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Will AI take web developer jobs?

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Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#41

Post by throwaway48duf »

SunlitCat wrote: post #29

It will happen when we stop using the web as "the web" and treat it as a Software as a Service delivery network.

AI needs the web to thrive & survive ...its leech of the worlds' knowledge & where it gained the majority of its knowledge from and will continue to do so.

The next big platform winner I think will be an AI phone... one that embraces the web over app stores. Its web browser will be where all the games and everything is built even if we no longer open our web browsers up as we do now.

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#42

Post by codr7 »

simonw wrote: post #24
journal wrote: post #5

GPT4o-mini, I asked it to refactor my class to a property with backing field and trim. It did that, but it also lost my Email property in the process. I asked it about it and it apologized and gave it back. Same with GPT4o.

Have you tried o3-mini? I'm finding it to be significantly better than GPT-4o for code - I'm even finding myself using it in place of Claude 3.5 Sonnet a lot of the time.

A lot of the time?

What kind of code are you writing, if I may ask; and how long have you been doing it?

I sometimes ask whatever AI open ended questions on subjects I know very little about, and sometimes I find some kind of starting point for less random research using better tools.

Beyond that, and whatever fancy autocomplete my IDE forces down my throat, nope.

If if was gone tomorrow I would barely notice.

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#43

Post by rvz »

dlcarrier wrote: post #15

AI creates bloated, sometimes nonsensical output that often straight-up doesn't work. It's perfect for replacing web developers. It can make mobile apps, too.

> It's perfect for replacing web developers.

In fact, web developers are the first for AI to completely replace them as it is best trained on the javascript and typescript ecosystem(s) and that was all done by themselves due to it's high popularity and the lowest of all barriers in this industry.

It will take time for the other sectors, but web developers are the first to be completely displaced.

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#44

Post by ripped_britches »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #20
crote wrote: post #8

It's missing one critical point: if AI makes a good developer 10% more productive, the industry needs 10% less developers to achieve the same output. You're not getting replaced by AI. You're getting replaced by a coworker using AI. It doesn't matter how poorly AI performs at any remotely complicated task, what matters is how many developer-hours it saves by not having to manually write as much boilerplate.

My company has had a backlog thousands of developer-hours long for years. Maybe eventually somebody will get fired because we're not needed, but the LLM would have to actually 10x our productivity for us to get through the backlog in a year.

That backlog almost certainly is just stuff you care about and not related to revenue

Or someone would have been added to headcount to work on it

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#45

Post by codr7 »

aqueueaqueue wrote: post #36

AI is problematic because it creates code that is good enough but would have been better if you wrote yourself. Leading to many papercuts. The real question is will AI create a shortage of developers to fix the mess!

Or will it be the end of society as we know it, since everyone will keep pretending it works until everything collapses.

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#46

Post by codr7 »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #39
SunlitCat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Although not really funny (if you want to use ChatGPT to do some real work), it's kinda cute how it always apologizes and says sorry if you remark that it lost something you were sure you included in your prompt. :) Personally, I would like all my personal interaction with people going like that. Life would be totally easier!

They're obnoxiously obsequious, though. They remind me of a customer service worker dialed up to 11. I'd rather be talked to straight, without all the "You're absolutely right!" and "Oh, I'm sorry!" nonsense.

AIs sort of have to be to survive, since they have no clue about anything yet always speak in a confident tone.

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#47

Post by Ekaros »

rvz wrote: post #43
dlcarrier wrote: post #15

AI creates bloated, sometimes nonsensical output that often straight-up doesn't work. It's perfect for replacing web developers. It can make mobile apps, too.

> It's perfect for replacing web developers. In fact, web developers are the first for AI to completely replace them as it is best trained on the javascript and typescript ecosystem(s) and that was all done by themselves due to it's high popularity and the lowest of all barriers in this industry. It will take time for the other sectors, but web developers are the first to be completely displaced.

So is the AI finally a working low code solution?

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#49

Post by codr7 »

akomtu wrote: post #38

It doesn't need to completely replace software devs. Rather, AI will make a $25k/year software dev as good as a $250k/year software dev, and the 25k one won't even need to speak English. The real question is: will AI enable the now jobless 250k software dev do something that's so valuable that the US companies will need his services at this price?

Sorry, that doesn't compute.

If you have a 25k/year software dev, and you pair it up with AI, now you have two 25k/year software devs at best.

It's sort of capable of producing the same crap as the least experienced, least motivated developers.

Re: Will AI take web developer jobs?

#50

Post by wruza »

dlcarrier wrote: post #15

AI creates bloated, sometimes nonsensical output that often straight-up doesn't work. It's perfect for replacing web developers. It can make mobile apps, too.

This may be seen as satire, but webdev as a phenomenon really is a collection of all sorts of poor reinventions and crutches, for which there’s naturally billions of lines of code, which AI loves to have. It will replace webdevs as is. The downside is that we’ll never make a step forward with that (not that webdevs planned to do so anyway).
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