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Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

martinalderson.com

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Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#21

Post by Mountain_Skies »

macintux wrote: post #16
TacticalCoder wrote: post #13

You guys remember HN from 2010, back when all software devs in the US and the EU would be out of job due to outsourcing? It's incredible that 15 years later, all software devs still have a job, but this time they're going to be out of job due to AI. Let me guess: in 15 years software devs are going to be fine but they'll all be out of their job soon because of, dunno, quantum computing maybe?

> all software devs still have a job As far as I can tell from comments on this site, that is far from reality. It's a tough market right now.

Impossible. The labor floodgates are still wide open and we're told there's still a critical shortage of developers. The government must help industry obtain in whatever numbers they desire, in any manner possible, until this critical shortage is gone.

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#22

Post by marstall »

>Opus 4.5 has really startled me - it genuinely can do complex software engineering tasks which I'd expect a proficient developer to take hours in minutes with very few defects.

I don't use Opus, but I use Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGpt 5.1, which are only a bit down the chart.

in my daily experience, these tools can help with many tasks - scaffolding crud, writing tests, explaining how this or that part of the code works, are three that come to mind.

But a mature piece of software has usually graduated to a point that it has numerous subsystems, layers and integrations that crosstalk with each other in often hacky ways. And my work is smack dab inth middle of that. Writing a feature or fixing a bug in that soup, I have found, is something that the best AIs will slow you down with as often as they speed you up.

And that doesn't even take into consideration that a very large part of my job is just defining what the bug or feature is, before I can even begin to code. And when I'm done with the coding, lets keep in mind the fun, time consuming processes known as "code review" and "deploy to customer"

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#23

Post by coffeefirst »

Nales wrote: post #5

From the home page of the website. > I also teach workshops on AI development for engineering teams So yet another article playing on FOMO about how urgent it is to get in tune with LLM usage written by someone who teaches how to use LLM.

Yep. I’m bored. These people have nothing to offer and nothing to say.

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#24

Post by martinald »

jgalt212 wrote: post #14

> US agents fell from 132,000 to 74,000, retail locations from 34,000 to 13,000, total jobs down 70% by 2021 What does the author mean by total jobs? 132k > 74k is -44%.

Good catch, bad wording from me. Revised on the post.

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#25

Post by jjmarr »

I've been unable to convince any "businessy" or liberal arts people to vibe code. I've attempted with everyone in my immediate family, friends, etc. Even when they sit on the computer and watch the AI type out a script for them that saves them hours/day, they get an "ick" factor that prevents them from trying again.

They'd rather ask me to talk to the AI for them and pay me money to do so. Heck one of my cousins offered me $5 to edit a photo with AI tools? It's a 1000% markup for clicking 4 buttons.

I can't square this with the alleged tidal wave of non-tech people replacing SWEs with AI. Non-tech people largely refuse to use the technology right in front of them to improve their productivity. They'd rather ask me to spend 20 seconds on a task and pay me to do so.

More likely than an SWE crash is an SWE dispersal. Lots of non-tech fields have automation opportunities that haven't been seized upon since one can make $500k risk free in FAANG.

If that goes away, I'd start a consulting business and ruthlessly automate Excel-based business processes with AI coding agents.

It takes me half an hour to vibe code a proof of concept web scraper and immediately demonstrate value to someone now willing to throw money at me to maintain it for them at insane profit margins since I've replaced a human repeatedly clicking on things.

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#26

Post by martinald »

marstall wrote: post #22

>Opus 4.5 has really startled me - it genuinely can do complex software engineering tasks which I'd expect a proficient developer to take hours in minutes with very few defects. I don't use Opus, but I use Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGpt 5.1, which are only a bit down the chart. in my daily experience, these tools can help with many tasks - scaffolding crud, writing tests, explaining how this or that part of the code works, a…

I don't think the benchmarks catch this very well. Opus 4.5 is _significantly_ better than Sonnet 4.5 in my experience, far more than the SWE Bench scores would say. I can happily leave Opus 4.5 running for 20-30 minutes and come back to very high quality software on complex tasks/refactoring. Sonnet 4.5 would fall over within a couple of minutes on these tasks.

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#27

Post by 20251227 »

martinald wrote: post #26
marstall wrote: post #22

>Opus 4.5 has really startled me - it genuinely can do complex software engineering tasks which I'd expect a proficient developer to take hours in minutes with very few defects. I don't use Opus, but I use Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGpt 5.1, which are only a bit down the chart. in my daily experience, these tools can help with many tasks - scaffolding crud, writing tests, explaining how this or that part of the code works, a…

I don't think the benchmarks catch this very well. Opus 4.5 is _significantly_ better than Sonnet 4.5 in my experience, far more than the SWE Bench scores would say. I can happily leave Opus 4.5 running for 20-30 minutes and come back to very high quality software on complex tasks/refactoring. Sonnet 4.5 would fall over within a couple of minutes on these tasks.

What does "very high quality" mean here

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#28

Post by DANmode »

crote wrote: post #19
Havoc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still hire personal assistants to do grunt work like that

But how are you ever going to find a halfway-competent personal assistant for the occasional bounded task like that? I need someone to spend a few days every couple of years to plan a holiday, not someone who is available several hours a day to read my emails for me.

Resourceful people who can read quickly are similarly competent at both of these tasks.

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#29

Post by esafak »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #12
joshuahedlund wrote: post #10

> If your job is to translate requirements into code manually - and that's it - you're the generalist travel agent. I’ve been a full-stack web programmer at five different companies over the last fifteen years, big and small, e-commerce and B2B, junior to senior to staff, and that has never fully described my responsibilities.

Which responsibilities do you figure are a combination of highly valuable in your role, and resistant to automation?

Knowing what to implement, and having the social skills to perform various tasks in a company?

Re: Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in

#30

Post by chorkpop »

jjmarr wrote: post #25

I've been unable to convince any "businessy" or liberal arts people to vibe code. I've attempted with everyone in my immediate family, friends, etc. Even when they sit on the computer and watch the AI type out a script for them that saves them hours/day, they get an "ick" factor that prevents them from trying again. They'd rather ask me to talk to the AI for them and pay me money to do so. Heck one of my cousins offe…

Do you remember when travel agents were still around? Most people would absolutely never even consider using their computer to book a ticket. It was nearly 2010 before I could convince my mother to enter her credit card for Amazon. Just because someone isn't interested in vibe coding today doesn't mean they won't be using similar most polished tools in the very near future.
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