Comment by TheRoque
5 days ago
So when should we start to be worried, as developers ? Like, I don't use these tools yet for cost + security. But you can see it's getting there, mostly. It could take a day before to find a complex algorithm, understand it, and implement it to your code, now you can just ask an AI to do it for you and it could succeed in a few minutes. How long before the amount of engineers needed to maintaint a product is divived by 2 ? By 10 ? How about all the boring dev jobs that were previously needed, but not so much anymore ? Like, basic CRUD applications. It's seriously worrying, I don't really know what to think.
Here's an alternative way to think about that: how long until the value I can deliver as a developer goes up by a factor of 2, or a factor of 10?
How many companies that previously would never have dreamed of commissioning custom software are now going to be in the market for it, because they don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and wait 6 months just to see if their investment has a chance of paying off or not?
The value you can deliver doesn't necessarily correlate with your compensation, though
Cleaning staff also offer a business a huge amount of value. No-one wants to eat at a restaurant that's dirty and stinks. Unfortunately the staff aren't paid very well
depends if you’ll still need skills to deliver or if it will be something anyone with some interest is able to learn in few months
The thing is that the world is already flooded by software, games, websites, everyone is just battling for attention. The demand for developers cannot rise if consumers have a limited amount of money and time anyways.
Not everything is entertainment. Some software is useful, but buggy or poorly designed.
Yesterday, I was using a slow and poorly organized web app with a fantastic public-facing API server. In one day, I vibe coded an app to provide me with a custom frontend for a use case I cared about, faster and better organized than the official app, and I deployed it to cloud "Serverless" hosting. It used a NodeJS framework and a CSS system I have never learned, and talked to an API I never learned. AI did all the research to find the toolkits and frameworks to use. AI chose the UI layout, color scheme, icons, etc. AI rearranged the UI per my feedback. It added an API debug console and an in-app console log. An AI chatbot helped me investigate bugs and find workarounds. While I was testing the app and generating a punchlist of fix requests, AI was coding the improvements from my previous batch of requests. The edit-compile-test cycle was just a test-test-test cycle until the app was satisfactory.
0 lines of code or config written by me, except vibe instructions for features and debugging conversation.
Is it production quality? No. Was it part of a giant hairy legacy enterprise code base? No. Did it solve a real need? Yes. Did it greatly benefit from being a greenfield standalone app that integrated with extremely well build 3rd party APIs and frameworks? Yes. Is it insecure as all heck thanks to NodeJS? Maybe.
Could a proper developer review it and security-harden it? I believe so. Could a proper develop build the app without AI, including designing and redesigning and repeatedly looping back to the target user for feedback and coding and refactoring in less than a week? No.
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Every company I have ever worked for had years of work on their backlog that they didn't have the capacity to handle.
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I’m less familiar with consumer facing stuff, but even in the last year I’ve seen projects that formerly would have been three people working over multiple sprints turn into something one person could do in an afternoon.
There’s lots of caveats, it’s not everything, but we’re able now to skip a ton of steps. It takes less time now to build up he real software demo than it did before to make the PowerPoint that shows conceptually what the demo would be. In B2C anyway AI has provided a lot of lift.
And I say that as someone generally very sceptical of current AI hype. There’s lots of charlatans but it’s not bs
I can make strong arguments for both "you dont need be worried at all anytime soon" and "we're screwed"
Truth is no-one has any idea. Just keep an eye on the job market - it's very unlikely anthing major will happen overnight
> So when should we start to be worried, as developers ?
I've been worrying ever since chatgpt 3 came out, it was shit at everything but it was amazing as well. And in the last 3 years the progress was incredible. I don't know if you "should" worry, worrying for the sake of it isn't helping much, but yes we should all be mentally prepared to the possibility we won't be able to make a living doing this X years from now. Could be 5, could be 10 , could be less than 5 even.
God, I’d love to once again be working at a company where coding speed mattered.
Meanwhile in non-tech Bigcos the slow part of everything isn’t writing the code, it’s sorting out access and keys and who you’re even supposed to be talking to, and figuring out WTF people even want to build (and no, they can’t just prompt an LLM to do it because they can’t articulate it well, and don’t have any concept of what various technologies can and cannot do).
The code is already like… 5% of the time, probably. Who gives a damn if that’s on average 2x as fast?
I agree that coding isn't all we do by if agentic A.I progresses far enough it can drastically reduce the amount of people you're supposed to talk to, figure out what they want to build etc. There'll be way fewer of those around - including some of us unfortunately.