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Comment by electrondood | Hacker News Reader

> I really doubt if AI will have any impact on developer jobs.

It already has. Every single one of my coworkers is using Copilot. If you mean in terms of the job market, the shift to more declarative supervision of the tool rather than imperative implementation of the work yourself means that the bar for skill is far lower.

There will come a time when product managers and UX designers just use AI to generate Figma mocks, and AI generates an entire scaleable platform from just that. Will they need developers? Sure, but maybe 1. Certainly not 8-10.

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> Every single one of my coworkers is using Copilot

And all of you still got a job. Copilot has been out for a time now, if it was transformative we would see companies releasing a ton of products and fix all the bugs and then fire most of their developers etc the past half year, but that didn't happen.

Making developers a bit more productive wont have an impact on developer jobs. It changes your day to day job a bit, but that is like switching to another IDE, it wont transform the industry. Even if it reduces the need for developers by an entire 10% it is not that big of a deal, it would be worth many billions but for an average developer they wont notice much of an impact. It is like the productivity improvement of giving developers another screen, a better computer, a better IDE etc, those are nice but they didn't transform the industry.

In a few years it will be called Pilot instead of Copilot.

Fortunately in every company I worked, the main limiting factor to hire engineers seem to be money and not lack of tings to build. For a time, it might just translate in companies building more features and being even more wasteful than today.

I think capitalism might take care of this. Let's say we have tools that make devs 10x more productive. A company could lay off 90% of their engineers and produce as much as they did before generative AI. What if their competitor decides they're going to retain all of their engineers and produce 10x more than they did before? That's going to force everyone to staff up to be able to keep up with the 10x company.

> I think capitalism might take care of this

This has never saved anyone's job from automation. Ask the coal mining industry in the US. In fact, capitalism will do the opposite because investors own most companies and investors like to see reductions in head counts.

> What if their competitor decides they're going to retain all of their engineers and produce 10x more than they did before?

There are very few companies where "more code" = "more profit". Code is a cost center and support function of the business. Look at all the companies that recently fired 20%+ of their coders and are more profitable than they were before.

If your coders are 10x as productive and your business is growing in a healthy way, your bottleneck is going to be sales and marketing. It probably already was sales and marketing. You're not going to retain all the people you don't need.

Thought the exact same thing when I read someone’s conspiracy theory about why FAANG have laid everyone off due to ChatGPT making them redundant.

Seems a little stupid if your competitor has way more productivity?

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