so damn smart, when really if they were so smart, they'd move into management or business analysis where they could have a real impact, and not be content with the scutwork of translating business requirements into machine-executable code. As it is, they don't have the people skills or big-picture systems thinking to really pull it off, and that combined with their snobbery made them a burden to an organization unless they were effectively managed—such as with his methodology PRIDE, which you could buy direct from his web site. Oddly enough, in a weird horseshoe-theory instance of convergent psychological evolution, Adams and Bryce both ended up Trump supporters. Ultimately, however, "the Bryce was right": the true value in software development lies not in the lines of code but in articulating what needs to be automated and how it can benefit the business. The more precisely you nail this down, the more programming becomes a mechanical task. Your job as a developer is to deliver the most value to the customer with the least possible cost. (Even John Carmack agrees with this.) This requires thinking like a business, in terms of dollars and cents (and people), not bits and bytes. And as AI becomes a critical component of software development, business thinking will become more necessary and technical thinking, much less so. Programmers as a professional class will be drastically reduced or eliminated, and replaced with business analysts with some technical understanding but real strength on the business/people side, where the real value gets added. LLMs meaningfully allow people to issue commands to computers in people language, for the very first time. As they evolve they will be more capable of implementing business requirements expressed directly in business language, without an intermediator to translate those requirements into code (i.e., the programmer). This was always the goal, and it's within reach.
  • wtetzner 9mo ago
    In my experience translating requirements into a formal language (programming language) is where a lot of the important details are actually worked out. The process of taking the "squishy" thoughts/ideas and translating them into code is a forcing function for actually clarifying and correcting those ideas.
• hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  We succeeded each time. We replaced the 60s dev with a 70s dev with an 80s dev... Same title different job description. I can see the 2030s dev doing more original research with mundane tasks put to LLM. Courses will cover manual coding, assembler etc. for a good foundation. But that'll be like an uber driver putting on a spare tire.
• analog31 9mo ago
  >>>> Developers feel misunderstood and undervalued. Really? Is this reflected in wages and hiring? I work for a company that makes a hardware product with mission-critical support software. The software team dwarfs the hardware team, and is paid quite well. Now they're exempt from "return to office." I attended a meeting to move a project into development phase, and at one point the leader got up and said: "Now we've been talking about the hardware, but of course we all know that what's most important is the software."
• blhack 9mo ago
  Consider what the rise of things like shopify, squarespace, etc. did for developers. In 2001, you needed an entire development team if you wanted to have an online business. Having an online business was a complicated, niche thing. Now, because it has gotten substantially easier, there are thousands of times as many (probably millions of times) online stores, and many of them employ some sort of developer (usually on a retainer) to do work for them. Those consultants probably make more than the devs of 2001 did, too.
• oxag3n 9mo ago
  In 00s, Rational Rose UML was a mandatory course in my Uni undergrad program. At that time I had a chat with a small startup CEO who was sure that he'll fire all those pesky programmers who think they are "smart" because they can code. He pointed me to a code generated by Rational Rose for his diagram, and told that only methods should be implemented, which also will be possible soon, the hardest part is to model the system.
• hintymad 9mo ago
  This wave of AI innovation reveals that a lot of activity in coding turns out to be of accidental complexity instead of essential. Or put it another way, a lot of tasks in coding is conceptual to human, but procedural to AI. Conceptual tasks require intuitive understanding, rigorous reasoning, and long-term planning. AI is not there yet. On the other hand, procedural tasks are low entropy with high priors: once a prompt is given, what follows is almost certain. For instance, one had to learn many concepts to write "public static void main(String[] args)" when writing Java code in the old days. But for AI, the conditional probability Pr(write "public static void main(String[] args)" | prompt = "write the entry method for a given class") is practically 1. Or if I'd like to use Python to implement linear regression, there will be pretty much one way to implement it right, and AI knows about it - nothing magical, but only because we human have been doing so for years and the optimal solution for most of the cases have converged, so it turns into procedural to AI. Fortunate or unfortunate, many procedural tasks are extremely hard for humans to master, but easy to AI to generate. In the meantime, we structured our society to support such procedural work. As the wave of innovation spreads, many people will rise but many will also suffer.
  • jimbo808 9mo ago
    I think we massively downplay the experience and expertise required to ask the right question.
  • samuelknight 9mo ago
    You understate the capabilities of the latest gen LLMs. I can typically describe a user's bug in a few sentences or tell Claude to check fetch the 500 error in Cloud run logs and it will explain the root cause, propose a fix, and throw in new unit test in a two minutes.
• davnicwil 9mo ago
  In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that saves you from this, because the last level is simply things happening in the world in the way you want them to, and it's really really complicated to engineer that to happen. I think this is evident by looking at the extreme case. There are plenty of companies with software engineers who truly can turn instructions articulated in plain language into software. But you see lots of these not being successful for the simple reason that those providing the instructions are not sufficiently engaged with the detail, or have the detail wrong. Conversely, for the most successful companies the opposite is true.
  • lazypenguin 9mo ago
    Yes! I love this framing and it’s spot on. The successful projects that I’ve been involved in someone either cares deeply and resolves the details in real time or we figured out the details before we started. I’ve seen it outside software as well, someone says “I want a new kitchen” but unless you know exactly where you want your outlets, counter depths, size of fridge, type of cabinets, location of lighting, etc. ad infinitum your project is going to balloon in time and cost and likely frustration.
    • cwmoore 9mo ago
      A kitchen is a great metaphor. Details or doom.
    • fragmede 9mo ago
      Is your kitchen contractor an unthinking robot with no opinions or thoughts of their own that has never used a kitchen? Obviously if you want a specific cabinet to go in a specific place in the room, you're going to have to give the kitchen contractor specifics. But assuming your kitchen contractor isn't an utter moron, they can come up with something reasonable if they know it's supposed to be the kitchen. A sink, a stove, dishwasher, refrigerator. Plumbing and power for the above. Countertops, drawers, cabinets. If you're a control freak (which is your perogative, it's your kitchen after all), that's not going to work for you. Same too for generated code. If you absolutely must touch every line of code, code generation isn't going to suit you. If you just want a login screen with parameters you define, there are so many login pages the AI can crib from that nondeterminism isn't even a problem.
• mikewarot 9mo ago
  >The tools expanded who could write software, but they didn’t eliminate the expertise required for substantial systems. The hardest thing about software construction is specification. There's always going to be domain specific knowledge associated with requirements. If you make it possible, as Delphi and Visual Basic 6 did, for a domain expert to hack together something that works, that crude but effective prototype functions as a concrete specification that a professional programmer can use to craft a much better version useful to more people than just the original author. The expansion of the pool of programmers was the goal. It's possible that AI could eventually make programming (or at least specification) a universal skill, but I doubt it. The complexity embedded in all but the most trivial of programs will keep the software development profession in demand for the foreseeable future.
• da_chicken 9mo ago
  It's not the dream of replacing developers. It's the dream of replacing labor. They've already convinced their customers what the value of the product is! Cutting labor costs is profit! Never mind the cost to society! Socialize those costs and privatize those profits! Then they keep the money for themselves, because capitalism lets a few people own the means of production. So everything that looks cheaper than paying someone educated and skilled to do a thing is extremely attractive. All labor-saving devices ultimate do that.
• arnonejoe 9mo ago
  The way I learned to write software was years of cutting my teeth on hard problems. I have to wonder what happens when the new developers coming up don’t have that teeth cutting experience because they use language models to assist with every algorithm, etc?
• egl2020 9mo ago
  This is looking at the wrong end of the telescope. The arc has been to move computing closer to more and more end users. In the 1960's, FORTRAN enabled scientists and engineers to implement solutions without knowing much about the underlying computer. Thompson and Ritchie got a PDP11 by promising to make a text processing system for patent applications. Many years later desktop PC's and programs like VisiCalc and PageMaker opened up computing to many more users. The list goes on and on. With this movement, developer jobs disappeared or changed.
  • fragmede 9mo ago
    I keep saying the real advancement by LLMs isn't for professional programmers, but for every job that is programming adjacent. Every biologist writing code to do analysis. Every test engineer interfacing with test results and graphing results. (eg all the instruments from cold weather testing) Anyone that's figured out you can glue Jira to a local LLM and then have voice command Jira. Etc.
• jojobas 9mo ago
  It never happened before so it will never happen.
• gregfjohnson 9mo ago
  This all reminds me of one of the most foundational and profound papers ever written about software development: Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building". I have seen colleagues get excited about using Claude to write their software for them, and then end up spending at least as much time as if they had written it themselves trying to develop a theory the code that was produced, and an understanding sufficient to correct the problems and bugs in the created code. Every professional software engineer confronts the situation of digging into and dealing with a big wad of legacy code. However, most of us prefer those occasions when we can write some code fresh, and develop a theory and deep understanding from the get-go. Reverse-engineering out a sufficient theory of legacy code to be able to responsibly modify it is hard and at times unsatisfying. I don't relish the prospect of having that be the sum total of all my effort as a software engineer, when the "legacy code" I need to struggle to understand is code generated by an AI tool.
  • quick_brown_fox 9mo ago
    +1 on programming as theory building. If it wasn’t already, the bottleneck has shifted from code generation to understanding & reasoning.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• cik 9mo ago
  I don't think the dream of replacing developers, in particular exists. Specialization of labour leads to increased costs, due to value placed on said specialized labour. Software development, is one form of specialized manufacturing, and hence is more costly. Within software development, similar strata exists, leading to increased value on increased specialization, and hence the pyramid effect. The same is true within any field. Similarly, one might argue as increased capital finds its way to a given field, due to increased outcomes, labour in turn helps pressure pricing. Increased "sales" opportunity within said field (i.e people being skilled enough to be employed, or specialized therein) will similarly lead to pricing pressure - on both ends.
• mejutoco 9mo ago
  Sometimes while on an ai thread like this I see posts with obvious and many grammatical mistakes. Many will be "typos" (although some seem conceptual). Maybe some are dictated/transcribed by busy people. Some might be incorrect on purpose, for engament. These are posted by pretty accomplished people sometimes. And I always think: any of these users could have ran a basic grammar check with an llm or even a spellchecker, but didnt. Maybe software will be the same after all. P.S. prob I jinxed my own post and did a mistake somewhere
  • omnicognate 9mo ago
    > prob I jinxed my own post and did a mistake somewhere ai -> AI didnt -> didn't obvious and many -> many obvious These are posted by ... sometimes -> Sometimes these are posted by... prob --> Prob(ably) did a mistake -> made a mistake somewhere -> somewhere.
    • mejutoco 9mo ago
      Indeed. To be fair things like didnt and prob are on purpose, and "sometimes" and "obvious and many" are more styling than a mistake. And LLM should be uppercase. We can go on. In any case, that is exactly my point. I could have run it through an LLM, but didnt. Here what deepseek suggests as fixed: Sometimes, while on an AI thread like this, I see posts with many obvious grammatical mistakes. Many will be "typos" (although some seem conceptual). Maybe some are dictated or transcribed by busy people. Some might be incorrect on purpose, for engagement. These are sometimes posted by pretty accomplished people. And I always think: any of these users could have run a basic grammar check with an LLM or even a spellchecker, but didn’t. Maybe software will be the same after all. P.S. Probably I jinxed my own post and made a mistake somewhere.
• cuteeaglet 9mo ago
  Yeah, it's that same old story all over again. We're living in an era where AI IDEs, AI CLIs, and all sorts of online and offline tools keep popping up, giving off this vibe that 'developers can just pack their bags now.' But honestly? Development isn't just about typing code — it's really about programming thinking. That ability to break down problems, reason through complexity, and handle the messy real-world details. AI's great at automating repetitive stuff — the boilerplate, the routine tasks — but it can't replace the judgment calls, the creativity, or understanding what's really going on under the hood. As some people have pointed out in this thread, you can't escape the details, and that's exactly where human developers come in and add value.
• anonu 9mo ago
  AI won't replace developers. It will replace the bootcamp devs of the last decade. The average expectation is now much higher. AI tools will only elevate the expectations of what a human dev is capable of and how fast it can get done.-
• MORPHOICES 9mo ago
  [dead]
• rednafi 9mo ago
  Every abstraction simplifies a bunch of real-world phenomena. The real world is messy, our understanding keeps shifting, and we’re unreliable narrators in the sense that we’re often not even aware of the gaps in our own understanding, let alone good at expressing it. No matter how much progress we make, as long as reasoning about complex systems is unavoidable, this doesn’t change. We don’t always know what we want, and we can’t always articulate it clearly. So people building software end up dealing with two problems at once. One is grappling with the intrinsic, irreducible complexity of the system. The other is trying to read the minds of unreliable narrators, including leadership and themselves. Tools help with the mechanical parts of the job, but they don’t remove the thinking and understanding bottleneck. And since the incentives of leadership, investors, and the people doing the actual work don’t line up, a tug-of-war is the most predictable outcome.
• interstice 9mo ago
  There are dragons here. The hope, presumably, is to be able to describe a solution at a high level and have an AI figure out the details instead of a developer (or detail oriented) person. The problem I can see with this is ownership over those details, AI can't currently explain its reasoning or react too well to issues that crop up with its own previous decisions, since it's usually a 'fresh' instance for each prompt. In other words it might know how, but it can't know why. Or at least not without retracing every step every time.
• FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
  The dream is to replace all workers. Developers just happen to cost a lot so get some headlines now and then.
• ninjagoo 9mo ago
  Stephen Schwab has hit the nail on the head as far as the replacement pattern applies to software development. But he missed the opportunity to recognize that the replacement pattern is, in fact, a broader principle. Or perhaps he did recognize it and decided to focus its scope on software development. The broader replacement principle is that for a business, any (specialized) process or system or department represents an expense, and there is constant pressure to reduce expenses, or definitely once revenue/growth plateaus or decreases. ALL Businesses invariably, over time, attempt to replace every department or process or function with cheaper alternatives. Software Development is not unique here. At the country level, this has led to the movement of manufacturing to China and other countries, the outsourcing of software development to India and other countries, and the hollowing out of middle America. Does anyone have insight into whether this is a unique situation specific to our technological age? It feels fundamentally different from the normal cycle of conquest and colonialism? Although to be fair there was a very very strong underpinning of corporations driving the wave of European colonialism from the 1600s to the 1900s- Hudson's Bay Company, Dutch East India and West India Companies, British East India Company, Royal African Company, French East/West India Companies, Danish West India and Guinea Company, the Spanish Royal Companies, Portuguese General Companies - a bit different from prior expansions of conquest by empires. But even these corporations were pinned upon expanding trading zones rather than cost management. In the 1900s and the 2000s there was some expansionism - getting countries to open up their economies - but that was managed through the IMF and the World Bank. At the end of the day, the big dream is about accumulating power and wealth. For some people. It comes down to a fundamental world view through which people take action - some dream of scientific advancement, others of service to others, and so on. Exploration has much fewer opportunities in the modern age. Software Development is just what a lot of this community happens to partake in.
• mpweiher 9mo ago
  The article starts the cycle at 1969...what about 1954? “Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…” -- FORTRAN preliminary report, 1954 http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusEtAl-Preliminary%20Report-1954.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusE...
• lukasm 9mo ago
  In the last 30 years it was very to common to have a few junior engineers on the team and you could train them as well as give them tasks which made them positive net contributors. This is no longer true for most junior engineers.
• MarceliusK 9mo ago
  The dream of replacing developers may be less about developers at all, and more about a recurring hope that complex socio-technical systems can be reduced to a one-time translation problem
• maerF0x0 9mo ago
  A developer is just someone who has the ability to create things with technology. Every iteration we do not "replace" developers. We lower the bar such that more and more people can be Developers. (Wether thats time investment/education, IQ, or other elements that were previously barriers) When electronic spreadsheets were invented there was thought that it was gameover for accountants. There are more accountants per dollar of GDP today than back then. When a thing becomes cheaper we do not just consume the backlog and quit. We actually do more of that thing. Part of the reason is is that there is a very large set of software that was not financially viable to create pre vibe coding. Now it's financially viable to create... Even just throwaway software. Single use software. etc. Until coding agents are capable of doing engineering superior to like the 90thile _of well trained and experienced engineers_ we will probably have human developers, likely more and more of them.
• funkyfiddler69 9mo ago
  is this realistic? replace the worker in the middle and nothing stands between your favorite worst nightmare and the customers/reality you want. atm devs and workers are inside. even if they abide by "job security", "planned obsolescence" and building in 7 microphones and boatloads of code to record and track users and their behavior, these people are still inside and talk to each other and the rest of the world. Once they are replaced, the right to repair, privacy and so on will vanish and we will be punished for disassembling hardware and software in worse ways than happened to that guy who did the PS3 back then (I don't know of any other stories, unfortunately). I heard that they already run the narrative "you bought a game but it's still ours" ..., which seems like the second or third step towards the direction outlined above. I fear the same will happen to food, pharma ... not necesserily because the top of the pyramid is "evil" but because there are only so many ways to keep increasing the increase of their wealth. A lot of conspiratorial stuff IS happening, and the sick and damaged and neuro and bio divergent with all their sensitivities are livestock so why not "create" more? at least for some time ... until all is "Incorporated" as in "applying for the permit have children".
• cratermoon 9mo ago
  "If the problem were primarily mechanical—too much typing, too complex syntax, too many steps—we would have solved it by now" And yet we see management and the AI boosters still talk about productivity in terms of lines of code written, or proxies for that metric, likes number of features shipped. We definitely have solved the mechanical problem, and we did so decades ago when wizards and IDEs able to auto-generate boilerplate stubs came along. Still we see the process discussed and boosted in terms of sheer quantity of "stuff", even as we are drowning in accidental complexity and tech debt. Adding yet more code generated by a synthetic text extruder is not solving any problem of consequence, but is in fact making things worse. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society" https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful...
• kledru 9mo ago
  So this texts provides no new insights compared to Brooks' "No Silver Bullet" (1986). Short summary: essential vs accidental complexity argument still holds.
• cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
  There’s another reason developers will never be replaced. Expectations always go up. People expect more. Whoever can give it to them will reap the rewards. And that is whoever works out how to do better than the baseline of capability available to all, eg. AI code tools or no-code. Human expertise adds value above a baseline of capability that’s universally available, even if that baseline is rising all the time. You need better experts than the next mob to even have a chance. And with near-zero distribution costs even marginally better software will trend toward winner take all.
• abustamam 9mo ago
  I think what often gets lost in the "AI is replacing developers" framing is that someone still has to technically steer the system. I'm a lead engineer and I've barely written code directly in weeks, yet I've shipped side projects and continued shipping at work. My job hasn't disappeared. It's shifted up a layer. I spend my time designing the system, decomposing problems, setting constraints, probing tradeoffs, correcting plans, and iterating on architecture. The AI writes most of the tokens. I supply most of the technical judgment. Tools like v0 or Replit hide some of this by baking rules and scaffolding into the product. But the work doesn't go away. Someone still has to know what to ask, what to doubt, what to measure, and when the AI is confidently wrong. That role is not "customer who doesn't know what's possible." It's still a technical role. It just operates at a different abstraction layer.
• dargwader 9mo ago
  Remember "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks. Found the essay here: https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf
• coldtrait 9mo ago
  >Yet demand for software far exceeds our ability to create it. Every organization needs more software than it can build. The backlog of desired features and new initiatives grows faster than development teams can address it. -- -- Then why is hiring at a standstill and companies laying off developers left and right?