Everybody talks about AI killing programming jobs, but any developer who has had to use it knows it can’t do anything complex in programming. What it’s really going to replace is program managers, customer reps, makes most of HR obsolete, finance analysts, legal teams, and middle management. This people have very structured, rule based day to days. Getting an AI to write a very customized queuing system in Rust to suit your very specific business needs is nearly impossible. Getting AI to summarize Jira boards, analyze candidates experience, highlight key points of meetings (and obsolete most of them altogether), and gather data on outstanding patents is more in its wheelhouse.
I am starting to see a major uptick in recruiters reaching out to me because companies are starting to realize it was a mistake to stop hiring Software Engineers in the hopes that AI would replace them, but now my skills are going to come at a premium just like everyone else in Software Engineering with skills beyond “put a react app together”
Trouble is, you’re basing all that on now, not a year from now, or 6 months from now. It’s too easy to look at it’s weaknesses today and extrapolate. I think people need to get real about coding and AI. Coding is language and rules. Machines can learn that enormously faster and more accurately than humans. The ones who survive will be those who can wield it as a tool for creativity. But if you think it won’t be capable of all the things it’s currently weak at you’re just kidding yourself unfortunately. It’ll be like anything else - a tool for an operator. Middlemen will be wiped out of the process, of course, but those with money remain those without time or expertise, and there will always be a place for people willing to step in at that point. But they won’t be coding. They’ll be designing and solving problems.
We are 18 months into AI replacing me in 6 months. I mean… the CEO of OpenAI as well as many researchers have already said LLMs have mostly reached their limit. They are “generalizers” and if you ask them to do anything new they hallucinate quite frequently. Trying to get AI to replace developers when it hasn’t even replaced other menial office jobs is like saying “we taught AI to drive, it will replace all F1 drivers in 6 months”.
If, 24 months from now, most people aren’t coding, it’ll be because people like him cut jobs to make a quicker buck. Or nickel.
Well if it works, means that job wasn’t that important, and the people doing that job should improve themselves to stay relevant.
Edit: wow what a bunch of hypersensitive babies. I swear, y’all just allergic to learning or something. I just said people need to improve themselves to stay relevant, and people freak out and send me death threats. What a joke.
job wasn’t that important
I keep telling you that changing out the battery in the smoke alarm isn’t worth the effort and you keep telling me that the house is currently on fire, we need to get out of here immediately, and I just roll my eyes because you’re only proving my point.
Sure, believe what you want to believe. You can either adapt to what’s happening, or just get phased out. AI is happening whether you like it or not. You may as well learn to use it.
I get why you’re enthusiastic about AI. This whole comment reads like it was AI generated.
The only people who would say this are people that don’t know programming.
LLMs are not going to replace software devs.
I can see the statement in the same way word processing displaced secretaries.
There used to be two tiers in business. Those who wrote ideas/solutions and those who typed out those ideas into documents to be photocopied and faxed. Now the people who work on problems type their own words and email/slack/teams the information.
In the same way there are programmers who design and solve the problems, and then the coders who take those outlines and make it actually compile.
LLM will disrupt the programmers leaving the problem solvers.
There are still secretaries today. But there aren’t vast secretary pools in every business like 50 years ago.
It’ll have to improve a magnitude for that effect. Right now it’s basically an improved stack overflow.
!remindme in 24 months
I will put down a solid grand that this exact same article will be printed by the exact same website 24 months from now and it will receive the exact same reception.
If that’s true, how come there isn’t a single serious project written exclusively or mostly by an LLM? There isn’t a single library or remotely original application made with Claude or Gemini. Not one.
My last employer had many internal tools that were fine.
They had only a moderate amount of oversight.
I had to find a new job, I’m actually thinking of walking away from software development now that there are so few jobs :(
It sucks but there’s no sense pretending this won’t have a large impact on the job landscape.
What did these tools do? I don’t see any LLm being used for creating anything working from scratch, without the human propmter doing most of the heavy lifting.
Translation: “We’re going to make the suite for building, testing, and deploying so obnoxiously difficult to integrate with your work environment that in two years nobody in your DevOps team will be able to get anything to a release state.”
Me, fiddling with a config file for a legacy Perl script that’s been holding up the ass-end of the business since 1996: “Uh, yeah that’s great.”
