Wages are certainly going down for most software roles
We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse?
Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?
There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.
photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_
some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.
We get about 10% YoY now, which is actually impressive, but not even close to the past experiences. Computing power used to take 18 months to double, and was being attacked at a bunch of different angles.
Now we are literally out of tricks, to the point where we had to undo some of those tricks because they were fundamentally flawed, and it takes 100x the engineering investment to get that 10% YoY, or sometimes only every other year, and that isn't going to continue for much longer.
We can't increase clock speed much. We can't increase density much. We are out of clever tricks. It takes an entire earth's worth of human talent just to produce the machine that produces the chips. How the hell are people still insisting that computing power continues to follow Moore's Law?
Several of the limits we've hit are fundamental matters of physics.
Meanwhile, LLMs ask for orders of magnitude more compute than is cheap and cheerful right now. Do we even have a single order of magnitude left for compute?
This is in a way the same argument that all companies will use just boxed (albeit customized) software. In reality many, ie banks run their own custom software and for good reasons. Wake me up (in retirement) when any major bank decides to run their finances, regulatory stuff and transactions on llm-generated stuff made by underpaid devs like you describe.
We're doing a great job of that right now, aren't we?
LLMs are non-deterministic so any interaction with them is a bug inducing act by definition because you don't know what you're gonna get.
What can a mid level person do? Instead of a consultancy loaning out a team of 3-4 people, it might just be one person now. That could mean a lot of downsizing.
One thing mid level people wouldn't be counted on to do was create Photoshop or Paypal. The original thread is about top level pros being the ones who stay in the industry, right? That sounds about right if we're moving the conversation over to Photoshop and Paypal.
- if it is true that AI enhances our abilities it just means the goal posts move of what was expected for each level
- the complexity ceiling will rise for the level a superstar or a company is capable of maintaining, meaning there will still be stratified complexities for the mid levels of old to handle, it might just be higher than before
- counter intuitively but time and again increased software creation more often than not increases demand for more software rather than decreases
if the world decides it has no more problems to solve with software, then we are in trouble. i don't think that is happening anytime soon.
If its so good why aren't you rich?
Seems like so far the market is not convinced at all that SaaS companies as a whole are any more disruptable than before.
Most people book flights online, travel agents still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that travel agency as a business is economically worse than ever.
Most people have cameras in their pockets that can take good photos, photographers still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that being a photographer is economically worse than ever.
Hopefully, you see the pattern. You don't remember that companies that are no longer around.
Bun gets a lot of hate for vibe coding.
I vibe coded to modernize one of my old hobby websites (so not even vibe coding from scratch) and I immediately got anti-AI comments, and I didn't even say I used AI.
Well that's where we're seemingly at an impasse, no?
I don't even like the term "good vibecoding". The term was implied as a means to just let the computer type its own code and "go with the vibes". i.e. you have no deeper idea on how it works underneath.
Now, AI-assisted coding? It can be good. It can be a rush job. But the idea is that LLM's are in the passenger's seat, not the diver's. Much smaller chance where you have no idea where you're going since you're at the wheel.
There was not 1 mention about anything being broken, they were simply complaining about AI.
Anti-AI psychosis is a very real thing that is happening https://x.com/Jediwolf/status/2054776716770320631
Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself.
Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift.
We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.
100% agree. People are looking at the future through the lenses of the current paradigm just like when people from the past imagined the future (our present) in a way which we now find hilarious. Most of the time, the future doesn't bring developments which improve an action in a scalar way (faster, shorter, stronger, etc) but instead fundamentally change the nature of that action (handwritten letter communication vs video calls) or completely override the need for it (telephone boxes vs mobile phones).
But if I can clarify my point. It's more that I'm trying to say "Company promises A is happening and B is the necessary consequences to achieve it".
I do not believe A is happening but B is occurring despite that, in order to achieve hidden agenda C. Though in this case, C is not that hidden since every other article has them blabbing out loud about "wow it's going to be so amazing when C happens!"
here,
A = AI is making us more productive than ever
B = This will cause impacts on jobs and the economy as a whole as we realign what labor is
C = Companies make more money than ever as it works towards eliminating labor on massive (90+%) levels in order to maximize profits and moating the idea of knowledge itself
We are all scrambling to figure out what else we need to do (and so are many other roles).
En masse, I argue not. More productivity for engineers would not be met with mass layoffs if engineering production was why value was being added. On the contrary, other industries have had to hire back talent becsuse companies were too aggressive cutting people and needed that work to be done.
But I'm not an oracle. I can only speak for what I see today and won't predict tomorrow. Especially in these trying times.
Everything else is something else you care about, but producitivty is simply proven for almost every engineer on the above point.
You're not getting my point, and it's not hard. I disagree with this statement.
>producitivty is simply proven for almost every engineer on the above point.
I've read otherwise.
Even if people could find the tools, they won't seek it if a one button solution can come to them. But we can't outcompete Instagram in a prompt, nor some popular app.
Agentic solutions just don't have these issues. You give them your image, that's it.
Yeah, that's the marketing pitch. Much easier to fall into that than really think and approach how you perform a task.
A photo with adjusted cropping, background blurring, and contrast etc?
I'm a doctor and I'm building my own EMR system.
I've also been a hobbyist programmer for over a decade, but the point still stands because without LLMs I wouldn't have the time to even try it.
Sadly, we have trained software users to pay for shit code.
A lot of AI believers (me too fwiw) seem to forget it’s a lot harder to ‘close the loop’ on non-code projects. I think this is because they are usually coders.
Which is kinda proof they're populated by sociopaths with extremely little empathy. The people who are building that stuff are programmers, and if they had a tiny bit of functioning empathy they'd stop or slow down or at least be unenthusiastic.
And we're not talking about very high level empathy here, but the very basic kind of thinking about the effects on someone very much like yourself.
Not necessarily, there's a growing and somewhat untapped market for BBWs
There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.
There are only so much customers to chose from and all of them have finite budgets.
The exponential growth curve only exists in MBA books.
You can see current AI hype as example, and its government didn't step in and printed N trillions yet.
If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.
If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.
I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?
Naturally we can't use figures of speech.
And now your comparison is inaccurate. I said whole application. So the correct one would be selling/renting construction vehicles vs building entire building and here selling/renting is maybe 10% of developer income.
Digging a hole is like making small code change and if you wish to continue using this analogy then tokens are digging a hole and selling entire applications (thing Software house do) is construction company building entire building
Second obviously deliver more cash and here AI premise starts to crack. AI can't deliver anything good, costs much more than developing team (Uber proved it) and even if you use it as hard as possible and it does what it suppose to deliver max 5% increase across the board
But the current state of AI is a very good indicator were it is going. Even if we don't achieve AGI, do you think AI in its current form will not be better in 5 or 10 years and we will have this solved a lot more/better than today?
Even with AI, you still need to design the software, test it, try it out, deploy it and scale it. An proper agentic platform still needs time to be build.
And the models need to be a little bit better and for that you want human feedback/reinforcement learning
This alone will lead to being able to run a fable class claude model 24/7 and potentially running something like this in parallel multiply times over.
In my sector? No, not really. Because the core problem isn't tech, but labor rights. Those will only worsen.
You are comparing what it is with what should be.
There was a submission a while back that might be relevant here: "Why Law Is Law-Shaped" (lawvm.org) [0]
PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.
Whether that is due to AI or other economic conditions is an exercise left to the reader.
we are entering the world of smaller service firms (1 - 3 people) - where technical chops will even get paid more. the age of cookie-cutter apps is over.