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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#421

Post by CPLX »

immibis wrote: post #416
echelon wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If LLMs are good at writing software, then there's lots of good software around written by LLMs. Where is that software? I don't see it. Logical conclusion: LLMs aren't good at writing software.

Presumably they are writing the same quality software faster, the market having decided what quality it will accept.

Once that trend maxes out it’s entirely plausible that the level of quality demanded will rise quickly. That’s basically what happened in the first dot com era.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#422

Post by lelanthran »

zby wrote: post #68
jackfranklyn wrote: post #52

[flagged]

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.

> 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.

That's completely disconnected from whether software developer salaries decrease or not, or whether the software developer population decreases or not.

The introduction of the loom introduced many many more jobs, but these were low-paid jobs that demanded little skill.

All automation you can point to in history resulted in operators needing less skill to produce, which results in less pay.

There is no doubt (i.e. I have seen it) that lower-skilled folk are absolutely going to crush these elitists developers who keep going on about how they won't be affected by automated code-generation, it will only be those devs that are doing unskilled mechanical work.

Sure - because prompting requires all that skill you have? Gimme a break.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#423

Post by sanderjd »

davnicwil wrote: post #251

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…

Yeah this is a thought provoking framing. Maybe the way in which those of us who really enjoy programming are weird is that we relish meticulously figuring out those details.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#425

Post by GorbachevyChase »

lotu wrote: post #106
enos_feedler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological…

You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. Ho…

No, I’m pretty sure the models are still improving or the harnesses are, and I don’t think that distinction is all that important for users. Where were coding agents at 2025? 2024? I’m pretty amazed by the improvements in the last few months.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#426

Post by MarceliusK »

davnicwil wrote: post #251

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…

I don't think the recurring failure is that we haven't found the right abstraction yet. It's that abstraction is often mistaken for understanding

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#428

Post by MarceliusK »

dijit wrote: 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…

Democratisation doesn't eliminate specialists. It just ensures the specialists arrive later, under more pressure, with more to unwind.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#429

Post by sanderjd »

echelon wrote: post #394
godelski wrote: post #327

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…

Why wouldn't we find new things to do with all that new productivity?

Anecdotally, this is what I see happening in the small in my own work - we say yes to more ideas, more projects, because we know we can unblock things more quickly now - and I don't see why that wouldn't extend.

I do expect to see smaller teams - maybe a lot more one-person "teams" - and perhaps smaller companies. But I expect to see more work being done, not less, or the same.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#430

Post by MarceliusK »

heliumtera wrote: post #51

Business quacks being forever bamboozled because turns out implementation is the only thing that matters and hacker culture outlived every single promise to eradicate hacker culture.

Hacker culture survives because it's the culture that optimizes for contact with reality
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