Comment by jiggawatts
17 hours ago
It does have real benefits, but also, of course, all of the downsides you mentioned.
The best analogy is the outsourcing / offshoring fad of the last decade.
Managers hated that senior developers were getting highly compensated (often higher than the management class!) and pounced on every opportunity to replace expensive people with (much!) cheaper options, quality be damned.
For the few companies that paid attention to the quality, this worked out swimmingly. Apple is probably the best example, they've outsourced almost all of their manufacturing to China and other similar countries.
So yes, my mental picture is that every manager is drooling right now because they think they can replace someone getting paid six figures with an AI that costs six dollars a day, if that. A virtual employee that doesn't talk back, doesn't argue, doesn't question, doesn't go off on "unproductive tangents" like refactoring (whatever that's even supposed to mean), and just pumps out code 24/7 like a good little slav... employee.
The very rare smart managers out there are looking at this more like the transition that happened to architect firms when CAD became available. They used to have a dozen draftsmen for every architect. Now there are virtually none, I haven't even heard that job title being used in decades! We still have architects, and if anything, they're paid even more.
I'm wondering what this could mean to the future of software work and AI use, care to weight in? I don't have a good mental model for this period of time (I do agree with your sense of things).
A lot of people have already noticed that it's becoming cheaper to create bespoke software, as an alternative to paying a SaaS or purchasing off-the-shelf.
An example is that instead of buying a cookie-cutter "MacMansion" like in the last century even individuals can afford a unique house designed by a professional architect. It may not be an award winning artistic design, but it won't be the same copy-paste design as every neighbour up and down the street.
I'm seeing more comments online that developers are now expected to do more in the sense that what used to be a CLI script may now be a semi-vibe-coded application with a Web UI, a dashboard, and Open Telemetry integration because... why not?
As an example, I got a bunch of boxes of random Lego for my kid and I wanted to figure out what sets the pieces came from. I got Codex to vibe-code a full SPA web UI and a matching API app that pulls Rebrickable database CSVs, parses them, puts them into SQLite, and then runs a fairly complex integer optimisation solution on top of that collected data to figure out the best match. I did that in an hour while sitting in on an online meeting!
There is no way I'd have the mental energy to do a project like that otherwise. I'm too busy with housework, actual work, etc... Maybe when I was younger I could blow a few weeks of effort on something like this, but now? No way.
That cost-benefit arithmetic has dramatically shifted thanks to AI developer agents. Suddenly, many fiddly tasks are no longer fiddly, or even trivial, so there's no excuse not to do them any more.
Going back to the architect or mechanical engineering example: Significant corrections to designs used to be expensive because all the blueprints (on paper!) had to be redrawn and distributed. Now, a change to CAD design in 3D can be converted to arbitrary 2D views, cross-sections, or whatever in seconds. The software just projects whatever view you want out of the master design file. Creating the paper blueprints similarly takes a minute or two at most on an industrial large-format printer. It just spits it out.
> I did that in an hour while sitting in on an online meeting!
And they say meetings aren’t productive!