GitHub CEO Warns Developers: "Either Embrace AI or Get Out of This Career"

Why wouldn't it be? I believe programming is very much susceptible to Jevons paradox. I'm coding things I never would have started working on a year ago because it either would have taken too long or would have been simply impossible without an LLM (like and MCP server).

> What if companies actually have about as many systems as they need

They think ~"companies don't have as many systems as they need".

My opinion? Even without GenAI, our sector has too many cooks.

I've not valued most of the stuff that was added to any consumer facing software product or service in the last decade or so. Facebook has, if anything, regressed since 2007. YouTube (itself, no comment on the content) peaked sometime around 2016. SwiftUI (2019) still isn't an improvement over UIKit. Google Maps is very marginally worse than it was in 2018. MacOS has improved so slowly since it was named after cats (2012) that it's hard to even care about the aggregated changes since then (even if I ignore all the bugs*), and similarly for Google Translate since they bought and integrated Word Lens in 2014.

Entirely new things are sometimes (like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion) genuinely interesting and make a novel departure from what came before, but it's very rare.

* https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2025/06/19-15.56.44.html

Good point. I think that's demonstrably already a problem. Software products are notoriously prone to enshittification in part because successful companies build up vast development teams that have to somehow justify their existence with continuous feature churn.

It's only trendy now to say those things publicly without PR and media training filter.

https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/

Of course, when phrased with adversarial language, these self-proclaimed gurus and "leaders" are basically saying: "We know everything and you know not too much, get on board or get behind", to boost their sales. Many times these futures didn't work out:

- Elon's self driving cars

- Elon's Boring Tunnel

- NFTs (mega flop)

- Web3/blockchain (it happened but wasn't the revolution and future they were proclaiming)

These are just salespeople, they have no idea what they are talking about, they just want to create a need for their product and sell it to you.

Would you listen to Linus Torvalds: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/29/linus_torvalds_ai_hyp... or to some guy you've never heard of so far. Same for the creator of curl, a tool you use every day: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/15/curl_creator_mulls_ni.... Nah, this guy is talking BS, as many before him.

That’s just a majority of people in the industry. If there any reason to leave, that’s it.

He will just follow Satya's movements blindly.

1. opensource devs who ran on 246 (iirc) problems with ai assistance all projected that they would save around 20% of their estimated time, but all went over by about the same margin - salaries cost money, people are paid per _time unit_, not per deliverable (though if we were, I think there'd be a lot fewer ai-first devs out there - see sunken time cost above)

2. studies of opensource code monitoring error rates for ai-assisted repos showed a much higher defect rate than those "artisinal" coders you disdain so much - this is likely a corollary to (1) where in that case, devs have to debug ai-generated code that they could have written faster themselves

And the whole argument forgets about the upskill issue that will become more prevalent in the future: if we're replacing low-skill workers with ai agents, even assuming that those agents can do a better job (and when you actually _measure_ it, instead of just _thinking_ it, it turns out they don't), we end up with a massive skill gap as no-one upskills when they're replaced.

It's good for me - I'll probably still be able to get work when I'm 80 (anyone remember y2k?) - but it's bad for the industry as a whole, and definitely bad for any entry-level coders who were going to become great, but couldn't, because they couldn't learn on the job they didn't have.

As for competing in the labor market - we'll see how that goes as more and more companies are starting to realise that the "savings" promised to them by ai code agents not only don't materialise, but are often actually _losses_. Again, see (1) and (2) above. I don't have links, but they should be relatively easy to find - I found them all right here.

"ai" in it's current incarnation (glorified token predictors) will never surplant skilled devs, simply because it cannot understand anything. It can't understand the domain, it can't understand the users, it can't understand the code. It has no concept of understanding. All it knows is "sequence a,b,c likely is followed by d", just on a larger scale. If it can do a fully-functional, unbuggy bit of code for you, it's simply because it's seen that exact code before, and in that case, it's robbed you of learning anything because the journey to finding that code, or the docs that spawned it, is part of the learning process. Much like we always scolded devs who copy-pasta'd from Stack Overflow, we should hold these agents to the same standard.

Please, please, at least if you're going to use these tools, _don't trust them_. Scrutinise everything. Personally, having to double check a confidently wrong junior dev all day (one which won't learn from its mistakes either) sounds like a step down from actually creating stuff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152

How it's going: platform wants to stop people from sharing the code they wrote with each other.