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Do we yet have actual, irrefutable evidence of SWE job losses attributable to successful implementation of LLM coding agents? They've been around long enough a

Do we yet have actual, irrefutable evidence of SWE job losses attributable to successful implementation of LLM coding agents? They've been around long enough and management has been horny enough about the whole thing long enough that we should be able to point to some notable examples.

ex-aws-dude 2mo ago
Literally none yet people keep stating it like it’s fact Every layoff just automatically attributed to AI even though they have nothing to do with it
antinomicus 2mo ago
So far my experience has been management shoving ai haphazardly down the throats of any semi technical person across the board, resulting in a fragmented hodgepodge of vibe coded frameworks and “ai apps” that pile on more requirements for more human attention to make those apps at least look superficially functional to management, than actual reductions in man hours saved by those vibe coded crApps. I believe wholeheartedly that things like Claude code bring immense value but to management types they aren’t visible enough to prove their “ai first” narratives resulting in a bunch of crap they have us build that look and seem smart but in fact are just slop we have to deal with the consequences of. Good for job security I guess, but I’m getting pretty tired of it all.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago
  So far I'm finding that in a good subset of my regular work Claude can be pretty useful and will speed me up. But I also drive it with a heavy hand. Strong expectations, I know what I want, what success looks like, and I steer it to give me that. Conversely, the product guys I work with are adept at producing proof-of-concept tools that look really good. Fake data, runs entirely in a browser, but conveys their goals way more specifically than Balsamiq ever good. And I think this is a great use case for Claude. But what ain't happening here is product guys producing code that would go directly into production. And even if it could, they're not in a position to provide tech support or debugging when it breaks, so they don't want to be in that position anyway. Nobody can really predict the future very well, it seems, but my personal best guess is that we end up moving the boundaries of what we work on and how, but the need for humans isn't going to go down. As magic as LLMs look sometimes, I constantly run into reminders of how much it relies on how I phrase a prompt when it delivers any kind of answer. That influence really drives how satisfying the results are.
danans 2mo ago
I've seen examples of non-hiring: new teams that are staffed at half or quarter the headcount that they would have before LLMs. Are those job losses? Maybe not. But they are much lower hiring relative to the amount of software engineering output.

ex-aws-dude 2mo ago

Literally none yet people keep stating it like it’s fact Every layoff just automatically attributed to AI even though they have nothing to do with it

antinomicus 2mo ago

So far my experience has been management shoving ai haphazardly down the throats of any semi technical person across the board, resulting in a fragmented hodgepodge of vibe coded frameworks and “ai apps” that pile on more requirements for more human attention to make those apps at least look superficially functional to management, than actual reductions in man hours saved by those vibe coded crApps. I believe wholeheartedly that things like Claude code bring immense value but to management types they aren’t visible enough to prove their “ai first” narratives resulting in a bunch of crap they have us build that look and seem smart but in fact are just slop we have to deal with the consequences of. Good for job security I guess, but I’m getting pretty tired of it all.

rootusrootus 2mo ago
So far I'm finding that in a good subset of my regular work Claude can be pretty useful and will speed me up. But I also drive it with a heavy hand. Strong expectations, I know what I want, what success looks like, and I steer it to give me that. Conversely, the product guys I work with are adept at producing proof-of-concept tools that look really good. Fake data, runs entirely in a browser, but conveys their goals way more specifically than Balsamiq ever good. And I think this is a great use case for Claude. But what ain't happening here is product guys producing code that would go directly into production. And even if it could, they're not in a position to provide tech support or debugging when it breaks, so they don't want to be in that position anyway. Nobody can really predict the future very well, it seems, but my personal best guess is that we end up moving the boundaries of what we work on and how, but the need for humans isn't going to go down. As magic as LLMs look sometimes, I constantly run into reminders of how much it relies on how I phrase a prompt when it delivers any kind of answer. That influence really drives how satisfying the results are.

danans 2mo ago

I've seen examples of non-hiring: new teams that are staffed at half or quarter the headcount that they would have before LLMs. Are those job losses? Maybe not. But they are much lower hiring relative to the amount of software engineering output.