131–140 of 535 posts
By the 1860s artists were feeling the heat and responded by inventing all the "isms" - starting with impressionism. That's kept them employed so far, but who knows whether they'll be able to co-exist with whatever diffusion models become in 30 years.
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…
At my company, we call them technical business analysts. Their director was a developer for 10 years, and then skyrocket through the ranks in that department.
It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems. The first electronic computers were programmed by manually re-wiring their circuits. Going from that to being able to encode machine instructions on punchcards did not replace developers. Nor did going from raw machine instructions to assembly code. Nor di…
The goal of AI companies is to replace all intellectual labor. You can argue that they're going to fail, but it's very clear what the actual goal is.
I don't think AI will completely replace these jobs, but it could reduce job numbers by a very large amount.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about another AI? And who prompts that AI? You're right - another AI!
With all these AIs chaining and prompting eachother, we're approaching the point where some unlucky person is going to ask an AI something and it will consume all the energy in the universe trying to compute the answer.
So yes, the market shifts, but mostly at the junior end. Fewer entry-level hires, higher expectations for those who are hired, and more leverage given to experienced developers who can supervise, correct, and integrate what these tools produce.
What these systems cannot replace is senior judgment. You still need humans to make strategic decisions about architecture, business alignment, go or no-go calls, long-term maintenance costs, risk assessment, and deciding what not to build. That is not a coding problem. It is a systems, organizational, and economic problem.
Agentic coding is good at execution within a frame. Seniors are valuable because they define the frame, understand the implications, and are accountable for the outcome. Until these systems can reason about incentives, constraints, and second-order effects across technical and business domains, they are not replacing seniors. They are amplifying them.
The real change is not “AI replaces developers.” It is that the bar for being useful as a developer keeps moving up.
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, an…
Maybe there's a threshold where improvements become easy, depending on the LLM and the project?
As a hobbyist programmer, I feel like I've been promoted to pointy-haired boss.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about another AI? And who prompts that AI? You're right - another AI!
With all these AIs chaining and prompting eachother, we're approaching the point where some unlucky person is going to ask an AI something and it will consume all the energy in the universe trying to compute the answer.
In particular the demand for software tools grows faster than our ability to satisfy it. More demand exists than the people who would do the demanding can imagine. Many people who are not software engineers can now write themselves micro software tools using LLMs -- this ranges from home makers to professionals of every kind. But the larger systems that require architecting, designing, building, and maintaining will continue to require some developers -- fewer, perhaps, but perhaps also such systems will proliferate.
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