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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

#201

Post by swid »

aurareturn wrote: post #151
poidos wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.

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,…

Because there is so much money for kindergarten teachers, paying an extra salary for a software dev for every kindergarten will certainly lead to better outcomes. The computer programs will make up for the lost teacher economically by teaching the children instead of people, raising the market share of my local kindergarten, or enticing people to have more babies. \s

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

#202

Post by altern8 »

seydor wrote: post #172
altern8 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

So, machines will allow ordering an app.

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

#203

Post by pramodbiligiri »

I'm not convinced of this bit: "it revealed three things as the real bottlenecks (1) deciding and specifying what to build, (2) verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and (3) the deep human understanding — of the codebase, the business, and the environment — required to carry out both of these."

It could be that because coding was seen as expensive and a bottleneck, much effort (both upstream and downstream) had been going into making sure its input is correct and the output need not be discarded. If coding is seen as a quick and cheap step, its output could stand to be thrown away and therefore the same amount of oversight may not be needed upstream?

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

#204

Post by 5701652400 »

rdksu wrote: post #24

The only bit AI can't replace is probably the need for a 'fall guy' or someone to take responsibility for something. This, however, will obviously not be sufficient to prevent job losses.

there are systems that can very well operate without "fall-guy". example:

A) diffuse responsibility. nobody is responsible. — this is what typical beruactacyl operates in.

B) everybody is self-responsible. end users use AI, they are responsible. this is typical MIT licenses. "use at own risk", literally first statement in any open source.

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

#205

Post by Henchman21 »

TheDong wrote: post #192
zero_shift wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 app…

> 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. Right now, people pay all sorts of money for real interactions with real people, most notably friendship and dating. Tiktok has done a good job at starting to disrupt this, but with AI and better VR technology, maybe we can finish the job and disrupt all human re…

I’m going to assume this lacks the /s that seems relevant. Because if not:

Do you want to live in this world? Why? Because you envision yourself receiving said money?

You should be ashamed of yourself for writing such a thing.

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

#206

Post by CodesInChaos »

pramodbiligiri wrote: post #203

I'm not convinced of this bit: "it revealed three things as the real bottlenecks (1) deciding and specifying what to build, (2) verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and (3) the deep human understanding — of the codebase, the business, and the environment — required to carry out both of these." It could be that because coding was seen as expensive and a bottleneck, much effort (both upstream and down…

Having to throw away code isn't the primary cost of building the wrong thing. The impact of the software misbehaving, and the need to maintain backwards compatibility are much worse.

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

#207

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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 become more productive, the goalposts move.

Anytime we became more productive in the past we become in a way that didn't remove engineers, just increased the abstraction an engineer would work in. And we did it at times of rapid expansion of computing and internet, meaning way more need for engineers counter-balancing the increased productivity.

>The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far.

Has it? The expansion of IT has reached global saturation, we're getting desparate, and try to push shit like Blockchain and IoT, and shoving "smart" features even where people don't want them.

And the world is full of software nobody or very few care for or use/subscribe/buy. App Store have huge "long tails" of stuff nobody cares for.

And with autonomous agents we designed something to replace the engineer altogether. So even if the demand for software increases, that can be like "spawn more agents" not "get more developers".

Some human supervisors per N agents? Sure. Equal human demand as what's now? Unlikely.

In general "we did it 5 times, to we'll surely do it 6" is not a real argument, just a hope that something will never end.

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

#208

Post by vanuatu »

zero_shift wrote: post #175
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 app…

It's unclear whether mobile apps as a segment has a correlation with the elasticity of software in general

In aggregate software comes out of R&D, operations, and labor spend. Good software increases revenue and decreases costs for companies, which grows the economic pie, and frees up more spend and more companies spin up and start spending

A world where we've saturated out software would seem utopian compared to right now

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

#209

Post by Aefiam »

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…

Even if the budget for software development were to stay constant, if an ever increasing part of it is spent on llm usage, it will reduce the money left for developers, resulting in mass layoffs and/or mass salary cuts.

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

#210

Post by coldtea »

photochemsyn wrote: post #174
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…

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…

>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.?

Yes.

With a tiny subset of people building core modules and libs to be used for the above (eg. an OCR module, plenty of which already exist, and an AI can trivially hook them with other functionality into an app form).

Most of what you write can be built already quite easily. An example "Custom audio apps for recording and playing music files"*:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW4rIXft0Bg

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