8 ms·

AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

46 points by fwef64 8mo ago

nomilk 8mo ago
Interesting yc vid on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqwSb2hO1jE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqwSb2hO1jE tl;dr it argues when there's a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of production of a good or service, its per-unit cost goes down so much that demand skyrockets, leading to greater demand for employees in that sector. The examples it gives are radiologists (after neural nets were predicted to be able to perform their jobs essentially for free), and dock workers If this happens in the case of SWEs, it would mean a 'unit' of software will be able to be produced much more cheaply, but the demand for and price (i.e. salaries) of SWEs might stay the same or increase.
- baxtr 8mo ago
  Yes, but then many young people today won't pursuing a career in SW development because of the doomsday stories... which - if your case turns out to be true - will lead to an even higher shortage of SWEs.
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
  The argument here is basically, let’s say a particular widget requires 3 human steps to make. If we replace the most expensive step with a cheaper automated alternative, the overall cost of the widget will fall and so demand for the widget will rise. And so even though the human effort to create one widget will reduce, the increase in demand will mean the reduced work per widget * new widget demand is often >= old work per widget * old widget demand. The problem with this argument is that AI, or at least the vision of AI companies and governments are spending trillions of dollars on, purports to replace the human itself. Put another way it intends to automate all the 3 steps (as well as any ancillary services in marketing the widget, legal services in protecting the company, etc). So any increase in demand does not lead to any additional labor since the labor per unit is 0. This video’s argument simply collapses the debate back to whether AI can largely replace human intelligence or not.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  That argument is so broken it's not even funny. A lot of assumptions would have to hold for that particular outcome to be true. There are many more and most of those simply result in corporations employing fewer workers and having higher profits. I'm sure that the next argument you'd get is 'trickle down economics' but that doesn't work either.
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
  The Jevon's Paradox argument is not wrong but they're blanket applying it. Geoff Hinton has talked a lot about this, and he notes that while some things do benefit from Jevon's Paradox, there are a lot of things that AI is automating that won't. In terms of thoughtfulness and credibility I'll trust Geoff over YC.
program_whiz 8mo ago
Easy to cherry pick examples and counter-examples. See the luddites for counter-example. Artisans making high-quality textiles are no longer broadly in demand. Lots of pro examples too, I just don't find analogies helpful. It may be that like clothes, there's only so much need for software. We don't really need 1000 browsers or operating systems after all, 3 or 4 good ones is enough (and 90% of people use 1 or 2), despite there being free very good alternatives (unit costs 0, demand still low).
- sidpatil 8mo ago
  > It may be that like clothes, there's only so much need for software. Clothing demand has increased greatly in the past decade due to fast fashion. Much of this clothing is designed to cost a few bucks, last a few wears, then get thrown out. It's an ecological disaster. Maybe we'll see something similar happen with software — as production costs fall, trends will shift toward few-use throwaway software. I highly suspect this is already happening.
  - robofanatic 8mo ago
    > trends will shift toward few-use throwaway software software has worked this way since the rise of the internet and SaaS. consumers rarely need to install anything locally other than a browser.
  - program_whiz 8mo ago
    Sorry I meant -- only so much demand for people to produce clothing. the thesis "AI will not replace software engineers" could go the same way as textiles (or not). Massive demand for software, no need for developers. Same as I'm sure having AI art will probably increase the total consumption of art/music, but probably reduce the jobs for artists.
paul7986 8mo ago
It reduces the amount of engineers needed. I'd say by half and web, graphic designers and front end developers coding the designs are really no longer needed. I was just laid off from my job of 8 years in which I was the UX Researcher, Designer, Front-End Dev and Customer UX Support. In a week I have sold my house and am downsizing significantly and in two years or less will be working as an RN(nurse). I will try to get back into my field but the current administration and the many tech layoffs has flooded the market with people like me looking for job. All the while AI is eating my career & field. It just doesnt seem wise that my career of 20 years is going to be around in the next ten years. Also, will there be interfaces we have today in five to ten years or so? My guess is AI is the interface that does everything for us through voice (Open AI's upcoming device) or text .. now we still could have handheld AI phones or devices but where AI does everything including presents articles, games we play, etc and all from these AI devices' lock screen (websites are not visited much)
- reeredfdfdf 8mo ago
  Voice is going to become more important, but I doubt it's going to be that much of a threat to websites. I can already ask Gemini in my last generation smart watch for latest news, but I much prefer reading them myself. IMO AI will be simply integrated to smart watches and phones. Maybe you'll also have more devices like Amazon Alexa at home, but I see no demand for an entirely new kind of a device/user interface. That said, I don't have much faith in the future of my programming career either. Unless robotics gets exponentially better, registered nurses are going to be way safer from automation (at least the ones doing physical treatment).
  - paul7986 8mo ago
    Sure but if Gemini starts just presenting the news and all the information either via text and or graphically from Android's locks screen ... going to websites become much less.
- francisofascii 8mo ago
  Sorry to hear your situation. As a full stack Dev, I miss the days of having a UX expert on the team. Now we are just expected to create something good enough. Also your question of will there be interfaces like today makes me more nervous than anything else.
game_the0ry 8mo ago
"Will AI replace software engineers?" is not the right question and stems from a misunderstanding of how tech affects humans and how they work. Tech is a tool. It will take away some jobs, and then create new ones. Think of a combine tractor -- it took away crop picking jobs, but created a new job of combine tractor driver. It bumps productivity. The correct frame is "how can software engineers (or anyone, for that matter) use AI to increase my productivity?" With that frame, AI does not replace engineers; rather, engineers are in the best position to understand how it deliver products faster and implement that understanding.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Combine tractors deleted jobs. You can't say there are as many combine tractor drivers as there were crop pickers. Anyway they don't need drivers now as they're fully robotic. The only reason society didn't collapse: there were enough other jobs to absorb those displaced workers. Will there always be?
  - game_the0ry 8mo ago
    But we were also able to feed a lot more people for a lot fewer resources in a lot less time. > Combine tractors deleted jobs. Number of jobs is not the metric to key off of. If that were the case, we should get rid of combine tractors and pay people to farm by hand bc it would increase the number of jobs.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      That's been a suggestion to avoid societal collapse. People could be paid to do useless menial work as a proof of work, so that people will still have money and society won't collapse.
- ACCount37 8mo ago
  Tech was a tool. Historically. This doesn't mean it'll stay that way.
empressplay 8mo ago
End of the engineer. Rise of the architect.
- robofanatic 8mo ago
  What’s preventing AI from taking on the role of an architect?
  - bdcravens 8mo ago
    Nothing. Most software "architecture" is simply repeating the same patterns, just like writing code, just at a slightly higher level of abstraction. There's a slight moat if you are good at the business domain, and can serve as a bridge, but honestly, AI is getting pretty good at that as well.
  - steve1977 8mo ago
    Or a CEO?
    - claysmithr 8mo ago
      honestly, I hired an AI to be my CEO and Sales/Marketing manager. It's not to bad.
  - musesum 8mo ago
    I wonder. I follow @DamiLeeArch on YouTube. She talks about architecture in the built environment. Ostensibly, built for Humans. At least for now.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    Good taste. I just vibe coded some garbage in an hour. But it is so bad I can't see how to get to good code from here and so I'll spend the rest of the week doing it by hand. now to be fair this is my first attepmt at vibe coding and so I might not know how to prompt the ai
    - eloisant 8mo ago
alphazard 8mo ago
AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. There's no reason to believe that's the case. LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cognitively demanding engineering tasks like design, planning, or creative problem solving. We will need a different architecture for that, transformers don't look like they get smarter in that way even with scale.
- throwfaraway4 8mo ago
  > AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?" >unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case. How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
  - steve1977 8mo ago
    > Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?" And also at what cost and at what scale? Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby. But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.
    - red75prime 8mo ago
      So far it looks like AI will go the same road as other technological analogues of biological systems: not a self-contained unit (powered by currently technologically unreachable nano-mechanisms), but infrastructure that produces and maintains specialized units. A tractor can't reproduce or repair itself, but it is better than a horse for farming. A self-driving car can't learn by itself, but a datacenter can use its data to train a new version of the car software. A humanoid robot by itself might not be flexible enough to count as AGI, but it can defer some problems to an exascale datacenter.
augusteo 8mo ago
The tractor analogy keeps coming up in these threads, and I think it's actually more pessimistic than people realize. Tractors didn't just change farming. They emptied entire regions. What saved the people (not the communities) was that other industries absorbed them. Factory work, services, construction. The question for software isn't whether AI creates efficiency. It's whether there's somewhere else for displaced engineers to go. I've been writing code professionally for 16 years. The honest answer is I don't know. The optimistic scenario is that AI makes software so cheap that we build things we never would have attempted. The pessimistic one is that most of what needed building gets built, and the remaining work fits in fewer hands. Both seem plausible. I'd bet on somewhere in between, but I'm not confident enough to tell anyone starting out that they should ignore the risk entirely.
- elevatortrim 8mo ago
  What I do not understand is why is it that software engineers are so afraid? I have heard from so many other white collar people that AI already changed their job entirely (technical salesmen, translators, designers, government researchers, the list goes on), yet it is the software engineers that I hear the most noise from. Software engineering is one of the most intellectually demanding categories of white collar work. I’m not saying it is invincible, but I do not see why SWEs should worry more.
  - goostavos 8mo ago
    A lot of pride is wrapped up in the craft of writing software. If that goes away (I don't think it will) it would leave a lot of people wondering how they spent all their time. (or something like that. Obviously I'm too well adjusted to have these existential worries)
  - tjr 8mo ago
    I also hear the most from software engineers, but then again, I don't really follow translation or government research discussion forums.
    - 8mo ago
827a 8mo ago
IMO: Its going to. But, organizations which frame this replacement as "we're going to fire you and replace you with AI" are going to crash and burn. Instead, we're just seeing per-engineer and per-team productivity increase, and that productivity begins to outpace other bottlenecks in your company process, and you hit another wall. When faced with that second wall, some companies will naturally interpret this as "ok we don't need to hire more engineers". Other companies will try to apply AI (or hire humans) to fix that bottleneck, then go back to hiring engineers. The dream of a Jira integration directly wired to an autonomous system to quickly close stories with no human intervention will remain a dream for a long time for anything except the lowest-level 10% of stories. Its not interactive enough; the feedback loop needs to be tighter, the vibes need to be conversational, and businesses will get the most value out of the pilot in the chair being someone who in years past called themselves a software engineer. I think we still will; the tools just change.
eranation 8mo ago
I have several thoughts on this. 1. The common (and correct) claim that software engineering is not just about writing code (counter argument, with time, AI will be able to take on planning, debugging. Counter counter argument: if you ever tried just do what customers ask, you will get conflicting requirements, humans will need to help AI make decisions, not implement them) 2. Related to the above, as long as a good software engineer + AI brings more ROI than a mediocre engineer + AI that brings more ROI than a random person + AI that brings more ROI than just AI, it will be economically wise to hire more good engineers to beat your competitors who just opted to save money and fired their engineering team. Salaries might go down but for top talent, eg imagine an “AI whisperer” that can not be a 10x engineer but a 1000x because they know how to get the most out of Claud code / cursor. They will be paid accordingly. 3. Jevons paradox - perhaps making software ubiquitous, cheaper to make, will actually make software engineers in larger demand
junglistguy 8mo ago
[dead]
_pdp_ 8mo ago
AI may replace the need for coding but not the need for understanding how it works. It is as simple as that. We still need / want to study physics to understand the universe despite the fact that it is a process that we have no control over. AI is the same. Even when code is written by AGI you still need to be able to understand what it is and how it works. The alternative is complete abdication and resembles a lot more like religion or even a cult. Trust but verify.
pupppet 8mo ago
It won't replace all engineers, but it will replace many. Code is no longer some precious resource. You now turn on the tap and code flows out, and it requires only so many people to turn on a tap.
claysmithr 8mo ago
The problem is that your boss might think it can replace you, not really understanding what you are doing and how you are doing it.
cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
Depends how rigid your definition is. Typing code will be replaced, but that’s okay. Because for me, typing and not making typos while keeping a high level plan in your head - is bloody awful.

46 points by fwef64 8mo ago

Interesting yc vid on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqwSb2hO1jE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqwSb2hO1jE tl;dr it argues when there's a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of production of a good or service, its per-unit cost goes down so much that demand skyrockets, leading to greater demand for employees in that sector. The examples it gives are radiologists (after neural nets were predicted to be able to perform their jobs essentially for free), and dock workers If this happens in the case of SWEs, it would mean a 'unit' of software will be able to be produced much more cheaply, but the demand for and price (i.e. salaries) of SWEs might stay the same or increase.

baxtr 8mo ago
Yes, but then many young people today won't pursuing a career in SW development because of the doomsday stories... which - if your case turns out to be true - will lead to an even higher shortage of SWEs.
hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
The argument here is basically, let’s say a particular widget requires 3 human steps to make. If we replace the most expensive step with a cheaper automated alternative, the overall cost of the widget will fall and so demand for the widget will rise. And so even though the human effort to create one widget will reduce, the increase in demand will mean the reduced work per widget * new widget demand is often >= old work per widget * old widget demand. The problem with this argument is that AI, or at least the vision of AI companies and governments are spending trillions of dollars on, purports to replace the human itself. Put another way it intends to automate all the 3 steps (as well as any ancillary services in marketing the widget, legal services in protecting the company, etc). So any increase in demand does not lead to any additional labor since the labor per unit is 0. This video’s argument simply collapses the debate back to whether AI can largely replace human intelligence or not.
jacquesm 8mo ago
That argument is so broken it's not even funny. A lot of assumptions would have to hold for that particular outcome to be true. There are many more and most of those simply result in corporations employing fewer workers and having higher profits. I'm sure that the next argument you'd get is 'trickle down economics' but that doesn't work either.
CuriouslyC 8mo ago
The Jevon's Paradox argument is not wrong but they're blanket applying it. Geoff Hinton has talked a lot about this, and he notes that while some things do benefit from Jevon's Paradox, there are a lot of things that AI is automating that won't. In terms of thoughtfulness and credibility I'll trust Geoff over YC.

program_whiz 8mo ago

Easy to cherry pick examples and counter-examples. See the luddites for counter-example. Artisans making high-quality textiles are no longer broadly in demand. Lots of pro examples too, I just don't find analogies helpful. It may be that like clothes, there's only so much need for software. We don't really need 1000 browsers or operating systems after all, 3 or 4 good ones is enough (and 90% of people use 1 or 2), despite there being free very good alternatives (unit costs 0, demand still low).

sidpatil 8mo ago
> It may be that like clothes, there's only so much need for software. Clothing demand has increased greatly in the past decade due to fast fashion. Much of this clothing is designed to cost a few bucks, last a few wears, then get thrown out. It's an ecological disaster. Maybe we'll see something similar happen with software — as production costs fall, trends will shift toward few-use throwaway software. I highly suspect this is already happening.
- robofanatic 8mo ago
  > trends will shift toward few-use throwaway software software has worked this way since the rise of the internet and SaaS. consumers rarely need to install anything locally other than a browser.
- program_whiz 8mo ago
  Sorry I meant -- only so much demand for people to produce clothing. the thesis "AI will not replace software engineers" could go the same way as textiles (or not). Massive demand for software, no need for developers. Same as I'm sure having AI art will probably increase the total consumption of art/music, but probably reduce the jobs for artists.

paul7986 8mo ago

It reduces the amount of engineers needed. I'd say by half and web, graphic designers and front end developers coding the designs are really no longer needed. I was just laid off from my job of 8 years in which I was the UX Researcher, Designer, Front-End Dev and Customer UX Support. In a week I have sold my house and am downsizing significantly and in two years or less will be working as an RN(nurse). I will try to get back into my field but the current administration and the many tech layoffs has flooded the market with people like me looking for job. All the while AI is eating my career & field. It just doesnt seem wise that my career of 20 years is going to be around in the next ten years. Also, will there be interfaces we have today in five to ten years or so? My guess is AI is the interface that does everything for us through voice (Open AI's upcoming device) or text .. now we still could have handheld AI phones or devices but where AI does everything including presents articles, games we play, etc and all from these AI devices' lock screen (websites are not visited much)

reeredfdfdf 8mo ago
Voice is going to become more important, but I doubt it's going to be that much of a threat to websites. I can already ask Gemini in my last generation smart watch for latest news, but I much prefer reading them myself. IMO AI will be simply integrated to smart watches and phones. Maybe you'll also have more devices like Amazon Alexa at home, but I see no demand for an entirely new kind of a device/user interface. That said, I don't have much faith in the future of my programming career either. Unless robotics gets exponentially better, registered nurses are going to be way safer from automation (at least the ones doing physical treatment).
- paul7986 8mo ago
  Sure but if Gemini starts just presenting the news and all the information either via text and or graphically from Android's locks screen ... going to websites become much less.
francisofascii 8mo ago
Sorry to hear your situation. As a full stack Dev, I miss the days of having a UX expert on the team. Now we are just expected to create something good enough. Also your question of will there be interfaces like today makes me more nervous than anything else.

game_the0ry 8mo ago

"Will AI replace software engineers?" is not the right question and stems from a misunderstanding of how tech affects humans and how they work. Tech is a tool. It will take away some jobs, and then create new ones. Think of a combine tractor -- it took away crop picking jobs, but created a new job of combine tractor driver. It bumps productivity. The correct frame is "how can software engineers (or anyone, for that matter) use AI to increase my productivity?" With that frame, AI does not replace engineers; rather, engineers are in the best position to understand how it deliver products faster and implement that understanding.

direwolf20 8mo ago
Combine tractors deleted jobs. You can't say there are as many combine tractor drivers as there were crop pickers. Anyway they don't need drivers now as they're fully robotic. The only reason society didn't collapse: there were enough other jobs to absorb those displaced workers. Will there always be?
- game_the0ry 8mo ago
  But we were also able to feed a lot more people for a lot fewer resources in a lot less time. > Combine tractors deleted jobs. Number of jobs is not the metric to key off of. If that were the case, we should get rid of combine tractors and pay people to farm by hand bc it would increase the number of jobs.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    That's been a suggestion to avoid societal collapse. People could be paid to do useless menial work as a proof of work, so that people will still have money and society won't collapse.
ACCount37 8mo ago
Tech was a tool. Historically. This doesn't mean it'll stay that way.

empressplay 8mo ago

End of the engineer. Rise of the architect.

robofanatic 8mo ago
What’s preventing AI from taking on the role of an architect?
- bdcravens 8mo ago
  Nothing. Most software "architecture" is simply repeating the same patterns, just like writing code, just at a slightly higher level of abstraction. There's a slight moat if you are good at the business domain, and can serve as a bridge, but honestly, AI is getting pretty good at that as well.
- steve1977 8mo ago
  Or a CEO?
  - claysmithr 8mo ago
    honestly, I hired an AI to be my CEO and Sales/Marketing manager. It's not to bad.
- musesum 8mo ago
  I wonder. I follow @DamiLeeArch on YouTube. She talks about architecture in the built environment. Ostensibly, built for Humans. At least for now.
- bluGill 8mo ago
  Good taste. I just vibe coded some garbage in an hour. But it is so bad I can't see how to get to good code from here and so I'll spend the rest of the week doing it by hand. now to be fair this is my first attepmt at vibe coding and so I might not know how to prompt the ai
  - eloisant 8mo ago

alphazard 8mo ago

AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. There's no reason to believe that's the case. LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon. They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cognitively demanding engineering tasks like design, planning, or creative problem solving. We will need a different architecture for that, transformers don't look like they get smarter in that way even with scale.

throwfaraway4 8mo ago
> AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?" >unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case. How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
- steve1977 8mo ago
  > Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?" And also at what cost and at what scale? Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby. But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.
  - red75prime 8mo ago
    So far it looks like AI will go the same road as other technological analogues of biological systems: not a self-contained unit (powered by currently technologically unreachable nano-mechanisms), but infrastructure that produces and maintains specialized units. A tractor can't reproduce or repair itself, but it is better than a horse for farming. A self-driving car can't learn by itself, but a datacenter can use its data to train a new version of the car software. A humanoid robot by itself might not be flexible enough to count as AGI, but it can defer some problems to an exascale datacenter.

augusteo 8mo ago

The tractor analogy keeps coming up in these threads, and I think it's actually more pessimistic than people realize. Tractors didn't just change farming. They emptied entire regions. What saved the people (not the communities) was that other industries absorbed them. Factory work, services, construction. The question for software isn't whether AI creates efficiency. It's whether there's somewhere else for displaced engineers to go. I've been writing code professionally for 16 years. The honest answer is I don't know. The optimistic scenario is that AI makes software so cheap that we build things we never would have attempted. The pessimistic one is that most of what needed building gets built, and the remaining work fits in fewer hands. Both seem plausible. I'd bet on somewhere in between, but I'm not confident enough to tell anyone starting out that they should ignore the risk entirely.

elevatortrim 8mo ago
What I do not understand is why is it that software engineers are so afraid? I have heard from so many other white collar people that AI already changed their job entirely (technical salesmen, translators, designers, government researchers, the list goes on), yet it is the software engineers that I hear the most noise from. Software engineering is one of the most intellectually demanding categories of white collar work. I’m not saying it is invincible, but I do not see why SWEs should worry more.
- goostavos 8mo ago
  A lot of pride is wrapped up in the craft of writing software. If that goes away (I don't think it will) it would leave a lot of people wondering how they spent all their time. (or something like that. Obviously I'm too well adjusted to have these existential worries)
- tjr 8mo ago
  I also hear the most from software engineers, but then again, I don't really follow translation or government research discussion forums.
  - 8mo ago

827a 8mo ago

IMO: Its going to. But, organizations which frame this replacement as "we're going to fire you and replace you with AI" are going to crash and burn. Instead, we're just seeing per-engineer and per-team productivity increase, and that productivity begins to outpace other bottlenecks in your company process, and you hit another wall. When faced with that second wall, some companies will naturally interpret this as "ok we don't need to hire more engineers". Other companies will try to apply AI (or hire humans) to fix that bottleneck, then go back to hiring engineers. The dream of a Jira integration directly wired to an autonomous system to quickly close stories with no human intervention will remain a dream for a long time for anything except the lowest-level 10% of stories. Its not interactive enough; the feedback loop needs to be tighter, the vibes need to be conversational, and businesses will get the most value out of the pilot in the chair being someone who in years past called themselves a software engineer. I think we still will; the tools just change.

eranation 8mo ago

I have several thoughts on this. 1. The common (and correct) claim that software engineering is not just about writing code (counter argument, with time, AI will be able to take on planning, debugging. Counter counter argument: if you ever tried just do what customers ask, you will get conflicting requirements, humans will need to help AI make decisions, not implement them) 2. Related to the above, as long as a good software engineer + AI brings more ROI than a mediocre engineer + AI that brings more ROI than a random person + AI that brings more ROI than just AI, it will be economically wise to hire more good engineers to beat your competitors who just opted to save money and fired their engineering team. Salaries might go down but for top talent, eg imagine an “AI whisperer” that can not be a 10x engineer but a 1000x because they know how to get the most out of Claud code / cursor. They will be paid accordingly. 3. Jevons paradox - perhaps making software ubiquitous, cheaper to make, will actually make software engineers in larger demand

junglistguy 8mo ago

[dead]

_pdp_ 8mo ago

AI may replace the need for coding but not the need for understanding how it works. It is as simple as that. We still need / want to study physics to understand the universe despite the fact that it is a process that we have no control over. AI is the same. Even when code is written by AGI you still need to be able to understand what it is and how it works. The alternative is complete abdication and resembles a lot more like religion or even a cult. Trust but verify.

pupppet 8mo ago

It won't replace all engineers, but it will replace many. Code is no longer some precious resource. You now turn on the tap and code flows out, and it requires only so many people to turn on a tap.

claysmithr 8mo ago

The problem is that your boss might think it can replace you, not really understanding what you are doing and how you are doing it.

cadamsdotcom 8mo ago

Depends how rigid your definition is. Typing code will be replaced, but that’s okay. Because for me, typing and not making typos while keeping a high level plan in your head - is bloody awful.