Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
They’re just gonna sit around and wait a few months until they are begged to come back and can demand more compensation. The current generative AI, which is not general AI, will not be able to replace high functioning jobs. Eventually, a lot of those software engineers will be asked back and get much more for their services.
They’ll either move up the food chain to higher-touch work where AI can’t compete, or they’ll do other things.
Keep in mind that most devs aren’t really all that good at their jobs, so it will probably be economically beneficial for them to do something else. I say this as a long-time hiring manager with many decades of experience in the field.
It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes
Only if you believe the hype. It can do that in best-case scenarios when the requirements are written as rigorously as code, or where it’s replicating a common pattern.
Do they just become homeless?
During previous layoffs, a lot of them left the field, and some of the rest founded startups. It wasn’t always the case that firms were founded by teenaged sociopaths with strong family connections to VC funding. There was a time when they were founded by people who knew how to do things.
If it is able to replace software devs, it’s probably able to replace 95% of the jobs that require mainly using your brain.
Why would devs be displaced by an interactive search engine?
There are a lot of dumb takes here in the comments
Developer displacement works the same way it does for any other technology
The problem is not that the job is eliminated but that fewer are needed per unit of output
My startup only has 4 engineers because we don’t need 5
This trend will continue until the SV hiring bubble bursts
You have to understand what software can do, how to design it, and how it should interact with other systems in order to write software and not just code, and AI can’t do that. If you tell it to make you A, and what you really want is B, you’ll never get what you want.
Only about 10-20 percent of my job as a software engineer is writing code. AI can be really amazing at writing code, but unless it can do the other 80-90% of my job without me, I’ll be safe.
Now, whether middle and upper management will know this is an entirely different question. A lot of them think that lines of code written is a good measure of productivity, when in fact it’s often the opposite.
I foresee there being a big struggle for management to come to grips with the fact that AI is better suited at their job than ours.
My best days as a software dev are negative line days.
NegaSLOCS are the best SLOCS.
Hear, hear!
Spend their days (and some nights) tweaking and refining AI prompts to get the stupid thing to generate the software that the dumbass product manager wants and the user does not.
You know…
Pretty much the same thing they do now.
The same thing that devs displaced by all the CMSs are doing - their jobs, just with another tool in their toolkit.
On a related note, what happens when the number of different CMS’s exceeds the number of devs? And why is it that every intermediate-level dev seems to write another shitty CMS rather than learning to use a good one?
Well before that level of complexity is achieved, the jobs of CEOs and Managers will be gone. Question is, will the Ai CEO really want to risk the safety of a review, knowing that it IS the company. Pump and Dump won’t do it any more. Then CEOs need to actually work for their money. (Or well… get replaced by an Ai)
As a dev, there’s still quite a bit ai can’t do and will most likely not be able to do.
AI is good at solving old problems but it’s not trained on anything new. Its good at boilerplate and templates, but not good at original material. If it gets tremendously better, and really does get to the point where it’s better than we are at development, then the industry will shift into prompt engineering. But I can see a huge reduction of jobs.
You seem like someone who hasn’t really worked in software development.
Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.
You’ll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
That will never happen, or at least with how ai currently works. It’s basically a glorified autocorrect, it uses the same technology underneath.
But presuming it does, yes. We will have to go to another industry, like AI prompting. Coding is a tiny part of professional software development.
Glorified autocorrect… YES! It’s a really good analogy that i will use to temper the expectation of my boss. Also: AI hallucination is just a fancy way to say ’it’s a wrong answer’.
Yes, exactly this.
When compilers came along, some people honestly thought it would dumb down programming so much that anyone could do it.
When high level programming languages came along, they rejoiced again - now finally anyone can make software.
When Intellisense meat you no longer had to remember variable names, write your own imports and could guess how most libraries work, the bells rang out once again in celebration.
And now we have AI, it’s cool but really just another step like all those steps before. For me, it’s a replacement for the documentation I never read anyway. I can ask an AI a stupid question rather than bothering a human developer.
These days it’s my job to manage a small team of developers - when I ask them why they wrote a stupid thing that makes no sense, 90% of the time, the answer is that an AI wrote it for them.
And if it’s going to be full-blown AGI then we’ll become AI psychologists.
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I even used Claude AI to write an entire C# application, I did ZERO coding, yes, literally nothing! I have NEVER coded in C# before, I gave it all requirements, worked with it like a project manager… it created a full blown working application that was beyond my expectations.
I achieved the same in 2000 with a home grown framework, and again in 2006 with Ruby on Rails.
Astonishingly fast prototyping is a quarter of a centrury old.
- How are you enjoying maintaining this app in production? (Or is it not there yet, because it’s just very nice for a prototype?)
- How did Claude AI do at deploying it?
- Are you satisfied with Claude AIs answers to your boss’ traffic analytics and load balancing questions?
- When will Claude AI let you know how the A/B tests proved out for optimizing sales?
- Or doesn’t it do those things yet?
Computers are replacing us. They’ve been at it since their inception.
Keep learning the trade and you’ll find there’s a metric ton more that computers cannot help with, than that they can help with. That will get better. I’m working at making it get better.
I figure that my learning how to train the computers is job security. I didn’t count on it being a harsh lesson in how long it’s going to be before computers get not stupid.
I do have a plan for when I automate myself out of a job. It’s just not a plan I’m really counting on, because I’ve been trying for decades and I only have so many decades left of doing this.
I’ve been constantly advised to have an exit plan, for when the computers replaced me, for the entirety of those same decades.
Most often by the same people who want me to charge less.
Funny thing, that. Take care who you listen to on this topic, and that their motives are.
My motive is to (continue to) charge the rest of you a shit ton of money before the AI finally replace us.
It does help me if you all don’t buy into the bullshit that CEOs have been spouting about replacing us all.
We’ve all been undercharging for about 3 years due to it.
AI hasn’t accomplished jack shit, but a lot of you have accepted lower pay than you probably should.
I make very good money, but I can’t help but notice that it would be a bit more of the rest of you would wise to the scam and raise your own prices.
Some days, all I do is code.
So your instincts are correct. You need to learn the rest of the job, before the part you are doing is replaced by robots.
Lots of my colleagues in SWE use full blown AI development tools.
We all use full blown AI development tools. Before that we had other tricks that did the same thing.
We must beware mistaking the instrument for the musician, or we get sold a broken old instrument that doesn’t perform miracles outside it’s master’s hand.
What are you using to get Claude to write for you? I’ve been using it to write a full stack Go/javascript app but it needs a lot of handholding.
There will always need to be a human operator to guide the machine.
I’m using Cursor. It’s done some very impressive things for me. https://www.cursor.com/features
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The plan is to rehire them back temporarily to babysit the AI and fix all the AI generated crap. Then realize it was cheaper to actually just have the devs make code. Then hire them back at a reduced rate on a more permanent basis with the understanding that they believe the code will still be partially generated by AI and cleaned up by the same people and they aren’t paying top tier for third hand AI slop.
They’ve been doing the same thing in IT for decades, just replace AI with outsourcing.
Well if it can replace senior software engineers… Wouldn’t it also be able to do almost all of the other jobs? Or are you referring to some future where AI advances massively, but robotics does not and handymen are still safe?
I’d say if all humans are unemployed, society would change massively. We can’t really tell how that’d work. But if machines / AI do all jobs, get food on the table… I don’t really know what other people would be doing. I think I’d relax and pursue a few hobbies and interests. Or it’d be some dystopia where humankind is oppressed by the machines and I’d fight for the resistance.
But regardless… In a world like that, money wouldn’t work the way it does now. Neither would salaries for labor mean anything.
I was going to learn how to give a really good handjob but the AI robots will probably take over that too.
