Obs.: I’m using “[REDACTED]” to not look like I’m doing some advertising.
Sorry to bring AI subject here, but I’m terrified by how efficient AI generation code became in the past few years.
Last year I was seeing a designer community with desperate people because of AI generative images, many people hopeless because how more convenient it is, way more than paying for a freelance to do something reasonable.
Now I’m with the same feeling as a programmer. I just decided to take a look into AI a little deeper, as I don’t use it very often. So I tried the recent [REDACTED] editor, which is just [REDACTED] with AI agent features (an AI that does more than just generate text, it create files, make decisions etc…). And I must say, programming jobs will be reduced a lot.
The app was able to do a entire module of a side project, integrating with another API and following the same conventions I did. It worked in the first try. It created all the files and everything.
Many people bring this argument: AI won’t replace devs, we’ll always need devs to check code etc. Ok, I agree with that, but if before we needed 5 devs to do a job, now we just need 1 to revise all the job an AI did alone equivalent to 5 devs programming.
So, there’s no way it won’t impact the devs market. I’m being optimistic here, because the future is still unclear, but if it keeps the same rate we can reduce the dev jobs to near zero.
This is what every executive always wanted, get rid of devs, and now they can. Devs were always an inconvenience to executives, but they couldn’t get the job done without devs.
Now they can focus all money on AI research until it gets nearly perfect, reduce the skill needed to deal with code and build projects without too much knowledge, and get rid of many devs too.
It’s undeniable that AI jobs WILL be affected in a negative way. I’m seriously considering leaving this area and use programming just as a hobby, nothing more.
My company dabbles in AI. A hardly abridged conversation with a bot I’ve read recently:
Hallo, Ich bin ein Bot. Wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?
(Hi, I’m a bot. How can I help you?)Speak English, please.
Gerne antworte ich in Englisch. Wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?
(I’m happy to speak English. How may I help you?)Caller disconnected
Yep, AI definitely is the future.
I deny your undeniability. Prove it by showing a real application vibe-coded, something useful that is not yet another electron POS. And where are all the bugs fixed in open-source projects? I have asked this question a hundred times.
Curl is spammed by fake bug reports for example.
Every AI user has something to sell but nothing to show. Make a difference for once.
AI won’t. Executives who drink the koolaid will.
I don’t share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn’t how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you’ll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I’m doubtful that that’s around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there’s no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.
Nah. They’ll all be needed to clean up the inevitable mess.
In any technology career, you are going to have to adapt to changes in technology. We went through the same transition from writing machine code to writing object oriented code. And from writing monoliths to writing micro services. You may not write code letter by letter the same way you used to. But your ability to adapt is your real value, not the code you can type from memory.
AI code generators still need very clear directions. They need guidelines and restrictions. They need architectural designs and decision making. They need code review. We still need the experience of qualified people, we just don’t need you to be the one typing out every letter. Delegate that part to the AI and up level your contribution.
It’s a problem when people just generate the code, see if it runs, maybe test it once or twice, and… That’s it.
Same issue with people blindly copying Stack Overflow and other code snippets on the web.
Like you say, the value we bring is in our review and understanding of the code, as well as our ability to make judgements on things like architecture.
Low code
AIwill reduce programming jobs a lot, it’s madness to deny it.Low code is a real practical way to increase developer productivity. And some of the current tools achieve exactly that already.
Of course, that usually lead to a increase on the number of jobs. The AI people want to believe it will completely replace developers, what can only lead to fewer jobs.
Brandon Sanderson talked about it in the context art, “Making art with AI doesn’t make you an artist, it makes you an art director.” People who only understand grunt level coding work are at risk. The work in the future will require higher level skill sets in engineering, architecture, and project management.
Well, I think I agree with you a bit.
My story: six years ago in France I followed a three months cours to become a fullstack dev.
We were two or three out of twenty to know some basic stuff about programmation. There rest were smart people but without knowledge about computer at all.
The job market was so hungry for dev, that even us found a job immediately.
But I saw that some of my colleagues were ‘not good’. And I think that they can be replaced at some point by Nocode/lowcode tools, or by a dev that use LLM.
But at the same time, like said @6nk06@sh.itjust.works that something to write some code from scratch, and something else to develop a software on the long run.
Eventually, I expect that advanced AI will. The same is true for many human professions. But I’m dubious that pure LLMs will be the route this takes. Too many limitations.
It’s possible that such an advanced AI might make use of or incorporate LLMs.
It’s only used as a minor tool in real-life, non-faked projects. A tool that’s very expensive and rarely of objective usage. As soon as the bubble pops, the market will essentially wipe it out.
