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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

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
    We're talking about things like a flashlight app on your phone with a subscription and that requests every system permission available, or the ten trillion todo apps.
  - LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
    Haven't played them personally since the double whammy of the Zynga playbook and the pandemic of DLC. But I have been building my own games to play that are free of these infestations. The enshittification surrounds us and penetrates us. Edit: Yes, I see, as a former gamer and game developer, I am unemploying myself by creating games with AI to play myself instead of ennriching the pockets of Gabe Newell and other billionaires, hence the downvote.
- JimDabell 4mo ago
  When I use any moderately complex piece of software, for instance a word processor, the UI is stacked full of things I don’t use, making it less convenient for me to use. At the same time, simple features that would be useful to me are not present. Software is currently aimed at the highest common factor so that it appeals to as many people as possible, which paradoxically makes it suboptimal for everybody. If I wanted to build something that is specific to my needs, this would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Even today with all the latest models – even if what I want is relatively mundane. To add on to that, what would be produced would be ideal for me but less ideal for other people. Other people need things that I don’t, and they don’t need things that I do. And people’s needs change over time. So the actual range of software that there is appetite for is the result of a huge combinatorial explosion of features, for every single type of application out there. The appetite you are thinking is satisfied today is merely “there is an app that does X” but the appetite that is actually present once we are able to create software much more efficiently is more along the lines of “everybody gets their own custom app that does X”. I don’t think the appetite for software can be quenched until we have just-in-time feature generation. That is definitely not within present day capabilities.
  - jayd16 4mo ago
    Part of the reason software ate the world is standardized tooling. Going back to everyone having completely bespoke ways of doing things would be a nightmare.
- Rooster61 4mo ago
  This has very little to do with the actual demand for good software though. People very much still want good software that works. The issue is the group of people in the industry that have learned they can push blasphemously useless crap, charge a premium, and have people be forced to consume it due to poor governance over market practices (monopolies, blatantly anti-consumer features, etc).
basch 4mo ago
>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 Or humans are relegated to the co-processor role. The AI does 99% of the thinking and work and consults the human for the 1% it needs. Whether that extra contribution is essentially a random number generation, creativity / outside the box input, or esoteric problem solving remains to be seen.
- JimDabell 4mo ago
  This is called a “reverse centaur”.
vitally3643 4mo ago
I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious. The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects. The overwhelming trend in commercial software these past few decades has been hyper-aggressive anti-customization, anti-personalization, anti-user. Commercial software has been reduced to one single happy path and if that doesn't suit your needs, then fuck off. No one is making commercial software for everyday people. Even open source is trending away from everyday users. Soon, regular everyday people who simply need some software to solve a problem the way they want it solved will have the ability to do so. In the bast majority of those cases, the quality and correctness of said software really doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform.
- LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
  I do this already scraping web sites for descriptions of what they provide and then tell the agent to build the part I want and nothing more. There's a lot broken about the web and software today that can be addressed by these agents. Just getting a newsfeed of news I want to read free of the mandatory click and enrage bait would be progress for me IMO. But I'd never ship a product that did that because of how Google treated ad-blockers on chrome.
- zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
  This has "why pay for Dropbox" vibes.
  - corndoge 4mo ago
    I am tired of reading this comment
    - mattbettinson 4mo ago
epochbtc 4mo ago
My opinion throughout this AI revolution of the past few years is: appetite for software is insatiable. AI tooling will 3x-10x the output and sophistication of software but will not meaningfully decrease employment over the long haul, except perhaps in legacy or not-forward-thinking organizations.
deleted 4mo ago
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rkozik1989 4mo ago
"The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far." Yeah, I don't that does not necessarily mean everyone is looking for the latest and greatest. Many businesses are still reliant on technologies like custom spreadsheets and Microsoft Access because they do exactly what they want them to do, have a fixed rate, and rarely require any additional modifications/maintenance. Once you step outside of the bubble so many of us are stuck in you'll realize that many, many people aren't interested in upgrades, but rather they just want the old shit they know to just work.
- vanuatu 4mo ago
  that kind of implies theres a ton of room for progress right? imagine if we got new shit that worked better
  - packetlost 4mo ago
    That violates the worse is better principle which has held true since the inception of software. Switching costs are real. It's not that hard to make an improvement, but it's very hard to make an improvement that justifies the cost in both money and time.
    - vanuatu 4mo ago
      i think my point stands clearly we were able to keep making improvements! the ceiling is nowhere near reached yet
- nitwit005 4mo ago
  The classic pattern is they become a larger company, and either those processes stop working well, or a custom solution becomes worthwhile due to scale. The row count limit in Excel has been hit many times over the years.
amelius 4mo ago
> at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things. But that puts 90% of developers out of a job. And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.
- poidos 4mo ago
  It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.
  - SecretDreams 4mo ago
    How much does the appetite for good* software need to grow to not have loss of jobs?
  - aurareturn 4mo ago
    Exactly. I see software engineering going the way of accounting or lawyer. Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies, employing a software dev was simply not a thing. Nowadays, your kindergarten might employ a full time or part time software engineer to build custom software. One dev can build a lot more a lot faster. That said, I think the average or below average dev won’t earn $200k/year anymore. However, the top devs will earn more than ever. If AI increases an average dev’s productivity by 10x, then it will increase a top tier dev’s by 100x.
    - euwuw 4mo ago
      “ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ” No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.
      - aurareturn 4mo ago
        It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before: 1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own. 2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more. I’m in the #2 camp right now. My team shrank by 50% through attrition in the last year. We didn’t hire anyone new when someone left. My pay has increased.
tossandthrow 4mo ago
Quite a few developers will likely loose their jobs. In particular the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models - the ones who are forever junior. The engineers who can manage large scale projects using agents will, on the other hand, probably get a hefty salary bump.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  I've worked in many places on many teams and never met anyone that essentially does nothing besides write code... I question the obsession engineers have with their "code writing" being replaced by a machine. Do you really think that's the value you bring to the table? Non-engineers don't want to sit down and think about anything, they don't want to sit down and test that thinks actually work, they don't want to think about all the failure cases that could go wrong besides a few shallow tests, and they definitely don't want to have to pick up the mess if something does go wrong... This is what you get paid to do. Coding is a small part of that.
  - tossandthrow 4mo ago
    You are on point: The developers of the future need to hold much more of the domain that is being developed for. It is not a job to write JSX and tailwind classes anymore, so you need to move up in abstraction - and complexity. Not all can do that.
- allajfjwbwkwja 4mo ago
  > the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models Those people don't exist.
  - tossandthrow 4mo ago
    Sure they do - there are a lot of people who thrive working with concrete technologies and solve relatively straight forward issues (implement this component - style work). These people will see a brutal job market that is forcing them to take more responsibility and work at a higher level of abstraction. This is nothing new - A bunch of people simply don't thrive well as knowledge workers. The bar for being a knowledge worker is going to go up - by a lot.
reinitctxoffset 4mo ago
In every regime where we have meaningful longitudinal data about the long run outcomes of introducing technology that is superhuman at some or all of a human's job, the combination of the machine and an expert human outperforms either alone, with probably the clearest parallel structurally being chess, though this is true of all of the hard sciences and all of frontier engineering (semiconductor design). There will never be a human who can beat Stockfish ever again, digital intelligence has simply accelerated away from human intelligence in that regime. There is no other human alive who can beat Magnus Carlsen. Stockfish crushes Magnus. But Magnus and Stockfish playing together crush any conceivable combination of just human or just computer. And no serious chess player would train without a computer or decline the assist if the contest mattered. And this is in a regime where the dominance of the machine is total, structural, and permanent, far more so than any existing AI's impact on the outcome distribution of any recent development on any white-collar knowledge work include even the most sophisticated software engineering done anywhere. The demonstrated as opposed to completely conjectural lift on SWE outcomes with Claude Code (and even that's controversial, let's take the high end of the claims) is real and changes the geometry of the situation not at all. Nor is there any apparent limit on how much arbitrarily sophisticated software the world has an appetite for, you could take someone at the absolute top of the field (I'm a big Carmack fan let's go with Carmack), and give him cutting edge AI assist, and the best program a person can write just got better. Sweet! And this applies anywhere from junior to Carmack: however good they were, they're better now. We can build harder things. We can have extreme quality software where previously we were stuck with some Electron jank, across the board. Does anyone think Slack would lose market share if it went back to its gaming roots and was gorgeously 3D accelerated on every surface against a backend that could instant and perfectly synchronize an arbitrary workspace on a flakey cell connection and never have an outage or data loss? Or would they rapidly shred the remaining competition and become the favored tool of everyone? In adversarial regimes like trading or drone warfare, you better believe the best hackers have arbitrary assist if you're going to play against them. I think the thing to be hand-wringing about isn't AI, it's that capitalism no longer seems to be an adversarial regime. The worst software rivalries in the industry look more like a pillow fight than a battle of will. And if there is any lasting reduction in headcount, it's leaders lacking ambition agreeing tacitly to not play very hard, not AI, that is to blame for that. None of the HFT shops nor amusingly the frontier labs have reduced their hiring or compensation at all. If anything, it's going up!
Brendinooo 4mo ago
>e.g. front-end web development It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want. I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.
- tracerbulletx 4mo ago
  Yeah everyone thinks its great at the things they don't personally know that much about or appreciate and I think it's kind of embarrassing to proclaim its going to do someone else's speciality great but not theirs and just reveals an underlying ignorance.
  - technomoloch 4mo ago
    I'm solidly a generalist, I custom create designs for products and implement them, and also work on backends and large scale production ml systems. I would actually have to agree with the person you are replying to - simply because backends are text problems, (an LLMs domain), and frontends are visual - llms are just still not quite as good at seeing details as humans, whereas they can scan a large codebase for possible problems much faster than any human could. Both areas need careful supervision and feedback loops, adversarial reviews etc - but for the frontend, I find myself having to do much more manual work actually checking myself, because an llm just doesn't get symmetry if it doesn't perfectly correlate to margin being 16px on both sides of a box, etc, ie symmetry you can see in code. Or whether a design "feels" nice to look at, etc. But with backend, you give it proper guidance to create tests, do benchmarking, follow sane design patterns, etc, and its very effective.
  - JimDabell 4mo ago
    I’ve been writing front-end code for more than a quarter of a century. I can assure you I’m not saying this because I’m unfamiliar with the field.
seydor 4mo ago
You can't expect that timeline to continue forever. AI is a whole different beast than programming. It is in fact what programming set out to be in the 1940s: A replica of the brain. Automating programming tasks has only gotten us so far, but that timeline is probably ending now. We no longer need to automate programming because we can talk to the machine.
zero_shift 4mo ago
> 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 It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores. There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static. In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w35275.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...) Their analysis is on pg42-43 > they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite. Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?
- nicoburns 4mo ago
  > There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static. Isn't the likely explanation for this that the updraft is a huge number of sloppy AI-generated apps that nobody wants to use because they're just bad?
  - pzo 4mo ago
    You also need to have time to play all those great games, watch all those great shows and read all those books. There is a lot of software that are constrained by human eyeballs (entertainment or ads monetized)
- TheDong 4mo ago
  > money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Right now, people pay all sorts of money for real interactions with real people, most notably friendship and dating. Tiktok has done a good job at starting to disrupt this, but with AI and better VR technology, maybe we can finish the job and disrupt all human relationships, all romantic relationships, all friendships. It's a huge addressable market (all humans), and if even just 5% of all humans buy a $5 virtual coffee (free to produce, pure profit) for their AI partner each day, that would be a massive increase in software spend. Once we hit "The Matrix", that'll mean software has nowhere left to go.
coldtea 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. Anytime we became more productive in the past we become in a way that didn't remove engineers, just increased the abstraction an engineer would work in. And we did it at times of rapid expansion of computing and internet, meaning way more need for engineers counter-balancing the increased productivity. >The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. Has it? The expansion of IT has reached global saturation, we're getting desparate, and try to push shit like Blockchain and IoT, and shoving "smart" features even where people don't want them. And the world is full of software nobody or very few care for or use/subscribe/buy. App Store have huge "long tails" of stuff nobody cares for. And with autonomous agents we designed something to replace the engineer altogether. So even if the demand for software increases, that can be like "spawn more agents" not "get more developers". Some human supervisors per N agents? Sure. Equal human demand as what's now? Unlikely. In general "we did it 5 times, to we'll surely do it 6" is not a real argument, just a hope that something will never end.
Aefiam 4mo ago
Even if the budget for software development were to stay constant, if an ever increasing part of it is spent on llm usage, it will reduce the money left for developers, resulting in mass layoffs and/or mass salary cuts.
s_dev 4mo ago
>Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. Jervons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Lutger 4mo ago
We all tend to assume AI will only ever be good at the execute part, but what if AI will also be good at decide-deliver? What if some day, we could put AI in charge of not only running a company, but coming up with a business idea, getting funded, driving sales, pivoting until product-market fit and then scaling? Who would profit from such a company?
- dron57 4mo ago
  The capital backing it would profit. Your scenario is a real doom loop of runaway capital building up without any corresponding returns to human labour. See Thomas Picketty and his “Capital in the 21st Century”.
pzo 4mo ago
> 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. Not all software but how many movies you can watch, books read? Similarly how many games you can play? How many ads you can watch during a day? Eventually projects will have to be profitable. And even if everybody will make a great game most of them won’t be profitable because you competing for limited eyeballs time
- foolserrandboy 4mo ago
  4 day work week could help with this like weekends help sell more automobiles.
YtMtBt 4mo ago
[dead]
empath75 4mo ago
> We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. I used to work at an overnight NOC many years ago, and I literally learned bash and python just to save time so I could spend more time watching netflix or whatever instead of working. Instead, my scripts handled so many alerts that they laid off someone and gave me a promotion to being a sys admin :( I've been chasing the dream of automating my job away and collecting a paycheck for doing nothing for decades now, and I keep getting promoted...
_diyar 4mo ago
Your argument holds across the supply-curve of software-engineering-skills. However, there must be some threshold where a previously employed dev is now sol because AI+Human outcompetes him (ie the supply curve has shifted, and the point they used to occupy is not unprofitable)
ChrisLTD 4mo ago
I agree with most of what you're saying, but it's also funny that front-end developers are catching strays in your conclusion. As long as human beings are interfacing with software, there's going to be a lot of judgement and nuance necessary for building good UIs. Data structures, back-end infra, can all be alien and still work. But your UI can't be alien.
sebasmart 4mo ago
You’re right that automation has historically expanded what we can build. But the real work of software engineering isn’t coding. It’s architecting solutions: defining the problem, making trade-offs, and designing for maintainability and change. That’s significantly harder to automate, and I explained why in another reply on this thread. Even if AI becomes competent at engineering (my two-part series covers what “System Definition” would be needed to get there), it still has a deeper limitation: AI is a consensus machine. It excels at recombining what’s already known and rewarded. Paradigm shifts and black swans almost always come from people willing to challenge the current consensus, which is exactly what AI consensus tends to suppress. That’s the real risk to technological progress: how do we move in new directions when AI defaults to following the majority view from past experience? https://hackernoon.com/who-dares-to-be-the-first-cassandras-problem-in-the-age-of-ai-consensus https://hackernoon.com/who-dares-to-be-the-first-cassandras-...
rstuart4133 4mo ago
The feeling I get is LLM's are the new Excel. I've seen lots of people develop little web based apps that tickle their interest. Things like dashboards for data that would didn't fit on their phone, table tennis scoring (really!), small account keeping apps, plotting calculated GPS path on a map. These are tiny single use stuff. Exactly the sort of thing the company nerd would create spreadsheets for. The GUI is more advanced, but it is no more maintainable or scalable.

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
  We're talking about things like a flashlight app on your phone with a subscription and that requests every system permission available, or the ten trillion todo apps.
- LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
  Haven't played them personally since the double whammy of the Zynga playbook and the pandemic of DLC. But I have been building my own games to play that are free of these infestations. The enshittification surrounds us and penetrates us. Edit: Yes, I see, as a former gamer and game developer, I am unemploying myself by creating games with AI to play myself instead of ennriching the pockets of Gabe Newell and other billionaires, hence the downvote.
JimDabell 4mo ago
When I use any moderately complex piece of software, for instance a word processor, the UI is stacked full of things I don’t use, making it less convenient for me to use. At the same time, simple features that would be useful to me are not present. Software is currently aimed at the highest common factor so that it appeals to as many people as possible, which paradoxically makes it suboptimal for everybody. If I wanted to build something that is specific to my needs, this would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Even today with all the latest models – even if what I want is relatively mundane. To add on to that, what would be produced would be ideal for me but less ideal for other people. Other people need things that I don’t, and they don’t need things that I do. And people’s needs change over time. So the actual range of software that there is appetite for is the result of a huge combinatorial explosion of features, for every single type of application out there. The appetite you are thinking is satisfied today is merely “there is an app that does X” but the appetite that is actually present once we are able to create software much more efficiently is more along the lines of “everybody gets their own custom app that does X”. I don’t think the appetite for software can be quenched until we have just-in-time feature generation. That is definitely not within present day capabilities.
- jayd16 4mo ago
  Part of the reason software ate the world is standardized tooling. Going back to everyone having completely bespoke ways of doing things would be a nightmare.
Rooster61 4mo ago
This has very little to do with the actual demand for good software though. People very much still want good software that works. The issue is the group of people in the industry that have learned they can push blasphemously useless crap, charge a premium, and have people be forced to consume it due to poor governance over market practices (monopolies, blatantly anti-consumer features, etc).

basch 4mo ago

>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 Or humans are relegated to the co-processor role. The AI does 99% of the thinking and work and consults the human for the 1% it needs. Whether that extra contribution is essentially a random number generation, creativity / outside the box input, or esoteric problem solving remains to be seen.

JimDabell 4mo ago
This is called a “reverse centaur”.

vitally3643 4mo ago

I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious. The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects. The overwhelming trend in commercial software these past few decades has been hyper-aggressive anti-customization, anti-personalization, anti-user. Commercial software has been reduced to one single happy path and if that doesn't suit your needs, then fuck off. No one is making commercial software for everyday people. Even open source is trending away from everyday users. Soon, regular everyday people who simply need some software to solve a problem the way they want it solved will have the ability to do so. In the bast majority of those cases, the quality and correctness of said software really doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform.

LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
I do this already scraping web sites for descriptions of what they provide and then tell the agent to build the part I want and nothing more. There's a lot broken about the web and software today that can be addressed by these agents. Just getting a newsfeed of news I want to read free of the mandatory click and enrage bait would be progress for me IMO. But I'd never ship a product that did that because of how Google treated ad-blockers on chrome.
zeroonetwothree 4mo ago
This has "why pay for Dropbox" vibes.
- corndoge 4mo ago
  I am tired of reading this comment
  - mattbettinson 4mo ago

epochbtc 4mo ago

My opinion throughout this AI revolution of the past few years is: appetite for software is insatiable. AI tooling will 3x-10x the output and sophistication of software but will not meaningfully decrease employment over the long haul, except perhaps in legacy or not-forward-thinking organizations.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

rkozik1989 4mo ago

"The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far." Yeah, I don't that does not necessarily mean everyone is looking for the latest and greatest. Many businesses are still reliant on technologies like custom spreadsheets and Microsoft Access because they do exactly what they want them to do, have a fixed rate, and rarely require any additional modifications/maintenance. Once you step outside of the bubble so many of us are stuck in you'll realize that many, many people aren't interested in upgrades, but rather they just want the old shit they know to just work.

vanuatu 4mo ago
that kind of implies theres a ton of room for progress right? imagine if we got new shit that worked better
- packetlost 4mo ago
  That violates the worse is better principle which has held true since the inception of software. Switching costs are real. It's not that hard to make an improvement, but it's very hard to make an improvement that justifies the cost in both money and time.
  - vanuatu 4mo ago
    i think my point stands clearly we were able to keep making improvements! the ceiling is nowhere near reached yet
nitwit005 4mo ago
The classic pattern is they become a larger company, and either those processes stop working well, or a custom solution becomes worthwhile due to scale. The row count limit in Excel has been hit many times over the years.

amelius 4mo ago

> at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things. But that puts 90% of developers out of a job. And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.

poidos 4mo ago
It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.
- SecretDreams 4mo ago
  How much does the appetite for good* software need to grow to not have loss of jobs?
- aurareturn 4mo ago
  Exactly. I see software engineering going the way of accounting or lawyer. Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies, employing a software dev was simply not a thing. Nowadays, your kindergarten might employ a full time or part time software engineer to build custom software. One dev can build a lot more a lot faster. That said, I think the average or below average dev won’t earn $200k/year anymore. However, the top devs will earn more than ever. If AI increases an average dev’s productivity by 10x, then it will increase a top tier dev’s by 100x.
  - euwuw 4mo ago
    “ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ” No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.
    - aurareturn 4mo ago
      It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before: 1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own. 2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more. I’m in the #2 camp right now. My team shrank by 50% through attrition in the last year. We didn’t hire anyone new when someone left. My pay has increased.

tossandthrow 4mo ago

Quite a few developers will likely loose their jobs. In particular the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models - the ones who are forever junior. The engineers who can manage large scale projects using agents will, on the other hand, probably get a hefty salary bump.

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
I've worked in many places on many teams and never met anyone that essentially does nothing besides write code... I question the obsession engineers have with their "code writing" being replaced by a machine. Do you really think that's the value you bring to the table? Non-engineers don't want to sit down and think about anything, they don't want to sit down and test that thinks actually work, they don't want to think about all the failure cases that could go wrong besides a few shallow tests, and they definitely don't want to have to pick up the mess if something does go wrong... This is what you get paid to do. Coding is a small part of that.
- tossandthrow 4mo ago
  You are on point: The developers of the future need to hold much more of the domain that is being developed for. It is not a job to write JSX and tailwind classes anymore, so you need to move up in abstraction - and complexity. Not all can do that.
allajfjwbwkwja 4mo ago
> the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models Those people don't exist.
- tossandthrow 4mo ago
  Sure they do - there are a lot of people who thrive working with concrete technologies and solve relatively straight forward issues (implement this component - style work). These people will see a brutal job market that is forcing them to take more responsibility and work at a higher level of abstraction. This is nothing new - A bunch of people simply don't thrive well as knowledge workers. The bar for being a knowledge worker is going to go up - by a lot.

reinitctxoffset 4mo ago

In every regime where we have meaningful longitudinal data about the long run outcomes of introducing technology that is superhuman at some or all of a human's job, the combination of the machine and an expert human outperforms either alone, with probably the clearest parallel structurally being chess, though this is true of all of the hard sciences and all of frontier engineering (semiconductor design). There will never be a human who can beat Stockfish ever again, digital intelligence has simply accelerated away from human intelligence in that regime. There is no other human alive who can beat Magnus Carlsen. Stockfish crushes Magnus. But Magnus and Stockfish playing together crush any conceivable combination of just human or just computer. And no serious chess player would train without a computer or decline the assist if the contest mattered. And this is in a regime where the dominance of the machine is total, structural, and permanent, far more so than any existing AI's impact on the outcome distribution of any recent development on any white-collar knowledge work include even the most sophisticated software engineering done anywhere. The demonstrated as opposed to completely conjectural lift on SWE outcomes with Claude Code (and even that's controversial, let's take the high end of the claims) is real and changes the geometry of the situation not at all. Nor is there any apparent limit on how much arbitrarily sophisticated software the world has an appetite for, you could take someone at the absolute top of the field (I'm a big Carmack fan let's go with Carmack), and give him cutting edge AI assist, and the best program a person can write just got better. Sweet! And this applies anywhere from junior to Carmack: however good they were, they're better now. We can build harder things. We can have extreme quality software where previously we were stuck with some Electron jank, across the board. Does anyone think Slack would lose market share if it went back to its gaming roots and was gorgeously 3D accelerated on every surface against a backend that could instant and perfectly synchronize an arbitrary workspace on a flakey cell connection and never have an outage or data loss? Or would they rapidly shred the remaining competition and become the favored tool of everyone? In adversarial regimes like trading or drone warfare, you better believe the best hackers have arbitrary assist if you're going to play against them. I think the thing to be hand-wringing about isn't AI, it's that capitalism no longer seems to be an adversarial regime. The worst software rivalries in the industry look more like a pillow fight than a battle of will. And if there is any lasting reduction in headcount, it's leaders lacking ambition agreeing tacitly to not play very hard, not AI, that is to blame for that. None of the HFT shops nor amusingly the frontier labs have reduced their hiring or compensation at all. If anything, it's going up!

Brendinooo 4mo ago

>e.g. front-end web development It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want. I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.

tracerbulletx 4mo ago
Yeah everyone thinks its great at the things they don't personally know that much about or appreciate and I think it's kind of embarrassing to proclaim its going to do someone else's speciality great but not theirs and just reveals an underlying ignorance.
- technomoloch 4mo ago
  I'm solidly a generalist, I custom create designs for products and implement them, and also work on backends and large scale production ml systems. I would actually have to agree with the person you are replying to - simply because backends are text problems, (an LLMs domain), and frontends are visual - llms are just still not quite as good at seeing details as humans, whereas they can scan a large codebase for possible problems much faster than any human could. Both areas need careful supervision and feedback loops, adversarial reviews etc - but for the frontend, I find myself having to do much more manual work actually checking myself, because an llm just doesn't get symmetry if it doesn't perfectly correlate to margin being 16px on both sides of a box, etc, ie symmetry you can see in code. Or whether a design "feels" nice to look at, etc. But with backend, you give it proper guidance to create tests, do benchmarking, follow sane design patterns, etc, and its very effective.
- JimDabell 4mo ago
  I’ve been writing front-end code for more than a quarter of a century. I can assure you I’m not saying this because I’m unfamiliar with the field.

seydor 4mo ago

You can't expect that timeline to continue forever. AI is a whole different beast than programming. It is in fact what programming set out to be in the 1940s: A replica of the brain. Automating programming tasks has only gotten us so far, but that timeline is probably ending now. We no longer need to automate programming because we can talk to the machine.

zero_shift 4mo ago

> 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 It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores. There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static. In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w35275.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...) Their analysis is on pg42-43 > they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite. Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?

nicoburns 4mo ago
> There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static. Isn't the likely explanation for this that the updraft is a huge number of sloppy AI-generated apps that nobody wants to use because they're just bad?
- pzo 4mo ago
  You also need to have time to play all those great games, watch all those great shows and read all those books. There is a lot of software that are constrained by human eyeballs (entertainment or ads monetized)
TheDong 4mo ago
> money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Right now, people pay all sorts of money for real interactions with real people, most notably friendship and dating. Tiktok has done a good job at starting to disrupt this, but with AI and better VR technology, maybe we can finish the job and disrupt all human relationships, all romantic relationships, all friendships. It's a huge addressable market (all humans), and if even just 5% of all humans buy a $5 virtual coffee (free to produce, pure profit) for their AI partner each day, that would be a massive increase in software spend. Once we hit "The Matrix", that'll mean software has nowhere left to go.

coldtea 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. Anytime we became more productive in the past we become in a way that didn't remove engineers, just increased the abstraction an engineer would work in. And we did it at times of rapid expansion of computing and internet, meaning way more need for engineers counter-balancing the increased productivity. >The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. Has it? The expansion of IT has reached global saturation, we're getting desparate, and try to push shit like Blockchain and IoT, and shoving "smart" features even where people don't want them. And the world is full of software nobody or very few care for or use/subscribe/buy. App Store have huge "long tails" of stuff nobody cares for. And with autonomous agents we designed something to replace the engineer altogether. So even if the demand for software increases, that can be like "spawn more agents" not "get more developers". Some human supervisors per N agents? Sure. Equal human demand as what's now? Unlikely. In general "we did it 5 times, to we'll surely do it 6" is not a real argument, just a hope that something will never end.

Aefiam 4mo ago

Even if the budget for software development were to stay constant, if an ever increasing part of it is spent on llm usage, it will reduce the money left for developers, resulting in mass layoffs and/or mass salary cuts.

s_dev 4mo ago

>Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. Jervons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Lutger 4mo ago

We all tend to assume AI will only ever be good at the execute part, but what if AI will also be good at decide-deliver? What if some day, we could put AI in charge of not only running a company, but coming up with a business idea, getting funded, driving sales, pivoting until product-market fit and then scaling? Who would profit from such a company?

dron57 4mo ago
The capital backing it would profit. Your scenario is a real doom loop of runaway capital building up without any corresponding returns to human labour. See Thomas Picketty and his “Capital in the 21st Century”.

pzo 4mo ago

> 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. Not all software but how many movies you can watch, books read? Similarly how many games you can play? How many ads you can watch during a day? Eventually projects will have to be profitable. And even if everybody will make a great game most of them won’t be profitable because you competing for limited eyeballs time

foolserrandboy 4mo ago
4 day work week could help with this like weekends help sell more automobiles.

YtMtBt 4mo ago

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empath75 4mo ago

> We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. I used to work at an overnight NOC many years ago, and I literally learned bash and python just to save time so I could spend more time watching netflix or whatever instead of working. Instead, my scripts handled so many alerts that they laid off someone and gave me a promotion to being a sys admin :( I've been chasing the dream of automating my job away and collecting a paycheck for doing nothing for decades now, and I keep getting promoted...

_diyar 4mo ago

Your argument holds across the supply-curve of software-engineering-skills. However, there must be some threshold where a previously employed dev is now sol because AI+Human outcompetes him (ie the supply curve has shifted, and the point they used to occupy is not unprofitable)

ChrisLTD 4mo ago

I agree with most of what you're saying, but it's also funny that front-end developers are catching strays in your conclusion. As long as human beings are interfacing with software, there's going to be a lot of judgement and nuance necessary for building good UIs. Data structures, back-end infra, can all be alien and still work. But your UI can't be alien.

sebasmart 4mo ago

You’re right that automation has historically expanded what we can build. But the real work of software engineering isn’t coding. It’s architecting solutions: defining the problem, making trade-offs, and designing for maintainability and change. That’s significantly harder to automate, and I explained why in another reply on this thread. Even if AI becomes competent at engineering (my two-part series covers what “System Definition” would be needed to get there), it still has a deeper limitation: AI is a consensus machine. It excels at recombining what’s already known and rewarded. Paradigm shifts and black swans almost always come from people willing to challenge the current consensus, which is exactly what AI consensus tends to suppress. That’s the real risk to technological progress: how do we move in new directions when AI defaults to following the majority view from past experience? https://hackernoon.com/who-dares-to-be-the-first-cassandras-problem-in-the-age-of-ai-consensus https://hackernoon.com/who-dares-to-be-the-first-cassandras-...

rstuart4133 4mo ago

The feeling I get is LLM's are the new Excel. I've seen lots of people develop little web based apps that tickle their interest. Things like dashboards for data that would didn't fit on their phone, table tennis scoring (really!), small account keeping apps, plotting calculated GPS path on a map. These are tiny single use stuff. Exactly the sort of thing the company nerd would create spreadsheets for. The GUI is more advanced, but it is no more maintainable or scalable.