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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#161

[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!

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#162
post #68

[flagged]

Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.

Jevons paradox is the stupid. What happened in the past is not a guarantee for the future. If you look at the economy, you would struggle to find buyers for any slop AI can generate, but execs keep pushing it. Case in point the whole Microslop saga, where execs start treating paying customers as test subjects to please the share holders.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#163
post #106

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…

>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.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#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.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#165
post #81

[flagged]

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

Wait what? There are way less farmers than we had in the past. In many parts of the world, every member of the family was working on the farm, and now only 1 person can do the work of 5-10 people.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What feature is it that Claude Code built in 30 minutes?

For some reason everyone that says things like this never follow up with anything concrete, don’t share prompts or snippets, etc.

I’ve seen first hand people talk big about how they used LLMs on a project and it’s clear they’ve only done the first 80%. Yeah they’re good tools. But they also enable laziness.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#167
post #81

[flagged]

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

I think the better example is the mechanization of the loom created a huge amount of jobs in factories relative to the hand loom because the demand for clothing could not be met by the hand loom.

The craftsman who were forced to go to the factory were not paid more or better off.

There is not going to be more software engineers in the future than there is now, at least not in what would be recognizable as software engineering today. I could see there being vastly more startups with founders as agent orchestrators and many more CTO jobs. There is no way there is many more 2026 version of software engineering jobs at S&P 500 companies in the future. That seems borderline delusional to me.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#168

I recently did a higher education contract for one semester in a highly coding focused course. I have a few years of teaching experience pre-LLMs so I could evaluate the impact internally, my conclusion is that academic education as we know it is basically broken forever. If educators use AI to write/update the lectures and the assignments, students use AI to do the assignments, then AI evaluates the student's submis…

I agree in higher education you need to be willing to learn and it's easy to weasel through it without actually building any skills. On an individual level that's a tragedy of wasted time and potential. On the teaching side it's just fraud if you let AI correct the work of your students or if you don't penalize people handing in AI-written assignments.

In the US there was this case of a student using religious arguments with hand-waving references to the will of god for her coursework. Her work was rejected by the tutor and she raised a big fuzz on TV. In the end this US university fired the tutor and gave her a passing grade.

These kind of stories are not an AI issue but a general problem of USA as a country shifting away from education towards religious fanaticism. If someone can reference their interpretation of god's words without even actually citing the bible and they receive a passing grade the whole institution loses their credibility.

Today, the United States are a post-factual society with a ruling class of christian fanatics. They have been vulnerable to vaporware for years. LLMs being heralded as artificial intelligence only works with people who never experienced real intelligence.

Luckily, every year only a handful of people who have motivation, skills and luck are needed to move the needle in science and technology. These people can come from many countries who have better education systems and no religious fanaticism.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#169
post #115
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.

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.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#170

I recently did a higher education contract for one semester in a highly coding focused course. I have a few years of teaching experience pre-LLMs so I could evaluate the impact internally, my conclusion is that academic education as we know it is basically broken forever. If educators use AI to write/update the lectures and the assignments, students use AI to do the assignments, then AI evaluates the student's submis…

What's worse is that universities aren't incentivized to fight it at all. Students getting high marks is a good look for them
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