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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

#161

Post by aurareturn »

euwuw wrote: post #156
aurareturn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I see software engineering going the way of accounting or lawyer. Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies,…

“ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ” No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.

It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before:

1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own.

2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more.

I’m in the #2 camp right now. My team shrank by 50% through attrition in the last year. We didn’t hire anyone new when someone left. My pay has increased.

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

#162

Post by SoftTalker »

altern8 wrote: post #158
vitally3643 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soft…

> 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 People can't be bothered to cook for themselves, and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs 10 times as much just so they don't have to cook. Now they're going to build their own software every time they think the…

If they can do it from their couch by talking to their phone, they might.

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

#163

Post by Brendinooo »

JimDabell wrote: post #65

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…

>e.g. front-end web development

It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.

I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.

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

#165

Post by euwuw »

aurareturn wrote: post #161
euwuw wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ” No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.

It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before: 1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own. 2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more. I…

[flagged]

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

#166

Post by mattgreenrocks »

besterman23 wrote: post #72
RA_Fisher wrote: post #60

Sadly I think this post will mislead people, bc the difficult truth (for many) is that software engineering isn't that hard and that's why AI can easily substitute that layer (lower barriers to entry than widely believed).

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…

Yep. There's also been a relentless push for the past two decades or so to standardize many aspects of software development:

* programming languages (JS)

* frameworks (React)

* open source libraries

* platforms (Web, mostly)

* design systems (shadcn for newer apps)

Guess what makes it easier for automation to come in?

Our need for it to be easy and standard contributed to the success of LLM use in software engineering. I suspect it would have done well without some of those factors, but it may have taken longer.

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

#167

Post by christkv »

user43928 wrote: post #41
christkv wrote: post #3

I have found that the attention moves to thinking about the things I want done and planning, reading and iterating over the specs and other artefacts that will be part of running the agents. I still need to understand the code and iterate over it to get to a usable and maintainable point. I find the problem is we are reaching the top of the slop curve. I will subside because it's impossible to actually do anything us…

I find that it depends a lot on the project. I'm doing solo mobile app projects, and I have no need to iterate on specs. The bottleneck is QA testing whether it works on the phone. I don't need to carefully review and understand the implementation. It's not important whether I understand the details of how exactly UICollectionView in Apple's UIKit works. I see that my implementation works on different physical device…

The problem starts with a project of 20 engineers pumping 1000+ lines of code a day into a shared code base.

Single dev it's amazing, tiny team still good, large team wohoooo

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

#168

Post by aurareturn »

euwuw wrote: post #165
aurareturn wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before: 1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own. 2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more. I…

[flagged]

I’m not desperate at all. It was my company who was desperate to keep me and gave me a huge pay rise. I was already making top tier money.

I threatened to leave to start my own company unless they gave me enough money to make me not want to do it. They did.

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

#169

Post by christkv »

nicce wrote: post #16
christkv wrote: post #3

I have found that the attention moves to thinking about the things I want done and planning, reading and iterating over the specs and other artefacts that will be part of running the agents. I still need to understand the code and iterate over it to get to a usable and maintainable point. I find the problem is we are reaching the top of the slop curve. I will subside because it's impossible to actually do anything us…

LLMs still do not have proper contextual understanding of their solutions. Just couple days ago I was using GPT 5.5 with xhigh to vide code some application, and yet it defaulted for sorting dates from new to old by using plain string comparison. Just one of the many bugs.

LLMs is a little like the guy in Memento right. Every single conversation is it looking at the compressed scribbles of the context.
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