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AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

dmanco.dev

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Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

#31

Post by stnikolauswagne »

marcyb5st wrote: post #21
muldvarp wrote: post #11

I have yet to hear a single convincing argument by a person that works in software why they can't be replaced.

I am pretty familiar with a 500k LOC codebase. If for every feature request/bug the agent has to go through a lot of it, spend a gazillion thinking tokens for understanding what it needs to do, plan, and then execute (assuming it gets it right) given the current cost of tokens I argue I am often more cost effective. In fact, I believe that the most cost effective way is a collab of human+agent. Ie giving the agent di…

Not to mention the fact that even the most well documented codebase will have documentation blindspots about real-world concerns or limitations that LLMs cant know about. Cursor yesterday tried to remove a document format from the codebase because it was convinced that it was non-existant, turns out that not only does it exist and is vitally important for our shipping process, but also the API it comes from does not document its existence at all.

Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

#33

Post by florkbork »

antirez wrote: post #29
croes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your job safety doesn’t depend on the capabilities of AI but on what management thinks are the capabilities of AI

I don't think this makes any sense. Companies with managers that think AI capabilities are superior will be replaced if they are wrong as the companies will perform very poorly.

The lag time between firing your core team and finding out that was a bad idea can be measured in years of slow attrition.

Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

#35

Post by stnikolauswagne »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #28
marcyb5st wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty familiar with a 500k LOC codebase. If for every feature request/bug the agent has to go through a lot of it, spend a gazillion thinking tokens for understanding what it needs to do, plan, and then execute (assuming it gets it right) given the current cost of tokens I argue I am often more cost effective. In fact, I believe that the most cost effective way is a collab of human+agent. Ie giving the agent di…

This is why you can't be replaced today. I'm not sure you can rely on that remaining true for very long. And this goes for the vast majority of us. To be clear, I'm also not saying LLMs will definitely displace a lot of us very soon. I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised by either outcome and I don't know how anyone claims to know one way or another given the past year or so of progress.

Im curious if that point comes before it automates away the entire mid-upper management caste.

In a hypothetical world where LLMs have enough context window and "understanding" to have no need for an experienced user to give inputs I would assume its also going to have enough information to make most business decisions and provide well formatted info to the C-Suite.

Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

#36

Post by gspr »

pydry wrote: post #15
muldvarp wrote: post #11

I have yet to hear a single convincing argument by a person that works in software why they can't be replaced.

I've yet to hear an argument that argues that software engineers can be replaced by AI that doesnt boil down to slop apologism, inability to detect slop or simple gaslighting. These are things I've come to expect from bots, clueless journalists, clueless juniors, clueless expert beginners and clueless members of the professional managerial class but almost never from experienced software engineers. To be fair, season…

> I've yet to hear an argument that argues that software engineers can be replaced by AI that doesnt boil down to slop apologism, inability to detect slop or simple gaslighting.

That, or extreme extrapolation from events that form a vanishingly tiny part of the job of a software engineer. "Last week my AI solved this amazing software problem that I had struggled with" very quickly becomes "the AI is better at software than I am". Any pushback suggesting that the fact that something (or someone) did one tiny part of your job better than you one time does not mean you should be replaced, is quickly met with "yeah, but that's today, imagine how amazing the models will be in n years".

You can't win a debate with this much moving of goalposts.

Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

#37

Post by tanepiper »

kumarvvr wrote: post #14

When all the prompts are by AI, and all the commits by AI, and all the use by AI,only then will corporations realize that..something ..

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

#38

Post by gobdovan »

I had the same thought about ML engineering a while back, when Google released the AutoML suite, that was banned from Kaggle competitions. At the time, it seemed obvious to me that the closer you were to the models, the easier it was for them to replace your work, since most of the work on models was itself hill-climbing, grind searching and mutation search. So, the more your work is an explicit, measurable search loop, the more automatable it is.

Same with prompts, most attempts seem to be fidgeting with the models till they get your intend right, which is also a matter of hill-climbing, subtle mutation, and so on.

If I were to clarify anything from the article, I'd probably say that I'd rather do the factorisation of programming roles by how long they already existed. If someone is an AI engineer and his work only became relevant a month ago, very probably it will be obsolete in another month. If they do the same thing for the past 10 years, changes are that their skills would be useful for another 10 years to come.

Re: AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI

#39

Post by puritanicdev »

sdevonoes wrote: post #19
puritanicdev wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d reframe it: you won’t be replaced by someone using AI, you’ll be replaced by someone who is better at using AI and understands the code it generates Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen plenty of developers who remain barely competent despite having access to powerful AI tools. Generating code is easy. Evaluating whether it’s actually correct and maintainable is the hard part.

> Evaluating whether it’s actually correct and maintainable is the hard part. But AI can also do that. So, what’s the point? And if you think it can’t, wait one more year

If Ai can generate code, review code, validate correctness, understand reqs, make architectural tradeoffs, operate systems, and take responsibility for outcomes, then we're no longer talking about replacing programmers. We’re talking about replacing most knowledge workers

At that point the debate isn’t really about software engineering anymore

What time to be alive, eh?

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