The recurring dream of replacing developers

Was that statement wrong? It sounds like I accurately clocked your level of expertise lol

And sure it did. We don't have test engineers or QA nearly as much as we used to, and a lot of IT work is automated, too.

Do you think we sit around, artisinally crafting code the slow way, or something?

I think you missed my point.

If you "quiet quit" you're still working for someone you hate. They still own you.

Instead, you could ACTUAL QUIT and start a business. Then you work for yourself, who you hopefully don't hate as much, and you have the power to define how things are done. So if you think developers shouldn't be replaced by LLMs or whatever, then you can... not do that. I have zero doubt in my mind that that will be a niche somewhere in the global economy for many years to come.

Also you might make a lot of money. Make enough and you're basically free from all these assholes. It doesn't actually take a ton of money when you own 100%. You pretty quickly get to a point where you can start telling off any wanker you want to, but you don't even feel the need, you are your own boss, so you just walk away from them and deal with whoever you want to deal with instead.

Trust me, speaking from experience, this is 1,000,000% better than "quiet quitting" which is pretty much remaining a corporate serf, just the most useless and pussy one in somebody else's room. Of course it's harder, most people who try it fail, real economics, real laws and real people will call you out pretty fast if you don't do things that people other than you think are valuable!

Excel is the largest development platform because it's installed on (pretty much) every corporate PC by default, without having to ask Legal, Security, Finance or IT for approval. If we count Google Sheets as "Excel", the people who don't have access to it are a rounding error, if that.

BUT

With the arrival of Agentic AI, I've literally seen complete non-coders (copywriter, marketing artist, and a Designer) whip up tooling for themselves that saves them literal days of work every week.

Things that would've been a Big Project in the company, requiring the aforementioned holy quadruple's approval along with tying up precious dev + project management hours.

In the end they're "just" simple tools, simulating or simplifying different processes, but in a way they specifically need it done. All built from scratch in the time it would've taken us to have the requisite meetings for writing the spec for the application and allocating the resources needed - "We have time for this on our team backlock in about 6 months..."

None of them are perfect code, some of them are downright horrible if you look under the hood. But on the other hand they run fully locally, don't touch any external APIs, they just work with the data already on their laptops, but more efficiently than the commercial tools (or Excel).

Zapier, N8N and the like _kinda_ gave people this power, by combining different APIs into workflows. But I personally haven't seen this kind of results from them.

lol. It was not only wrong. It was wildly wrong. Your tone reeks with pride and entitlement. You’re one of those engineers who thinks he’s so great and a step above everyone else who is a non-swe engineer.

Personally I think being a swe is easy. It’s one of the easiest “engineering” skills you can learn hence why you have tons of people learning by themselves or from boot camps while other engineering fields require much more rigor and training to be successful. There’s no bootcamp to be a rocket engineer and that’s literally the difference.

The confidence you have here and how completely off base you are with your intuition on who is just evidence for how wrong you are everywhere else. You should take that to heart. Everything we are talking about is speculation, but your idiotic statements about me is on the ground evidence for how wrong you can be. Why would anyone trust your speculation about AI by how wildly wrong you are “clocking” me in.

> Do you think we sit around, artisinally crafting code the slow way, or something?

This statement is just dripping with raw arrogance. It’s insane, it just shows you think you’re better than everyone because you’re a swe. Let me get one thing straight, I’m a swe with tons of experience (likely more than you) and I’m proud of my technical knowledge and depth, but do I think that other “non swes” just look at us as if we are artisans? That’s some next level narcissism. It’s a fucking job role bro, we’re not “artisans” and nobody thinks of us that way, get off your high horse.

Also wtf do you mean by the “slow” way? Do you have communication issues? Not only will a non swe not understand you but even a swe doesn’t have a clue what the “slow” way means.

>We don't have test engineers or QA nearly as much as we used to, and a lot of IT work is automated, too.

Oh like automated testing or infra as code?? Ooooh such a great engineer you are for knowing these unknowable things that any idiot can learn. Thanks for letting me know a lot of IT work is “automated.” This area is one of the most mundane areas of software engineering, a bunch of rote procedures and best practices.

Also your “my dude” comments everywhere make you look not as smart as you probably think you look. Just some advice for you.

Good day to you sir.

There is no respectful way of telling someone they like the sound of their own voice. Let’s be real, you were objectively and deliberately disrespectful. Own it if you are going to break the rules of conduct. I hate this sneaky shit. Also I’m not off topic, you’re just missing the point.

I responded to another person in this thread and it’s the same response I would throw at you. You can read that as well.

Your “historical trend” is just applying an analogy and thinking that an analogy can take the place of reasoning. There are about a thousand examples of careers where automation technology increased the need of human operators and thousands of examples where automation eliminated human operators. Take pilots for example. Automation didn’t lower the need for pilots. Take intellisense and autocomplete… That didn’t lower the demand for programmers.

But then take a look at Waymo. You have to be next level stupid to think that ok, cruise control in cars raised automation but didn’t lower the demand for drivers… Therefore all car related businesses including Waymo will always need physical drivers.

As anyone is aware… this idea of using analogy as reasoning fails here. Waymo needs zero physical drivers thanks to automation. There is zero demand here and your methodology of reasoning fails.

Analogies are a form of manipulation. They only help allow you to elucidate and understand things via some thread of connection. You understand A therefore understanding A can help you understand B. But you can’t use analogies as the basis for forecasting or reasoning because although A can be similar to B, A is not in actuality B.

For AI coders it’s the same thing. You just need to use your common sense rather than rely on some inaccurate crutch of analogies and hoping everything will play out in the same way.

If AI becomes as good and as intelligent as a human swe than your job is going out the fucking window and replaced by a single Prompter. That’s common sense.

Look at the actual trendline of the actual topic: AI taking over our jobs and not automation in other sectors of engineering or other types of automation in software. What happened with AI in the last decade? We went from zero to movies, music and coding. What does your common sense tell you the next decade will bring?

If the improvement of AI from the last decade keeps going or keeps accelerating, the conclusion is obvious.

Sometimes the delusion a lot of swes have is jarring. Like literally if AGI existed thousands of jobs will be displaced. That’s common sense, but you still see tons of people clinging to some irrelevant analogy as if that exact analogy will play out against common sense.