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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#431

Post by yomismoaqui »

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…

My mantra as an engineer is "Devil is in the details".

For 2 almost identical problems, having a little diference between them, the solutions can be radically different in complexity, price & time to deliver.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#433

Post by sanderjd »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #425
lotu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm both amazed by the improvements, and also think they are fundamentally incremental at this point.

But I'm happy about this. I'm not that interested in or optimistic about AGI, but having increasingly great tools to do useful work with computers is incredible!

My only concern is that it won't be sustainable, and it's only as great as it is right now because the cost to end users is being heavily subsidized by investment.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#434

Post by mattgreenrocks »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #418
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which is hilarious, because AI is making it easier and easier to bring a good idea to market with much less external financing than usual. You can argue about security, reliability, and edge cases, but it's not as if human devs have a perfect record there. Or even a particularly good one. What are those execs bringing to the table, beyond entitlement and self-belief?

> What are those execs bringing to the table, beyond entitlement and self-belief?

The status quo, which always require an order of magnitude more effort to overcome. There's also a substantial portion of the population that needs well-defined power hierarchies to feel psychologically secure.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#435

Post by maerF0x0 »

A developer is just someone who has the ability to create things with technology. Every iteration we do not "replace" developers. We lower the bar such that more and more people can be Developers. (Wether thats time investment/education, IQ, or other elements that were previously barriers)

When electronic spreadsheets were invented there was thought that it was gameover for accountants. There are more accountants per dollar of GDP today than back then. When a thing becomes cheaper we do not just consume the backlog and quit. We actually do more of that thing. Part of the reason is is that there is a very large set of software that was not financially viable to create pre vibe coding. Now it's financially viable to create... Even just throwaway software. Single use software. etc.

Until coding agents are capable of doing engineering superior to like the 90thile _of well trained and experienced engineers_ we will probably have human developers, likely more and more of them.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#436

Post by calenti »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #265
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…

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 is infintely analog and therefore digital will only ever be an approximation.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#437

Post by funkyfiddler69 »

is this realistic?

replace the worker in the middle and nothing stands between your favorite worst nightmare and the customers/reality you want. atm devs and workers are inside. even if they abide by "job security", "planned obsolescence" and building in 7 microphones and boatloads of code to record and track users and their behavior, these people are still inside and talk to each other and the rest of the world.

Once they are replaced, the right to repair, privacy and so on will vanish and we will be punished for disassembling hardware and software in worse ways than happened to that guy who did the PS3 back then (I don't know of any other stories, unfortunately). I heard that they already run the narrative "you bought a game but it's still ours" ..., which seems like the second or third step towards the direction outlined above.

I fear the same will happen to food, pharma ... not necesserily because the top of the pyramid is "evil" but because there are only so many ways to keep increasing the increase of their wealth. A lot of conspiratorial stuff IS happening, and the sick and damaged and neuro and bio divergent with all their sensitivities are livestock so why not "create" more? at least for some time ... until all is "Incorporated" as in "applying for the permit have children".

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#438

Post by cratermoon »

"If the problem were primarily mechanical—too much typing, too complex syntax, too many steps—we would have solved it by now"

And yet we see management and the AI boosters still talk about productivity in terms of lines of code written, or proxies for that metric, likes number of features shipped.

We definitely have solved the mechanical problem, and we did so decades ago when wizards and IDEs able to auto-generate boilerplate stubs came along.

Still we see the process discussed and boosted in terms of sheer quantity of "stuff", even as we are drowning in accidental complexity and tech debt. Adding yet more code generated by a synthetic text extruder is not solving any problem of consequence, but is in fact making things worse. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society" https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful...

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#439

Post by mathgeek »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #348
cyber_kinetist wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the the most coveted ability of a skilled senior developer, is precisely this "uncanny" ability to predict beforehand if some particular detail is important or irrelevant. This ability can only be obtained through years of experience and hubris.

Woah woah woah, that sounds like a skill set we might have to _pay_ someone for??? Can’t we just prompt the model to do that??

While I know your comment was in sarcastic jest, the question folks are asking this month is "can't we just pay one person to prompt ten models to do that?"

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#440

Post by dijit »

twistedpair wrote: post #397
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…

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…

Fair point, but I think you’ve actually illustrated my argument perfectly: you didn’t eliminate the need for specialists, you outsourced them to your cloud vendor. Those underlying nodes being “patched and replaced automatically” by AWS/GCP/Azure? That’s their SRE teams doing exactly the work your sysadmin used to do, just at massive scale. The control plane managing your deployments? Cloud vendor specialists built and maintain that.

And I’d wager you’ve still got people on staff doing operational work, they just don’t have “sysadmin” in their title anymore. Someone’s managing your K8s manifests, debugging why pods won’t schedule, fixing networking issues when services can’t communicate, handling secrets management, setting up monitoring and alerting. That work didn’t vanish, it just got rebranded. The “DevOps engineer” or “platform engineer” or “SRE” doing that is performing sysadmin work under a different job title.

Managed K8s can absolutely reduce operational overhead compared to hand-rolling everything. But that’s not democratisation, that’s a combination of outsourcing and rebranding. The expertise is still required, you’ve just shifted who pays for it and what you call the people doing it.

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