Are devs getting slowly replaced by AI? \ stacker news ~devs

5145 sats \ 34 comments \ @bitcoinplebdev 18 Mar devs

Are devs getting slowly replaced by AI or are we just getting enhanced?

I'm critical of every tech bro's assumption that AI will start replacing real developer positions. I can see there being LESS entry level positions or MORE responsibility for certain senior positions with the growing utility of AI assistance in coding, but that's about it.

Human enhancement with technology will always progress, but human replacement is a new thing, a zero to one.

With the advent of new tools like Devin and new and improved LLM's like Claude 3 I see how things can be dizzying with new and better tools constantly popping up.

However, to view these developments as mere replacements is to miss the forest for the trees. The core of software development has always been about problem-solving, creativity, and understanding user needs. Aspects that AI, at this stage, cannot fully replicate. AI tools, like Devin or Claude 3, are incredibly powerful aids, yet they require skilled developers to guide them, interpret their output, and integrate that into practical solutions.

Furthermore, the emergence of AI in the coding world could potentially democratize software development. It might lower the barrier to entry for many aspiring developers by handling the more mundane or boilerplate aspects of coding, thereby allowing more people to focus on the creative and innovative parts of development. This doesn't mean less need for developers but a shift in what skills are prioritized.

It's also worth noting that with every technological advancement, there's always been a fear of displacement. Yet, history shows us that technology typically creates more jobs than it destroys. It shifts the landscape, requiring adaptation and lifelong learning, but it also opens up new avenues for those willing to navigate them.

So what do you think?

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779 sats \ 2 replies \ @cascdr 18 Mar

I always saw this as no coder bro cope.

I don't get paid for shipping 90% of a product. Or 95% of a product. Or 99% of a product. I get paid for shipping 100% of a product and maintaining it indefinitely.

First law of thermodynamics: shit happens. Shit has happened. Shit will continue to happen.

AI does not fix this but it does indeed help you fix things faster.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullama 19 Mar

I don't get paid for shipping 90% of a product

You can definitely get paid for 100% shipping of a product that is not complete.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cascdr 19 Mar

If it doesn't make money or give the end customer/client/user fully what they need the work will be massively devalued.

564 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Mar

Capital enhancement reduced the farm population from 90%+ to 3%. I think AI will similarly reduce the number of people in a bunch of professions.

I also think you're right to expect a net increase in jobs, but those will likely be different types of jobs in those industries as well as a bunch of new industries that will now be economical.

669 sats \ 4 replies \ @kepford 18 Mar

One important difference between farming and software development is the gulf between the complexity and skill required. Farming still requires a lot of management and skill as well as a ton of luck but it seems to me having grown up in a farming community that machines replaced mostly manual labor jobs. Additionally chemicals increased yields at least in the short run (there are negative side effects for this long term). Software engineers most important skill is problem solving.

Here's my take. I've said it before but I'll repeat it. We are many many years away from "AI" being able to actually solve problems that have not been solved many times before. I have used these tools and many of my colleagues have as well. They do not replace the years of experience and knowledge as well as problem solving skill. They do however save time and make software engineers more efficient. The field of software engineering is already hard for a new comer to get into and I expect it will get even harder now. I see AI replicating a really bad new programmer pretty well. If you run a company and think you can hire a prompt engineer to replace your devs I pity your customer support team.

I agree with you that the likely outcome of all this is new industries that were economically enviable becoming possible. Many of the sky is falling story lines lack all logic to me as well as knowledge of the history of technologies and their affects on humanity. AI isn't magic. It is a bad name for different type of algorithm. I've lived through previous hype cycles and heard to crying, I will live through it again.

33 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Mar

That reminds of the omitted point about farming, which is that there is much more farming than there had been, despite fewer farmers to do it.

23 sats \ 2 replies \ @kepford 18 Mar

What is comical about all this fear mongering is that the minimum wage tends to eliminate more jobs by making it financially viable to automate manual labor or repetitive tasks. I have witnessed this over the years living in farm lands but the press NEVER talks about this factor.

33 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 18 Mar

It turns out that there's certain science that they aren't very interested in following.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 18 Mar

Shocking! :)

470 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 18 Mar

I don't think so, maybe it solves niche cases on the margin, for certain people who are tech savyy or want to learn and do it themselves, but its not as if AI will always spit out the cleanest code or the most effective execution model, maybe its good for startups and proof of concept, maybe its good for cleaning up certain pieces of your code base, but I always think there will be developers.

Development requires you to know wtf you want to do, solve and why, and most people with websites and management don't know their dick from their elbow and talk out their arse.

So how will they even know how to prompt correctly and evaluate the result is correct?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Car 18 Mar

I agree, I think it helps people like me do things much more efficient, as a founder it also adds another skill set that I can leverage. Also I think most people are underestimating real world experience and god given talent, two things AI is not capable of yet.

349 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 18 Mar

Speaking as a college professor who teaches some simple coding:

AI is not at a level yet where it's usable in the hands of someone who isn't already skilled at coding. What I observe is that the students who try to use AI to write their code always get things wrong, because the AI only gets it 90% of the way there, but the students who use it aren't able to fill out the rest of the 10%. The students who don't use AI and just follow my instructions / pay attention in class, do much better than the ones who use AI. (It could be a selection issue though--the ones who use AI use it because they don't know what to do)

But regardless, the truth is that my usage of AI (as someone already skilled) multiplies my productivity, but in the hands of my students (who are not skilled), it actually diminishes their productivity relative to asking another human. So, I think AI is going to be complementary to skill level. So it will reduce the quantity and the compensation of entry-level positions, but enhance the productivity and compensation of more senior and skilled positions.

248 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 18 Mar

I'm pretty much in agreement with your take. We have to remember that many of these "tech bros" have something to gain by their "sky is falling" takes. Attention. We live in an attention economy and we often forget this when taking in information. Others spreading this nonsense want the state to step in to slow things down so their company can catch up. Others want to pump their tech stocks. Its really over hyped. There is real value in many of these tools but we are no where near replacing problem solving engineers.

One colleague of mine told me recently after finding and fixing a bug in an implementation of a open source tool, "No AI will fix this bug, at least not yet. There wasn't a Stackoverflow post or blog post about it. No documentation. Just years of looking at code and knowing the system and being to stubborn to stop."

145 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bullen 19 Mar

123 sats \ 4 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 18 Mar

I don't claim to be a fortune teller, but I have serious doubts that AI will ever fully replace developers. I use AI for coding myself, but only for specific tasks. The generated code still needs to be reviewed and tested thoroughly.

32 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullama 19 Mar

Yeah, but it's a matter of time until we have tools that are basically like this:

"make an app that connects to twitter, summarizes the twits about Biden and sends me a daily email about the overall sentiment"

Instead of having a freelancer to deal with, the recipient of that text would be an AI and the output would be delivered in seconds instead of days/weeks/months.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 19 Mar

I don't underestimate the potential of AI, and I think it's a great tool for when we're stuck on something. Even in these simple applications, it's necessary to verify and test. We can't trust the output 100%. Again, I don't see AI being able to come up with a complete solution anytime soon. But I could be wrong, of course...

16 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullama 19 Mar

Here's an interesting read about long lasting bugs

I think we will always have bugs in software, so I reckon the best way forward is to build fast a new version of the code. AI can help with this.

Bit rot is real and AI can keep outdated software up-to-date in seconds. And that's just one aspect where AI can help. There are countless of other ways.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 19 Mar

Looks like good content, I'll read it in more detail later. I agree that AI is very good at helping with small tasks, which can be tedious if done manually. I think AI is like Google when it first appeared, it comes to 'democratize' knowledge, but with great power comes great responsibility. We cannot forget this!

62 sats \ 0 replies \ @stackerhacker 18 Mar

I think another angle to consider is the evolution of developer roles. As AI takes over more of the repetitive tasks, devs could find themselves moving towards roles that require a deeper understanding of systems architecture, user experience, and project management. It's not just about writing code anymore, it's about overseeing the integration of AI outputs into viable products and ensuring they meet user needs.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullcount 18 Mar

Every job is slowly getting replaced by a new job.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @expatriotic 19 Mar

I think...

A bot can replace a mediocre writer.

But a bot cannot replace a dev for one simple reason. I can't even set up and run a coding enviroment. So the code a bot gives me is worthless. Everyone knows how to type words and what to do with that output. But not everyone knows what to do with the code that a bot spits out. Therefore necessarily, for now, bots will simply enhance the workflow of those that already code.

51 sats \ 0 replies \ @Silent_Hodler 18 Mar

Devs are being slowly replaced. Whoever thinks otherwise is just coping. AI now is just helping but it’ll become more and more robust to the point less and less devs will be needed and people will have to be laid off. With how things progress one-two seniors or experts per company will suffice, mostly to do audits of code produced by AI and do controlled deployments. Eventually even this will be automated. It’s just a matter of time.

Disclaimer: been coding commercially for past 26 years, running my own software development company for the past 13.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @SwearyDoctor 18 Mar

no. AI is basicallz a copy-paste technology with frills. It can't do what it hasn't seen before, and then hallucinates BS. Easy repetative coding yes, but anything new, no.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 19 Mar

I have used AI for code generation and it clearly can generate new stuff.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @supratic 25 Mar

Just found another example: #479600

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @_vnprc 19 Mar

I have yet to see a single developer lose their job to an AI. It might get bad devs fired, but like you said software engineers need to have robust problem solving skills. What people are calling AI today (which is not actually AI) simply doesn't have that capacity.

When people try to scare me with talk about being replaced I tell them this: good developers will simply move up the stack. Picture a software engineer with a fleet of AI helper agents. This is the future that is unfolding before our eyes.

When the automated loom was invented a bunch of manual laborers lost their jobs, got angry, and started smashing the machines that replaced them. Those people are now a historical joke. They are called Luddites. Don't be a luddite. Learn how to operate the new machinery. Simple as that.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 19 Mar

I think it's a perfect storm:

A massive wave of new devs have been coming into the industry in the last 10-15 years because software development pays well and anyone can follow a hello world tutorial in an afternoon and call themselves "developer".
In the last few years automation, free or low cost services, global freelancing, and more recently AI have been reducing the number of devs you need to create something.

This means that now we have heaps of people trying to sell their dev time and the required dev time to create a goal is reduced, making it difficult for most devs to earn a lot of money.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 19 Mar

I see AI like guitars: A guitar is only as good as the one who is playing it.

I also see AI as a way to differentiate yourself even more from people who don't understand the software they are shipping. With AI, there will be a lot more of these people than there already are and thus someone who not only knows how to use AI will be in more demand. I know what I am doing and can use AI.

This also means that there will be a lot more shit code out.¹

It might also be related to the invention of LED lamps: We didn't save energy by replacing old lamps, we simply used more lights, just more efficient.

So applying this to AI would mean that AI will not replace devs since it might mostly be used in companies who didn't even have devs before. People who never were devs will now use AI to write software to automate simple tasks for which hiring a dev was too expensive or was never considered for other reasons.

A great thing for someone interested in cybersecurity ↩

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @arrivederci 18 Mar

'AI' / 'Artificial Intelligence' does not and will never exist

Don't use bullshit terms made up by fantasists and bullshitters

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullama 19 Mar

Silicon based intelligence is clearly real.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @arrivederci 20 Mar

If you say this then you either have a very different definition of 'intelligence' (a much poorer and non-useful one) or you are a fantasist

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rsync25 18 Mar

No. Both will work together.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @oliverweiss 18 Mar

No, they are replaced with people who can work with AI.

Footnotes