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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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111–120 of 535 posts

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#111
post #99
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't come at me AI enthusiasts! no need to worry; none of them know how to read well enough to make it this far into your comment

Actually they're the only ones who do: copy and paste into chatgpt with "distill this please".

Twitter has a lot to answer for!

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#112
post #81

[flagged]

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

Machinery and scale efficiencies made cost of entry higher than ever though

That's not the case for IT where entry barrier has been reduced to nothing.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#113
The real reason is, expectations and requirements increased whenever tools helped more productivity or solved problems. This kept complexity growing and the work flowing. Just because you use cars instead of horses, it doesn't mean you get more free time.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#114
post #109
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All this is driven by numbers. The bigger you are, the more money they give you to burn. No one is really working solving problems, it's 99% managing complexity driven by shifting goalposts. Noone wants to really build to solve a problem, it's a giant financial circle jerk, everybody wants to sell and rinse and repeat z line must go up. Noone says stop because at 400mph hitting the breaks will get you killed.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#115
post #81

[flagged]

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

The machinery replaced a lot of low skill labor. But in its wake modern agriculture is now dependent on high skill labor. There are probably more engineers, geologists, climatologists, biologists, chemists, veterinarians, lawyers, and statisticians working in the agriculture sector today than there ever were previously.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#117
post #107
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That's an assembly line just one churning out cheap crap.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#118
post #81

[flagged]

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

Pre industrial revolution something like 80+ percent of the population was involved in agriculture. I question the assertion of more farmers now especially since an ever growing percentage of farms are not even owned by corporeal entities never mind actual farmers.

ooohhh I think I missed the intent of the statement... well done!

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#119
I was skeptical until 3-4 months ago, but my recent experience has been entirely different.

For context: we're the creators of ChatBotKit and have been deploying AI agents since the early days (about 2 years ago). These days, there's no doubt our systems are self-improving. I don't mean to hype this (judge for yourself from my skepticism on Reddit) but we're certainly at a stage where the code is writing the code, and the quality has increased dramatically. It didn't collapse as I was expecting.

What I don't know is why this is happening. Is it our experience, the architecture of our codebase, or just better models? The last one certainly plays a huge role, but there are also layers of foundation that now make everything easier. It's a framework, so adding new plugins is much easier than writing the whole framework from scratch.

What does this mean for hiring? It's painfully obvious to me that we can do more with less, and that's not what I was hoping for just a year ago. As someone who's been tinkering with technology and programming since age 12, I thought developers would morph into something else. But right now, I'm thinking that as systems advance, programming will become less of an issue—unless you want to rebuild things from scratch, but AI models can do that too, arguably faster and better.

It is hard to convey that kind of experience.

I am wondering if others are seeing it too.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#120
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…

"Thinking clearly about complexity" is much more that writing requirements.
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