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Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

• jehnnysmith 4mo ago
  This guy might be living under a rock.
• redsocksfan45 4mo ago
  [dead]
• pmdr 4mo ago
  Might never replace completely, but those remaining will be expected to pump out a lot more code so companies won't need to hire as many.
• christkv 4mo ago
  I have found that the attention moves to thinking about the things I want done and planning, reading and iterating over the specs and other artefacts that will be part of running the agents. I still need to understand the code and iterate over it to get to a usable and maintainable point. I find the problem is we are reaching the top of the slop curve. I will subside because it's impossible to actually do anything useful with all the output. There will just be a ton of half-finished and abandoned projects. Whatever gets into production will require more eyes on it. I just think a lot of people are still stuck in the "holy f** I'm so productive" and working themselves into the ground being productive pumping out code. I think it's a phase that will pass.
  • polotics 4mo ago
    it sometimes goes like this: vibecoding viberequirements, vibeleadership vibemanagement, vibecustomers as a matter of taste, you can substitute "slop" as a prefix
    • christkv 4mo ago
      I think we as a professional class have gotten a bit overwhelmed with the magic slot machine. 2 in the morning let me just do one more pull on the slop machine. I WILL win this time. It's a phase. The problem is the managerial class sees it as a magic black box and don't understand it's limitations. Calling it AI does not help either. It's the "rockstar developer" illness but on crack.
  • nicce 4mo ago
    LLMs still do not have proper contextual understanding of their solutions. Just couple days ago I was using GPT 5.5 with xhigh to vide code some application, and yet it defaulted for sorting dates from new to old by using plain string comparison. Just one of the many bugs.
    • properbrew 4mo ago
      This absolutely fascinates me. I had a friend who needed subtitle files generating for audio and using in CapCut yesterday yet none of the available stuff was suitable, so he asked if I could adapt some of my software to export subtitles. 2 hours later he's got a fully working piece of local software that does exactly what he wants, yet yours is not able to even sort dates correctly. Feel free to download it if you want to see for yourself, I didn't even do any UI tweaks as this was just a tool for him to use: Linux - https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstable/linux/x86_64/WhistleSubtitles-unstable.deb https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstab... Windows - https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstable/windows/x86_64/WhistleSubtitles-unstable-setup.exe https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstab... Mac - https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstable/macos/arm64/WhistleSubtitles-unstable.dmg https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstab... How can there be such a massive gap in what can be produced?
      • nicce 4mo ago
        > How can there be such a massive gap in what can be produced? What I was doing looks really nice and mostly works on the surface, but it is all about the corner cases where these bugs appear. In another day I was able to generate Frida script with LLM help that bypasses Dart certificate pinning/validation and proxies all the traffic by injecting the runtime binaries. With the latest Flutter/Dart version on Android when doing security analysis.
        • properbrew 4mo ago
          Ahhh ok I totally understand what you mean. Yea the edge cases are absolutely where you start to feel the pain and things look good on the surface until you dig in. I think even in the age of LLMs the adage of 90% of the time is spent of the last 10% will ring true. Sure an app can be built and spun up in an afternoon, but are you willing to spend another 6 months ironing out all those little bugs, tuning it a bit, testing, tweaking, testing etc.
  • pydry 4mo ago
    I've never seen a greater disconnect between what I read on social media about vibe coding and what I've seen in real life. In particular the whole "the best people are the ones who will use it the best". IME the best ones are the ones keeping it the most at arm's length while the people who embrace it the most churn out epic amounts of utter slop.
  • user43928 4mo ago
    I find that it depends a lot on the project. I'm doing solo mobile app projects, and I have no need to iterate on specs. The bottleneck is QA testing whether it works on the phone. I don't need to carefully review and understand the implementation. It's not important whether I understand the details of how exactly UICollectionView in Apple's UIKit works. I see that my implementation works on different physical devices, my tests cover device rotation, and I checked the memory allocations in the Instruments tool. It has been some months of part-time work on my side, and I will publish this iOS app soon. Without AI I could not have done it, the scope of the features is too large. The project is around 100k LOC. It is not true that projects become unmaintainable and abandoned because of agentic engineering, or even vibecoding if you want to call it that.
    • christkv 4mo ago
      The problem starts with a project of 20 engineers pumping 1000+ lines of code a day into a shared code base. Single dev it's amazing, tiny team still good, large team wohoooo
  • ianhxu 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  • ChrisLTD 4mo ago
    This 100%. Maybe I have a prompting skill issue, but without my guidance Opus (and now Fable) writes some gnarly stuff with tons of small bugs, and weird design decisions.
• hottrends 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• baalimago 4mo ago
  It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as webapps and native apps. So what they are missing is a platform to easily deploy and maintain their projects, much like a "normal" developer would. Right now it's quite tedious to set up this scaffolding, but it's absolutely possible with AGENTS.md, skills and rigid hollistic tests. Once done, non-technical people can continue developing independently without hiring any software engineers by simply telling claude/codex what they want. Claude/codex will then be able to make judgement calls based on the preset architecture, which will guide the non-technical user. So in my anecdotal case, AI has already replaced several software engineers. Once scaffolding like this is productized, I suspect that greenfield projects can be managed entirely from a product standpoint using agentic coders + platform engineering. And that is today. Imagine in 5 years.
  • nicce 4mo ago
    > It most certainly will replace software engineers. I would say it will most certainly replace software developers. There is a subtle difference between these terms.
    • tvink 4mo ago
      There truly is not. Software engineering is not different in any meaningful way. Sure 30 years ago in waterfall land we were emulating the project management of engineering, with miserably expensive results. But it's all the same now. It's like differentiation between coding and programming, it's different in everyone's head.
      • nicce 4mo ago
        If there is no difference, then it is just the result of everyone inflating the term in their CVs/LinkedIn etc. Software developer typically is the one which builds typical CRUD app, front-end, back-end with database and something around that. Their main job is to make the software to apply clear business requirements on software level, while the software itself is not likely revolutionary. Or they are not the responsible ones to make it revolutionary. They provide code in demand. Then there are engineers that may apply math problems to software and optimise and develop new algorithms, compilers etc. The software itself might be revolutionary and the business.
• kypro 4mo ago
  Not buying it. The idea that deciding and delivering are things only humans can do with their intelligence seems faulty. As it stands AIs today are not always great at making decisions (but they're getting much better), and orgs of today still trust people and hold people to account, rather than their AI systems. Neither of these are strong moats. It's a moat only while AI systems have some limitations vs an expert human, and corporate processes are still extremely human-centric.
  • logicchains 4mo ago
    > orgs of today still trust people and hold people to account >Neither of these are strong moats Having accountable people in key positions is a very important part of running a successful organization. Anthropic and OpenAI are never going to let you sue them when an AI employee makes a mistake; accountability is a strong moat.
    • kypro 4mo ago
      You sue bad employees? Most companies just hire someone else? In the future if you can't trust your AI system to perform a function well, you can switch to another. The accountability will be different – instead of an employee being accountable because their income depends on it, a corporation deploying the AI system be accountable because their success depends on it. We already see this today with coding. If you're paying too much for the code Claude produces or unhappy with its output, you stop paying for Claude and switch to another.
      • logicchains 4mo ago
        >In the future if you can't trust your AI system to perform a function well, you can switch to another. All will perform roughly at the same level, just like today. It doesn't matter what provider you switch to, they'll all going to make mistakes because performing at a high human level requires far more business context and domain knowledge than is going to fit in even a few million tokens. Humans have incentive to learn and improve, LLMs lack even the ability to improve, as there's been pretty much zero progress on live learning and it's theoretically impossible for a fully-trained (saturated weights) LLM to learn new things without forgetting old things.
• xnx 4mo ago
  Misleading > Among the 270 jobs in the 1950 U.S. census, only one job was automated away — elevator operator. But many others were rendered obsolete by new technology, like the job of telegraph operator. In that same time farm jobs went from 15% of the workforce to 2%.
  • zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
    Farm employment itself has decreased 4x compared to 1950 (the % figure overstates it since the total workforce is larger). However if we consider the broader "food" industry employment has increased substantially. Thus we may see "coder" employment decrease but the broader "software/tech" industry increase in employment.
    • 5701652400 4mo ago
      nonsense. you are shifting definitions of what "coding" / "producing/operating software" as a profession is. by this logic, if I define "food" industry as sitting on my couch as a "job", with govenment (payouts) my employment, you get "food" industry at employment at 100%! once you start shifting definitions, it is slippery slope. you can prove anything and argue anything. and it is all loosing meaning. tactic usually employed to confuse and mislead people.
  • chneu 4mo ago
    Look up the logging industry. Like 95% of those jobs are automated now, but they like to blame an owl
  • 5701652400 4mo ago
    yep. selective usage of stats at their best. how about factories too? conveyer belts? people losing their jobs all the time whenever automation comes in. and we just "hope" for the best they can find jobs or delusional hopefulness swinging into extremes ("be generalist!", "be specialist!", "work in service!", "learn to code!", "learn to mine coal!"), all incoherent. just listen to @pmarca to see how totally lost and incoherent tech leadership is. check Stripe Press latest on indutrial automation: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency
• lnenad 4mo ago
  It literally has and will even more in the future. It won't replace *all* software engineers but once the genie is out low effort low risk stuff will be done by an AI. Loveable and such have so many live projects, the alternative was a human building those.
  • piker 4mo ago
    > alternative was a human building those ... or them not existing at all?
    • lnenad 4mo ago
      I'm talking about actual live services that deliver money to someone, not toy projects. Do you think there's even a slight percentage of those or are 100% of the projects hosted by these services throwaway shit?
      • piker 4mo ago
        No, I just mean there is a rate at which people wouldn't have been able to do them economically.
        • lnenad 4mo ago
          The world isn't US based rates. There are plenty of people that would be taking these "non-economical" projects and being extremely happy with the money they can make from them.
  • ThePhysicist 4mo ago
    Can you point to any "great" projects on Lovable that would actually be useful as full blown SaaS software tools? Stuff that has been written/prompted by non software experts?
    • lnenad 4mo ago
      Please try to read my message again. I never said the things you're implying I said. I literally said not gonna replace all, and low effort low risk stuff. Do you think that not even 0.00001 projects on those websites could have been a good payday for a software engineer/team? Do you think what took 3 people before for a low effort saas is not going to be done by 1 person now?
• bamboozled 4mo ago
  The question is, are executives willing to give up all their power and status to an LLM or will “industry” just use AI to invent more bullshit jobs to keep everyone, including the exec relevant. The reason humans haven’t been replaced in many areas entirely is because humans like being someone’s.
  • dahkenangnon 4mo ago
    Even AI can do incredible things, like code (our job), It's difficult to me to think that one day, companies will fully assign all software lifecyble job (from designing, implementation, deployement, scaling and maintenance) to autonomous ai agent because, even the better software in the world can have bug and bug can cause from low to fatal real world damage. Those damage , in civil human real world, need a responsible. Unless, govs start voting to give citizenship to ai & autonomous agents and penal responsibility to those agents, human will also be in the loop, always. Because, Human like to designate a responsible and that's right things. So, the adaptative software engineer will always has it place.
• softwaredoug 4mo ago
  It’s not really about replacing software engineers. But about commodifying it. More software engineers (or roles responsible for code) that work for lower pay might be the trend. Or to maintain a high level of pay you wear many hats, including software.
  • logicchains 4mo ago
    >It’s not really about replacing software engineers. But about commodifying it. AI's having the opposite effect; it multiplies the productiveness of skilled software engineers while simultaneously multiplying the destructiveness of bad ones. The engineer who can shepherd a handful or Claude/Codex instances around simultaneously without producing slop will be immensely better compensated then the engineer who just gives vague instructions to the AI, goes to get a coffee and hopes for the best.
• logicchains 4mo ago
  AI won't be put in important positions of responsibility within an organization because AI providers will never accept liability for bad decisions. You can't fire Claude if it fucks up, and it's got very limited ability to learn from its mistakes. It's also incapable of making good decisions where doing so requires synthesizing more than a few hundred thousand tokens worth of domain knowledge/experience in something that doesn't have an infinite amount of synthetic verifiable training data like code and math. In theory continuous learning (live weight updates) could help to some degree. But there's essentially no progress towards that because it requires solving a few hard, currently completely unsolved problems. 1. Weights drift over time and there's no way to re-merge them after a few tens of thousands of updates, so when a new model version was released there'd be no way to update existing continuously-learned models to that. 2. It'd allow permanent jailbreaking. And 3. A model can't learn new things without forgetting existing things, unlike humans brains which have hardware plasticity (like London taxi drivers having larger hippocampi due to having to memorize so many streets).
  • sophiabits 4mo ago
    > You can't fire Claude if it fucks up What's the difference between "firing" Claude vs moving to a model from a different provider? The latter seems very analogous to firing an employee for performance and backfilling with someone new. Re the rest, it's just not my experience that models become incapable of making good decisions in cases where input token count > the context window, but ymmv based on domain. A very extreme example of this: a couple years ago when GPT 4 was state of the art and the 32K context variant was gated to design partners I worked at an EdTech company in the college admissions space that wanted to produce quarterly reports on student progress for parents. That involved crunching a LOT of data (multiple hours of meeting transcripts per week, very detailed notes about student activities, their general profile - UK and US admissions function very differently!) It was a difficult problem, but we _did_ manage to produce these reports 4K output tokens at a time at a level of quality that exceeded what humans could do internally, and models+the surrounding tooling have only gotten better since then.
    • logicchains 4mo ago
• rdksu 4mo ago
  The only bit AI can't replace is probably the need for a 'fall guy' or someone to take responsibility for something. This, however, will obviously not be sufficient to prevent job losses.
  • 5701652400 4mo ago
    there are systems that can very well operate without "fall-guy". example: A) diffuse responsibility. nobody is responsible. — this is what typical beruactacyl operates in. B) everybody is self-responsible. end users use AI, they are responsible. this is typical MIT licenses. "use at own risk", literally first statement in any open source.
• simianwords 4mo ago
  Just look and see what Cloud did for software engineers? It pushed us one level higher and lowered the demand for "db experts" and "low level systems people". The only ones who remained were the strong ones who were hired into the cloud companies. The rest moved up and changed careers. Why would anyone think the same thing won't apply here? If you are still a Typescript bunny who fiddles with some newly learned React tidbit -- this won't cut it anymore. The market won't need you. Move up and adapt or move down and become an expert (harder).
  • lelanthran 4mo ago
    > Why would anyone think the same thing won't apply here? Because there's nothing to "move up into" other than "spec, optionally design". Because the jobs that had "spec, design but don't code" already existed for decades, and pay less than half what the "design + code" person earned.
    • porridgeraisin 4mo ago
      They only said the jobs won't go away. They didn't say it would pay the same :)
    • hiq 4mo ago
      Not sure what you mean by spec and design, but around me, that's always been paid more than simply coding. If you have a clean technical spec that's detailed enough, the code naturally flows and is often left to more junior engineers, with more senior folks reviewing the code but rarely writing it.
      • porridgeraisin 4mo ago
        That, and it also needs to be mentioned that if an engineer is given a tool like claude, they will be given _more_ work. As an example, you might give an intern the following task: "we have service A that receives a request, it now has a new flag in it, we need you to pass it through to in the call A makes to service B, and then add it in the where clause of the query that B makes". and expect it to take 2 days including manual testing. Now you would expect the same much quicker. Any weird bug of the kind "flag not showing up in B because its another weird place where the request _actually_ goes through" that would before suck up 5 hours, would now be found out by the LLM in 2 minutes. "Oh because of this feature being activated in <random yaml file>, this new path is used, so you have to add the flag passing logic there". And the next day they get a new task. This was an extreme example, and it's also not a silver bullet, since now you need to ensure that the intern does the task in a way that they still learn the codebase and the service structure (ideally, they learn quicker) and doesn't become completely beholden to the LLM. So that will also become a skill teams look to hone, how they use tools like this.
• litver 4mo ago
  "In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs." - too late, it already did
  • keybored 4mo ago
    The layoffs I’ve seen are those where the CEO claims it’s because of AI.
• dekdrop 4mo ago
  I think it's people who were sloppy about programming are more interested in vive-coding. Because now they can make something without the mental rigour needed. Engineering as it should be is play of rigour. Those who value understanding system will continue the human aspect of it
  • keybored 4mo ago
    Judging by all the trivial errors made in pre-AI code, many of us are far from rigorous a lot of the time. It’s like that story about the programmer who wants to send the car down the slope one more time to see if it does the same thing again (or whatever it was). The ephemerality makes iteration possible and appropriate, but also makes rigour less important.
  • DonsDiscountGas 4mo ago
    Engineering should be exactly as rigorous as the task requires. Anything more is wasteful.
• neuroelectron 4mo ago
  The whole field of engineering set to disappear and be replaced by contractors. Of course this is what they've always wanted. That's why they do outsourcing and the whole point of AI so, basically instead of getting paid a small salary to maintain someone's money-making machine, people will bid for jobs. They'll be more and more layers of abstraction that business owners will have to pay rent to. Until it's just basically socialism.
• another-dave 4mo ago
  "Can the sandwich be further compressed? We don’t think so. At one end of the pipeline, development teams need to decide what to build." I mean, but this is talking about the process as a whole, not individual jobs. "Farmers won't be replaced by combine harvesters - we still need someone to decide what to plant and to harvest it". Sure, but if you used to have 10 labourers in a field manually ploughing with a pair of oxen and now you have one guy driving the machinery it absolutely has replaced jobs. Companies are already talking about "1 person teams" to deliver projects. We'll still have _some_ jobs but the ratio will change dramatically and engineering will move a lot closer to "team lead" role (and maybe even Product Manger role to boot)
• IanCal 4mo ago
  > software development, as a “decide-execute-deliver sandwich”. AI compresses the “execute” layer — the middle of the sandwich — but the other two layers resist automation in a way that will not be overcome by capability improvements alone. I really struggle to see why improved capabilities cannot deal with those other layers. I do not believe you have substantiated this claim about not being possible as capabilities improve. > At one end of the pipeline, development teams need to decide what to build. Developers are not the ones that do this largely. This role is far more on the side of "Product Owner". Sometimes your job covers both, but this is not the majority of the work and does not mostly require SE knowledge - some input usually. > This layer is hard to automate because it requires thinking about user needs, market signals, organizational priorities, and in some cases regulatory constraints. Hmm, these are language models that can talk through much of this already - but more importantly none of what is mentioned there requires software engineering. For parts that do (I'm sure someone would come to correct me if I said that there was none or seemed to suggest it is never ever ever relevant) this is a much smaller slice. > As AI capabilities improve, the kinds of decisions that can be delegated to AI increase over time. But this does not make the “decide” layer thinner — once a decision can be delegated to AI, it is no longer a source of competitive advantage, and the value of human decision-making migrates upward. Software increases in complexity over time, so there is no ceiling to this process. Now this is rather hidden but a huge leap in logic. The decide layer does get thinner for all the same projects, and then you simply assert that software will get more complex and so this cancels it all out. A team of 5 may end up being able to ship what a team of 50 used to, and maybe now there are 10 teams outputting more - but is there not a clear limit to this? At some point do we not just need 45 fewer people? That there needs to be some engineers is not the same as needing anywhere near as many as we have. For a time I think we will see increased output meaning more software, but that tails off as they get better. > At the other end of the sandwich, human teams need to be accountable for what they deliver. Why? And if we assume so, why does that need a software engineer? > It is possible that some day in the future teams will ship mission-critical code without fully testing and understanding it, You don't need to read code to test it, and people choose to ship products without fully understanding the code all the time. Literally any decision maker who is not a software engineer who knows the entire codebase does this. Companies fully ship systems that are far too complex for any single developer to even understand. And much of software isn't mission critical. Or at least, if you want to say it is then the mission is low stakes. > today’s AI is so unreliable that such haphazard practices would represent an existential threat to software teams and their customers. I'd argue for a bunch of stuff this isn't true, and the whole point of the article is "never even if they get better" which is different. > A central insight of AI as Normal Technology is that we can collectively choose to keep humans accountable through shared norms, law, and policy. Sure, we can ban AI writing code, but will we? Is there a huge collective concern for all us high paid engineers being replaced by AI?
• RA_Fisher 4mo ago
  Sadly I think this post will mislead people, bc the difficult truth (for many) is that software engineering isn't that hard and that's why AI can easily substitute that layer (lower barriers to entry than widely believed).
  • besterman23 4mo ago
    Wholeheartedly agree, there are some aspects to SWE that could be considered hard, but most of the time it’s rote pattern matching or simple logic resolutions. People were getting 6-figure salaries with 3 month boot camps before AI, any random college major could eventually become a developer with a few online courses and practicing LeetCode, the party was bound to end eventually. Even in the case that a college degree was absolutely necessary (it wasn’t) making $150k fresh out of a bachelor’s degree was absurd for every other domain, many of which were much harder than CS.
    • RA_Fisher 4mo ago
      Yup! I was a part of the learn to code industry. I am proud of that, bc I know my worker helped a lot of marginalized people gain wealth and power (woo!). My own occupation, stats and econometrics, requires years of higher education to even begin (and decades to master), and yet ~ half of SWE were looking down on me, disrespecting me. To be clear, there were many who were not, but usually they were from some marginalized group: women, autistic, person of color, gay, person from a poor country, etc. I thought, why is my towering knowledge not being respected? Ah, the patriarchy combined with SWE. And then as time went on I just started using my knowledge for myself / those that know and that’s worked out well (bc it’s based on actually knowing math as opposed to relying on the patriarchy). I think it’s possible the industry eventually figures out that statisticians and econometricians know far more than CS / SWEs (bc AI will tell people), but it could be a decade from now.
      • orangecoffee 4mo ago
        You are making a wrong assumption that more knowlege leads to more comp, it never has or will.
• JimDabell 4mo ago
  We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we become more productive, the goalposts move. There’s two things that could put an end to this. Firstly, we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far. Secondly, if AI becomes superhuman at software engineering when acting autonomously. Specifically, AI+human developer no longer outperforms AI alone. So far, all the available evidence seems to show AI as a force multiplier for developers and that for good results, at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things. There isn’t strong evidence that either of these situations is going to happen in the near future, so I think software engineers are safe for now. But if you have a narrow skill set and you are focused in particular areas (e.g. front-end web development), then I would worry more, because even if AI cannot replace software engineers in general, it’s quite likely to be able to completely consume specific domains with generalists holding the reins.
  • franktankbank 4mo ago
    > we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I think we are past this point personally. Lots of blasphemously useless crap being built.
    • fragmede 4mo ago
      The useless box dates back to 1952, and the pet rock was a phenomenon for a while. If useless software bothers you, you've got to be pretty bothered quite a number of things. What do you think of video games?
      • vitally3643 4mo ago
• Havoc 4mo ago
  I don’t think pointing at all the corporate coms about ai layoffs as fake invalidates the risk. The corporate stuff can be lies while the tech‘s impact could end up being real. It’s just noise in this context. Similarly this assumption (the burger diagram in the article) showing execution phase shrinks but somehow everything else expands to keep the burger size the same seems less than plausible. That said some portions of swe seem like they‘re still very far off from being threatened. Especially the portions where correctness is crucial. With say web dev you’ve got a lot more room to yolo it than say navigation code for rockets. The LLM can likely do both but I don’t think anyone is vibe coding the later any time soon
• kiviuq 4mo ago
  > There is great anxiety about AI replacing jobs. It's always the business owner who replaces workers. Let's not anthropomorphize a bunch of graphics cards
  • zaik 4mo ago
    If the bunch of graphics cards becomes truly more efficient, business owners who want to hire humans will not be able to compete.
    • pocksuppet 4mo ago
      The rules are made by a consortium of business owners, if they didn't want it that way then it wouldn't be that way.
      • 5701652400 4mo ago
        sadly, delusions, incoherence, anti-humanism is rampant in tech/business "leadership"
    • 5701652400 4mo ago
      they would not be able to compete with grapic cards either. what are they providing? to whom? if economy collapses (everybody looses jobs). nobody can pay for whatever he is offering in his business. and neither is he would be able to buy even cards or electricity himself. if economy goes to a halt (Mad Max scenario or if it is socialist collapse, Soviet style). there is no "business" even conceptially anymore.
• jstummbillig 4mo ago
  Things are changing at rapid speed, there is nothing "classic" about any of this, and you should at least be able to understand that much if you want to advise people.
• 6stringmerc 4mo ago
  “When we did this analysis…” Nah, kids, this is an opinion column. If you can’t tell the difference, then you don’t get to sit at the adults table. I’ve been an opinion writer for most of my life, and dressing up my perspectives in scientific LARP is bullshit. And yes, I do have underlying suspicions why certain cultures feel entitled to get away with taking such a tone in their declarations. This has been formed over decades of observation and I won’t claim it is scientific…unlike these two fellas who enjoy foods I do not.
• LadyCailin 4mo ago
  I think it’s useful to distinguish between LLM and AI. I think this criticism is valid against LLMs, but not against AI. LLMs are a useful tool, but they aren’t AI. Once actual AI is a thing, I think it’s worth revisiting this topic. I’m certain we’ll get there one day, but it will probably be a lot like fusion.
  • zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
    I guess by "actual AI" you mean what most people call "AGI"
• throwaway1114 4mo ago
  I sure belive that at the moment each big tech ai provider has it's black pr budget for propaganda, influcencing influencers, comments factories, FOMO spin doctors etc. In the meantime wise heads counted that unless they (AI providers) provide like couple times more of real profit it will all collapse, thus next level is IPOing to buy more time.
• Uptrenda 4mo ago
  It can already produce code for just about anything you can name. From implementations of browsers to micro-kernels. Yes, it doesn't yet one-shot any problem but my interactions lead me think it won't be long before that is automated. My intuition of how this will be done won't be with some elegant solution where any given step never fails. It will more be like swarms of interacting agents, loops, and formalised processes (themselves little more than frameworks of prompts), all inching towards the solution progressively and self-correcting when they go off course. This will be cheaper to do when models improve and cost less. There is another bottleneck though and it's important: the personal computing needed to really do this well is ... expensive. What I mean is to even utilise this in a development process you need access to your own high-end hardware where the agents can run experiments fast. That requires (1) a lot of cores (2) and a lot of RAM. So there's a bottleneck in personal computing, too. Unfortunately, I really do think we're all screwed here. Increasingly: the most optimistic projections for what AI will be able to do are starting to become reality every few months. So the odds aren't looking good here.
• mteoharov 4mo ago
  I work at a dev agency, most of our clients are start ups that need to go into the market quickly. We've used agentic development for about a year and a half now and our roles have changed drastically during that time. I can't speak to the volume of projects flowing in (as I do not know the exact numbers) but from what I can see all that has changed is the expectations for what can be delivered. And instead of 5 people delivering on a projects, it's now usually 1 or 2. The reality is however, that greenfield projects have been largely automated. A ton of the manual labour work (iterating on UX/UI designs, iterating on system architecture, trying out different approaches to solve a difficult problem with no clear measurement metric) now happens instantly. Basically - if you can understand it in your head, you can put it out into the world in 1/100th of the time. During this period I've also changed a lot about the way I work and think about a system. I've grown symbiotic with the LLM and I really can't do without it. It doesn't mean I don't understand the code it writes, I very much follow each and every change and have a large understanding of the codebase (much larger than the LLM), but I've greatly atrophied my manual code writing skills (which I am perfectly fine with). Currently I feel like the general layer, the translator, between what the business goals are and what tech covers it the best way. This is still problem solving, but a very high level one and is still really interesting and fun to me. But something tells me that the best strategy for these times (for developers anyway) is to remain critically thinking and use these tools to your advantage. Now everybody has superpowers. You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else. Maybe the future is an economy of macro products, each person offering something unique to the world.
  • handzhiev 4mo ago
    I agree with a lot that you say and notice similar trends in our work. I am a little skeptical about this one though: "You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else." One of the reasons for devs to work in company is not that they can't deliver the work themselves. It's that they don't have the connections to land customers. Most devs need a company at least to handle the marketing so they can focus on what they are good at.
• pocksuppet 4mo ago
  It doesn't have to replace you. It just has to convince your boss that it replaces you.
• _the_inflator 4mo ago
  The trouble I have is, that unlike the Cobol and Assembler era of the Mainframes, React, JavaScript and Python are beginner technology for AI. In other words: AI doesn't have a blind spot no matter whether AI will ever "get" Cobol or not. So even if we jump into 2050, we won't have to fix any React application due to three simply reasons: It is easier to build something new; AI understands the old garbage; and the last one: who knows, what will be in 2050? Tough time. My biggest concern is not AI, but the total demotivation of the veterans. Suddenly there isn't merit nor fun in building something over a week you took off. And that hits hard.
  • thewhitetulip 4mo ago
    Forget weekend projects, people are using AI for talking to each other via IM! It is infuriating!
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• panavm 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• arisAlexis 4mo ago
  "and won't" is a classic mistake of nit understanding the power of new discoveries. It's actually blind religion like thinking. Surprising to find it here.
• phyzix5761 4mo ago
  There will definitely be jobs in the future because as most companies reach a level playing field regarding the capabilities of AI they will need humans to build the next generation of innovative products. But these jobs will change into some synthesis of product owner and software engineer.[0] [0] https://arkvis.com/blog/2026-04-26_the-future-role-of-engineers-and-product-owners.html https://arkvis.com/blog/2026-04-26_the-future-role-of-engine...
• IshKebab 4mo ago
  Wishful thinking. Code has always been a bottleneck. It never took zero time. Also declaring that it "won't" is an assertion that AI will stop improving, which is absurd. A graph showing different numbers of "software developers" and "computer programmers" as some kind of evidence of something other than that people prefer fancy sounding names is extremely dumb. You may as well plot "HR" vs "personnel" and conclude that companies no longer have people.
• DarkVanilla 4mo ago
  My wife was replaced by A.I. She was a programmer. Her company openly build an agent for the purpose of replacing her (and a few others), and they got rid of her about a month after it started working.
  • 5701652400 4mo ago
    damn. hope you guys are ok. what was aftermath? did she get a new job? is it in still in software?
  • eks391 4mo ago
    Dang. I bet the morale of the peers still working there is poor. My team got a new boss 18mo ago. He had obvious favoritism, and his favorite person happened to be the only person who wasn't a team player. He also over the course of the 18mo, figured out a way to fire every remote worker, no matter how good their past performance was (one even has won several awards above our bosses level; our boss always gives recognition only to that one toxic person). So no replacements via AI, but folks have been feeling really unvalued, much how I would expect an AI replacement to be. Everyone in my supervisor's team, including my supervisor (who is high functioning autistic, and frequently made fun of by our boss), have been applying for jobs elsewhere. I hope for their mental health that they are successful. I did bring up problems with HR a couple times, and even found in the work policies rules that were being violated by him, and that's when I've learned that, at least here, they are just words, and I needed to get out because I was painting a target on my back. Several others also raised concerns, and most of them are the same ones who have since found work elsewhere. In other news, I've got a job lined up that I will be going to very soon, and I'm excited for that!
• ionwake 4mo ago
  well that premise being clearly wrong saved me time
• dfilppi 4mo ago
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• SoftTalker 4mo ago
  I haven't really gone into the deep end yet on AI coding, as my job these days doesn't involve writing a lot of code. But when I use AI for other problems, such as resolving a weird linux issue, or figuring out why I'm having a particular problem on my network, I find AI is great at surfacing possibilities but it will very quickly go down rabbit holes that end up leading nowhere. If I didn't have enough experience under my belt, I'm not sure I'd realize this when it was happening. For me, AIs are great enhanced search engines. They make it easier for me to find out what I need to know to deal with a novel problem. But left on their own, they will (confidently) go way too far down dead-end paths.
• 5701652400 4mo ago
  once author gets laidoff, and stuck without a job for 1y+, he will sing very differently.
• lonelyasacloud 4mo ago
  afaik, no vendor offers any guarantees on the work their agents do. Therefore sane organisations using those agents currently need to have someone they trust to review and sign off of on anything consequential those agents do on their behalf. Lawyers for legal, Doctors for medical, Software Engineers for Software etc. Given the amount of money being thrown at AI - and the need for return - it seems unlikely that regardless of domain that lack of guarantees is a situation that will persist.
• pramodbiligiri 4mo ago
  I'm not convinced of this bit: "it revealed three things as the real bottlenecks (1) deciding and specifying what to build, (2) verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and (3) the deep human understanding — of the codebase, the business, and the environment — required to carry out both of these." It could be that because coding was seen as expensive and a bottleneck, much effort (both upstream and downstream) had been going into making sure its input is correct and the output need not be discarded. If coding is seen as a quick and cheap step, its output could stand to be thrown away and therefore the same amount of oversight may not be needed upstream?
  • CodesInChaos 4mo ago
    Having to throw away code isn't the primary cost of building the wrong thing. The impact of the software misbehaving, and the need to maintain backwards compatibility are much worse.
• atleastoptimal 4mo ago
  Anyone who claims AI could never replace some certain job implicitly doesn’t believe in AI ever reaching parity with humans in general reasoning. All these semantic arguments and redefining what the role of a software engineer is, etc is just pointless dancing around the core issue: will AI, as scaling and development continue on frontier models, reach human level reasoning in every domain? If it can, then it’s easy to argue how it would replace any job, especially one where all the inputs/outputs are via a computer.
  • qsera 4mo ago
    >humans in general reasoning If this happens then LLMs will fix every human problems. It will have cured cancers, solved the pollution and global warming problem, solved wars, and it no one will ever have to work again. Who cares if anyone has a job in that world?
• tsunamifury 4mo ago
  Did computers replace secretaries? By and large... yes. But what evolved out of them were more sophisticaed roles like sprint planner, office operations, etc that were higher order roles for the company's newer high speed productivity. That being said, so far no AI model is producing shippable code well enough to go either unprompted OR unreviewed at a meticulous level so... I'm not sure this will happen so soon.
• aenis 4mo ago
  There is a large gap between people who have been using AI for coding for the hundreds or thousands of hours, vs. those who do not. People like Ed Zitron, who never managed or participated in dev projects scream from the rooftops that AI coding is only relevant for small hobby projects. Meanwhile, in my own backyard, we are happily shipping production stuff for a few months now, and newly launched IT projects get launched with substantially smaller teams. And anyone who ever had to work with mediocre developers will take Fable any day of the week.
  • jdauriemma 4mo ago
    I'm sorry, but this is borderline silly. Fable has been out for less than a week and you're already making grand pronouncements about its superiority? How much first-hand evidence could you possibly have for that claim?
    • handfuloflight 4mo ago
      If he is already enjoying what he claims with pre-Fable models, then it stands to reason Fable is already above that baseline, and therefore your nitpick is silly.
      • jdauriemma 4mo ago
        That both fair and also charitable to the commenter. It's not a given that Fable is "above that baseline," all we can go by is anecdotes and Anthropic's marketing materials. Both tend to be puffed up. And if they're speaking generally about LLM-assisted coding, they could have chosen to say it that way.
        • aenis 4mo ago
          You sometimes meet someone and hit it off immediately. A fellow engineer, hobbyist, anyone. That is my experience after working with Fable since it launched and barely sleeping. I never had more nuanced, interesting and fruitful design discussions in my life. And I've been programming across the entire stack, from transistors to enterprise architecture, and spent 40 years around computers. Love is love, it does not need to be well researched and may well be misplaced :-)
• jdauriemma 4mo ago
  The most wide-eyed AI believers I've met are tinkerers. And that tracks; the speed at which we can tinker has become so marvelous thanks to LLM-assisted coding. Tinkering is a process; people get a lot of joy out of the act of building and tweaking things. Outcomes are a secondary or tertiary considerations. AI has massively expanded our ability to act (and therefore tinker) but it can't generate meaningful impact (e.g. "engineering") by itself. Impact > activity.
  • zuzululu 4mo ago
    tinkers often what engineering looks like before the org has invented a process around it. Prototyping, debugging, testing, etc are not fake work because they happen quickly. Compilers do not generate impact by themselves either. Neither do CI, IDEs, frameworks, or cloud infra. They increase the leverage of the person using them.
    • jdauriemma 4mo ago
      > Compilers do not generate impact by themselves either I did not mean to give the impression that Compilers and other key infrastructure are not impactful. I believe these are deeply impactful.
• JohnMakin 4mo ago
  The reasoning for AI driving layoffs never really made sense to me. My company is hiring more than ever before - the rationale being two main things - one, strong hiring market == cheaper, stronger hires, two - we are seeing efficiency gains per employee that appears at this point multiplicative, if we believe our output is valuable, hiring more to get more output (e.g., growth) is the common sense move. I don't know how many other companies are doing this, but at least where I am, I have seen the total opposite behavior. They are very pleased with the results of AI and eager to hire.
• _pdp_ 4mo ago
  I think the math is pretty clear. Today AI is 100% automating the software engineering market. We all know it and it is not evenly distributed with some fields being more impacted than others. However, what is not mentioned anywhere is for long this will continue and what shape it will take. It is a trickier question. There are two factors in my mind: cost and volume. On the cost side, AI coding agents could become unfordable. What happens then? Back to engineering jobs? Hard to tell. It might impact seriously the bottom line of many companies while jobs remain lost forever. On the scale side, the more code is written the more complex it becomes - that is a fact. Who is going to look after this code? More AI? That will make it more costly. Or is that most software is dead on arrival - then why build it? So it is not clear cut. The investment is there but how to turn the investment in meaningful long-term ROI is not. Even on the highly subsidies plans most software written today has marginal ROI. Building landing pages and features that nobody asked for is not a good execution plan and frankly I have done this mistake myself. The last bit I would like to flag is that if software becomes almost free then why build at all? Why would companies even bother building anything at all?
• vonneumannstan 4mo ago
  "No you see I'm a special SWE, I'm not one of the 80% that will get automated!"
• johnthescott 4mo ago
  ai has no fear.
• scotty79 4mo ago
  It's really hard to read through someone's argument when you know the conclusion is 2+2=5 from the start.
• dodu_ 4mo ago
  I get this is just another speculative opinion piece and nobody really knows what is going to happen, but I kind of wish shit would either happen or not already. I'm absolutely fucking exhausted from this bullshit discourse after almost 4 years of it at this point. These AI companies need to stop bloviating and administering verbal self-fellatio and either replace everyone or fuck off already. I don't even care which it is anymore, I just want to be done with this hype cycle and move on with my life/career.
  • FromTheFirstIn 4mo ago
    Amen. I’m done trying to convince anyone- I know what I think and now I just want to see what happens and accept the outcome.
• Jioon 4mo ago
  AI isn't replacing software engineers as a whole; it is replacing specific tasks within their role. Because there are still dimensions of the job that only human engineers can handle, AI won't eliminate the profession entirely. However, this isn't unique to software engineering. AI can automate parts of any job. It just so happens that software engineering faces the highest proportion of this displacement. Therefore, instead of self-soothing with the delusion that "we are irreplaceable," engineers need to shift their mindset. They must identify exactly which tasks are being automated, figure out how to expand their scope beyond those tasks, and find ways to leverage AI to their advantage. In fact, software engineering is a field where you can use AI to go incredibly deep, scale your impact, and boost your earning potential more than in any other profession. This is absolutely no time to be sitting around and wasting energy on these kinds of complacent thoughts. “Software Is Eating the World” It is the software that is eating the world, not the engineers. It’s time for software engineers to drop the arrogance. If you wonder why management is trying to lay off software engineers? The answer is obvious. It's because too many engineers still hold onto that exact complacent attitude.
  • scotty79 4mo ago
    > it is replacing specific tasks within their role What's shortsighted is thinking that it won't be able to replace other specific tasks of there role until there's zero specific task in that role left for humans to do.
• scotty79 4mo ago
  Why would I read this article rather than this: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a2bd5c8-2188-83e8-8f7e-1b6c9b604932 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a2bd5c8-2188-83e8-8f7e-1b6c9b6049...
• Sab7749 4mo ago
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• shardullavekar 4mo ago
  some x.com influencer claiming that they built a one man company with agents doing everything. Like, hey Claude - create a staffing automation company and a swarm of agents search, reach out, follow ups, and AI voice calls etc. Its bs marketing, I get it but "what if this comes true, not now but in future?" - drives the anxiety. The sandwich framework sounds great until the decision and accountability is passed on to AI with guardrails. The AI in its current state is great to take the feedback and decide the next course of actions.
• sebasmart 4mo ago
  This matches the exact point being discussed. I actually just published a two-part article on HackerNoon digging into this exact issue—and the consequences of ignoring it. Hopefully, this adds some useful context to the discussion: Part 1: System Definition Brings Software Engineering to AI Coding https://hackernoon.com/system-definition-brings-software-engineering-to-ai-coding https://hackernoon.com/system-definition-brings-software-eng... Part 2: Working Code, Wrong Engineering: Why AI-Generated Code Needs System Definition Tests https://hackernoon.com/working-code-wrong-engineering-why-ai-generated-code-needs-system-definition-tests https://hackernoon.com/working-code-wrong-engineering-why-ai...