Ask HN: Do you think AI is threat to developers job?

Developers do things besides write code naturally. They design, implement, sometimes deploy, and always diagnose and debug. AI can help with some of these of course at about the same expertise level as a very qualified intern/jr. developer.

I can look back at a career full or production bug finding/understanding/fixing and say with high confidence I'm in no danger of being replaced anytime soon.

Consider the dev cycle changing such that a Product Team feeds specs to some AI and delivers code wireframes to development as step 1. If we were going to eliminate developers thats where we'd have to start.

Any of us could try it too. Take the requirements/design artifacts of a feature and feed it to the AI of your choice. Sit back and watch it build the whole feature, integrate it into the product, test it, deploy it and maintain it. We all know that exercise is not going to even get past Step 0.

When product/feature stakeholders/designers are using AI to capture requirements and generate code thats the start of the cycle. The next problem would be now we got this big hairball of AI generated code that to every dev who works on it is "somebody else's (non-running) code - and its not even finished!". Any devs here who have ever got thrown on a project where you get to take ownership of some other teams unfinished, not working codebase? If you have you know how hard Step 2 would be.

Per OP, I think thats about right. There are still gains on the table to be made in leveraging AI too. The whole "AI is gonna take our jobs!!" thing gets pretty silly when you start thinking of it from the perspective of being hired as CTO someplace with your main task being "Leverage AI to eliminate all development staff".

Completely agree with this. Problems are solved by people, not code. Code is a tool that can either improve, degrade or leave unchanged the state of a system/service. Plus, code is usually the easiest, quickest bit of the process (perhaps with the exception of some huge legacy monoliths).

LLMs can be useful for improving developer velocity, but the key skills that make good software developers good have yet to be emulated well by AI.

> Personally I'm looking forward to a long career fixing up all the code produced by below average developers relying on AIs

“Looking forward” is a bit of a stretch… :)

imo most larger organisations have had a lot of bloat to begin with and there has always been a case for a reduction in headcount for established orgs and so i don't forsee a reduction in developer jobs even though in theory their productivity should be accelerated due to AI.