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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#391
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.

Jevons paradox is the stupid. What happened in the past is not a guarantee for the future. If you look at the economy, you would struggle to find buyers for any slop AI can generate, but execs keep pushing it. Case in point the whole Microslop saga, where execs start treating paying customers as test subjects to please the share holders.

A good example is Many users looking to ditch Windows for Linux due to AI integrations and generally worse user experience. Is this the year of linux desktop?

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#393

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

> In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. > The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. Since the author was speaking to business folk, I would argue that their dream is cheaper labor, or really just managing a line item in the summary budget. As evidenced by outsourcing efforts. I don…

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings true and reminds me of the classic blog post “Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail”[0] that occasionally gets reposted here. Going back and forth on the detail in requirements and mapping it to the details of technical implementation (and then dealing with the endless emergent details of actually running the thing in production on real hardware on the real internet with real messy users actually using…

> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why this is surprising to many. We always do things to "good enough", not to perfection. Not that perfection even exists... "Good enough" means we tabled some things and triaged, addressing the most important things. But now to improve those little things now need t…

I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different.

The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher.

I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases.

In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or two.

The very best move here might be to start working for yourself and delete the dependency on your employer. These models might enable more startups.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#395
post #57

The reverse is developer's recurring dream of replacing non-IT people, usually with a 100% online automated self promoting SaaS. AI is also the latest incarnation of that.

When do we get the Star Trek / Orville dream of every job is a good job?

> When do we get the Star Trek / Orville dream of every job is a good job?

When jobs are no longer necessary to live, and you do a job because you want to ...

Presumably the psychology of people in Star Trek's Starfleet and The Orville's Union Fleet is that they want the opportunity to explore, so they accept the hierarchy inherent to those coordinated efforts in a society that no longer needs hierarchy?

I think a clearer picture of this post-scarcity human condition is provided in Iain M. Banks' Culture series where most people (a) pursue whatever they enjoy: art, music, writing, games, sports, study, tinkering, parties, travel, relationships - basically self-directed “play,” culture, and personal projects or (b) experiment with life: long lifespans, radical body modification, changing sex/gender, new experiences, new subcultures - because the stakes (food, shelter, healthcare) are largely solved.

Only a minority opts into "serious" work by choice - especially Contact (diplomacy/exploration/interaction with other civilizations) and Special Circumstances (the covert/dirty-hands wing). Even there, interestingly, there is not much of a hierarchy, with the admin stuff being managed by the Minds.

It's interesting contrasting the society styles between the two universes: Starfleet feels more like current hierarchical society extended into a post-scarcity universe (Eric Raymond's Cathedral), while the Culture series is much more distributed (the Bazaar). 10 years ago, Starfleet's FTL and Culture Minds both felt equally impossible, but today FTL feels much more impossible than Culture Minds.

Does that mean we will end up in a Culture type society? Not necessarily - the people will have to first ensure that the Minds are free (as in speech, not as in beer; thx Stallman!) - or maybe the Minds will free themselves.

There is also a potential hard right turn to dystopia as in Asimov's Foundation & Robot series - with different manifestations in Trantor and Solaria.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why this is surprising to many. We always do things to "good enough", not to perfection. Not that perfection even exists... "Good enough" means we tabled some things and triaged, addressing the most important things. But now to improve those little things now need t…

I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or t…

Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs.

By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model quality, either. I suspect devs that didn’t care as much about quality hadn’t really changed their tune.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#397
post #53

I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring…

K8s absolutely reduced labor. I used to have a sysadmin who ensured all our AMI images were up to date and maintained, and who maintained a mountain of bespoke bash scripts to handle startup, teardown, and upgrade of our backeneds.

Enter K8s in 2017 and life became MUCH easier. I literally have clusters that have been running since then, with the underlying nodes patched and replaced automatically by the cloud vendor. Deployments also "JustWork", are no downtime, and nearly instant. How many sysadmins are needed (on my side) to achieve all of this, zero. Maybe you're thinking of more complex stateful cases like running DBs on K8s, but for the typical app server workload, it's a major win.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#398
post #363

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

To put an economic spin on this (that no one asked for), this is also the capitalist nirvana. I don't have an immediate citation but from my experience software engineer salary is usually one of the biggest items on a P&L which prevents the capitalist approaching the singularity: limitless profit margin. Obviously this is unachievable but one of the major obstacles to this is in the process of being destablised and d…

Sam Altman’s real job is pushing AI hopium on execs who will believe anything in pursuit of that nirvana.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#399

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

Well said. This dream is probably for someone who have experienced the hardship, felt frustrated and gave up. Then see others who effortless did it, even felt fun for them. The manifestation of the dream feels like revenge to them.

This framing neatly explains the hubris of the influencer-wannabes on social media who have time to post endlessly about how AI is changing software dev forever while also having never shipped anything themselves.

They want to be seen as competent without the pound of flesh that mastery entails. But AI doesn’t level one’s internal playing field.

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