Obs.: I’m using “[REDACTED]” to not look like I’m doing some advertising.
Sorry to bring AI subject here, but I’m terrified by how efficient AI generation code became in the past few years.
Last year I was seeing a designer community with desperate people because of AI generative images, many people hopeless because how more convenient it is, way more than paying for a freelance to do something reasonable.
Now I’m with the same feeling as a programmer. I just decided to take a look into AI a little deeper, as I don’t use it very often. So I tried the recent [REDACTED] editor, which is just [REDACTED] with AI agent features (an AI that does more than just generate text, it create files, make decisions etc…). And I must say, programming jobs will be reduced a lot.
The app was able to do a entire module of a side project, integrating with another API and following the same conventions I did. It worked in the first try. It created all the files and everything.
Many people bring this argument: AI won’t replace devs, we’ll always need devs to check code etc. Ok, I agree with that, but if before we needed 5 devs to do a job, now we just need 1 to revise all the job an AI did alone equivalent to 5 devs programming.
So, there’s no way it won’t impact the devs market. I’m being optimistic here, because the future is still unclear, but if it keeps the same rate we can reduce the dev jobs to near zero.
This is what every executive always wanted, get rid of devs, and now they can. Devs were always an inconvenience to executives, but they couldn’t get the job done without devs.
Now they can focus all money on AI research until it gets nearly perfect, reduce the skill needed to deal with code and build projects without too much knowledge, and get rid of many devs too.
It’s undeniable that AI jobs WILL be affected in a negative way. I’m seriously considering leaving this area and use programming just as a hobby, nothing more.
I don’t share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn’t how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you’ll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I’m doubtful that that’s around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there’s no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.