I doubt it, the narrative is that software engineering is dead and everything will be replaced by AI, so that salaries can continue to be depressed. Just like the original passing didn't really cause much trouble in the general market this repeal will mostly just produce more shareholder value.
ive been coding 5+ hours a day almost every day for 15 years. i think ai will replace 70% of SWE in the near future. not employement, but 70% of the current work done by engineers
I don’t even spend 70% of my time coding. I suspect that’s common and looking at data it’s more like 25% on average. So even if it replaces 100% of coding (unlikely) that’s the extent of the gain.
Agreed, seems it's a great day if I get close to 50% of coding time. The rest is various meetings, communication, and code review.
And even with reviews you can currently plausibly automate only the code correctness check part, the juicy part of reviews is always manual testing of the change and doing the logical reasoning if the change is doing a meaningful thing. And no, the ticket with the spec is not a reliable source of this info for an LLM as it's always just a partial understanding of the concept.
Some of my biggest productivity gains with llms come from areas that aren’t coding. Research, summation, communication and operational issues have all seen pretty dramatic improvements for me when adding llms.
I don’t think ai will replace the career of software development but I do think the tools we will be using to to it will be dramatically different.
Agreed. I see AI as a major tool upgrade in the same way the IDE was an upgrade from text editors. It will quickly replace the need to do trivial things and greatly reduce the time needed to do complex things.
And I agree. Because ultimately we don’t need that much code in the first place. We need robust data sets.
AI models will enable the data driven machine state dream. Chips that self improve models will boot strap from them and rely on humans to iteratively improve updates.
Coding like it’s 1970 in the 2020s and beyond is not that high tech.
At which point you're potentially looking at Jevon's Paradox.
Software developers do X and Y. AI thing can now do X, so it's used for that, and it's cheaper, so the number of projects increase because you get more demand at a lower price. Those projects each need someone to do Y.
Either we have wildly different difficulty levels at our jobs or this is bs. I tried the agents (I get access to basically all state of the art from my company) and they still have all the same issues of agents from a year back. Each step gets more chaotic and the end result is always that I end up reverting the over complicated mess it made and writing it myself. One-offs with lots of context still sometimes work.
Even a perfect eval loop like failing tests end up 80% of the time with them creating something way too complicated since they solve one visible but not root issue at a time and build on top of that hacky foundation until again I end up reverting it all
Yeah - that’s the hard part now - dialing things down to eliminate the divergent paths the AI can take to implement what you want.
You can tell it “implement feature X” and it’ll go and do whatever’s easiest for it, often something dumb, that’s when people usually think “it’s dumb, won’t replace devs” and give up. Or you can nail down your requirements by talking to it and describing what you’re looking for, often it comes back with things you hadn’t considered or ways of doing things you didn’t know. Then just tell it “implement this SDD” and watch it one shot it in an hour or so.
There’s also pain points - some languages like Swift have changed so often and there’s little open source code to train on out there, so it’s on the worse side if you do iOS development.
It’s a new skill that needs working at, but in the end your output is significantly increased.
> in the end your output is significantly increased.
The claim you're arguing against is that AI will replace software engineering as a discipline. Seems like you're instead saying that it will increase developer productivity, which no one disagrees with.
Well yeah, if you have one senior with the power of 2-3 AI agents - you don’t need juniors or sometimes mid developers at all. Let’s say you’re Whatsapp and your 20 people develop the app, well now you need 5 at most for the same workload.
Obviously we’re not yet at the point where the CEO can enter “build me the next Uber” in Claude Code and watch the stock price go up.
I'd love to get access to codebases made entirely with agentic coding that people deem a success. Everything they've suggested for me beyond trivial work has been wildly overcomplicated.
I am overemployed with 3 dev jobs at once. AI is writing virtually all my code and letting me nap all day. Eventually that will end once people see the power of them.
Changes like this may have an impact on employment but it’s impossible to observe the results in a vacuum.
Given that most large companies are towing the “AI means less jobs required” line, it seems likely that this will, at best, modestly slow the rate at which companies divest themselves of software developers.
I cant see any reasonable reason, in a broader context, this would have a meaningful impact.
(Yeah yeah, AI means more jobs one day maybe, but right now that is categorically not true, and the future is always pure speculation, but in the near term, the impact of this seems like it probably wont be material to me; maybe a small reduction in the number of layoffs)
> I cant see any reasonable reason, in a broader context, this would have a meaningful impact.
A significant amount of software dev employment is in startups. Companies that are spending on development, but aren't making much money yet, will see a huge benefit from this. The change in tax liability could mean a single seed or series A round paying for an extra 1-2 devs.
