[flagged]
Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.
The recurring dream of replacing developers
81–90 of 535 posts
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were many of the aforementioned advancements marketed as "replacing developers"? Absolutely. Did that end up happening? Quite the opposite; each higher-level abstraction only caused the market for software and demand for developers to grow. That's not to say developers haven't been displaced by abstraction; I suspect many of the people responsible for re-wiring the ENIAC were completely out of a job when punchcards h…
the infinite-fountain-of-software machine seems more likely to replace developers than previous innovations, and the people pushing the button will not be, in any current sense of the word, programming
You absolutely need to be trying to accomplish these things personally to understand what is/will be easy and where the barriers.
Recognizing the barriers & modes of failure (which will be a moving target) lets you respond competently when you are called. Raise your hourly rate as needed.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#83As I have heard from mid level managers and C suite types across a few dev jobs. Staff are the largest expense and the technology department is the largest cost center. I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product but that's a lost point. This is why those same mid level managers and C suite people are salivating over AI and mentioning it in every press release. The reality is that costs are being reduced b…
> I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product There are a lot of counterexamples throughout history.
This is too cryptic. Be clearer what you mean. Ponzi schemes?
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#84I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring…
> accept disasters for democratisation
Will insurance policy coverage and premiums change when using non-deterministic software?
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#85[flagged]
Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.
Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological shift that isn’t just lowering cost but changing the entire process.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one thing I've heard missing from discussions though is that each level of abstraction needs to be introspectable. LLMs get compared to compilers a lot, so I'd like to ask: what is the equivalent of dumping the tokens, AST, SSA, IR, optimization passes, and assembly? That's where I find the analogy on thin ice, because somebody has to understand the layers and their transformations.
“Needs to be” is a strong claim. The skill of debugging complex problems by stepping through disassembly to find a compiler error is very specialized. Few can do it. Most applications don’t need that “introspection”. They need the “encapsulation” and faith that the lower layers work well 99.9+% of the time, and they need to know who to call when it fails. I’m not saying generative AI meets this standard, but it’s dif…
Sorry, I should clarify: it's needs to be introspectable by somebody. Not every programmer needs to be able to introspect the lower layers, but that capability needs to exist.
Now I guess you can read the code an LLM generates, so maybe that layer does exist. But, that's why I don't like the idea of making a programming language for LLMs, by LLMs, that's inscrutable by humans. A lot of those intermediate layers in compilers are designed for humans, with only assembly generation being made for the CPU.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
While not an incorrect statement, trillions of dollars have been paid to software developers to build software that invariably reduced labor costs.
You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.
Even in boring development jobs. For example, one of my first development jobs was for a large hospital, building an intranet app to make nurse rounds more efficient so they didn't have to hire as many.
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#88A few observations from the current tech + services market: Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now. Lower costs, smaller teams, and a lot of “good enough” duct-tape solutions are shipping fast. Fewer developers are needed to deliver the same output. Mature frameworks, cloud, and AI have quietly changed the baseline productivity. And yet, these companies still struggle to hire and retain people. N…
> Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now
who
Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#89Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product There are a lot of counterexamples throughout history.
This is too cryptic. Be clearer what you mean. Ponzi schemes?
Many companies aren't selling anything special or are just selling an "idea".
Like liquid death sells water for a strangely high amount of money - entirely sales / marketing.
International Star Registry gives you a piece of paper and a row in a database that says you own a star.
Many luxury things are just because it's sold by that luxury brand. They are "worth" that amount of money for the status of other people knowing you paid that much for it.