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

normaltech.ai

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

#91
I work at a dev agency, most of our clients are start ups that need to go into the market quickly.

We've used agentic development for about a year and a half now and our roles have changed drastically during that time. I can't speak to the volume of projects flowing in (as I do not know the exact numbers) but from what I can see all that has changed is the expectations for what can be delivered. And instead of 5 people delivering on a projects, it's now usually 1 or 2.

The reality is however, that greenfield projects have been largely automated. A ton of the manual labour work (iterating on UX/UI designs, iterating on system architecture, trying out different approaches to solve a difficult problem with no clear measurement metric) now happens instantly. Basically - if you can understand it in your head, you can put it out into the world in 1/100th of the time.

During this period I've also changed a lot about the way I work and think about a system. I've grown symbiotic with the LLM and I really can't do without it. It doesn't mean I don't understand the code it writes, I very much follow each and every change and have a large understanding of the codebase (much larger than the LLM), but I've greatly atrophied my manual code writing skills (which I am perfectly fine with).

Currently I feel like the general layer, the translator, between what the business goals are and what tech covers it the best way. This is still problem solving, but a very high level one and is still really interesting and fun to me.

But something tells me that the best strategy for these times (for developers anyway) is to remain critically thinking and use these tools to your advantage. Now everybody has superpowers. You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else. Maybe the future is an economy of macro products, each person offering something unique to the world.

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

#92

We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we becom…

I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious.

The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.

The overwhelming trend in commercial software these past few decades has been hyper-aggressive anti-customization, anti-personalization, anti-user. Commercial software has been reduced to one single happy path and if that doesn't suit your needs, then fuck off. No one is making commercial software for everyday people. Even open source is trending away from everyday users.

Soon, regular everyday people who simply need some software to solve a problem the way they want it solved will have the ability to do so. In the bast majority of those cases, the quality and correctness of said software really doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I think we are past this point personally. Lots of blasphemously useless crap being built.

The useless box dates back to 1952, and the pet rock was a phenomenon for a while. If useless software bothers you, you've got to be pretty bothered quite a number of things. What do you think of video games?

We're talking about things like a flashlight app on your phone with a subscription and that requests every system permission available, or the ten trillion todo apps.

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

#94

I work at a dev agency, most of our clients are start ups that need to go into the market quickly. We've used agentic development for about a year and a half now and our roles have changed drastically during that time. I can't speak to the volume of projects flowing in (as I do not know the exact numbers) but from what I can see all that has changed is the expectations for what can be delivered. And instead of 5 peop…

I agree with a lot that you say and notice similar trends in our work. I am a little skeptical about this one though:

"You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else."

One of the reasons for devs to work in company is not that they can't deliver the work themselves. It's that they don't have the connections to land customers. Most devs need a company at least to handle the marketing so they can focus on what they are good at.

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

#96
post #75
post #70

> There is great anxiety about AI replacing jobs. It's always the business owner who replaces workers. Let's not anthropomorphize a bunch of graphics cards

If the bunch of graphics cards becomes truly more efficient, business owners who want to hire humans will not be able to compete.

The rules are made by a consortium of business owners, if they didn't want it that way then it wouldn't be that way.

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

#97
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.

You sue bad employees? Most companies just hire someone else?

In the future if you can't trust your AI system to perform a function well, you can switch to another. The accountability will be different – instead of an employee being accountable because their income depends on it, a corporation deploying the AI system be accountable because their success depends on it.

We already see this today with coding. If you're paying too much for the code Claude produces or unhappy with its output, you stop paying for Claude and switch to another.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wholeheartedly agree, there are some aspects to SWE that could be considered hard, but most of the time it’s rote pattern matching or simple logic resolutions. People were getting 6-figure salaries with 3 month boot camps before AI, any random college major could eventually become a developer with a few online courses and practicing LeetCode, the party was bound to end eventually. Even in the case that a college degr…

Yup! I was a part of the learn to code industry. I am proud of that, bc I know my worker helped a lot of marginalized people gain wealth and power (woo!). My own occupation, stats and econometrics, requires years of higher education to even begin (and decades to master), and yet ~ half of SWE were looking down on me, disrespecting me. To be clear, there were many who were not, but usually they were from some marginal…

You are making a wrong assumption that more knowlege leads to more comp, it never has or will.

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

#99
post #30

I think it's people who were sloppy about programming are more interested in vive-coding. Because now they can make something without the mental rigour needed. Engineering as it should be is play of rigour. Those who value understanding system will continue the human aspect of it

Engineering should be exactly as rigorous as the task requires. Anything more is wasteful.

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

#100

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…

The thought experiment I like to have is imagining my company running without engineers and just LLMs. The thought of my CEO or sales guys sitting down and reading/redirecting LLMs all day is just hilarious. My CEO is highly technical but he has other shit to do. The first thing they'd do is hire someone to do that for them, and the best person for that task is someone who knows how things _should_ be. Now they'll pr…

I am currently making a fair amount of my living helping out CEOs like this. The quick-sand that LLMs let non-engineers build overtime is pretty remarkable.

A project usually starts with a list of basic looking cosmetic bugs that the stakeholder is having a hard time getting Claude to fix. Literally every bug unearths a heap of other bugs or architectural problems.

As an example yesterday I was looking at a basic, “record XYZ not appearing on list view” bug. Turned out that Claude had built the list view (which should have been backed by thousands of records) to only ever load the first 100, and then do all organization, counts, sorting and filtering on the frontend on that dataset.

Also found a query that was taking ~18 seconds to query 1 record from a set of ~60.

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