Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs?

Question

Longer title: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs and instead start thinking how we are going to hire more developers?Hi folks,I can't be the only one noticing that AI coding agents are making us work more, not less.Here's the math that's been bugging me. If a developer used to write 100 lines of code per day (illustrative) but now AI writes 90% of the code, so you'd think that the load will go down to 10 lines, right? What I find is that the scope has exploded. Developers are now able to crank 1000 lines per day total and while you may say that AI writes 90% of them we are still writing 100 lines of the hard stuff.Every feature that seemed too expensive before is suddenly doable. Every prototype becomes production system. The bottleneck shifted from typing to thinking, but the thinking load just got 10x bigger. We have also single-handedly increased the demand of that 10% chunk which is not as easy to scale as machines. Am I the only one noticing this?

_pdp_ · Accepted Answer

BTW, I also posted a longer version of this realisation here for what's worth: https://go.cbk.ai/more-work

xenospn · Answer

AI software developers are similar to self driving cars. Both are great for increasing stock prices, but not much more than that.

toomuchtodo · Answer

Lines of code is a poor metric for productivity, revenue, and profit. The question is: is AI making existing developer populations more efficient to where the demand trajectory for software engineers declines over time. I think we're too early to tell and that early indicators are the unsophisticated in power going "Magic robot makes you work better, use magic robot or we will replace you, and we're not going to hire materially more people until we approach what appears to be a failure mode." Bit of a collective industry death march based on vibes and cargo culting.

krapp · Answer

No one is going to hire more developers, that's the entire point of AI. You'll do more work and provide more value to shareholders for the same if not less pay until you're rich enough to escape the hell-cycle of capitalism or you die.

allears · Answer

The problem isn't the overall demand for developers. The issue is that AI will replace entry-level developers, thus eventually reducing the ranks of experienced developers. A senior developer brings much more to bear on her work than simply coding skills. Where is she going to get that experience?

mikewarot · Answer

There's a divide between Engineering a system, and implementing it in most other fields. We're now facing the situation where LLMs have artificially accellerated the trend we were already on, towards a professionalization of the art of Software Engineering. The title inflation of most of the programing jobs being incorrectly labeled as "software engineer" has obscured this trend.The demand for actual Engineering skills won't go away anytime soon. The thing about Engineers is accountability and responsibility. If you're responsible for outcomes, you must exercise authority over the process. This gives you bargaining power for wages, which FAANG and others don't want you to have.

GoldenMonkey · Answer

The demand will be for developers to be phenomenal debuggers of massive ai code bases.Time to retire. Unless one enjoys debugging instead of coding.

sixtram · Answer

The last time I asked an LLM AI to review my code, it added extra lines that weren't originally there. Then, it claimed that there were many bugs in those lines. When I pointed this out, it apologized. But I don't know how much time I wasted on this thing. I'm a developer with over 30 years of experience. Should I ease into vibe coding?

austin-cheney · Answer

Neither. Hiring and firing is the primary game of software employment. It&rsquo;s why so much corporate software sucks compared to open source alternatives under strong leadership. It&rsquo;s the game most developers play instead of actually writing software.Instead I really wish there were was more emphasis, like at my current employment, all focused on ownership, training, and retention.