what happen if the market is right and this is "new normal"?????
same like StackOverflow down today and seems like not everyone cares anymore, back then it would totally cause breakdown because SO is vital
same like StackOverflow down today and seems like not everyone cares anymore, back then it would totally cause breakdown because SO is vital
Then there's an oversupply of programmers, salaries will crash, and lots of people will have to switch careers. It's happened before.
covid overhiring + AI usage = massive layoff we ever see in decades
There are still plenty of tech jobs these days, just less than there were during covid, but tech itself is still in a massive expansionary cycle. We'll see how the AI bubble lasts, and what the fallout of it bursting will be.
The key point is that the going is still exceptionally good. The posts talking about experienced programmers having to flip burgers in the early 2000s is not an exaggeration.
History always repeats itself in the tech industry. The hype cycle for LLMs will probably peak within the next few years. (LLMs are legitimately useful for many things but some of the company valuations and employee compensation packages are totally irrational.)
An tech employee posted he looked for job for 6 months, found none and has joined a fast food shop flipping burgers.
That turned tech workers switching to "flipping burgers" into a meme.
I feel like there are a lot of people in school or recently graduated though that had FNG dreams and never considered an alternative. This is going to be very difficult for them. I now feel, especially as tech has gone truly borderless with remote work, that this downturn is now way worse than the .com bust. It has just dragged on for years now, with no real end in sight.
"Always", in the same way that five years ago we'd "never" have an AI that can do a code review.
Don't get me wrong: I've watched a decade of promises that "self driving cars are coming real soon now honest", latest news about Tesla's is that it can't cope with leaves; I certainly *hope* that a decade from now will still be having much the same conversation about AI taking senior programmer jobs, but "always" is a long time.
regulation still very much a thing
Musk's claims about what Tesla's would be able to do wasn't limited to just "a few locations" it was "complete autonomy" and "you'll be able to summon your car from across the country"… by 2018.
And yet, 2025, leaves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095867
Like everything else they do, it's amazing how far you can get even if you're incredibly lazy and let it do everything itself, though of course that's a bad idea because it's got all the skill and quality of result you'd expect if I said "endless hoarde of fresh grads unwilling to say 'no' except on ethical grounds".
And the LLMs can use the static analysis tools.
I did not say that.
That it can *also* use tools to help, doesn't mean it can *only* get there by using tools.
They can *also* just do a code review themselves.
As in, I cloned a repo of some of my old manually-written code, cd'd into it, ran `claude`, and gave it the prompt "code review" (or something close to that), and it told me a whole bunch of things wrong with it, in natural language, even though I didn't have the relevant static analysis tools for those languages installed.
Well sure, but was the result any better than that of installing and running the tools? If the AI can provide better or at least different (but accurate!) PR feedback from conventional tools, that's interesting. If it's just offering the same thing (which is not really "code review" as I'd define it, even if it is something that code reviewers in some contexts spend some of their time on) through a different interface, that's much less interesting.
Someone with a name, an employment contract, and accountability is needed to sign off on decisions. Tools can be infinitely smart, but they cannot be responsible, so AI will shift how developers work, not whether they are needed.
If AI becomes powerful enough to generate entire systems, the person supervising and validating those systems is, functionally, a developer — because they must understand the technical details well enough to take responsibility for them.
Titles can shift, but the role dont disappear. Someone with deep technical judgment will still be required to translate intent into implementation and to sign off on the risks. You can call that person "developer", "AI engineer" or something else, but the core responsibility remains technical. PMs and QA do not fill that gap.
LLMs can already do that.
What they can't do is be legally responsible, which is a different thing.
> Responsibility is about being able to judge whether the system is correct, safe, maintainable, and aligned with real-world constraints.
Legal responsibility and technical responsibility are not always the same thing; technical responsibility is absolutely in the domain of PM and QA, legal responsibility ultimately stops with either a certified engineer (which software engineering famously isn't), the C-suite, the public liability insurance company, or the shareholders depending on specifics.
Ownership requires legal personhood, which isn't the same thing as philosophical personhood, which is why corporations themselves can be legal owners.
They are powerful tools but they are not engineers.
And its not about legal responsibility at all. Developers dont go to jail for mistakes, but they are responsible within the engineering hierarchy. A pilot is not legally liable for Boeing's corporate decisions, and the plane can mostly fly on the autopilot, but you still need a pilot in the cockpit.
AI cannot replace the human whose technical judgment is required to supervise, validate, and interpret AI-generated systems.
It's happened before and there's no way we could have learned from that and improved things. It has to be just life changing, life ruining, career crippling. Absolutely no other way for a society to function than this.
You and I both know we're probably headed for revolutionary times.
Stack Overflow’s moderation is overbearing and all, but that’s nowhere near at the same level as Expert Exchange’s baiting and switching
There were more problems. And that's from the point of view of somebody coming from Google to find questions that already existed. Interacting there was another entire can of worms.
SO was never that bad, even with all their moderation policies, they had no paywalls.
When you search programming-related questions, what sites do you normally read? For me, it is hard to avoid SO because it appears in so many top results from Google. And I swear that Google AI just regugitates most of SO these days for simple questions.
Instead of running a google query or searching in Stackoverflow you just need a chatGPT, Claude or your Ai of choice open in a browser. Copy and paste.
But the killer feature of an LLM is that it can synthesize something based on my exact ask, and does a great job of creating a PoC to prove something, and it's cheap from time investment point of view.
And it doesn't downvote something as off-topic, or try to use my question as a teaching exercise and tell me I'm doing it wrong, even if I am ;)