Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
Coding is just a part of the overall “programming” problem. Most problematic areas are in translating what the customer wants into code (requirements analysis), modifying code to overcome specific constraints, integration, etc and etc
Don’t forget testing the code to make sure what is delivered actually matches what the customer wants.
They’re probably gonna laugh at the absurdity of the situation because some new popular language will come along and the AI will be back to pushing out broken code. That, or laugh because the code in well used languages will include a shit ton of vulnerabilities that wouldn’t be present if real devs had to double check code before pushing it out to the public.
back
When did it ever not push out broken code?
In this hypothetical situation?
In this hypothetical, why would we create new languages? What benefit does that have for AI-gen code?
So either we’re going to improve AI-gen to the point where we rely on it, or human devs are still important in which case new languages matter. The main exception here are languages specifically designed for AI, in which case error-rate would go down.
So either AI pushes out broken code and human devs are still important, or AI doesn’t push out broken code and new languages aren’t valuable.
I think both can happen at the same time. There’s a lot of fkn nerds out there. (I’m a software developer myself)
Retire. All I ever wanted to be was a programmer. If I can’t do that anymore I’ll just retire. I’m saving/investing every penny I can just in case.
Same. If I can retire before my job is irrelevant, I’ll work on my own projects on my own terms. If I don’t, at least I have a nice pile of assets and can coast with another job.
That said, I don’t think people like you and I will have problems, because we’ll adapt. It’s the “programming is just a job” crowd that would have a lot of issues.
Fixing broken software some robot pushed to prod
I’m not a programmer, but I don’t think I’d pay for code that was 95% accurate. That sounds buggy af
I am a programmer, and I also wouldn’t stand for that either. We also introduce bugs and are probably around that 95% rate, but at least we know the most important uses are correct and the person who introduced them can usually fix them quickly. With AI, there’s no guarantee where the bugs will occur.
You don’t have to pay for it. The billionaires do, and they will do it without hesitation
Finally free from the Golden Handcuffs, I’d use my extra time to do something I’ve always wanted, like music production, which would also inevitably be taken over by AI.
Ai-herder or Robot-farmer or Llama-raiser etc etc
devs still needed to ensure code is sane and not some insane hallucination.
Writing code is last thing you want to do as senior SWE because every line of code is potential debt and maintenence problem.
The just write code bro, figure out things later attitude is good for R&D, MVP and POC that is like 10% of job.Just like with art, writing code like drawing is just a skill. AI is trying to replace the obvious part (that is actually the reward from thinking and describing problem in your head) because it can’t replace thinking. Removing rewards bring us to depression, depression bring us to death.
Ergo AI will kill economy with no people left to replace it so we will end up to being monkas.
That’s why I’d say SWE will go to farm and wait untill people in cities will start starving to death because AI stopped working and there is nobody left to fix it.It’s funny how all trends extrapolated out lead to the plot of Idiocracy.
I am starting to believe that current “AI” is way for corporate to gatekeep the knowledge and as you said lead us to idiocracy. On the other hand people always amaze me on how they can collectively find the way out from these situations and turn the cards to their side. So there is always hope.
Honestly people are getting distracted here. Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive thats a huge boost for smaller companies with only handful of developers.
Many companies are only thinking about reducing costs for themselves but at the same time they’re freeing up a lot of talent for new and old competitors.
Here’s some food for thought:
- Open source developers may use A.I to develop better software to close gap between paid alternatives. (Blender, Gimp, Krita, Linux distributions, mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed)
- Many LLM’s can already be ran freely and locally. These will only get better as technology progresses. This can make selling/profiting from A.I services a lot harder
- A.I may be used to block ads or obfuscate (create bunch of fake data) user data that is sold to advertisers.
- Some media sites are already using A.I to write articles. Whats the point when users may just use chatbot to get all the information without ever engaging with the source.
These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.
Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive
That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.
Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.
The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful.
This glorified parrot tool of LLMs is one of the coolest we have seen in awhile, but it’s not going to materially fix the awful state of the field of software development.
The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.
AI may mildly improve the delivery timelines of the still very incorrect and over-budget solutions delivered by the average development team.
That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.
Yes the value is wildly optimistic to match the expectations driven by all the hype from these companies pushing their LLM services.
Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.
The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful. The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.
You’re oversimplifying things here there are a lot more variables that influence success in software projects. The company you work for might have oversold the project, the client might only have vague understanding of what they really want, project management may fail to keep the costs, developers or timeline in check, client or the company you work for might have high employee turnover causing delays as new employees need proper induction to the project, the initial tech stack may become deprecated or obsolete mid-way the project, etc
You’re oversimplifying things here there are a lot
I think… we’re agreeing?
My point is that what is currently possible with AI doesn’t solve any of that.
People in this thread keep discussing growth in programmer productivity as if programmer typing speed and number of languages known are the limiting factors of programmer productivity. They are not. It’s all the other bullshit that makes (the vast majority of) programming projects fail.
My source: I know so many programming languages and I type insanely fast. My team is also productive beyond all reason. These two tidbits are only related in that I tried and failed with the first before succeeding with the second.
Same thing the rest of us replaced by AI are gonna do: live on the dole or starve
Once AI can develop code it can be used to improve itself in a feedback loop that would take short time to reach skynet.
We’d be the last of our species once it would want more resources than we’d be able to give it
There is a term but I forget but its something like ai-slop or ai collective hallucinations. If you feed enough ai-gen output back as ai input it becomes some insane garbage.
You seem like someone who hasn’t really worked in software development.
Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.
You’ll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
You have to understand what software can do, how to design it, and how it should interact with other systems in order to write software and not just code, and AI can’t do that. If you tell it to make you A, and what you really want is B, you’ll never get what you want.
Only about 10-20 percent of my job as a software engineer is writing code. AI can be really amazing at writing code, but unless it can do the other 80-90% of my job without me, I’ll be safe.
Now, whether middle and upper management will know this is an entirely different question. A lot of them think that lines of code written is a good measure of productivity, when in fact it’s often the opposite.
I foresee there being a big struggle for management to come to grips with the fact that AI is better suited at their job than ours.
My best days as a software dev are negative line days.
NegaSLOCS are the best SLOCS.
Hear, hear!
They’re just gonna sit around and wait a few months until they are begged to come back and can demand more compensation. The current generative AI, which is not general AI, will not be able to replace high functioning jobs. Eventually, a lot of those software engineers will be asked back and get much more for their services.
The plan is to rehire them back temporarily to babysit the AI and fix all the AI generated crap. Then realize it was cheaper to actually just have the devs make code. Then hire them back at a reduced rate on a more permanent basis with the understanding that they believe the code will still be partially generated by AI and cleaned up by the same people and they aren’t paying top tier for third hand AI slop.
