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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#471

Post by abustamam »

I think what often gets lost in the "AI is replacing developers" framing is that someone still has to technically steer the system.

I'm a lead engineer and I've barely written code directly in weeks, yet I've shipped side projects and continued shipping at work. My job hasn't disappeared. It's shifted up a layer. I spend my time designing the system, decomposing problems, setting constraints, probing tradeoffs, correcting plans, and iterating on architecture. The AI writes most of the tokens. I supply most of the technical judgment.

Tools like v0 or Replit hide some of this by baking rules and scaffolding into the product. But the work doesn't go away. Someone still has to know what to ask, what to doubt, what to measure, and when the AI is confidently wrong.

That role is not "customer who doesn't know what's possible." It's still a technical role. It just operates at a different abstraction layer.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#472

Post by TeMPOraL »

godelski wrote: post #337
TeMPOraL wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: perhaps it's not about escaping all the details, just the irrelevant ones, and the need to have them figured out up front. Making the process more iterative, an exploration of medium under supervision or assistance of domain expert, turns it more into a journey of creation and discovery, in which you learn what you need (and learn what you need to learn) just-in-time. I see no reason why this wouldn't b…

> perhaps it's not about escaping all the details, just the irrelevant ones But that's the hard part. You have to explore the details to determine if they need to be included or not. You can't just know right off the back. Doing so contradicts the premise. You cannot determine if a detail isn't important unless you get detailed. If you only care about a few grains of sand in a bucket you still have to search through…

Right. But that's where tight feedback loop comes into place. New AI developments enable that in at least two ways: offloading busywork and necessary but straightforward work (LLMs can already write and iterate orders of magnitude faster than people), and having a multi-domain expert on call to lean on.

The thing about important details is that what ultimately matters is getting them right eventually, not necessarily the first time around. The real cost limiting creative and engineering efforts isn't the one of making a bad choice, but that of undoing it. In software development, AI makes even large-scale rewrites orders of magnitude cheaper than they ever were before, which makes a lot more decisions easily undoable in practice, when before that used to be prohibitively costly. I see that as one major way towards enabling this kind of iterative, detail-light development.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#473

Post by threethirtytwo »

habinero wrote: post #452
threethirtytwo wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There is no evidence” is not skepticism. It’s abdication. It’s what people say when they want the implications to go away without engaging with anything concrete. If there is “a lot of evidence of the opposite,” the minimum requirement is to name one metric, one study, or one observable trend. You didn’t. You just asserted it and moved on, which is not how serious disagreement works. “You first, lol” isn’t a rebutta…

> If there is “a lot of evidence of the opposite,” the minimum requirement is to name one metric, one study, or one observable trend. You didn’t. You just asserted it and moved on, which is not how serious disagreement works. I treated it with the amount of seriousness it deserves, and provided exactly as much evidence as you did lol. It's on you to prove your statement, not on me to disprove you. Also, you still hav…

What you’re doing here is interesting: you’re flattening everything into “we already had tools” because admitting this is different forces you to ask which parts of your own day are actually irreplaceable. So instead of engaging the claim about leverage, you retreat to credential checks and nostalgia for scaffolding scripts from 2012.

Also, saying “this has been automated for decades” is only persuasive if those automations ever removed headcount. They didn’t. This does. Quietly. At the margin. That’s why you’re arguing semantics instead of metrics.

And the “you’re not a professional engineer” line is pure tell. People reach for status policing when the substance gets uncomfortable. If the work were as untouched as you imply, there’d be no need to defend it this hard.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#474

Post by knollimar »

sanderjd wrote: post #461
knollimar wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What new things would we do? I do contracting so maybe I'm lowest-bidder-pilled but I feel like drops in price in lean organizations sre going to eat the lunch of shops trying to make more quality software in most software disciplines. How much software is really required to be extensible?

There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve. None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doin…

I still think it's more likely to be more of the same thing but with less people.

One man shops being the ideal, and I don't think there will be proportionately more of them

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#475

Post by brandonmb »

immibis wrote: post #416
echelon wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or t…

If LLMs are good at writing software, then there's lots of good software around written by LLMs. Where is that software? I don't see it. Logical conclusion: LLMs aren't good at writing software.

Are you trying to make a distinction between writing software vs writing code? LLMs are pretty great at writing good code (a relative term of course) if you lay things out for them. I use Claude Code on both greenfield new projects and a giant corporate mono repo and it works pretty well in both. In the giant mono repo, I have the benefit of many of my coworkers developing really nice Claude.md files and skills, so that helps a lot.

It’s very similar to working with a college hire SWE: you need to break things down to give them a manageable chunk and do a bit of babysitting, but I’m much more productive than I was before. Particularly in the broad range of things where I know enough to know what needs to be done but I’m not super familiar with the framework to do it.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#476

Post by bitwize »

ripe wrote: post #441
bitwize wrote: post #211

To understand how business views developers, reread Tim Bryce's Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers (which is old enough to drink in the USA today): https://web.archive.org/web/20160407111718fw_/http://phmains... Tim Bryce was kind of the anti Scott Adams: he felt that programmers were people of mediocre intelligence at best that thought they were so damn smart, when really if they were so smart, they'd…

Thanks for the information about Tim Bryce and the relationship with Adams's obsessions. Regarding your assertion: > as AI becomes a critical component of software development, business thinking will become more necessary and technical thinking, much less so. That remains to be seen. This is the story that AI evangelists are peddling and that employes are salivating over, for sure.

Geez, man. Even Eric "Cathedral and the Bazaar" Raymond is mindblown that he can basically specify software into existence. The technology is here today, it's real, and it works.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#477

Post by Retric »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #469
Retric wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions of working Americans don’t have cars. Also, you can make the median wage in the US without any collage education. Poverty still exists, but vast inflation of what is considered’a basic standard of living’ hides a great deal of progress. People want to redefine illiteracy to mean being unable to use the internet not by the standards of the past.

> Millions of working Americans don’t have cars. How would you describe the level of wealth of those Americans outside of metro areas?

Literally across the full spectrum. A surprising number of communities exist outside the US road network.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#478

Post by Retric »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #468
Retric wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is, if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved that’s a self correcting system. Less than that work and you have less people.

> if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved I actually didn’t say that. And the twisting of words is the source of confusing

You can argue about all the many secondary reasons for each of the different groups (retirees, prisoners, etc), but only one thing is required for every group.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#479

Post by fragmede »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #406
christophilus wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once wrote software that had to manage the traffic coming into a major shipping terminal- OCR, gate arms, signage, cameras for inspecting chassis and containers, SIP audio comms, RFID readers, all of which needed to be reasoned about in a state machine, none of which were reliable. It required a lot of on the ground testing and observation and tweaking along with human interventions when things went wrong. I’d gues…

Sir your experience is unique and thanks for answering this. That being said, someone took the idea of you saying LLM's might be good at subsets of projects to consider we should use LLMs for that subset as well But I digress because (I provided more in depth reasoning in other comment as well) because if there is an even minute bug which might slip up past LLM and code review for subset of that and for millions of c…

> we won't know if LLM's might save a life

I had friend who was in crisis while the rest of us were asleep. Talking with ChatGPT kept her alive. So we know the number is at least one. If you go to the Dr ChatGPT thread, you'll find multiple reports of people who figured out debilitating medical conditions via ChatGPT in conjunction with a licensed human doctor, so we can be sure the numbers greater than zero. It doesn't make headlines the same way Adam's suicide does, and not just because OpenAI can't be the ones to say it.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#480

Post by fragmede »

christophilus wrote: post #279
fragmede wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of an "other stuff"?

I once wrote software that had to manage the traffic coming into a major shipping terminal- OCR, gate arms, signage, cameras for inspecting chassis and containers, SIP audio comms, RFID readers, all of which needed to be reasoned about in a state machine, none of which were reliable. It required a lot of on the ground testing and observation and tweaking along with human interventions when things went wrong. I’d gues…

I've had good luck when giving the AI its own feedback loop. On software projects, it's letting the AI take screenshots and read log files, so it can iterate on errors without human input. On hardware projects, it's a combination of solenoids, relays, a pi and pizerow, and a webcam. I'm not claiming that an AI could do the above mentioned project, just that (some) hardware projects can also get humans out of the loop.
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