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Comment by amarant | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this whole "but sure, let's fire the engineers" part is just anti-ai narrative. Like, is anyone actually firing engineers because they have AI now? Does anyone know anyone who's lost their job as an SWE due to being replaced by AI?

I sure don't, and noone I've asked so far knows anyone who's had that happen to then either.

I want to say it's a sign of the times to try and make technology a political issue, but my understanding is the same thing happened during the industrial revolution, so maybe it's just human nature?

Well the industrial revolution didn't make us all homeless beggars, so I doubt AI will, either.

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I have literally seen dozens, if not hundreds of people claim here, on Reddit and LinkedIn things like "we have downsized our engineering team from 50 to 5 engineers", "I produce 5x the amount of code", etc. A few tech CEOs - both from frontier labs and traditional software companies - are also claiming software engineers are a thing of the past.

I think these two audiences - tech CEOs and random anons on the internet - tend to be full of shit and I give very little credence to what they say, but to your point, some people are at least claiming things of the sort.

> from frontier labs

The target market of these companies are software shops. You don’t see them advertising the model capabilities in i.e. Civil Engineering much. They are trying specifically to sell a cheaper replacement of software engineers to those CEOs. You have to read the news and announcements with this lens:

A vacuum cleaner manufacturer claims that dirty dusty house is a thing of the past. Of course they say that.

A similar thing could be said about traditional tech CEOs like Benioff - that it's part of their fiduciary duty to stakeholders to say things like that. I don't disagree with you; I'm merely saying it's the nature of the game, and that people are definitely claiming that there is an imminent (or even ongoing) firing of engineers.

I don’t think you should let them off the hook with this fiduciary duty idea. If anything, they should be aware of what their company’s concrete plans are for firing off 90% of their engineers. If they are saying something like that, and it doesn’t happen… they are lying. There’s no duty to lie to everyone (including shareholders) for… their own good? (Not that I see how it would be for their own good).

The funny thing is, the AI that is so good that it can replace 90% of developers, can probably replace the vast majority of software shops as well. What I guess will happen eventually, is that at some point AI (not the current one) will replace “software” in many areas. Why have Stripe when AI manages the transactions. Why have Airbnb when AI can both manage and rent properties. Why have Shopify, and so on and so forth. Letting AI build your app will look silly. Why even have an app? IMO that’s when the real/massive displacement will happen.

Well at least companies use AI as a reason for layoffs / not hiring. Though there are other reasons that may be masking.

Generally what actually seems to be happening is companies want to focus on AI so they close non-AI parts of their business and beef up the AI parts. Which isn’t the same as “replacing engineers with AI”

Perception precedes reality, being a dev was already a low status job. Consider a top tier FAANG vs white shoe lawyer. With AI that has dropped further. Even if AI only takes the very junior roles there will be increased competition at the more senior roles which will again drive down prestige and salary.

Additionally, I’m not hiring anymore which is kind of the same thing as firing. I did have a few roles open for junior assistant types but those are now filled by using AI. AI helps improve my productivity without the added overhead of dealing with staff / contractors. I even hired junior devs and put them on full time study mode to try to skill them up to be useful, one guy was in that mode for 6 months before I had to fire him for learning too slowly. Technically LLMs did learn faster than he did and it was his full time job. It’s easier for me to communicate with the AI, especially with the quick responses and being always available.

I figure the AI will eventually get to my level and eat my lunch but hopefully there are a few years before that happens.

And designers, OMG AI is far easier to deal with and produces far better results.

But why don't you steal directly from GitHub, it will make you more "productive", too?

I need code that works within the specialized context of my project, I couldn't steal code from GitHub even if I wanted to.

What kind of design work is AI even capable of? I’m not saying the output isn’t occasionally very impressive (as a toy), I’m saying it’s utterly useless in practice.

Coming up with a spec or design system? I’m not sure what an AI-generated design could possibly be based on and how it would get the necessary inputs from stakeholders other than… in the form of a spec, formulated by someone collating those requirements.

Creating assets based on a spec or design system? Again, I have yet to see any output that can stay internally consistent. Frontend code might even work, despite being a mishmash of half a dozen flavours of react with two or three different vintages of tailwind. But good luck with native code or anything beyond basic CRUD forms.

I recently tried to get claude and gemini to scaffold a tailwind component library from a pretty comprehensive design document. It felt like getting a roomba to swim across a lake.

Sorry by designers I mean UI assets. Art and iconography.

I recently needed a transpiler for a mini-DSL to Lua. Google Gemini did a pretty good job of it, hallucinated a bunch of non existent helper functions but they were easy enough to add. It knew the target language Lua better than I did so it has some good ideas for simple generation of code. I naively would have generated more natural looking code at the cost of more effort. Once I fixed the bugs it worked fine. I estimate it would have taken me 4x as long without it.

> Like, is anyone actually firing engineers because they have AI now?

Look no further than the Microsoft layoff they announced earlier this week.

Of course, you are free to doubt the honesty of the people making those announcements.

Literally the org I was formerly in.

I know many people who have lost their jobs after the leadership wanted to go "all-in" on AI. I also know of multiple leadership teams who have been fired en masse after pushing for that direction and the organization failing to deliver.

But if you are asking if I know of an organization that was successful after firing their people... Nope, I don't know any of those.

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