Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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