The recurring dream of replacing developers • Hacker News Board

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#171

Post by -warren » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

blutoot wrote: post #164

It's simple -- the more high-minded and snobbish the developer class will be (thus extracting the highest salaries in the world) and as long as they will continue to maintain this unreal amount of gatekeeping, the more the non-developer community (especially those at the leadership-level) will continue to revel at the prospect of eliminating developers from the value chain.

I think you're onto something. Replace "developers" with "doctors" I that statement and you've described healthcare in the mid 1900s. Replace with "masons" and we describe the medieval times. There is always a specialized class

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#172

Post by falloutx » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #22

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…

> 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.

Thats not the goal the Anthropic's CEO has. Nor does any other CEO for that matter.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#173

Post by kelipso » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

falloutx wrote: post #163

lotu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ho…

>The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. How do you know that? For tech products most of the users are also technically literate and can easily use Claude Code or whatever tool we are using. They easily tell CC specifically what they need. Unless you create social media apps or bank apps, the customers are pretty tech savvy.

One example is programmers who would code physics simulations that run in massive data. You need a decent amount of software engineering skills to maintain software like that but the programmer maybe has a BS in Physics but doesn’t really know the nuances of the actual algorithm being implemented.

With AI, probably you don’t need 95% of the programmers who do that job anyway. Physicists who know the algorithm much better can use AI to implement a majority of the system and maybe you can have a software engineer orchestrate the program in the cloud or supercomputer or something but probably not even that.

Okay, the idea I was trying to get across before I rambled was that many times the customer knows what they want very well and much better than the software engineer.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#174

Post by defrost » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

m3047 wrote: post #169

asdff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes: farmers.

Indeed.

And overall fewer farmers with more technological skill sets than back in the dustbowl days.

Here (Western Australia) the increase in average farm size by product can be plotted over time along with the fall in numbers working that land.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#175

Post by vbezhenar » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

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…

Kubernetes enabled qualities small companies didn't dream before.

I can implement zero downtime upgrades easily with Kubernetes. No more late-day upgrades and late-night debug sessions because something went wrong, I can commit any time of the day and I can be sure that upgrade will work.

My infrastructure is self-healing. No more crashed app server.

Some engineering tasks are standardized and outsourced to the professional hoster by using managed serviced. I don't need to manage operating system updates and some component updates (including Kubernetes).

My infrastructure can be easily scaled horizontally. Both up and down.

I can commit changes to git to apply them or I can easily revert them. I know the whole history perfectly well.

I would need to reinvent half of Kubernetes before, to enable all of that. I guess big companies just did that. I never had resources for that. So my deployments were not good. They didn't scale, they crashed, they required frequent manual interventions, downtimes were frequent. Kubernetes and other modern approaches allowed small companies to enjoy things they couldn't do before. At the expense of slightly higher devops learning curve.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#176

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

lotu wrote: post #106

enos_feedler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ho…

We talk about things like S curves for AGI, and how it's slowing down.

But where is the S curves for programmers at?

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#177

Post by sosborn » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #90

fn-mote wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kno…

Those are all products.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#178

Post by falloutx » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

safety1st wrote: post #50

bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing. Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive. Hey, it's just business.

[flagged]

Every founder and owner is basically a money chaser and bill_joy_fanboy is the true businessman. You will not get it.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#179

Post by eks391 » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

azan_ wrote: post #161

jackfranklyn wrote: post #52

[flagged]

> The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer. Doesn't mean it will happen this time (i.e. if AI truly becomes what was promised) and actually it's not likely it will!

I felt like the article had a good argument for why the AI hype will similarly be unsuccessful at erasing developers.

> AI changes how developers work rather than eliminating the need for their judgment. The complexity remains. Someone must understand the business problem, evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve.

What is your rebuttal to this argument leading to the idea that developers do need to fear for their job security?

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#180

Post by falloutx » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #102

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.

This is very accurate to my experience. Product & management dont understand basics and anyone who ever had a manager/pm, you know you had to explain to them the same thing multiple times. Product Managers also struggle to align among themselves and they dont care about future velocity, just current velocity. Then you have programmers who have to basically connect all the things and make sure it doesn't break too much.