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

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

#171

Post by seydor »

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…

You can't expect that timeline to continue forever. AI is a whole different beast than programming. It is in fact what programming set out to be in the 1940s: A replica of the brain. Automating programming tasks has only gotten us so far, but that timeline is probably ending now. We no longer need to automate programming because we can talk to the machine.

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

#172

Post by seydor »

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…

They can be bothered to order food. The machine will figure out the rest with the help of other machines and the network

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

#173

Post by euwuw »

aurareturn wrote: post #168
euwuw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

[flagged]

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

#174

Post by photochemsyn »

vitally3643 wrote: post #92
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…

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…

Really? People will just have their AI build OCR apps for converting handwritten notes (with equations) into LaTex, transcription apps for spoken language-to-text for understanding foreign language speakers, custom audio apps for recording and playing music files, etc.?

This sounds good. But technically it seems highly implausible, just as a thriving human civilization on Mars sounds highly implausible. Nice plot for a sci-fi novel though.

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

#175

Post by zero_shift »

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…

> I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different

It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.

There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.

In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users

Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)

Their analysis is on pg42-43

> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far

I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.

Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?

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

#176

Post by chneu »

xnx wrote: post #8

Misleading > Among the 270 jobs in the 1950 U.S. census, only one job was automated away — elevator operator. But many others were rendered obsolete by new technology, like the job of telegraph operator. In that same time farm jobs went from 15% of the workforce to 2%.

Look up the logging industry. Like 95% of those jobs are automated now, but they like to blame an owl

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

#177

Post by rafterydj »

lnenad wrote: post #61
ThePhysicist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to any "great" projects on Lovable that would actually be useful as full blown SaaS software tools? Stuff that has been written/prompted by non software experts?

Please try to read my message again. I never said the things you're implying I said. I literally said not gonna replace all, and low effort low risk stuff. Do you think that not even 0.00001 projects on those websites could have been a good payday for a software engineer/team? Do you think what took 3 people before for a low effort saas is not going to be done by 1 person now?

You're phrasing of "could have been a good payday" makes me think about why people pay for software at all. The bread and butter "quick job, get paid" gigs in software were always circumstantial and depended on humans understanding customer needs more than anything, and combining it with their own desires to grow in mastery of their work.

I'm reminded of the 'faster horses' remark from Ford - since AI by design produces what it thinks we are asking for, how will anyone know who to pay for true innovation?

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

#178

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

When I got my first job, it was in the early 1990s at one of the major consulting firms. I had a just completed a computer science undergrad degree, but a lot of the people in my "start group" had no significant programming experience, or maybe not any. Some were English or History or Econ majors. They had used computers in school, but not written programs. Everyone went through an in-house boot camp to learn how to program using the firm's standard methodologies. Everyone came out of it with enough skill to be assigned to client projects and start writing code.

Software jobs at that time paid pretty well but certainly not the crazy salaries that came in the dot-com era and after. They were just pretty good jobs, and anyone who was reasonably smart could learn to do them in a couple of months. Somewhere along the line we stopped thinking that, and started thinking that you had to be some sort of high priest savant to write code that responds to a mouse click.

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

#179

Post by pulse7 »

JimDabell wrote: post #147
amelius wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things. But that puts 90% of developers out of a job. And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.

No, you are ignoring my central point by assuming that the amount of software that is being produced remains fixed. Every other time we have increased software engineer productivity, we have responded by producing more software.

So it's similar to "Andy and Bill's Law" [1]: "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away".

If Windows would stay the same (and not grow) it would be much faster on newer CPUs...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

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