There are now prominent people in tech suggesting our next generation shouldn't learn coding because that'll be done by AI. What programming jobs do you expect will be less affected?
Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#2I don't think any common software engineering roles will be disrupted by ai.
I would speculate that a fair number of those prominent people are talking their book and have financial incentives for others to believe that is true and spend money on their ai products.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#3I don't think any common software engineering roles will be disrupted by ai. I would speculate that a fair number of those prominent people are talking their book and have financial incentives for others to believe that is true and spend money on their ai products.
They're likely on the hype train, I'll give you that. Doesn't mean next generation won't be doing software engineering completely different from how it's done now.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#4I don't think any common software engineering roles will be disrupted by ai. I would speculate that a fair number of those prominent people are talking their book and have financial incentives for others to believe that is true and spend money on their ai products.
They're likely on the hype train, I'll give you that. Doesn't mean next generation won't be doing software engineering completely different from how it's done now.
Of course it will be different. It is different now than it was 10 years ago, even without AI, and it was another flavor of different 10 years before that. Jobs evolve. That doesn't mean that we should be advising people to not learn. Keep learning, and be comfortable adapting as things change.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#5Very low-level work (OS kernels, firmware) and the more "product managery" high-level work at that requires speaking to customers. If models remain as unstable as they are rn, infrastructure and testing would be needed.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#6Work that is not easily solved by googling or searching the internet.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#7> There are now prominent people in tech suggesting our next generation shouldn't learn coding because that'll be done by AI.
If people listen to that advice, then we all have nothing to worry about.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#8The main problem with AI-gen solutions is validating the solutions. Across all industries, the most automatable jobs are the ones where the correctness of the AI's solution are most easily validated, and the situation is especially acute where the validation itself can be either done automatically (e.g. CI/CD), or outsourced to Mechanical Turk or Upwork.
So: anything that is impractical to validate in an automatic way, or, better, validate at all, is going to fare better.
Careful, however: many things that do not appear easily validatable actually are! For example, you might not be able to validate (with a GitHub workflow) that users prefer (say) a new UI design, but of course, you can check the design against well-understood usability principles, A/B test, and, soon, probably, user simulation, etc.
So: in the short and medium term, work that requires careful human attention or domain knowledge to validate (e.g. whether or not an interface design or system design or architectural plan is fit-for-purpose) will last longer.
In the long term, I don't think any programming work is safe.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#9The only jobs in programming that are truly threatened by AI are ones that are held by people who don't want to learn to use AI to make their programs better and easier to write.*
AI is like the internet. Those who make platforms with it will get seriously rich. Those who don't get it all will get left behind economically. The rest of us will adapt to it and use it as a different, and often better, way of working.
*Copilot for VS Code, for example.
Re: Ask HN: What programming jobs are least likely to be disrupted by AI?
#10Work in highly regulated industries (banking, aerospace, medical) will probably be the least affected.