What are devs displaced by AI going to do in the future? Is there an actual plan?
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?
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.
That's still a lot of software engineers displaced in the hypothetical scenario. That means you only need the devops and qa engineers, and a solution architect or principal engineer or whatever your company calls that sort of role for the analysis and design part.
That will never happen, or at least with how ai currently works. It's basically a glorified autocorrect, it uses the same technology underneath.
But presuming it does, yes. We will have to go to another industry, like AI prompting. Coding is a tiny part of professional software development.
Yes, exactly this.
When compilers came along, some people honestly thought it would dumb down programming so much that anyone could do it.
When high level programming languages came along, they rejoiced again - now finally anyone can make software.
When Intellisense meat you no longer had to remember variable names, write your own imports and could guess how most libraries work, the bells rang out once again in celebration.
And now we have AI, it's cool but really just another step like all those steps before. For me, it's a replacement for the documentation I never read anyway. I can ask an AI a stupid question rather than bothering a human developer.
These days it's my job to manage a small team of developers - when I ask them why they wrote a stupid thing that makes no sense, 90% of the time, the answer is that an AI wrote it for them.
Glorified autocorrect... YES! It’s a really good analogy that i will use to temper the expectation of my boss. Also: AI hallucination is just a fancy way to say ’it’s a wrong answer’.
And if it's going to be full-blown AGI then we'll become AI psychologists.
I achieved the same in 2000 with a home grown framework, and again in 2006 with Ruby on Rails.
Astonishingly fast prototyping is a quarter of a centrury old.
Computers are replacing us. They've been at it since their inception.
Keep learning the trade and you'll find there's a metric ton more that computers cannot help with, than that they can help with. That will get better. I'm working at making it get better.
I figure that my learning how to train the computers is job security. I didn't count on it being a harsh lesson in how long it's going to be before computers get not stupid.
I do have a plan for when I automate myself out of a job. It's just not a plan I'm really counting on, because I've been trying for decades and I only have so many decades left of doing this.
I've been constantly advised to have an exit plan, for when the computers replaced me, for the entirety of those same decades.
Most often by the same people who want me to charge less.
Funny thing, that. Take care who you listen to on this topic, and what their motives are.
My motive is to (continue to) charge the rest of you a shit ton of money before the AI finally replace us.
It does help me if you all don't buy into the bullshit that CEOs have been spouting about replacing us all.
We've all been undercharging for about 3 years due to it.
AI hasn't accomplished jack shit, but a lot of you have accepted lower pay than you probably should.
I make very good money, but I can't help but notice that it would be a bit more, if the rest of you would wise to the scam and raise your own prices.
So your instincts are correct. You need to learn the rest of the job, before the part you are doing is replaced by robots.
We all use full blown AI development tools. Before that we had other tricks that did the same thing.
We must beware mistaking the instrument for the musician, or we get sold a broken old instrument that doesn't perform miracles outside it's master's hand.
What are you using to get Claude to write for you? I've been using it to write a full stack Go/javascript app but it needs a lot of handholding.
There will always need to be a human operator to guide the machine.
I'm using Cursor. It's done some very impressive things for me. https://www.cursor.com/features
My best days as a software dev are negative line days.
Hear, hear!
If it is able to replace software devs, it's probably able to replace 95% of the jobs that require mainly using your brain.
Yeah it's being applied to software devs right now but it's already capable of replacing nearly every manager/supervisor in existence.
It can make schedules, direct tasks based on inventory, and balance a budget. Have a human backup available on call to fix hallucinations and you're golden.
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.
They've been doing the same thing in IT for decades, just replace AI with outsourcing.
Same in a lot of other industries too. This is literally how capitalism functions. This is how they reduce costs when they can't find any other way.
Except it is often more costly to do this in the long run, so it's a fiscally stupid move that corporations seem to make over and over again.
I think part of what perpetuates it is, the people making the decisions don't stay there long term, so they never really face the repercussions.
Some more stable places seem like they may have realized this though and keep things all or mostly in house.
Well if it can replace senior software engineers... Wouldn't it also be able to do almost all of the other jobs? Or are you referring to some specific future where AI advances massively, but robotics does not and handymen are still safe?
I'd say if all humans are unemployed, society would change massively. We can't really tell how that'd work. But if machines / AI do all jobs, get food on the table... I don't really know what other people would be doing. I think I'd relax and pursue a few hobbies and interests. Or it'd be some dystopia where humankind is oppressed by the machines and I'd fight for the resistance.
But regardless... In a world like that, money wouldn't work the way it does now. Neither would salaries for labor mean anything.
Yeah. In this wild scenario, only the people who can crack the robots security protocols, and reprogram them, will have any influence over society.
I promise to be a benevolent ruler.
Except Michael Bay will have to return to making Transformers movies full time. Sorry about that, in advance.
Or the people who own the robots and dictate their programming (/control them). That would be my concern. Unless they're sentient and make decisions completely on their own, they can be used to oppress people to other people's wishes. As it's the case with all (modern) technology. And currently AI isn't shaped by the people, but by a rich minority and big tech companies. And I see some issues with that, specifically, in the near future.
Agreed on all points.
That said, I am smarter than the asshole CEOs, and the current state of computer security is abysmal.
So there's still some hope that we are barreling toward my (mostly) benevolent reign over endless Michael Bay blockbuster summers.
Hopefully, for everyone's sake, reality will fall somewhere in between.
But joking aside, money isn't the only form of power. There aren't that many billionaires (compared to he rest of us) and a billionaire's influence is limited by what the rest of us will or won't do.
Lol. Yeah I get it. Though I still think the rich companies dictate a lot of things. They do a lot of lobbying and paying people to make sure it's not them who funds the majority of the country, they choose how much you pay for medication and everyday items, they choose to spy on everyone on the internet. Make you buy things you don't need, make housing prices subject to speculation. Make everyone addicted to their phone and spend like several hours a day with it. Separate society into filter bubbles. I think a lot of these things aren't liked by the people. Or are extremely unhealthy. Yet, they are a thing and never change. I think because some people will this into existance. Sure, they're far from being almighty. But it's enough control they have over everyone already.
And I think as they can use the internet as a tool for their interests (which had ultimately been invented to connect people), they could as well do the same with AI. I mean they train those models and choose in which ways they're biased. What the can and can not talk about. If that's paired with the surveillance tech, that's already inside of each smart TV, smart appliance or Alexa... It'll be kind of a dystopian scifi movie where someone else watches your steps all day, uses that to manipulate people... some kind of puppet master whom the bots really work for.
I'm really unsure. Sure, almost everything can be hacked. But does that really have an effect on the broader picture? Everytime I see some major hack, the next day it's business as usual and everything keeps working as it used to.
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.
There are a lot of dumb takes here in the comments
Developer displacement works the same way it does for any other technology
The problem is not that the job is eliminated but that fewer are needed per unit of output
My startup only has 4 engineers because we don't need 5
This trend will continue until the SV hiring bubble bursts
Even if we stipulate that, I’m not convinced it’s a big deal. The software field continues to grow like crazy and we can never find enough people to hire. If ai gets good enough to take the place of some of that hiring, fantastic!
Spend their days (and some nights) tweaking and refining AI prompts to get the stupid thing to generate the software that the dumbass product manager wants and the user does not.
You know....
Pretty much the same thing they do now.
Yeah. The whole job is figuring out just the right away to say "pretty please" to the computer. The ways it's done changes every decade or so. The fact that it's a huge pain in the ass has yet to change, in spite of decades of marketing promises.
Last time I used it the code it gave me wouldn't actually run. After 6 iterations and fixing the rest it kind of worked. In theory that should only get better but I'm not sold yet.
I would never have expected it to run, be shocked if it did. You use AI to get over humps, get new ideas and approaches. It's excellent for time saving in those cases.
AI isn't ready to replace coders, but it's quickly going to make a dent on the numbers needed.
Let me push back on this a bit - this belief comes from the assumption that I, as a hiring manager, need more team members because they can only type so fast.
My actual need for separate development team members is to achieve a bench depth of two people in each of the seven specializations necessary to keep my employer un-bankrupt. (My annual bonus is better if I somehow miraculously cover the 14 specializations necessary to make us never look like idiots. But these are wishes, not miracles.)
I don't currently see any sign that AI will ever materially affect the number of people I need to hire.
In contrast, the specific individuals I hire have massive impact on how many others I need to hire. One person with three specializations brings me massive savings.
But I pay my people to understand our organizational domains of expertise. LLMs don't bring any new understanding whatsoever into the organization.
I see your thought process there. But I'm not sure modern IDEs led to less devs. Time will tell but I just few most of this as vapor ware atm. Let's also look at the fact that chatgpt is hemmoriging money even with high price tiers. It is possible this just burns itself out.
I was going to learn how to give a really good handjob but the AI robots will probably take over that too.
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.
Welcome to being a luddite.
It's not actually about hating the progression of technology, it's realizing that your labor has been leveraged against you. You will not bear any of the true fruits, because your bosses will use the fruits of your labor to purchase the AI to replace you.
It's because the labor market is fucked and developers needed unions 20 years ago instead of thinking because they were "rockstars" and "made the big bucks" that they didn't need anybody else.
We wouldn't have to ask these kind of questions if the fruits of our labor were being equitably distributed.
Basically in the scenario described, this is what's happening to developers:
Unions in the us have ruined any interest in joining. Other countries have different imblementations. If I could start from scratch but laws favor the existing taking over.
This thread is full of people comparing OPs hypothetical about 10 years from now with last year's capability.
Will AI progress that fast? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It probably won't get that good, but it doesn't matter. If it gets as good as your average junior that's going to mean something like 100% increase in productivity, which means 50% as many jobs and that's going to be a BIG FUCKING DEAL.
Especially when it's going to be replacing a lot of other types of office workers. What kind of job is your average software dev going to transition to? Tech support? Not anymore. UI Designer? LOL. Manager? And who are you going to be managing?
If the US doesn't hit 15-20% unemployment in the next 10 years I'll eat my hat. I'll be eating it either way because I'll be starving to death.
There is a hard limitation on LLM, it doesn't and by definition can not have a criteria for truth, and unless something completely new emerges, it will never replace a junior, really. Some managers can be convinced that it did, but that will be a lie and the company that believes it will suffer.
It can transform some junior jobs for sure, some people might need to relearn some practices, there will probably be some shift in some methods, but unless something fundamentally new will appear, there is no way LLM will meaningfully replace meaningful amount of people
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.
Why would devs be displaced by an interactive search engine?
The same thing that devs displaced by all the CMSs are doing - their jobs, just with another tool in their toolkit.
You mean they haven't already?
Job security. It's 4d chess baby!
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.
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.
Someone still has to write the instructions. AI might not become a replacement for the engineer, but a more powerful compiler, that is still fed with code written by engineers.
Yeah, I agree that's the more likely scenario. People seem to worry way too much about AI, when it's really only going to replace junior devs, and only for short-sighted companies.
But I mean many people have already lost their job because AI automated it away.
True, and many people have lost jobs because something else automated it away, like toll booth workers, grocery clerks, and telephone switchers, and computers (i.e. people who would compute things by hand).
Jobs disappearing because technology advances is natural. It sucks for those impacted, but it's natural, and IMO it's only a problem of new jobs aren't created fast enough, or whole industries disappear. Fighting to keep jobs in spite of automation runs the risk of having an entire industry disappear, such as if dock workers win the fight to prevent automation on the docks, they'll just all lose their jobs at the same time once automation can replace them all at once.
The better plan is to adjust and adapt as technology changes. If you're entering CS or a recent grad, make sure you understand concepts and focus less on syntax. If you're a mid level, learn to incorporate AI into your workflow to improve productivity. If you're a senior, work toward becoming an architect and understand how to mitigate risks with poor quality code.
Fighting AI will at best delay things.
I think both can happen at the same time. There's a lot of fkn nerds out there. (I'm a software developer myself)
Riot.
How's that working for everyone in the USA? How many "riots" or protests have we done that yield nothing?
https://stacker.com/business-economy/30-victories-workers-rights-won-organized-labor-over-years
Here's a half decent starting point.
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
Homemade pornography, obviously.
But actually, I'll limit myself to fixing deployment pipelines, correcting business specification mistakes, helping business leaders understand how computers work at all, mitigating moderate security issues, and finding a new job when the unmitigated severe security issues drive my employer bankrupt.
So essentially, exactly how I spend my day today, but with less typing.
And more nude photography, of course.
All the parts of my job that make me want to shoot myself? Pass. Fortunately I have no such fear of AI.
Fixing broken software some robot pushed to prod
Ultimately we need to prepare for a future where the majority of jobs have been automated and need a way to keep the economy going. Everyone being employed full time is just something that is not sustainable on the long term as technology progresses. We'll eventually need UBI because otherwise all the money will be transferred to nearly fully automated companies controlling basically everything. We just won't be able to keep everyone employed without creating a massive amount of bullshit jobs nobody really wants to do. The better way is UBI and people going into research or creative works, and aim higher like space travel.
We're not quite ready yet and people are way too invested in capitalism for this to work just yet. But it will become a necessity eventually. It's not just affecting IT, it's affecting all sectors: we can basically 3D print houses now, we're not far off automating farming either. We will reach a point where most of society has been automated, we can feed everyone effortlessly.
Ai-herder or Robot-farmer or Llama-raiser etc etc
devs still needed to ensure code is sane and not some insane hallucination.
Thats a whole lot of heavy assumptions, doing some really heavy lifting.
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:
These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.
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.
Yes the value is wildly optimistic to match the expectations driven by all the hype from these companies pushing their LLM services.
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
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.
They're going to keep doing their job, good luck to some manager who thinks they can be verbose enough to get their idea across
As a dev, there's still quite a bit ai can't do and will most likely not be able to do.
AI is good at solving old problems but it's not trained on anything new. Its good at boilerplate and templates, but not good at original material. If it gets tremendously better, and really does get to the point where it's better than we are at development, then the industry will shift into prompt engineering. But I can see a huge reduction of jobs.
They'll get jobs as contractors fixing shitty AI code
I'm actually anxious this is where it's going.
If we end up there, I'm going to charge so much money, and I'm going to have all kinds of pain-in-the-ass clauses in my contract.
If I have to clean up the stupid again, everyone else is going to be doing doing some stupid shit that I find funny, in exchange for my help cleaning up their mess.
Yep, you better charge these assholes up the wazoo, they more than earned it! Write that shit up so you're taken care of. Make them understand that their stupidity is costly and their greed is short-sighted.
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.
Well before that level of complexity is achieved, the jobs of CEOs and Managers will be gone. Question is, will the Ai CEO really want to risk the safety of a review, knowing that it IS the company. Pump and Dump won't do it any more. Then CEOs need to actually work for their money. (Or well... get replaced by an Ai)
That's something that we're probably going to have to figure out quickly. We won't though given the lack of accountability of those in power.
If SWEs are losing their jobs you can imagine a lot of other white collar workers will be as well. This would mean you will be competing with many other people in other fields. The large number of unemployed will reduce demand for goods produced by those companies that are also laying off workers due to automation.
This is a bit of a tragedy of the commons where companies adopt the technology to increase profits but actually disrupt the economy, potentially leading to their own collapse.
It's impossible to really prepare for this scenario because it requires you to simultaneously be ready for retirement in the next few years but also riots. I'm just hoping for the best for now.
Plan? The CEOs plan to buy another yacht. These people are only interested in short term profits, not the long term well-being of their employees.
Then I'll train my own model to make others lose their jobs, too. I bet an AI will then be able to do all calculations a civil engineer can do. Or manage any project.
Not it can't replace a civil engineer. Gen AI is very bad at math and reasoning. There is a study from Apple about this topic.
Then it won't be able to replace me either
Same thing the rest of us replaced by AI are gonna do: live on the dole or starve
Who tells the AI what to create? And how well does the AI understand the exact thing the person is attempting to do?
It would be no different than prompt engineers now knowing exactly what the say/type in order to get the image output they want.
That prompt work would be a kind of programming code in upon itself.
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.
Combine harvesters are used to till, plow , sow seed , spray, water, reap and manage farms and most livestock have dedicated automated farming tools like cow milkers, feeders, shearers, etc. How long before no humans needed to hunt or forage or farm? When food is even cheaper to produce( of course the ai overlords and ai royalty ) but will hunger games everyone to get the artificially shortage and scarcity farm for vast amounts of resources to select groups.