Comment by apical_dendrite
16 hours ago
I wonder why we as engineers aren't protesting AI in the same way that artists and people in film and television are. This post should instill the same terror that visual artists feel.
If you're a more senior person in tech, this post is effectively saying that a large portion of your skillset is about to become completely worthless. This goes beyond the skills involved in writing the code. Everything that you've learned over years about how to determine whether code is good or bad, and what practices make an engineering team effective is not just obsolete, it's fundamentally counter-productive because it assumes a slow, human-centric process that requires you to actually review and understand the code. Even your ability to mentor junior engineers is now obsolete, because all that experience you've built up is now worthless to them.
If this is the approach the industry takes, particularly when combined with a lack of interest in quality from the business (and let's face it, consumers have shown us that they're happy to pay for cheap crap), it's hard to see much of a future for software engineers. You don't need thousands of people with deep technical expertise, you need a handful of manager-types, who will focus on defining product and business requirements and configuring how the AI gets enough context to implement the requirements.
Maybe, if we're extremely lucky, there's so much demand for software that total employment doesn't fall off a cliff, but the nature of the work will change so much that many older, more expensive engineers will become unemployable. Those who remain will have to accept that the skills they spend decades developing are now worthless, that younger engineers no longer respect or listen to them, that the business no longer sees them as experts worthy of respect, but old fogies who grew up in a different world.
Joe Biden liked to say that a job is more than just a paycheck, it's part of your identity and your sense of self-worth. We're all very used to a certain level of respect (and commensurate remuneration). If you don't think that's true, compare how a software engineer is treated to how a warehouse worker is treated. What happens when we lose that?
>a large portion of your skillset is about to become completely worthless
I'm not convinced of that.
I watched a video of an architect using AI to create architectural drawings. It became very clear to me that he has a lot of skills and terminology that helped him produce something very specific, in a few minutes. I've been working on some home improvement stuff including a studio/shed and I've struggled to produce even something simple (currently trying to get a conversation packet on the roof trusses to take the the permit department to get started). Even with my high school architecture class.
After watching that I wonder how much of what I'm doing with AI that looks easy is because I hae a deep technical knowledge, plus 3 years of heavy work with AI.
This is the case now - I can explain to the AI that I want to re-factor a component to support different implementations using a strategy pattern, and I can get a similar outcome to what I would have written, just implemented a bit faster. My expertise brings value.
But that's not what this specific article is describing. The world this article is describing is one where you describe the business requirements, and you don't think about how it's implemented. You don't write the code, you don't review the code, you don't test the code. You give the AI business requirements and you give it access to sources of context (slack, meeting notes, etc). Every place where the human would act as a gate reduces throughput, so it should be eliminated through building harnesses and providing context.
What they're doing here is the equivalent of taking a factory where you have 2 process engineers and 100 operators, and replacing all the operators with robots. They want to automate the whole process of making the software and just leave the part that figures out how to make the automation work effectively.
In this world, the average software company doesn't need people who know how to write good software, because writing, reviewing, maintaining, and testing the software will be entirely automated. There will be a small number of people at companies like OpenAI that need to know how to write good software in order to supervise training the models, and there will be a small number of people at the software companies who have expertise in setting up the automation.
>where you describe the business requirements
That right there is what I'm talking about: that architect would write the requirements for a building way different than I would.
How do you keep your skills if you no longer engage in the activity that keeps them sharp?
See, I just don't get that angle.
Just because I'm not typing "strcat(); strcpy(); sprintf()" doesn't mean I'm not thinking about problems. I'm still doing critical thinking all over my stack, and I don't see that going away. I'm just doing different thinking.
There are people who think, and AI just isn't going to change that. There are people who don't think, and they've existed long before AI. Back in the 90s when I worked at the phone company, man, I worked with some people who didn't do a lick of work (along with some really sharp people).
What is that protest going to get us? We'll convince or force business leaders to not use a cheaper/better tool and protect our jobs? And nobody else in the world is going to pivot either? And our companies will remain competitive?
Software engineers have always adapted to new technologies. New languages, frameworks, native apps, browser apps etc. So far this doesn't seem to be close to completely removing us from the loop.
If you are smart, educated, and can adapt, you'll figure it out. The economy has to find some stable equilibrium and it's not a zero sum game. Everyone in the economy getting a paycheck is also a consumer. With no consumers there is no business. The companies who are using AI and become more productive can do more things that before were not profitable but now are. Some of the people who are getting laid off are going to start new businesses and hire people. These things always cycle, and they basically have to.
I don't have a crystal ball though.
It's the other way around, unfortunately. The senior engineers will still be useful for architecture and infrastructure considerations, as well as guiding the agents. It's the junior engineers that get nailed, because there's little incentive to hire one when a LLM does a better job immediately and costs less.
That's true now. But in the world of this article, it's also the senior engineers that get nailed. In the world of this article, all code is like what machine code or bytecode is now - it's designed to be used by the machine, not the human, because the expectation is that humans will rarely, if ever, touch it.
Individual voices aren't strong enough to drown the marketing machine.
Artists and writers are unionized, why they have a more powerful collective voice.
Second, there are enough peole for which their jobs are very well paid and too cozy to dare to rock the boat.
The economy and job market isn't so hot either at the moment for people to quickly be able to jump ship.
Can you even be sure that you find a tech company that isn't jumping head first onto the AI hype train? Even politicians can't have enough of AI in their mouth.
I for one am not protesting because I know that this is bullshit marketing nonsense. Look at reliability metrics of OpenAI, they’re terrible. Everyone knew a long way ahead that it’s a scam, now they’re cranking up pricing and trying to rug pull. There will be a lot of developers who will come out very well once the stock tanks. That’s my two cents
engineers undervalue their own process
artists overvalue their own outputs