Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

normaltech.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 386 posts

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#31

Post by nicce »

Lionga wrote: post #21
baalimago wrote: post #6

It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…

Same way 3D printing replaced all common goods, can be done by anyone. Why not just print it yourself?

The consumer grade 3D printing is just now closing with the factory-level quality. Still not completely there. Is the quality difference similar vs. comparing human made software and LLM generated?

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#32

Post by neuroelectron »

The whole field of engineering set to disappear and be replaced by contractors. Of course this is what they've always wanted. That's why they do outsourcing and the whole point of AI so, basically instead of getting paid a small salary to maintain someone's money-making machine, people will bid for jobs. They'll be more and more layers of abstraction that business owners will have to pay rent to. Until it's just basically socialism.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#33

Post by tvink »

nicce wrote: post #10
baalimago wrote: post #6

It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…

> It most certainly will replace software engineers. I would say it will most certainly replace software developers . There is a subtle difference between these terms.

There truly is not. Software engineering is not different in any meaningful way. Sure 30 years ago in waterfall land we were emulating the project management of engineering, with miserably expensive results. But it's all the same now. It's like differentiation between coding and programming, it's different in everyone's head.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#36

Post by another-dave »

"Can the sandwich be further compressed? We don’t think so. At one end of the pipeline, development teams need to decide what to build."

I mean, but this is talking about the process as a whole, not individual jobs.

"Farmers won't be replaced by combine harvesters - we still need someone to decide what to plant and to harvest it". Sure, but if you used to have 10 labourers in a field manually ploughing with a pair of oxen and now you have one guy driving the machinery it absolutely has replaced jobs.

Companies are already talking about "1 person teams" to deliver projects. We'll still have _some_ jobs but the ratio will change dramatically and engineering will move a lot closer to "team lead" role (and maybe even Product Manger role to boot)

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#37

Post by logicchains »

kypro wrote: post #7

Not buying it. The idea that deciding and delivering are things only humans can do with their intelligence seems faulty. As it stands AIs today are not always great at making decisions (but they're getting much better), and orgs of today still trust people and hold people to account, rather than their AI systems. Neither of these are strong moats. It's a moat only while AI systems have some limitations vs an expert h…

> orgs of today still trust people and hold people to account >Neither of these are strong moats

Having accountable people in key positions is a very important part of running a successful organization. Anthropic and OpenAI are never going to let you sue them when an AI employee makes a mistake; accountability is a strong moat.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#38

Post by keybored »

nicce wrote: post #10
baalimago wrote: post #6

It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…

> It most certainly will replace software engineers. I would say it will most certainly replace software developers . There is a subtle difference between these terms.

Just changing words and saying (perhaps) that one is “just about code” and the other is about “architecture” rings hollow. LLMs can think (like submarines can swim) so the only question is how well.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#39

Post by raffael_de »

baalimago wrote: post #6

It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…

> who have now been able to create their pet projects

> So in my anecdotal case, AI has already replaced several software engineers.

Those projects wouldn't exist without language models to begin with. That means in your anecdotal case AI hasn't replaced any SEs.

Re: Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

#40

Post by firmretention »

drstewart wrote: post #12
baalimago wrote: post #6

It most certainly will replace software engineers. What's missing is, as the article suggests, the "Delivery" bit. But that's not the realm of software engineers, that's the realm of DevOps/SRE/Cloud engineers. I work as a cloud engineer and have been contacted by multiple non-engineering friends who have now been able to create their pet projects from scratch in different languages and have it running locally, as we…

Ruby on Rails generators could build toy projects in like 3 clicks 15 years ago, a Twitter clone being the famous one. Software engineers still continued to exist somehow.

I'm not saying LLMs will replace software developers, but this is such a ridiculous analogy that it hints to me that you've never seriously tried the latest tools.
Post reply on HN