Comment by cpt100
2 days ago
Yeah, I think it is definitely great. Having said that, I am still debating in my mind whether the volume of software engineers needed in the AI era is going to increase or decrease because of all of these advancements.
On the one hand, because it is easy to build products, more and more people will build. And more and more products and features will be built. However, a lot of people who are non-technical will also try to build, but they get stuck, and then they will need engineers. The sheer volume of product built by both experienced technical companies and non-technical novice startups and founders and wannabe founders is going to be massive. That is the bull case for having more software engineers needed in the near future.
On the other hand, in a year or so, people will build all these products, and most of them won't be able to market them, sell them and make money. Eventually, there won't really be a need for that many software engineers.
I think overall the bull case is probably going to win net net.
I see some similarities to 3D printing here. It’s great that everyone can make their own toothbrush holder (or whatever) but I’m probably not going to pay for someone’s weekend project.
I’m “seeing” more devs stepping into the SendCutSend stage where they’re cleaning up/fixing/productizing vibe coded projects so maybe there will be some new demand in that space?
3D printing is a good comparison - it allows almost anyone to make things, but in the end very few do.
Another example is when the WWW first became available, and suddenly everyone COULD be a publisher (browsers even included built-in HTML editors), and for a while MySpace pages proliferated until the excitement died down and people went back to being media consumers.
I expect we'll see the same thing with consumer use of generative AI. Suddendly everyone is generating 3-D worlds/games with Fable because they can, but I expect that just as with the web the novelty will wear off and they'll leave it up to the pros.
Professional use of GenAI, and coding in particular, is certainly here to stay, but it seems we're still in the early experimental/hype phase. At least tokenmaxxing has passed, and it seems most companies are now paying attention to, and limiting, how much they are spending, but it doesn't seem we've yet progressed to the stage where companies are paying attention to what they are actually getting out of it - is the money spent showing up on the bottom line in the form of increased revenues.
A comparison I find useful here is Excel (and spreadsheets in general). Those enabled huge numbers of non-programmers to build software-like things, while the demand for expert developers grew enormously at the same time.
I'm hoping vibe-coding plays out the same way.
It’s terrible and depressing work to take vibe coded garbage and make it a real product. There will be demand, but good engineers won’t want to touch it. And people paying will think they did the hard work so why pay a good rate?
I think LLMs/coding agents in particular are going to play out like automation always does.
1. You have a task and it requires an expert to perform it (software engineering, where we were) 2. You automate the task, it still requires the expert to babysit it (where we are now) 3. Management works out that the expert is just monitoring what the automation is doing and has actually lost expertise because they are just watching, not doing. Pay collapses. (where we are going)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
At least in China a lot of software developers are now struggling.
I think for a lot of type of software we have now reached peak employment.
Someone payed a few k just for a normal website.
> At least in China a lot of software developers are now struggling.
Do you think that Chinese software industry is that relevant to the kind of software market talked about on HN? I.e. lots of enterprise b2b and infra companies.
Chinese companies have always had a very low willingness to pay for software which kinda breaks the flywheel of B2B SaaS companies and companies to service those companies all the way down.
> Chinese companies have always had a very low willingness to pay for software
Are we still left with this mindset? Maybe once upon a time but it has definitely been changing.
There's plenty of B2B and enterprise SaaS companies in China serving the Chinese market. Maybe not as many, but no longer the very low of the past.
I also would not say enterprise were not willing to pay, even many years ago. It's the SME that refused to pay. Large CRM, ERPs etc have always existed.
2 replies →
Its a signal. They were earning well and AI crashed the market in China.
1 reply →
> On the one hand, because it is easy to build products, more and more people will build.
And those people won't need to be software engineers.
> but they get stuck, and then they will need engineers
You've implicitly assumed here that the AI systems will always be worse than the average engineer. That is IMO myopic. I'm not sure that it's even true now let alone in the nebulous future.
> And those people won't need to be software engineers....You've implicitly assumed here that the AI systems will always be worse than the average engineer.
Most of what we do as engineers is precisely describe or analyze the behavior we want or the behavior we don't want. All other engineering skills that are useful are ultimately downstream from understanding the behavior of software enough to know which parts to keep, improve, or jettison. Chatbots can take care, somewhat, of analysis or expansion of instructions.... but they can't read minds. I don't see that changing any time soon.
> but they can't read minds
I don't know who needs to hear this, but neither can humans.
You've implicitly assumed here that AI systems will always be worse at contextualizing and framing questions than the average engineer. I'm not sure that it's even true now let alone in the nebulous future.
You haven't narrowed the fundamental myopia of the assumption here, just dressed it in slightly different clothing.
8 replies →
The big thing to me is why are we even running these models on top of an operating system?
What I really want is Claude as a deep part of the operating system.
If that happens then a whole lot of the abstraction of software vanishes along with what we think of today as software jobs. I think many new forms of knowledge work would emerge from this though.
I would think that needs massive local compute but I can't imagine that is not the future down the line.
It’s also not the future SV is incentivized to build. They want everything for rent, nothing can be owned.
Luckily, China is on the verge of a true breakout, I’m not sure what exactly it will be - but I’d make a very large wager the “next iPhone” is Chinese, and will constitute a full blown “Sputnik moment” for the US and SV.
If Americans weren’t forbidden to own Chinese EVs they’d know this. But tariffs mean the breakthrough will be even more unexpected.
Since Chinese actually “sell stuff” I’m guessing their unbeatable lead in AI efficiency, manufacturing, and distribution will produce a step change breakthrough within a decade.