Firing programmers for AI is a mistake | Hacker News Reader

Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

defragzone.substack.com

741 pointsfrag847 comments

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not.

It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something other than LLM's. It just doesn't feel right around the corner. Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together.

The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep.

Somebody needs to write that operating system the LLM runs on. Or your bank's backend system that securely stores your money. Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality.

Part of the problem is that many working developers are still in companies that don't allow experimentation with the bleeding edge of AI on their code base, so their experiences come from headlines and from playing around on personal projects.

And on the first 10,000 lines of code, the best in class tools are actually pretty good. Since they can help define the structure of the code, it ends up shaped in a way that works well for the models, and it still basically all fits in the useful context window.

What developers who can't use it on large warty codebases don't see is how poorly even the best tools do on the kinds of projects that software engineers typically work on for pay. So they're faced with headlines that oversell AI capabilities and positive experiences with their own small projects and they buy the hype.

I'm surprised to see a huge disconnect between how I perceive things and the vast majority of comments here.

AI is obviously not good enough to replace programmers today. But I'm worried that it will get much better at real-world programming tasks within years or months. If you follow AI closely, how can you be dismissive of this threat? OpenAI will probably release a reasoning-based software engineering agent this year.

We have a system that is similar to top humans at competitive programming. This wasn't true 1 year ago. Who knows what will happen in 1 year.

A "causal model" is needed to fix bugs ie, to "root-cause" a bug.

LLMs yet dont have the idea of a causal-model of how something works built-in. What they do have is pattern matching from a large index and generation of plausible answers from that index. (aside: the plausible snippets are of questionable licensing lineage as the indexes could contain public code with restrictive licensing)

Causal models require machinery which is symbolic, which is able to generate hypotheses and test and prove statements about a world. LLMs are not yet capable of this and the fundamental architecture of the llm machine is not built for it.

Hence, while they are a great productivity boost as a semantic search engine, and a plausible snippet generator, they are not capable of building (or fixing bugs in) a machine which requires causal modeling.

Agreed, and I haven't yet seen any single instance of a company firing software engineers because AI is replacing them (even if by increasing productivity of another set of software engineers): I've asked this a number of times, and while it's a common refrain, I haven't really seen any concrete news report saying it in so many words.

And to be honest, if any company is firing software engineers hoping AI replaces their production, that is good news since that company will soon stop existing and treating engineers like shit which it probably did :)

Yes. I think part of the problem is how good it is at starting from a blank slate and putting together an MVP type app. As a developer, I have been thoroughly impressed by this. Then non-devs see this and must think software engineers are doomed. What they don't see is how terrible LLMs are at working with complex, mature codebases and the hallucinations and endless feedback loops that go with that.

A friend of mine reached out with some code ChatGPT wrote for him to trade crypto. It had so much random crap in it and lines would say "AI enhanced trading algo" and it was just an np.randomint line. It was pulling in random deps not even used.

I get it though like I'm terrible working with IMUs and I want to just get something going but I can't there's that wall I need to overcome/learn eg. the math behind it. Same with programming helps to have the background knowing how to read code and how it works.

The only thing I use it for is for small self-contained snippets of code on problems that require use of APIs I don't quite remember out of the top of my head. The LLM spits out the calls I need to make or attributes/config I need to set and I go check the docs to confirm.

Like "How to truncate text with CSS alone" or "How to set an AWS EC2 instance RAM to 2GB using terraform"

> Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at.

I would not trust them until they can do the news properly. Just read the source Luke.

"AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko

I use AI coding assistants daily, and whenever there is a task that those tools cannot do correctly/quickly enough so that I need to fallback to editing things by myself, I spend a bit of time thinking what is so special about the tasks.

My observation is that LLMs do repetitive, boring tasks really well, like boilerplate code and common logic/basic UI that thousands of people have already done. Well, in some sense, jobs where developers who spend a lot of time writing generic code is already at risk of being outsourced.

The tasks that need a ton of tweaking or not worth asking AI at all are those that are very specific to a specific product and need to meet specific requirements that often come from discussions or meetings. Well, I guess in theory if we had transcripts for everything, AI could write code like the way you want, but I doubt that's happening any time soon.

I have since become less worried about the pace AI will replace human programmers -- there is still a lot that these tools cannot do. But for sure people need to watch out and be aware of what's happening.

I dunno if it's always good at explaining code. It tends to take everything at face value and is unable to opinionatedly reject bs when it's presented with it. Which in the majority of cases is bad.

Same, LLMs are interesting but on their own are a dead end. I think something needs to actually experience the world in 3d in real time to understand what it is actually coding things or doing tasks for.

I think of it as an enabler that reduces my dependency on junior developers. Instead of delegating simple stuff to them, I now do it myself with about the same amount of overhead (have to explain what I want, have to triple check the results) on my side but less time wasted on their end.

A lot of micro managing is involved either way. And most LLMs suffer from a severe case of ground hog day. You can't assume them to remember anything over time. Every conversation starts from scratch. If it's not in your recent context, specify it again. Etc. Quite tedious but it still beats me doing it manually. For some things.

For at least the next few years, it's going to be an expectation from customers that you will not waste their time with stuff they could have just asked an LLM to do for them. I've had two instances of non technical CPO and CEO types recently figuring out how to get a few simple projects done with LLMs. One actually is tackling rust programs now. The point here is not that that's good code but that neither of them would have dreamed about doing anything themselves a few years ago. The scope of the stuff you can get done quickly is increasing.

LLMs are worse at modifying existing code than they are at creating new code. Every conversation is a new conversation. Ground hog day, every day. Modifying something with a lot of history and context requires larger context windows and tools to fill those. The tools are increasingly becoming the bottleneck. Because without context the whole thing derails and micromanaging a lot of context is a chore.

And a big factor here is that huge context windows are costly so there's an incentive for service providers to cut some corners there. Most value for me these days come from LLM tool improvements that result in me having to type less. "fix this" now means "fix the thing under my cursor in my open editor, with the full context of that file". I do this a lot since a few weeks.

> It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase

The COBOL crisis at Y2K comes to mind.

I think it's more likely that we'll see a rise in workflows that AI is good at, rather than AI rising to meet the challenges of our more complex workflows.

Let the user pair with an AI to edit and hot-reload some subset of the code which needs to be very adapted to the problem domain, and have the AI fine-tuned for the task at hand. If that doesn't cut it, have the user submit issues if they need an engineer to alter the interface that they and the AI are using.

I guess this would resemble how myspace used to do it, where you'd get a text box where you could provide custom edits, but you couldn't change the interface.

As context sizes get larger (and remain accurate within the size) and speeds increase, especially inference, it will start solving these large complex code bases.

I think people lose sight of how much better it has gotten in just a few years.

AI will create more jobs, if anything, as the "engineers" out of their depth create massive unmaintainable legacy.

> I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something other than LLM's.

We actually _need_ a breakthrough for the promises to materialize, otherwise we will have yet another AI Winter.

Even though there seems to be some emergent behavior (some evidence that LLMs can, for example, create an internal chess representation by themselves when asked to play), that's not enough. We'll end up with diminishing returns. Investors will get bored of waiting and this whole thing comes crashing down.

We'll get an useful too in our toolbox, as we do at every AI cycle.

+1. I've tried really hard to replace even some parts of my job with AI ever since GPT3 era, unsuccessfully. All it does for me is it allows me to enter unfamiliar domains (such as e.g. SwiftUI) but then I'm all on my own. In domains where I already have expertise it just doesn't work well. So it is a productivity booster, sure, but I don't see it replacing anyone doing non-bullshit work. I don't even see a trend line pointing in that direction.

Counterpoint: https://medium.com/@sweaty.phd/yet-another-ai-will-take-your...

> It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase

A lot of the use cases are on building something that has already been built before, like a web app, a popular algorithm, and etc. I think the real threat to us programmers is stagnation. If we don't have new use cases to develop but only introduce marginal changes, then we can surely use AI to generate our code from the vast amount of previous work.

Sorry for inadvertently advising but I met a guy who used v0.dev to make impressive websites (although admittedly he did use react before so he was experienced) with professional success. It's more than arguable that his company will fire/hire fewer devs. Of course in a decade or so they'll be a skill gap unless LLMs can fill that gap too.

The huge disconnect is that the skill set to use LLMs for code effectively is not the same skill set of standard software engineering. There is a very heavy intersection and I would say you cannot be effective at LLM software development without being an effective software engineer, but being an effective software engineer does not by any means make somebody good at LLM development.

Very talented engineers, coworkers, that I would place above myself in skill, seemed stumped by it, while I have realized at least a 10x productively gain.

The claim that LLMs are not being applied in mature, complex code-bases is pure fantasy, example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06972. Here Google is using LLMs to accelerate the migration of mature, complex production systems.

> It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase.

I agree with this completely. However the problem that I think the article gets at is still real because junior engineers also can't do significant changes on a mature codebase when they first start out. They used to do the 'easy stuff' which freed the rest of us up to do bigger stuff. But:

1. Companies like mine don't hire juniors anymore

2. With Copilot I can be so much more productive that I don't need juniors to do "the easy stuff" because Copilot can easily do that in 1/1000th the time a junior would.

3. So now who is going to train those juniors to get to the level where we need them to be to make those "significant changes"?

> Now completing small chunks of mundane code, explaining code, doing very small mundane changes. Very good at.

This is the only current threat. The time you save as a developer using AI on mundane stuff will get filled by something else, possibly more mundane stuff.

A small company with only 2-5 Seniors may not be able to drop anyone. A company with 100 seniors might be able to drop 5-10 of them total, spread across each team.

The first cuts will come at scaled companies. However, it's difficult to detect if companies are cutting people just to save money or if they are actually realizing any productivity gains from AI at this point.

I think you're discounting efficiency gains — through a series of individually minor breakthroughs in LLM tech I think we could end up with things like 100M+ token context windows

We've already seen this sort of incrementalism over the past couple of years, the initial buzz started without much more than a 2048 context window and we're seeing models with 1M out there now that are significantly more capable.

Marketing is really good at their job.

That coupled with new money and retail investors being thinking they’re in a gold rush and you get the environment we’re in.

I’m more keen on formal methods to do this than LLMs. I take the view that we need more precise languages that require us to write less code that obviously has no errors in it. LLMs are primed to generate more code using less precise specifications; resulting in code that has no obvious errors in it.

> We know what it is good at and what it's not.

We know what it's good at today. And pretty sure it won't be any worse at it in the future. And 5 years ago state of the art was basically output of Markov Chain. In 5 years we might be at another place entirely.

Been heavily testing Cursor, Windsurf and VSCode w/CP lately. Most low level stuff works surprisingly well. But for anything slightly more complex I just end up wasting 90% credits watching the AI chase its own tail.

My favorite has been everyday people claiming Elmo will find all sorts of corruption on Fed databases using AI. Trained on what datasets? What biases? Etc.

I agree but too many serious people are hinting we are very close I can't ignore it anymore. Sure, when Sam Altman / Zuckerberg say we're close I don't know if I can believe him because obviously the dudes will say anything to sell/pump the stock price. But how about Demis Hassabis ? He doesn't strike me like that at all. Same for Geoff Hinton, Bengio and a couple of others.

They all sounds like crypto bros talking about AI. It's really frustrating to talk to them, just like crypto bros.

A breakthrough is exactly what everyone is banking on. OpenAI was surprised by GPT3, they were just dumping data into an LLM and ended up with something that was way better than they expected.

Everyone is hoping (probably delusional) that bigger and more impressive breakthroughs will keep leaping up if we just keep tweaking the models and increasing the size of the data sets.

You missed the companies selling AI consulting projects, with the disconnect between sales team, customer, folks on the customer side, consultants doing the delivery, and what actually gets done.

My take is that AI's ability to generate new code will prove so valuable, it will not matter if it is bad at changing existing code. And that the engineers of the distant future (like, two years from now) will not bother to read the generated code, as long as it runs and passes the tests (which will also be AI-generated).

I try to use AI daily, and every month I see how it is able to generate larger and more complex chunks of code from the first shot. It is almost there. We just need to adopt the new paradigm, build the tooling, and embrace the new weird future of software development.

This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions:

1. AI code ability will be the same as is today

2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time

Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change to adapt to this. (Already doing)

The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs. At the end of the day product is just one area of company development, build the complete e2e ultimate solution with 0 distribution or marketing will not help.

This article, in my opinion, is just doomerism storytelling for nostalgic programmers, that see programming only as some kind of magical artistic craft and AI as the villain arrived to remove all the fun from it. You can still switch off Cursor and write donut.c if you enjoy doing it.

> The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs

After 20 years in tech, I can't think of a single company I've worked for/with that would fit the profile of an "intelligent" company. All of them make poor and irrational decisions regularly. I think you over-estimate the intelligence of leadership whilst simultaneously under-estimating their greed and eventual ability to self-destruct.

EDIT: you also over-estimate the desire for developers to increase their productivity with AI. I use AI to reduce complexity and give me more breathing room, not to increase my output.

> the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves.

That's a very bold claim. We are already seeing plateu in LLM capabilities in general. And there is little improvement in places where they fall short (like making holistic changes in a large codebase) since their birth. They only improve where they are already good at such as writing small glue programs. Expecting significant breakthroughs with just scaling without any fundamentally changes to the architecture seems like too optimistic to me.

>Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves.

How are you so sure?

Not to mention I haven't really seen AI replace anyone, except perhaps as a scapegoat for execs who were planning on layoffs anyway.

That said, I do think there is real risk of letting AI hinder the growth of Junior dev talent.

I tend to agree with you. The general pattern behind "x tool came along that made work easier" isn't to fire a bunch of folks, its to make the people that are there work whatever increment of ease of work more. ie, if the tool cuts work in half, you'd be expected to do 2x more work. Automation and tools almost never "makes our lives easier", it just removes some of the lower value added work. It would be nice to live better and work less, but our overlords won't let that happen. Same output with less work by the individual isn't as good as same or more output with the same or less people.

What makes you think (1) will be true?

It is only generating based on training data. In mature code bases there is a massive amount of interconnected state that is not already present in any github repository. The new logic you'd want to add is likely something never done before. As other programmers have stated, it seems to be improving at generating useful boilerplate and making simple websites and such related to what's out there en masse on Github. But it can't make any meaningful changes in an extensively matured codebase. Even Claude Sonnet is absolutely hopeless at this. And the requirement before the codebase is "matured" is not very high.

> their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs.

Not my experience. I spend as much time reading through and replacing wrong AI generated code as I do writing my own code, so it's really wasting my time more often than helping. It's really hit or miss, and about the only thing the AI gets right most often is writing console.log statements based on the variable I've just assigned, and that isn't really "coding". And even then it gets it right only about 75% of the time. Sure, that saves me some time, but I'm not seeing the supposed acceleration AI is hyped as giving.

> Quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves.

Where are your facts? What is your basis on these future prediction? Sure small code snippets have already improved since gpt2. What about larger applications where layers and layers of abstractions coming from private company sensitive data?

> At the end of the day product is just one area of company development, build the complete e2e ultimate solution with 0 distribution or marketing will not help.

this sounds like PR garbage to me why use "e2e ultimate solution" provide technical details so we can verify what you're saying is true

That the second assumnoption is wrong is based on > intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI

How many companies are intelligent given how many dumb decisions we see?

If we assume enough not so intelligent companies then better AI code we lead to mass firing.

> Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves.

This is the fundamental delusion that is driving AI hype.

Although scale has made LLMs look like magic, actual magic (AGI) is not on the scaling path. This is a conjecture (as is the converse), but I'm betting the farm on it personally and see LLMs as useful chat bots that augment other, better technologies for automation. If you want to pursue AGI, move on quickly to something structurally and fundamentally better.

People don't understand that AGI is pure speculation. There is no rigorous, non-circular definition of human intelligence, let alone proof that AGI is possible or achievable in any reasonable time frame (like 100 years).

> the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves

This is the incorrect assumption, or at least there’s no evidence to support it.

These two predictions seem contradictory. If the AI massively improves why would they slow roll adoption?

BTW your reasoning for 1 sound like previous reasoning for FSD.

Assuming the same kind of growth in capabilities isn't backed by reality.

The last release of OpenAI's model wasn't dramatically better.

At the moment it's more about getting cheaper.

My opinion: tech isn't firing programmers for AI. If is firing peogrammers because of the financial environment, and waving around AI as a fig leaf to pretend that it is not really cutting back in output.

When the financial environment loosens again, there’ll be a new wave of tech hiring (which is about equally likely to publicly be portrayed as either reversing the AI firing or exploiting new opportunities due to AI, neither of which will be the real fundamental driving force.)

I've come to believe it really is this.

Everybody got used to the way things worked when interest rates were near zero. Money was basically free, hiring was on a rampage, and everybody was willing to try reckless moonshots with slim chances for success. This went on for like fifteen years -- a good chunk of the workforce has only ever known that environment.

most narratives for everything are just an excuse for macro stuff. we had zirp for basically the entire period of 2008 - 2022 and when that stopped there was huge lay offs and less hiring. I see lots of newer/younger devs being really pessimistic about the future of the industry, being mindful of the macro factors is important so people don't buy into the AI narratives (which is just to bump up their stocks).

If people can get a safer return buying bonds they aren't going to invest in expansion and hiring. If there is basically no risk free rate of return you throw your money at hiring/new projects because you need to make a return. Lots of that goes into tech jobs.

It's this. Companies love a smokescreen to tighten their belts without spooking markets and tanking their stock. And workers are the collateral damage.

No one 0ast sole very small businesses (aka a single person with contractors) is seriously trying to replace programmers with AI right now. I do feel we will hit that phase sometimes down the line (probably in the 30's).so I at least think this is a tale to keep in the back of our minds long term.

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

We'll probably never have evidence either way ... Did Google and Stack Overflow "replace" programmers?

Yes, in the sense that I suspect that with the strict counterfactual -- taking them AWAY -- you would have to hire 21 people instead of 20, or 25 instead of 20, to do the same job.

So strictly speaking, you could fire a bunch of people with the new tools.

---

But in the same period, the industry expanded rapidly, and programmer salaries INCREASED

So we didn't really notice or lament the change

I expect that pretty much the same thing will happen. (There will also be some thresholds crossed, producing qualitative changes. e.g. Programmer CEOs became much more common in the 2010's than in the 1990's.)

---

I think you can argue that some portion of the industry "got dumber" with Google/Stack Overflow too. Higher level languages and tech enabled that.

Sometimes we never learn the underlying concepts, and spin our wheels on the surface

Bad JavaScript ate our CPUs, and made the fans spin. Previous generations would never write code like that, because they didn't have the tools to, and the hardware wouldn't tolerate it. (They also wrote a lot of memory safety bugs we're still cleaning up, e.g. in the Expat XML parser)

If I reflect deeply, I don't know a bunch of things that earlier generations did, though hopefully I know some new things :-P

It'll happen gradually over time, with more pressure on programmers to "get more done".

I think it's useful to look at what has already happened at another, much smaller profession -- translators -- as a precursor to what will happen with programmers.

1. translation software does a mediocre job, barely useful as a tool; all jobs are safe

2. translation software does a decent job, now expected to be used as time-saving aid, expectations for translators increase, fewer translators needed/employed

3. translation software does a good job, translators now hired to proofread/check the software output rather than translate themselves, allowing them to do 3x to 4x as fast as before, requiring proportionally fewer translators

4. translation software, now driven by LLMs, does an excellent job, only cursory checks required; very few translators required mostly in specialized cases

Zuckerberg said it.

https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mark-zuckerberg-plans-to-repla...

Part of my work is rapid prototyping of new products and technology to test out new ideas. I have a small team of really great generalists. 2 people have left over the last year and I didn't replace them because the existing team + chatGPT can easily take up the slack. So that's 2 people that didn't get hired that would have done without chatGPT.

There is little evidence that AI is replacing engineers, but there is a whole lot of evidence that shareholders and execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.

I can tell you from personal experience that investors are feeling pressure to magically reduce head count with AI to keep up with the joneses. It's pretty horrifying how little understanding or information some of the folks making these decisions have. (I work in tech diligence on software M&A and talk to investment committees as part of the job)

For a lot of tasks like frontend development I’ve found that a tool like cursor can get you pretty far without much prior knowledge. IMO (and experience) many tasks that previously required to hiring a programmer or designer with knowledge of the latest frameworks can now be replaced by one motivated “prompt engineer” and some patience

Feels like C-suite thinks if they keep saying it, it will happen. Maybe! I think more likely programmers are experiencing a power spike.

I think it's a great time to be small, if you can reap the benefits of these tools to deliver EVEN FASTER than large enterprise than you already are. Aider and a couple Mac minis and you can have a good time!

I can say my company stopped contracting for test system design, and we use a mix of models now to achieve the same results. Some of these have been running without issue for over a year now.

I'm feeling it at my non-tech company. They want more people to use Copilot and stuff and are giving out more bad ratings and PIPs to push devs out.

Even if it is a cover, many smaller companies follow the expressed reasoning of the larger ones.

Another issue is that the article assumes companies will let go of all programmers. They will make sure to keep some in case the fire spreads. Simple as that.

There were massive layoffs in 2024 and continuing this year. No one will scream they are firing people for LLMs

We have fired all our programmers.

However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected.

We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

I think people aren't getting your joke.

> We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

Also known as programmers.

The "AI" part is irrelevant. Someone with expertise in transmitting specifications to a computer is a programmer, no matter the language.

EDIT: Yep, I realized that it could be the joke, but reading the other comments, it wasn't obvious.

Yes, the best way is to type the real program completely into the AI, so that ClosedAI gets new material to train on, the AI can make some dumb comments but the code works.

And the manager is happy that filthy programmers are "using" AI.

>>However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected.

Speaking English to make something is one thing, but speaking English to modify something complicated is absolutely something else. And Im pretty sure involves more or less the same effort as writing code itself. Of course regression for this something like this is not for the faint hearted.

> We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

These people are however not experts in pretending to be a obedient lackeys.

Actually I think that's the near future, or close to it.

1. Humans also need specific wording in order to program code that stakeholders expected. A lot of people are laughing at AI because they think getting requirements is a human privilege.

2. On the contrary, I don't think people need to hire AI interfacers. Instead, business stakeholders are way more interested to interface with AI simply because they just want to get things done instead of filling a ticket for us. Some of them are going to be good interfacers with proper integration -- and yes we programmers are helping them to do so.

Side note: I don't think you are going to hear someone shouting that they are going to replace humans with AI. It started with this: people integrate AI into their workflow, layoff 10%, and see if AI helps to fill in the gap so they can freeze hire. Then they layoff 10% more.

And yes we programmers are helping the business to do that, with a proud and smile face.

Good luck.

What job title are you thinking of using?

> it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected

The AI complained that the message did not originate from a programmer and decided not to respond.

That was pretty funny. Bonus points if it was posted by an AI bot.

First Turing-complete prompt language when?

I sure empathize.... our AI is fussy and rigid... pedantic even.

Local minimum.

"Let AI replace programmers" is the new "Let’s outsource everything to <some country>." Short-term cost savings, long-term disaster.

I'm not sure why people are so sure one way or the other. I mean, we're going to find out. Why pretend you have a crystal ball and can see the future?

A lot of articles like this just want to believe something is true and so they create an elaborate argument as to why that thing is true.

You can wrap yourself up in rationalizations all you want. There is a chance firing all the programmers will work. Evidence beats argument. In 5 years we'll look back and know.

It is actually probably a good idea to hedge your bets either way. Use this moment to trim some fat, force your existing programmers to work in a slightly leaner environment. It doesn't feel nice to be a programmer cut in such an environment but I can see why companies might be using this opportunity.

This. Articles like this are examples of motivated reasoning and seem to be coming from a place of insecurity by programmers who feel their careers threatened.

For each programmer who actually spends their time on complex design work or fixing difficult bugs, there are many more doing what amounts to clerical work. Adding a new form here, fiddling with a layout there.

It is the latter class who are in real danger.

The new form and layout are what the business wants and can easily articulate. What they need is people who understand whether the new form needs to both be stored in the local postgres system or if it should trigger a Kafka event to notify other parts of the business.

The AI only world is still one where the form and layout get done, but what happens to that data afterward?

Layout fiddlers make changes people can see and understand.

If your job is massaging data for nebulous purposes using nebulous means and getting nebulous results, that you need to basically be another person doing the exact same thing to understand the value of, there's going to be a whole lot of management saying "Do we really need all those guys over there doing that? Can't we just have like one guy and a bunch of new AI magic?"

But the question is, are we there yet? I have yet to hear of an AI bot who can eat up a requirement and add said new form in the right place, or fiddle with a layout. Do you know any? So all those big promises you read right now are outright lies. When will we reach that point? I don't do gambling. But we are not there, regardless what the salespeople or fancy journalists might be claiming all day long.

That kind of boring busywork can be eliminated by using better abstractions. At the same time, it's a useful training ground for junior developers.

I agree with the statement in the title.

Using AI to write code does two things:

1. Everything seems to go faster at first until you have to debug it because the AI can't seem to be able to fix the issue... It's hard enough to debug code you wrote yourself. However, if you work with code written by others (team environment) then maybe you're used to this, but not being able to quickly debug code you're responsible for will shoot you in the foot.

2. You brain neurons in charge of code production will be naturally re-assigned for other cognitive tasks. It's not like riding a bicycle or swimming which once learned is never forgotten. It's more like advanced math, which if you don't practice you can forget.

Short term gain; long term pain.

Essentially: people are vastly overestimating AI ability and vastly underestimating HI ability.

Humans are supremely adaptable. That's what our defining attribute as a species is. As a group we can adapt to more or less any reality we find ourselves in.

People with good minds will use whatever tools they have to enhance their natural abilities.

People with less good minds will use whatever tools they have to cover up their inability until they're found out.

When the AI dust settles, I wonder who will be left standing among the groups of developers, testers, scrum masters, project leaders, department managers, compliance officers, and all the other roles in IT.

It seems the general sentiment is that developers are in danger of being replaced entirely. I may be biased, but it seems not to be the most likely outcome in the long term. I can't imagine how such companies will be competitive against developers who replace their boss with an AI.

> I can't imagine how such companies will be competitive against developers who replace their boss with an AI.

Me neither, but I think it'll be a gratifying fight to watch.

Please take the scrum masters first.

That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway.

Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.

You have a point, all people do like to think they're more irreplaceable than they are, but the last round of offshoring of programmers did in fact end up with the companies trying to reverse course a few years later. GM was the most well-known example of this, but I worked at several organizations that found that getting software done on the other side of the planet was a bad idea, and ended up having to reverse course.

The core issue is that the bottleneck step in software development isn't actually the ability to program a specific thing, it's the process of discovering what it is we actually want the program to do. Having your programmers AT THE OFFICE and in close communication with the people who need the software, is the best way to get that done. Having them on the other side of the planet turned out to be the worse way.

This is unintuitive (to programmers as well as the organizations that might employ them), and therefore they have to discover it the hard way. I don't think this is something LLMs will be good at, now or ever. There may come a day when neural networks (or some other ML) will be able to do that, but that day is not near.

> That’s what people said about outsourcing too.

And they were right... and a lot of companies fully failed because of it.

And the corporate meat grinder kept rolling forward anyway. And the decision makers were all shielded from the consequences of their incompetence anyway.

When the market is completely corrupted, nothing means anything.

I ones worked for a company that used to hire 70 developers from Vietnam to work on their product. Then one day they decided to hire ~5 developers from US. These 5 developers did the job faster, better and cheaper than 70 Vietnamese developers. So they fired all overseas developers and doubled the size of US team to about a dozen.

I believe AI is the excuse, but that this is just to cover another wave of outsourcing.

Our ability to predict technological "replacement" is pretty shoddy.

Take banking for example.

ATMs are literally called "teller machines." Internet banking is a way of "automating banking."

Besides those, every administrative aspect of banking went from paper to computer.

Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.

It's actually shocking how little network enabled PCs impacted administrative employment. Universities, for example, employ far more administrative staff than they did before PC automated many of their tasks.

At one point (during and after dotcom), PayPal and suchlike were threatening to "turn billion dollar businesses into million dollar businesses." Reality went in the opposite direction.

We need to stop analogizing everything in the economy to manufacturing. Manufacturing is unique in its long term tendency to efficiency.other industries don't work that way.

Is there data about this or is just your perception? Because my perception would be different, for example in my country countless bank branches closed and a lot of banking jobs do not exist anymore thanks to widespread home-banking usage (which I also know differs from country to country). This is also from the tales of people that had careers in banking and now tell how less banking jobs there are compared to when they joined in the 80s.

I wouldn't be sure that growth as an industry/business is correlated to a growth in jobs too.

Maybe I'm wrong, I would love to see some data about it.

> Do banks employ fewer people? Is it a smaller industry? No. Banks grew steadily over these decades.

Profits may have grown but In Ireland at least, the number of branches have declined drastically.

Yes banks employ less people. In my country there are now account managers handling hundreds of clients virtually. Most of the local managers got fired.

I find it easy to say from our privileged position that "tech might replace workers but it'll be fine".

Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff.

Tech innovation destroys lives in our current capitalist society because only the owners get the benefits. That's always been true.

A good analogy from not-so-distant past is the outsourcing wave that swept the tech industry. Shareholders everywhere were salivating at the money they would make by hiring programmers in India at 1/10 the cost while keeping their profits. Those of us who have been in the industry a while all saw how that went. I think this new wave wave will go roughly similarly. Eventually, companies will realize that to keep their edge, they need humans with creativity while "AI" will be one more tool in the bag. In the meantime, a lot of hurt will happen due to greed.

What do you mean by see how that went? The corps are at the point now where they stopped using consultancies and instead have their own company divisions in India where they still pay them 1/10th. If anything it’s a more dire situation.

what if india had programmers that were just as good? that would be a more apt comparison to what we will be facing in the near future. an alien country where the supply of programmers is infinite and they are better than any human. i bet five years ago you would say chatGTP, this very conversation, would be impossible or 1000 years off. you dont know anything

>>companies aren’t investing in junior developers

It was a case before AI as well.

Overall it reads the same as "Twitter will be destroyed by mass layoffs". But it is still online

Twitter is essentially losing money even with a bare bones staff

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit...

It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.

"Destroyed" is not the same as "annihilated from exhistence". Twitter is a shell of its former self.

"it is still online" is pretty high bar. The systems is riddled with bugs that are not being addressed for months now and the amount of spam and bots is even larger than before.

Being privately owned by a man with near infinite resources means it can stay online however long its owner wants, whether it's successful or not.

and we also see with what consequences

Twitter is, in fact, not online. It redirects to something called X, which is not Twitter.

Some companies will try to fire as many programmers as possible and will end up struggling bc they have no moats against other companies with access to the same AI, or will hit some kind of AI saturation usefulness threshold. Other companies will figure out a smart hybrid to utilize existing talent and those are probably the ones that will thrive among the competition.

But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI? The whole point of AI is that it doesn't need an "operator".

I'm not talking about GH Copilot or some autocomplete IDE feature, I'm talking about fully autonomous agents 2-3 years in the future. Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years. The next two years will be even faster if the past few months are anything to go by.

in a world where human labor is worthless, moats and other nonsense will be the last of anyones worries. you can take that to the bank whipper snapper

It seems that a lot of companies are skating where they hope the puck to go instead of hedging their bets for an uncertain future. Personally I would at least wait until the big AI players fire everyone before doing the same.

They are skating where bleachers full of hype men are screaming that the puck will go.

LLMs are good at producing plausible statements and responses that radiate awareness, consideration, balance, and at least superficial knowledge of the technology in question. Even if they are non-committal, indecisive, or even inaccurate.

In other words, they are very economical replacements for middle managers. Have at it.

Every generation sees a new technology that old timers loudly worry "will destroy programming as a profession".

I'm old enough to remember when that new and destructive technology was Java, and the greybeards were all heavily invested in inline assembly as an essential skill of the serious programmer.

The exact same 3 steps in the article happened about a decade ago during the "javascript bootcamp" craze, and while the web stack does grow ever more deeply abstracted, things do seem to keep on trucking along...

I'm not old enough to remember these, but they were certainly more disruptive than AI has been so far (reverse chronological order):

- The word processor

- The assembly line

- Trains

- Internal combustion engines

I do remember some false starts from the 90's:

- Computer animation will put all the animation studios out of business

- Software agents will replace all middlemen with computers

Technically, we automated most programing when we got rid of punch cards and created assembly languages.

I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question (at risk of deals failing through and being sued to obvilion). Which means we get the hear the real effects of tech debt all time. I call it the silent killer. Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. I'm constantly gobsmacked by how many companies are stuck on way past EOL libraries because of bad architecture decisions. Or can't deal with heinous noisy neighbour issues without spending through the nose on AWS because of bad architecture decisions. Or are spending the farm to rewrite part of the stack that can't perform well enough to land enterprise clients, but the rewrite is going to potentially bankrupt the company... because of bad architecture decisions. This shit happens ALL THE TIME. Even to very big companies!

The tech debt situation is going to become so, so much worse. My guess is there will be a whole lot of "dead by year five" companies built on AI.

Yeeeah... I've seen plenty of startup companies end up in "dead man walking" state because tech debt situation paralized their ability to pivot and follow the growing market and couldn't respond fast enough to growing costs. The developers causing the issues also left when the work became unfun, so they ended up without employees as well.

My work puts me in a similar position, but when they've gone bankrupt, and I see same thing. It's common to not invest in good enough developers early enough to manage to delete, refactor, upgrade and otherwise clean their software in time to be able to handle growth or stagnation on the business side.

Once I saw a software that was built mostly by one person, in part because he did the groundwork by pushing straight to main with . as the only commit message and didn't document anything. When they ended up in my lap he had failed for six months to adapt their system to changes in the data sources they depended on.

Sometimes the business people fucks up too, like using an excellent software system to do credit intensive trading without hedging for future interest raises.

I'm not so sure machines will solve much on either side even though some celebrities say they're sure they will.

> I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question

Nice. How do I get into that kind of position?

> Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info.

If nobody hears about it, then how do you hear about it? Moreover, what makes you think it's tech debt and not whatever reason the business told you? And further, if it's tech debt and not whatever reason the business told you, then don't you think the business lied? And didn't you just say they're not allowed to lie?

Can you clear that up?

I see there being no tech debt with sufficiently advanced AI. If humans are sufficiently out of the picture the AIs can just revert to highly performant binary output.

This is missing the fact that budding programmers will also embrace these technologies, in order to get stuff done and working and fulfill their curiosity. They will in fact grow up to be much more "AI native" than current more senior programmers, except that they are turbocharging their exploration and learning by having, well, a full team of AI programmers at their disposal.

I see it like when I came of age in the 90ies, with my first laptop and linux, confronted with the older generation that grew up on punchcards or expensive shared systems. They were advocating for really taking time to write your program out on paper or architecting it up front, while I was of the "YOLOOOO, I'll hack on it until it compiles" persuasion. Did it keep me from learning the fundamentals, become a solid engineer? No. In fact, the "hack on it until it compiles" became a pillar of today's engineering: TDD, CI/CD, etc...

It's up to us to find the right workflows for both mentoring / teaching and for solid engineering, with this new, imo paradigm-changing technology.

AI native like recent digital natives, who have more time using software but far less time exploring how it works and less overall success at using digital tools?

AI reminds me of calculators. For someone who is proficient in math, they boost speed. For those learning math, it becomes a crutch and eventually stops their ability to learn further because their mind can't build upon principles fully outsourced to the machine.

Another aspect this is missing is that, if AI works well enough to fire people (it already does, IMO), there is a whole world of software that was previously out of reach to be built. I wouldn't build a custom photography app for a single individual, nor would I write a full POS system for 3 people bakery. The costs would be prohibitive. But if a single developer/product designer can now be up to the challenge, be it through a "tweak wordpress plugins until it works" or through more serious engineering, there is going to be a whole new industry of software jobs out there.

I know that it works because the amount of softwrae I now write for friends, family or myself has exploded. I wouldn't spend 4 weekends on a data cleanup app for my librarian friend. But I can now, in 2-3 h, get something really usable and pretty, and it's extremely rewarding.

Real talk.

We are a small theme of people running an online game app.

We use XCode swift language and python for server.

We need to develop a website where this game can be played live and implement many features.

Current AIs are smart. There is DeepSeek R-1.

Has anyone actually figured out how to implement this in coding environment and get it to actually CORRECTLY implement the tickets and features without messing everything up?

How can it know if the feature actually works in the game? It can't test it, right?

How can it take into account the ENTIRE database of code with folders and directories and files and all that stuff + resources uploaded?

I don't think even DeepSeek can do that.

Which tool is best as of now?

> How can it take into account the ENTIRE database of code with folders and directories and files and all that stuff + resources uploaded?

Tools like Codeium's Windsurf and Cursor can help with some of that part.

If there will be actual AGI (or super intelligence), none of these arguments hold. The machines will just be better than any programmer money can buy.

Of course at that point every knowledge worker is probably unemployable anyway.

True AGI would make every worker unemployable.

The only reason why true androids aren't possible yet is software. The mechanics have been pretty much a solved problem.

This is like saying:

"If we just had a stable way to create net energy from a fusion reactor, we'd solve all energy problems".

Do we have a way to do that? No.

What if AGI is extremely expensive to run?

Firing developers to replace by AI, how does that realistically work?

Okay I fired half of our engineers. Now what? I hire non engineers to use AI to randomly paste code around hoping for the best? What if the AI makes the wrong assumptions about the requirement input by the non technical team, introducing subtle mistakes? What if I have an error and AI, as it often does, circles around not managing to find the proper fix?

I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects. If anything AI empowers to write more code, faster, and with more code running live eventually there are more products to maintain, more companies launched and you need more engineers.

> I'm not an engineer anymore but I'm still confident in dev jobs prospects.

I am somewhat confident in dev job prospects, but I am not confident in the qualifications of managers who sing the "AI will replace programmers" gospel.

How can this opion piece miss the big thing though? Even if it's an accurate prediction that will be someone else's problem. My last three companies have been Publicly traded, Private Equity, VC and PE. The timelines for decision makers in any of these scenarios maxes out around 4 years, and for some is less than a year. They're not shooting themselves in the foot, rather handicaping the business and moving on. The ones who time it right will have an extra-big payday, while the ones who do poorly will buy all these duds. Meanwhile the vast majority lose either way.

I'm sure there is a formal proof someone can flesh out.

- Half assed developer can construct a functional program with AI prompts.

- Deployed at scale for profit

- Many considerations were not considered due to lack of expertise (security, for example)

- Bad things happen for users.

I have at least two or three ideas that I've canned for now because it's just not safe for users (AI apps of that type require a lot of safety considerations). For example, you cannot create a collaborative AI app without considering how users can pollute the database with unsafe content (moderation).

I'm concerned a lot of people in this world are not being as cautious.

Why half-assed developer?

It could be high-level developer that take advantage of AI to be more productive. This will reduce team sizes.

Deployed how? People who ask AI to "Write me a clone of Twitter" are incapable of deploying code.

Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.

Agreed, hiring has slowed down but this seems more caused by the end of the zero interest rate era. At most I see low level copywriting and low level translation jobs in danger where it is a simpler input/output job flow

"Telecom Giant BT Will Cut 55,000 Jobs By 2030—And Replace Thousands Of Roles With AI"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...

I would say "soft replacement" is a thing. People may not be getting fired directly, but companies are hiring fewer developers, and freelancers are most likely getting fewer opportunities than before.

LLMs are not programming tools. They are general-purpose pattern matchers and stereotype generators. They lack the determinism or epistemological guarantees of a compiler, an IDE, a linter, or a manual. They can best be described as a supplement to a search engine.

Though I disagree to most of things said here, I do agree that the new fleet of software engineers won't be that technically adapt. But what if they don't need to? Like how most programmers today don't need to know the machine level instructions to build something useful.

I feel there will be a paradgym shift about what programming would be altogether. I think, programmers will more be like artists, painters who would conceptualize an idea and communicate those ideas to AI to implement (not end to end though; in bits and pieces, we'd still need engineers to fit these bits and peices together - think of a new programming language but instead of syntax, there will be natural language prompting).

I've tried to pen down this exact thoughts here: https://suyogdahal.com.np/posts/engineering-hacking-and-ai/

When an organization actively swaps out labor for capital, expecting deep savings and dramatic ROI, instead of incrementally improving processes, they deserve the failure coming. Change management and modernization are actually meaningful, despite the derision immature organizations show towards the processes.

The thing that is going to lead to programmers being laid off and fired all over has and will continue to be market consolidation in the tech industry. The auto industry did the same thing in the 1950s which destroyed detroit.

Market consolidation allows big tech to remain competitive even after the quality of software has been turned into shit by offshoring and multiple rounds of wage compression/layoffs. Eventually all software will end up like JIRA or SAP but you won't have much choice but to deal with it because the competition will be stifled.

AI is actually probably having a very positive effect on hiring that is offsetting this effect. The reason they love using it as a scapegoat is that you can't fight the inevitable march of technological progress whereas you absolutely CAN break up big tech.

Is there actually an epidemic of firing programmers for AI? Based on the companies/people I know, I wouldn't have thought so.

I've heard of many companies encouraging their engineers to use LLM-backed tools like Cursor or just Copilot, a (small!) number that have made these kinds of tools mandatory (what "mandatory" means is unclear), and many companies laying people off because money is tight.

But I haven't heard of anybody who was laid off b/c the other engineers were so much more productive w/ AI that they decided to downsize the team, let alone replace a team entirely.

Is this just my bubble? Mostly Bay Area companies, mostly in the small-to-mid range w/ a couple FAANG.

There are definitely a fair few companies laying off programmers at the moment, though few of the ones I've seen blamed it on AI (usually more either overhiring, the pandemic ending and usage going down, or someone thinking they can outsource everything to save money). Wouldn't be surprised if a few tried to say it was because of AI when it was really for some other reason though.

I'll just say that AI for coding has been amazingly helpful for finding bugs and thinking things through and improving things like long functions and simplifying code.

But it can absolutely not replace entire programmers at this point, and it's a long way of being able to say create, tweak, build and deploy entire apps.

That said this could totally change in the next handful of years, and I think if someone worked just on creating a purely JS/React website at this point you could build something that does this. Or at least I think that I could build this. Where the user sort of talks to the AI and describes changes and they eventually get done. Or if not we are approaching that point.

Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against these computational monsters that are extremely efficient and have access to a vast amount of information. Therefore, instead of such views, it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?

Once AI achieves runaway self improvement predicting the future is even more pointless than it is today. You’re looking at an economy in which the best human is worse at any and all jobs than the worst robot. There are no past examples to extrapolate from.

AI generated slop like your comment here should be a ban-worthy offense. Either you've fed the it through an LLM or you've managed to perfect the art of using flowery language to say little with a lot of big words.

> The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future.

Can you elaborate?

> Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control.

> it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?

These two statements seem contradictory. These kinds of propositions always left me wondering where they come from. Viewing the universe as deterministic, yeah, I see how "preventing what is to come is not within our control" could be a true statement. But who's to say what is inevitable and what is negotiable in the first place? Is the future written in stone, or are we able to as a society negotiate what arrangements we desire?

Workers in various industries have pled for their jobs and programmers said "no, my code can replace you". Now that automation is coming for them, it's suddenly "the dumbest mistake".

Tech has "disrupted" many industries, leaving some better, but many worse. Now that "disruption" is pointed inwards.

Programmers will have to adapt to the new market conditions like everyone else. There will either be fewer jobs to go around (like what happened to assembly line workers), or they will have to switch to doing other tasks that are not as easy to replace yet (like bank tellers).

The real funny thing is that now we‘re replacers and the replaced at the same time. We plead to ourselves.

The wings have begun melting and nothing will stop it. Finally, Icarus has flown too close to the sun.

LLMs might enable us to build things we couldn't build before.

It's just as plausible that the market will simply grow.

In my experience the majority of people believing in AI replacing people are people who are horrible in their jobs and who mostly BS their way through, which is the major skill that LLMs are really good at: Hallucinating with confidence.

Can be devs, can be managers, can be the board.

And hey, if LLMs and other "AI" ever do a better job at something valuable, I think that has the potential to lead to a bright future.

Currently the biggest risk is someone using LLMs to do something actually critical.

Also waiting for the first contract negotiations done with AI summaries to blow up into someone's face.

Generally I agree with the article, and I do feel that trying to replace everyone with AI will backfire in various ways. Lots of big companes will find that out the hard way, especially in the tech industry and other more regulated fields like medicine and finance.

But at the same time, it's also worth noting that (somewhat sadly) there are plenty of jobs and companies where an AI created solution could be just what they need, even at this stage in its development. Lots of companies who need sites too complex for Squarespace but too simple for a fully engineered custom solution. The kind who'd use WordPress plugins or small agencies to build out simple CRUD systems.

AI could absolutely annihilate that sort of work there and then. If you need a simple PHP or React based system and you don't need anything remotely complex functionality wise, even something like ChatGPT can build it out in about 20 minutes without many extra fixes needed.

Of course, that leads to the problems mentioned in the article again, since a lot of people get into programming/engineering through those sorts of companies and roles. AI may not make the folks at Alphabet or Meta obsolete at the moment (or even be a good fit for the kind of work many large tech companies do), but it could replace whole teams at small and medium sized organisations that don't need anything complex.

Many people are missing the point. The strategy for AI usage is not a long-term strategy to make the world more productive. If companies can save a buck this year, companies will do it. Period.

The average manager has short-term goals that needs to fulfill, and if they can use AI to fulfill them they will do it, future be damned.

To reign in on long-term consequences has always been part of government and regulations. So, this kind of articles are useful but should be directed to elected officials and not the industry itself.

Finally, what programmers need is what all workers need. Unionization, collective bargaining, social safety nets, etc. It will protect programmers from swings in the job market as it will do it for everybody else that needs a job to make ends meet.

Software ENGINEERS could benefit from unions once they get start getting replaced by AI, but that’s a fairly indirect way to solve the problem. Governments will eventually need to deal with mass unemployment, but that’s a societal problem bigger than any individual profession.

What Software ENGINEERING needs is standards and regulations, like any other engineering discipline. If you accept that software has become a significant enough component in society that the consequences of it breaking etc are bad, then serious software needs standards to adhere to, and people who are certified for them.

Once you have standards, the bar to actually replace certified engineers is higher and has legal risk. That way, how good AI needs to be has a higher (and safer) bar, which can properly optimise for the long term consequences.

If the software is not critical or important enough to be standardised, then let AI take over the creation. At that point, it’s not really any different to any other learning or creative endeavour.

This, we really should have unionized several years ago

There's probably a 1 - 3 year half time on business critical applicatios created by generative AI. Longer for stuff nobody cares about.

Take a 1 - 3 year sabbatical, then charge 1000% markup when the AI slop owners come calling begging you to fix the stuff nobody understands.

The strange thing is that AI tools would be used a lot more if they weren't being positioned as an alpha stage for AGI. There are things that LLMs are genuinely useful for, but they seem to get used in these large scale agent style tools which regularly fail and are thus not used very widely. Give me some smaller focused tools with high accuracy and everyone wins.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." - King Solomon

Litter, palanquin, and sedan chair carriers were fired.

Oarsmen were fired.

Horses were fired.

. . . [time] . . .

COBOL programmers where fired.

and, so on.

What was the expectation; that programmers will be forever? Lest we forget, barely a century ago, programmers started to push out a large swath of non-programmers.

The more important question is what roles will push out whatever roles AI/LLMs create.

I was watching How It’s Made last night and watching how pencils were made, thinking how hard this would be and how expensive a pencil would be if a person had to make them and how an endless supply of them can be made this way. Then I thought about how software has allowed us to automate so many things and scale and I realized AI is the final step where we can automate and remove the programmers. Pencil makers were replaced and so will programmers be replaced. Your best hope is being the person running the pencil machine.

A problem is the group think of programmers. Many of them view themselves as investors as a side track instead of a union shop worker because there are so few union employers. Their thinking being to maximize revenue for owners and shareholders during and from software development efforts, services, and software products created. Almost every other industry that there's money has sensibly created AI limitations from unions and trade groups, from Hollywood strikes, entry level knowledge requirements from lawyers and judges preventing AI generated research and briefs, and construction workers and shipyard unions preventing automated and AI machinery such as AI cranes cargo and other AI automation of logistics. Programmers seem to get a new trend software assistant every few years and now AI, then the first thing is the programmer group think their investors thinking to recommend attrition of the non 10x, elite, non-coding high wizards, instead of more jobs the merrier from an economic perspective.

So... to discuss this for real we should first admit how things look below the super-premium level.

Software engineering at Stripe, R&D at Meta and such... these are one end of a spectrum.

At the middle of the spectrum is a team spending 6 years on a bullshit "cloud platform strategy" for a 90s UI that monitors equipment at a factory and produces reports required for compliance.

A lot of these struggle to get anything at all done.

Firing programmers for using AI? I do see people asking on social media how to filter out hire candidates that are using AI in interviews.

But if they had meant replacing programmers with AI (bad title), I'm much more concerned about replacing non-programmers with AI. It's gonna happen on a huge scale, and we don't yet have a regulatory regime to protect labor from capital.

> The result? We’ll have a whole wave of programmers who are more like AI operators than real engineers.

I was a developer for over a decade, and pretty much what I did day-to-day was plumb together existing front end libraries, and write a little bit of job-specific code that today's LLMs could certainly have helped me with, if they'd existed at the time. I agree that the really complicated stuff can't yet be done by AI, but how sure are we that that'll always be true? And the idea that a mediocre programmer can't debug code written by another entity is also false, I did it all the time. In any case, I don't resonate with the idea that the bottom 90% of programmers are doing important, novel, challenging programming that only a special genius can do. They paid us $180k a year to download NPM packages because they didn't have AI. Now they have AI, and the future is uncertain with respect to just how high programmers will be flying ten years from now.

Yesterday, using Aider and an openai model, forgot which one it picks by default; i asked it to check some Go code for consistency. It made a few changes, some ok, but also some that just did not compile. (The model did not understand the local scoping of vars in an if-then clause)

It is just not reliable enough for mainstream Enterprise development. Nice for a new snake game….

What I see when producing code with AI (C/C++, Qt) is that often it gives output for different versions of a given library. It's like it can't understand (or doesn't know) that a given function is now obsolete and needs to use another method. Sometimes it can be corrected.

I think there will be a point in which humans will no longer be motivated to produce enough material for the AI to update. Like, why would I write/shot a tutorial or ask/answer a question in a forum if people are now going directly to ask to some AI?

And since AI is being fed with human knowledge at the moment, I think the quantity of good material out there (that was used so far for training) is going to slow down. So the AI will need to wait for some repos to be populated/updated to understand the changes. Or it will have to read the new documentation (if any), or understand the changes from code (if any).

All this if it wasn't the AI to introduce the changes itself.

It's a meme at this point. People who don't know anything about programming (lex fridman): "It's revolutionary. People with no programming skills can create entire apps." People who program for a living: "It can reproduce variants of code that have been implemented already 1000s of times, and... nothing else".

I've been programming full time with an LLM in an IDE for the last two weeks, and it's a game changer for me at the end of my career. I'm in future shock. I suddenly can barely live without it.

But I'm not fearful for my job, yet. It's amazingly better, and much worse than a junior dev. There are certain instructions, however simple, that just do not penetrate. It gets certain things right 98% of the time, which make me stop looking for the other 2% of the time where it absolutely sabotages the code with breaking changes. It is utterly without hesitation in defeating the entire purpose of the application in order to simplify a line of code. And yet, it can do so much simple stuff so fast and well, and it can be so informative about ridiculously obscure critical details.

I have most of those faults too, just fewer enough to be worth my paycheck for a few more AI generations.

"utterly without hesitation in defeating the entire purpose". So many examples, ever-more detailed prompts attempted as a solution. The more I try, the more "AI" seems to be only workable as "experienced prompt engineer with an AI stack".

I have to disagree with this article. Companies as is, particularly larger companies have a lot of fluff. People who do about three or four hours of work a week, and effectively just sit around so senior management can claim they have so many people working on such and such project.

With AI, you no longer need those employees to justify your high valuations. You don't need as many juniors. The party is over tell the rest of the crew. I wouldn't advise anyone to get into tech right now. I know personally my wages have been stagnant for about 5 years. I still make fantastic money, and it's significantly more than the average American income, but my hopes and dreams of hitting 300 or 400k total comp in retiring by 40 are gone.

Instead I've more or less accepted I'm going to have to keep working my middle class job, and I might not even retiring till my '50s! Tragic.

People who look forward to retiring are like people who look forward to heaven: missing out on life due to the belief their “real” life hasn’t begun yet.

Its a opportunity. Programmers contain internal architecture information. If they leak - and you collect the full set, you can reconstruct a similar product fresh from scratch for cheap- and then take over the business of a failing behemoth with ai-rot.

The eternal death-wish to cut the coding dependency murders yet another set of companies. So many where there before- Outsourcing, UML, node-based programming, no-codes in all variations and colours. Generations of managers have marched into this abyss and none-came back alive, the skulls of the ego-dream of "only business management is irreplaceable crunching beneath the boots" trying to cut the knowledge worker dependency out of the equation. And deep down, they feel the tingle of things going wrong- even now.

Everything that is of low value. And its okay. If it is not useful to humanity, it should decay over time and fade away. Low value propositions should be loaded with parasitic computation, that burdens it with costs until it collapses and allows new growth to replace the old system.

I believe regardless of the validity for the AI can replace programmers now narrative, we will see big co squeezing the labor force and padding the companies bottom line and their pocket.

The fact the narrative is false will be the problem of the one who replaces these CEOs, and us workers

I think that some engineers will still be needed to maintain old codebases for a while yes.

But it's pretty clear that the codebases of tomorrow will be leaner and mostly implemented by AI, starting with apps (web, mobile,...). It will take more time for scaling backends.

So my bet is that the need for software engineering will follow what happened for stock brokers. The ones with basic to average skills will disappear, automated away (it has already happened in some teams at my last job). Above average engineers will still be employed my comp will eventually go down. And there will be a small class of expert / smartest / most connected engineers will see their comp go up and up.

It is not the future we want but I think it what is most likely to happen.

What makes you think that AI is going to produce leaner codebases? They are trained on human codebases. They are going to end up emulating that human code. It's not hard to imagine some improvement here, but my gut is there just isn't enough good code out there to train a significant shift on this.

I have an image of 10,000 monkeys + typewriter + time = Shakespeare... Of course, these typed pages would engender a paper shortage. So the same 10,000 LLM's will create a similar amount of 'monkeyware' - I can see monkey testers roaming through this chaff for useable gems to be incorporated into a structure operated by humans (our current coder base) to engineer into complex packages?. Will this employ the human crews and allow a greater level of productivity? Look at Win11 = a huge mass full of flaws/errors (found daily). In general increased productivity has worked to increase GDP - will this continue? or will we be over run by smarter monkeys?

Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?).

They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting.

I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without IRQs and accumulators.

As always, ML will become another tool for multiplying the capabilities of humans (not replacing them).

CEOs have been dreaming for decades about firing all their employees, and replacing them with some kind of automation.

The ones that succeed, are the ones that “embrace the suck,” so to speak, and figure out how to combine humans with technology.

This is like arguing that surely we can get rid of all our formers as soon as we have a widespread enough caste of priests.

There is no such thing as "prompt engineering", because there is no formal logic to be understood or engineered into submission. That's just not how it works.

The ability of LLMs to replicate MBA CEO-speak and the kinds of activities the C-suite engage in is arguably superior to their ability to write computer programs and displace programmers, so on a replicated-skills basis LLMs should pose a greater risk to CEOs. Of course, CEO success is only loosely aligned with ability, nor can LLMs obtain the "who you know" aspect from reflection alone.

What is the actual engineering discipline that goes into creating prompts? Other than providing more context, hacking the data with keywords like "please", etc?

We also managed to get rid of JavaScript like 15 years ago, with major backend technologies providing their own compile-to-js frameworks.

But JS outlived them, because it's the whole write-run-read-debug cycle, whereas the frameworks only gave you write-run.

I'd like to suggest caution wrt a sentiment in this thread, that actual phase change in the industry i.e. readers here losing their jobs and job prospectcs, "doesn't feel right around the corner."

In specific, most of you are familiar with human cognitive error when reasoning with non-linearities.

I'm going to assert and would cheerfully put money behind the prospect that this is exactly one of the domains within which nonlinear behavior is most evident and hence our intuitions are most wrong.

Could be a year, could be a few, but we're going to hit the 80% case being covered just find thank you by run of the mill automated tools, and then press on into asymptote.

Agreed - AI agents are simply a form of outsourcing and companies that go all in on that premise will get bonked hard.

Getting into cyber security might be a gold mine in spite of all the AI generated code that is going to be churned out in this transition period.

Name one successful company that doesn’t outsource developer labor outside America.

AI will only raise the bar for the expected outcome of future programmers. It's just automated pair programming really.

The argument: "The New Generation of Programmers Will Be Less Prepared" is too cynical. Most of us aren't writing algorithms anyway, programmers may, but not Software Engineers which I really think the author is referring to.

Core libraries make it so SWE's don't have to write linked lists. Did that make our generation "less prepared" or give us the opportunity to focus our time on what really matters, like delivering products.

The post eerily sounds like it is written by the jailbreaked version of Gemini

Yes it is obviously LLM generated. The article is full of tells starting with the opening phrase.

But this went fact right past most commenters here, which is interesting in itself, and somewhat alarming for what it reveals about critical thinking and reading skills.

What are these fired programmers going to do? Disappear? They’ll build stuff, using the same plus-up AI tooling that enabled their old boss to fire them. So guess what, their old boss just traded employees for competitors. Congrats, I guess?

Zuck declaring that he plans on dropping programmer head-count substantially, to me indicates that they’ll have a much smaller technological moat in the future, and they won’t be paying off programmers to not build competing products anymore. I’m not sure he should be excited about that.

What moat did Meta have today?

I'd say there is a moat, but it's not on the tech side.

Tiktok flew right through the moat, and only a small part of that is about tech.

A lot of development on AI is exciting and meta is a big part of that, but there isn't any real moat there either.

Copilot to me is a multiplier, just like compilers and GUI editors and languages above machine language.

And possibly the biggest multiplier. But anything times zero is zero. Someone who does not understand the code Copilot writes is too dangerous to do anything.

But I worry what Copilot will do to future developers.

And knowing what universally available spell checking has done to me, destroyed my ability to spell correctly without it, I even worry how Copilot might deskill me over the coming years.

I think anyone who is afraid of AI destroying our field just has to look at the history of DevOps. That was a massive shift in systems engineering and how production is maintained. It changed how people did their jobs, required people to learn new skills, and leaders to change how they thought about the business.

AI is going to change a lot about software, but AI code tools are coming for SWEs the way Kubernetes came for DevOps. AI completely replacing the job function is unsubstantiated.

If the job of SWEs after AI is to edit yaml, json, yaml templates, and yaml-templates-in-yaml-templates all day long, while waiting for ArgoCD, I quit.

My pessimistic take on it is in the future code will closer to AI where its just a blackbox where inputs go in and outputs come out. There will be no architecture, clean code, design principles. You will just have a product manager who bangs on a LLM till the ball of wax conforms to what they want at that time. As long as it meets their current KPI security be dammed. If they can get X done with as little effort as possible and data leaks so be it. They will get a fine (maybe?) and move on.

We are already seeing how the speed of development plays a more important role than the quality of the software product (for example, the use of Electron in the most popular software). Software will become shittier but people will continue to use it. So LLM's will become just another abstraction level in modern programming, like JS frameworks. No company will regret firing real programmers because LLMs will be cheaper and end users don't care about performance.

What I've seen is less "let's fire 1000 people and replace with AI" but more "let's not hire for 2 years and see what happens as AI develops".

Did ChatGPT write this article? The writing style reeks of it.

There is a lot of demand for crap code (quick'n'dirty apps, websites, web services, etc.). Look at the apps for a lot of IoT devices: it's mostly boilerplate, kinda-sorta works, and obviously has been produced by programmers of...limited skill.

AI may well be able to take over a lot of that coding, or at least increase the productivity of the semi-competent (thus reducing the number of such jobs available).

It has its uses, but often fail at seemingly simple things.

The other day,i couldn't get Claude to generate an HTML page, with a logo on the top left, no matter how I prompted.

You can substitute AI with "Some Javascript Framework" and the subtitles still apply very well. Yet nobody was particularly concerned about that.

hehehe yea but how many of us were hand-writing JavaScript for a living anyways :)

Honestly show junior programmers a little more respect. It's such an old person thing to say they're going to all become prompt engineers or similar. Why does the old always look at the young and claim they're all pulled by the tides of the zeitgeist and not thinking human beings who have their own opinions about stuff. Many smart people have a contrarian streak and won't just dive into AI tools wholesale. Honestly a lot of the comments here are at the level of critique as those facebook memes of crowd of people with iphones for faces.

Most people have ALWAYS taken the easy road and don't become the best programmers. AI is just the latest tool for lazier people or people who tend towards laziness. We will continue to have new good programmers, and the number of good programmers will continue to be not enough. None of that is not caused by AI. I'm far from an AI advocate, but it will, someday, make the most boring parts of programming less tedious and be able to put "glue" kind of code in non-professional hands.

I remember very uplifted talk here a few years ago about firing truck and taxi drivers for AI. Turned out, programmers are easier to replace :)

Taxi driving is an antifragile profession apparently, to a degree that computer programming could only aspire to.

I think a more interesting question is what the impact will be on the next generation looking at CS/SWE as a potential profession. It's been considered a pretty "safe" profession for a long time now. That will change over the next 10 years. Will parents advise their kids to avoid CS because the job market will be so much smaller in 10 years' time?

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
  
  ~ Arthur C. Clarke

People who make decisions got bamboozled by the ads and marketing of AI companies. They failed to detect a lack of intelligence and got deceived, that they have magical golems for a fraction of the price but eventually, they will get caught with their pants down.

You don't fire developers and replace them with AI. This trope is often repeated and causing people to miss the actual picture of what's going on.

You use AI to disrupt a market, and that market forces the startup employing the devs to go bankrupt.

It's not a "this quarter we made a decision" thing.

It's a thing that's happening right now all over the place and snowballing.

I don't have anything against this style of writing in particular, but it's a shame it makes me assume it was written by an LLM

It's already pretty hard to find engineers that can actually go deep on problems. I predict this will get even worst with AI.

An agent would be able to replace sales, marketing, customer success, middle management and project managers much better and earlier than any developer of a software company.

Nocode and Shopify-like consolidation are/have been much bigger threats imo. These large orgs are just trimming fat that they would have trimmed anyways.

But hell what do I know. Probably nothing :)

> the real winners in all this: the programmers who saw the chaos coming and refused to play along. The ones who […] went deep into systems programming, AI interpretability, or high-performance computing. These are the people who actually understand technology at a level no AI can replicate.

Is there room for Interpretability outside of major ai labs?

Tangential, does AI pick up new knowledge of new tools? AI helped me write much better bash since there is tons of content by volunteers and less across-country animosity. Svelte and Fastapi were made/popularized this decade and people dont want to help their AI/offshore replacements with content. Will current AI get good at them?

I have been doing this for 30 years now. The software industry is all about selling variations of the same stuff over and over and over. But in the end, the more software there is out there, the more software is needed. AI might take it over and handle it all, but at some point, it would be cruel to make humans do it.

One major critique: why do we think junior programmers really learn best from the grizzled veterans? AI coaches can give feedback on what someone is actually seeing and doing, and can be available 24x7. I suspect this can enable the juniors of the future to have a much faster rise to mastery.

Today AI can generate code. Sometimes it's even correct.

AI is a useful aid to software developers, but it requires developers to know what they're doing. We need developers to know more, not less, so they can review AI-generated code, fix it when it's wrong, etc.

There's also the issue of a company doesn't own the copyright to a codebase generated primarily through prompts.

So anyone can copy it and reproduce it anywhere. Get paid to prompt ai by a company. Take all code home with you. Then when your tired of them use same code to undercut them.

I have been able to program stuff using AI that I could not do before. I never managed 3d before, but can now do advanced 3d stuff. I wrote an Apple watch application in a few hours instead of the week it took me before, in swift a language I have never used before.

Follow the money, all the way down to Mother Earth; which boats are lifted most, and at what cost?

Knowing the difference between programmers able to generate AI code vs those who can actually explain it matters. If orgs can do that, then firing programmers should be fine. If they can't, things might get ugly for some but not all.

I've switched sides on this issue. I do think LLMs will reduce headcount across tech. Smaller teams will take on more features and less code will be written by hand. It'll be easier to run a startup, freelance or experiment with projects.

As a software engineer with about 4 years of experience, what can I do to avoid being left behind?

The author mentions "systems programming" and "high-performance computing". Do you have any resources for that (whether it be books, videos, courses)?

I'm hoping that developers who have entered management positions will be able to talk their fellow managers out of this. I can understand if some non-technical MBA bozo doesn't understand, but former developers must see through the hype.

It's been noted that LLM's output quality decays as they ingest more LLM generated content in their training. Will the same happen for LLM generated code as more and more of the code on Github is generated by LLMs? What then?

Clicked on the Website. Greeted by the message: "Something has gone terribly wrong". It did load correctly at the second attempt, but I have to admit...well played with raising the dramatic effect webserver, well played ;-)

Programmers are not going to go away. But the lavish salaries, benefits packages, and generous work/life balances probably will.

I envision software engineering ending up in the same pit of mediocrity as all the other engineering disciplines.

Time to wake up and think in terms of 10-20 years ahead. Everyone around NVIDIA dies out... anyone with GPU compute ideas just cannot succeed... 3Dfx full of saboteurs that hinder their progress.

Open source takes away the livelihood of programmers and gives it to moneymen for free. They used open source to train AI models. Programmers got back a few stars and a pat in the back. And some recognition, but mostly nothing. All this while big corps use their work without compensation. There is zero compensation options for open source programmers on github. Somehow it's left out.

Same bullshit comes up again and again in different forms. Like your ideas worth nothing blablabla. Suuure, but moneymen usually have zero ideas and they like to expropriate others' ideas, FOR FREE. While naive people give away their ideas and work for free, the other side gives back nooothiiiing.

It's already too late.

So programmers and other areas that will be aiified in the coming decades will be slowly going extinct. AI is a skill appropriation device that in the long term will make people useless, so they don't need an artist, a musician etc. They will just need a capable AI to create whatever they want, without the hassle of the human element. It's the ultimate control tool to make people SLAVES.

Hope I'm wrong.

The same reason that outsourcing all your telecom infra to China is a bad idea.

It will destroy your own company, initially but if the AI is proven to do it better than humans, a lot of them will be converted into AI assistants to guide the AI you’d still need to know programming

> The next generation of programmers will grow up expecting AI to do the hard parts for them.

This is the opposite of what I’ve seen. AI does the easy parts, only the hard parts are left…

I think AI will thrive in low-code systems, not by writing Javascript.

Senior devs have a decade long reinforcement learning loop with the marketplace. That will be a massive advantage until they start RL on agents against the same environment.

There is only one word worse than "programmer" and it's "coder".

If your software developers do nothing but write text in VS Code, you might as well replace them with AI.

I would say that AI is not to blame here. It just accelerated existing process, but didn't initiate it. We (as a society) started to value quantity over quality some time ago, and, apparently, no-one care enough to change it.

Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)?

Why design and test hundreds of physical and easy-to-use knobs in the car if you can just plug a touchscreen (see Tesla)?

Why write a couple of lines of code if you can just include an `is-odd` library (see bloated npm ecosystem)?

Why figure out how to solve a problem on your own if you can just copy-paste answer from somewhere else (see StackOverflow)?

Why invest time and effort into making a good TV if you can just strap Android OS on a questionable hardware (look in your own house)?

Why run and manage your project on a baremetal server if you can just rent Amazon DynamoDB (see your company)?

Why spend months to find and hire one good engineer if you can just hire ten mediocre ones (see any other company)?

Why spend years educating to identify a tumor on a MRI scans if you can just feed it to a machine learning algorithm (see your hospital)?

What more could I name?

In my take, which you can say is pessimistic, we already passed the peak of civilization as we know it. If we continue business as usual, things will continue to detiorate, more software will fail, more planes will crash, more people will be unemployed, more wars would be started. Yes, decent engineers (or any other decent specialists) will be likely a winners in a short term, but how the future would unfold when there will be less and less of them is a question I leave for the reader.

Front-end development should have been automated by now. After all, it once was. Viamall. Dreamweaver. Mozilla Composer. Wix. Humans should not be writing HTML/CSS.

1. Work for megacorp 2. Megacorp CEOs gloat about forthcoming mass firings of engineers 3. Pay taxes as always 4. Taxes used to fund megacorp (stargate) 5. Megacorp fires me.

The bitter irony.

What the AI bull Wall Street analysts didn’t realize is that AI will replace their job much sooner than replacing programmers.

It will be extremely naive to believe that recent tech layoff is because of AI.

Obviously Wall Street and big tech like people to think this way.

Maybe it's just me boomer reading this, but I think all 3 points listed in the article are more of predictions from the author (with rationals from the author). However, AI today maybe different compare to AI in the future.

I'm a programmer, I love my skills, but I really hate to write code (and test etc etc), I don't even want to do system design. If I can just say to a computer "Hey, I got this 55TB change set and I want to synced it up with these listed nodes, data across all node must remain atomicity consistent before, during and after the sync. Now, you make it happen. Also, go pick up my dog from the vax", and then the computer just do that in the best way possible, I'll love it.

Fundamentally, programmer are tool creators. If it is possible that a computer can create better tools all by itself, then it looked unwise to just react such technology with emotional rejection.

I mean, the worries is real, sure, but I wouldn't just blank out reject the tech.

If you are a junior engineer who just graduated, what would you do to ensure that you learn the needed skills and not be overly reliant on AI?

Replacing juniors with AI is stupid because who will be the next senior? AI won't learn anything while performing inference only.

Did anyone else read this as "Firing programmers for (AI will destroy everything)" or have I been reading too much Yudkowsky

No accountant was fired when Microsoft Clippy was introduced. AI is nice for prototyping and code completion but that's all.

This reminds me of the outsourcing panic, many years ago. Hiring cheaper talent overseas seemed like a no brainer, so everyone's job was in danger. Of course, it turned out that it was not as simple, it came with its own costs, and somehow the whole thing just settled. I wonder if the same will happen here. In this line of work, it's almost as when you know exactly what you want to build, you are 90% there. AI helps you with the rest.

"The New Generation of Drivers Will Be Useless Without a Horse" is what I read when I see articles like this.

circular argument. literally “heres why you will regret it: 1) you will regret it” lol. nobody will regret firing their high-salary programmer within a year or two. its over. what happened to all the enthusiasm for the idea that technology doesnt steal jobs, it just creates new ones?!

Meanwhile the newest model is like "Oh just run this snippet"

And the snipped will absolutely ruin your corp if you run it.

Keeping things around doesn't drive shareholder value. Firing employees making six figures does.

Doesn't matter, a few minutes after firing the last programmer SkyNet wil become operational.

I find it interesting that the same community who has questioned for a long time about why companies like Facebook need 60000 engineers, “20 good engineers is all you need”, is now rallying against any cuts at all.

AI makes engineers slightly more efficient, so there’s a slightly less of a need for as many. That’s assuming AI is the true cause of any of these layoffs at all

Has there been any company so far that has fired 100% of their programmers to replace them with AI?

When a company announces layoffs: people suspect there's something wrong with their growth, cash flow, etc.

When a company announces layoffs because AI is making things more efficient: people start arguing about whether AI can really replace humans.

If you were in company management and had to do layoffs, which would you choose?

What about.. empowering programmers with AI - can it create any useful things ?

People really believe that companies are firing because AI will replace them ?

AI is cool, until they start going down the client’s absurd requirements.

Reminds me of the outsourcing rush in the 2000s.

I made good money cleaning that up.

Dejavu, Complaints on using AI sounds very similar to early times of offshoring/outsourcing. At the end of the day, corporates go for most profitable solution, so AI is going to replace some percentage of headcount.

Cursor being a 1 billion dollar company is just ridiculous

Frankly, I agree with the points in the article, yet I'm triggered slightly by the screaming dramatic writing like "destroy everything".

Reminder to everyone reading FUD like this that tech bro's are trying _very_ hard to convince everyone that these technologies are Fundamentally Disruptive and The Most Important Advancement Since The Steam Engine. When in fact they are somewhat useful content generation machines who's output needs to be carefully vetted by the very programmers this article claims will be out of a job.

To be clear: I am not saying this article is written in bad faith and I agree that if its assertions come to pass that what it predicts would happen. I am just urging everyone to stop letting the Sam Altmans of the world tell you how disruptive this tech is. Tech is out of ideas and desperate to keep the money machine printing.

Programmers are training their replacement.

> The ones who didn’t take FAANG jobs but instead went deep into systems programming, AI interpretability, or high-performance computing

I appreciate a good FAANG hatefest, but what the gosh-darn heck is this? Does the author seriously think all FAANG engineers only transform and sling gRPC all day? Or they they blindly stumbled into being hyperscalers?

The author should randomly pick a mailing list on any if those topics (systems programming, AI interpretability, HPC) and count the number of emails from FAANG domains

> Imagine a company that fires its software engineers, replaces them with AI-generated code, and then sits back, expecting everything to just work. This is like firing your entire fire department because you installed more smoke detectors. It’s fine until the first real fire happens.

I feel like this analogy really doesn't capture the situation, because it implies that it would take some event to make companies realize they made a mistake. The reality right now is: You'd notice it instantly. Product velocity would drop to zero. Who is prompting the AI?

The AI-is-replacing-programmers debate is honestly kinda tired, on both sides. Its just not happening. It might be happening in the same way that pirated movies "steal" income from hollywood: maybe companies are expanding more slowly, because we're ramping up per-capita productivity because engineers are learning how to leverage it to enhance their own output (and its getting better and better). But, that's how every major tool and abstraction works. If we still had to write in assembly there'd be 30x the number of engineers out there than there are.

There's no mystical point where AI will get good enough to replace engineers, not because it won't continue getting better, but because the economic pie is continually growing, and as the AI Nexus Himself, Marc Andreesen, has said several times: Humanity has an infinite demand for code. If you can make engineers 10x more efficient, what will happen in most companies is: we don't want to cut engineering costs by N% and stagnate, we want 10x more code and growth. Maybe we hire fewer engineers going forward.

> But with the AI craze, companies aren’t investing in junior developers. Why train people when you can have a model spit out boilerplate?

This is not happening. Its fun, pithy reasoning that Good and Righteous White Knight Software Engineers can prescribe onto the Evil and Bad HR and Business Leadership people, but its just not, in any meaningful or broad sense, a narrative that you hear while hiring.

The reason why juniors are struggling to find work right now is literally just because the industry is in a down cycle. During down cycles, companies are going to prioritize stability, and seniority is stability. That's it.

When the market recovers, and as AI gets better and more prolific, I think there's a reality where juniors are actually a great ROI for companies, thanks to AI. They've been using it their whole career. They're cheaper. AI might be a productivity multiplier for all engineers; but it will definitely be a productivity normalizer for juniors; using it to check for mistakes, learn about libraries and frameworks faster, its such a great upleveling tool for juniors.

Tech debt is hard enough when written by the person sitting next to you or no longer at the company

It will be impossible to maintain when it’s churned out by endless AI

I can’t imagine being a manager tasked with “our banking system lost 30 million dollars can you find the bug” when the code was written by AI and some intern maintains it

I’ll be watching with popcorn

AI bros are like crypto bros. Really trying to hype it up beyond what its currently capable of and what it will be capable of in the near future.

I have all sorts of people telling me I need to learn AI or I will lose my job and get left in the dust. AI is still a tool, not a worker.

ultimately Facebook and Google are completely unimportant, if they disappeared tomorrow the world would keep going

however, I for one can't wait for unreliable garbage code in:

    - engine management systems
    - aircraft safety and navigation systems
    - trains and railway signalling systems
    - elevator control systems
    - operating systems
    - medical devices (pacemakers, drug dispensing devices, monitoring, radiography control, etc)
    - payment systems
    - stock exchanges

maybe AI generated code is the Great Filter?

Total delusion from the author. If tech companies need a human dev, therell be plenty of them across the globe jumping at the chance to do it for peanuts. Youre soon to be extinct. Deal with it.

Counterpoint: lots of software is relatively very simple at its core, so perhaps we don't need nearly as many employed developers as we have today. Alternatively, we have far more developers today, so perhaps companies are only firing to re-hire for lower salaries.

Regarding the first hypothesis: For example, one person can make a basic social media site in a weekend. It'll be missing important things from big social medias: 1) features (some of them small but difficult, like live video), 2) scalability, 3) reliability and security, and 4) non-technical aspects (promotion, moderation, legal, etc.). But 1) is optional; 2) is reduced if you use a managed service like AWS and throw enough compute at it, then perhaps you only need a few sysadmins; 3) is reduced to essentials (e.g. backups) if you accept frequent outages and leaks (immoral but those things don't seem to impact revenue much); and 4) is neither reducible nor optional but doesn't require developers.

I remember when the big tech companies of today were (at least advertised as) run by only a few developers. They were much smaller, but still global and handling $millions in revenue. Then they hired more developers, presumably to add more features and improving existing ones, to make profit and avoid being out-competed. And I do believe those developers made features and improvements to generate more revenue than their salaries and keep the companies above competition. But at this point, would more developers generate even more features and improvements to offset their cost, and are they necessary to avoid competition? Moreover, if a company were to fire most of its developers, keeping just enough to maintain the existing systems, and direct resources elsewhere (e.g. marketing), would they make more profit and out-compete better?

Related, everyone knows there's lots of products with needless complexity and "bullshit jobs". Exactly how much of that complexity is needless and how many of those jobs are useless is up to debate, and it may be less than we think, but it may really not.

I'm confident the LLMs that exist today can't replace developers, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't "augment" developers so fewer developers + LLMs don't maintain the same productivity. But perhaps many programmers are being fired because many programmers just aren't necessary, and AI is just a placebo.

Regarding the second hypothesis: At the same time, there are many more developers today than there were 10-20 years ago. Which means that even if most programmers are necessary, companies may be firing them to re-hire later at lower salaries. Despite the long explanations above this may be the more likely outcome. Again, AI is just an excuse here, maybe not even an intentional one: companies fire developers because they believe AI can improve things, it doesn't, but then they're able to re-hire cheaper anyways.

(Granted, even if one or both the above hypotheses are true, I don't think it's hopeless for software developers. Specifically because, I believe many developers will have to find other work, but it will be interesting work; perhaps even involving programming, just not the kind you learned in college, and at minimum involving reasoning some of which you learn from development. The reason being that, while both are important to some extent, I believe "smart work" is generally far more important than "hard work". Especially today, it seems most of society's problems aren't because we don't have enough resources, but 1) because we don't have the logistics to distribute them, and 2) because of problems that aren't caused by lack of resources, but mental health (culture disagreements, employer/employee disagreements, social media toxicity, loneliness). Especially 2). Similarly to how people moved from manual labor to technical work, I think people will move from technical work; but not back to manual labor, to something else, perhaps something social.)

you still need a programmer

making tech != using tech

What it’s not good at is anything within the last 2 years (due to training cutoff) all fail at latest remix, svelte and selenium syntax for example.

This is an eternity in FE dev terms

I read this on Reddit, but it capture in essence where we are headed in the future.

"AI won't replace you. Programmers using AI will."

Most programmers are not worth anything. Firing them for ai or no reason at all, will not change anything.

Whether ai can do stuff comparable to a competent senior sde, remains to be seen. But current AI definitely feels like a super assistant when I'm doing something.

Anyone who says chatgpt/Claude/copilot etc are bad, is suffering a skill issue. I'd go as far as to say they are really bad at working with junior engineers. Really bad as teachers too.

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