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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#101

Post by groundzeros2015 »

Retric wrote: post #72
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t seem immediately false. Industrial society creates more complexity and specializations. There is more work to do all the time.

Actual AI seems like a possibility here. Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc. Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.

> Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while.

There are lots of negative reasons for this that aren’t efficiency. Aging demographics. Poor education. Increasing complexity leaves people behind.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#102

Post by gedy »

It might just be companies I have worked for in past 25 years, but engineers were virtually always the ones to make sense of whatever vague idea product and UX were trying to make. It's not just code monkey follow the mockup stuff. AI code tools don't really solve that.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#103

Post by krackers »

dijit wrote: post #53

I'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…

All abstractions are leaky abstractions. E.g. C is a leaky abstraction because what you type isn't actually what gets emitted (try the same code in two different compilers and one might vectorize your loop while the other doesn't).

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#104

Post by chis »

dijit wrote: post #53

I'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…

If Kubernetes didn't in any way reduce labor, then the 95% of large corporations that adopted it must all be idiots? I find that kinda hard to believe. It seems more likely that Kubernetes has been adopted alongside increased scale, such that sysadmin jobs have just moved up to new levels of complexity.

It seems like in the early 2000s every tiny company needed a sysadmin, to manage the physical hardware, manage the DB, custom deployment scripts. That particular job is just gone now.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#106

Post by lotu »

enos_feedler wrote: post #85
zby wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. However, if we are going to see the exponential improvements towards AGI AI boosters talk about we would have already seen the start of it.

When LLMs first showed up publicly it was a huge leap forward, and people assumed it would continue improving at the rate they had seen but it hasn't.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#107

Post by lotu »

pydry wrote: post #94
fn-mote wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at traditional manufacturing. Automation has made massive inroads. Not as much of the economy is directly supporting (eg, auto) manufacturers as it used to be (stats check needed). Nevertheless, there are plenty of mechanical engineering jobs. Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though. You have to ask yourself which category you are in (by analogy). Don’t be the SWE working on the assem…

>Don’t be the SWE working on the assembly line. The job is literally building automation. There is no equivalent to "working on the assembly line" as an SWE. >Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though Because Globalization.

Yes there totally are web development, shovel ware app development, are two that I can think of off the top of my head.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#108

Post by lotu »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #16

> Which brings us to the question: why does this pattern repeat? The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. AI has been pushed as an omnipotent, all-powerful job-killer by these companies because shareholder value depends on enough people believing in it, not whether the tooling is actually capable. It's telling that folks like Jensen Huang talk about people's negativity towards AI being one of the bigge…

Yes very much so, if they could make their product do the things they claim they would be focused on doing that, not telling people to stop being naysayers.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#109

Post by dijit »

chis wrote: post #104
dijit wrote: post #53

I'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…

If Kubernetes didn't in any way reduce labor, then the 95% of large corporations that adopted it must all be idiots? I find that kinda hard to believe. It seems more likely that Kubernetes has been adopted alongside increased scale, such that sysadmin jobs have just moved up to new levels of complexity. It seems like in the early 2000s every tiny company needed a sysadmin, to manage the physical hardware, manage the…

You’re absolutely right that sysadmin jobs moved up to new levels of complexity rather than disappeared. That’s exactly my point.

Kubernetes didn’t democratise operations, it created a new tier of specialists. But what I find interesting is that a lot of that adoption wasn’t driven by necessity. Studies show 60% of hiring managers admit technology trends influence their job postings, whilst 82% of developers believe using trending tech makes them more attractive to employers. This creates a vicious cycle: companies adopt Kubernetes partly because they’re afraid they won’t be able to hire without it, developers learn Kubernetes to stay employable, which reinforces the hiring pressure.

I’ve watched small companies with a few hundred users spin up full K8s clusters when they could run on a handful of VMs. Not because they needed the scale, but because “serious startups use Kubernetes.” Then they spend six months debugging networking instead of shipping features. The abstraction didn’t eliminate expertise, it forced them to learn both Kubernetes and the underlying systems when things inevitably break.

The early 2000s sysadmin managing physical hardware is gone. They’ve been replaced by SREs who need to understand networking, storage, scheduling, plus the Kubernetes control plane, YAML semantics, and operator patterns. We didn’t reduce the expertise required, we added layers on top of it. Which is fine for companies operating at genuine scale, but most of that 95% aren’t Netflix.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#110

Post by Twey »

daxfohl wrote: post #97
Twey wrote: post #48

This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far. On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening: First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of inci…

I don't even think that "singularity-level coding agents" get us there. A big part of engineering is working with PMs, working with management, working across teams, working with users, to help distill their disparate wants and needs down into a coherent and usable system. Knowing when to push back, when to trim down a requirement, when to replace a requirement with something slightly different, when to expand a requ…

I think that's exactly an example of climbing the abstraction ladder. An agent that's incapable of reframing the current context, given a bad task, will try its best to complete it. An agent capable of generalizing to an overarching goal can figure out when the current objective is at odds with the more important goal.

You're correct in that these aren't really ‘coding agents’ any more, though. Any more than software developers are!

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