Comment by raw_anon_1111
14 hours ago
It’s funny over the years I went from
1. I like being hands on keyboard and picking up a slice of work I can do by myself with a clean interface that others can use - a ticket taking code monkey.
2. I like being a team lead /architect where my vision can be larger than what I can do in 40 hours a week even if I hate the communication and coordination overhead of dealing with two or three other people
3. I love being able to do large projects by myself including dealing with the customer where the AI can do the grunt work I use to have to depend on ticket taking code monkeys to do.
Moral of the story: if you are a ticket taking “I codez real gud” developer - you are going to be screwed no matter how many b trees you can reverse on the whiteboard
Moral of your story.
Each and everyone of us is able to write their own story, and come up with their own 'Moral'.
Settling for less (if AI is a productivity booster, which is debatable) doesn't equal being screwed. There is wisdom in reaching your 'enough' point.
If you look at the current hiring trends and how much longer it is taking developers to get jobs these days, a mid level ticket taker is definitely screwed between a flooded market, layoffs and AI.
By definition, this is the worse AI coding will ever be and it’s pretty good now.
> By definition, this is the worse AI coding will ever be
This may be true, but it's not necessarily true, and certainly not by definition. For example, formal verification by deductive methods has improved over the past four decades, and yet, by the most important measures, it's got worse. That's because the size of software it can be used to verify affordably has grown, but significantly slower than the growth in the size of the average software project. I.e. it can be used on a smaller portion of software than it could be used on decades ago.
Perhaps ironically, some people believe that the solution to this problem is AI coding agents that will write correctness proofs, but that is based on the hope that their fate will be different, i.e. that their improvement will outpace the growth in software size.
Indeed, it's possible that AI coding will make some kinds of software so cheap that their value will drop to close to zero, and the primary software creation activity by professionals will shift precisely to those programs that agents can't (yet) write.
I am really not convinced yet.
From all the data I have seen, the software industry is poised for a lot more growth in the foreseeable future.
I wonder if we are experiencing a local minima, on a longer upward trend.
Those that do find a job in a few days aren't online to write about it, so based on what is online we are lead to believe that it's all doom and gloom.
We also come out of a silly growth period where anyone who could sort a list and build a button in React would get hired.
My point is not that AI-coding is to be avoided at all costs, it's more about taming the fear-mongering of "you must use AI or will fall behind". I believe it's unfounded - use it as much or as little as you feel the need to.
P.S.: I do think that for juniors it's currently harder and require intentional efforts to land that first job - but that is the case in many other industries. It's not impossible, but it won't come on a silver plate like it did 5-7 years ago.
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