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> Not software engineers being kicked out ... but rather experienced engineers using AI to generate bits of code and then meticulously reviewing and testing the

by gokhan 1y ago

> Not software engineers being kicked out ... but rather experienced engineers using AI to generate bits of code and then meticulously reviewing and testing them. But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question. And the author is implementing a fairly technical project in this case. How about routine LoB app development?

paxys 1y ago
Increased productivity means increased opportuntity. There isn't going to be a time (at least not anytime soon) when we can all sit back and say "yup, we have accomplished everything there is to do with software and don't need more engineers".
- spiderice 1y ago
  But there very well might be a time very soon where human's no longer offer economic value to the software engineering process. If you could (and currently you can't) pay an AI $10k/year to do what a human could do in a year, why would you pay the human 6 figures? Or even $20k? Nobody is claiming that human's won't have jobs simply because "we have accomplished everything this is to do". It's that humans will offer zero economic value compared to AI because AI gets so good and so cheap.
  - paxys 1y ago
    And there might be a giant asteroid that strikes the earth a few years down the line ending human civilization. If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it. Until that happens this entire discussion is science fiction.
    - spiderice 1y ago
      If experts were saying the astroid will hit earth in the next 5 years, would it still be science fiction? You acting like those two scenarios are the same is disingenuous. Fuck that.
      - paxys 1y ago
        Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (running AI startups, selling AI courses, wanting to pump their company's stock price by associating with AI) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view.
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        Yup, because it's a stupid view. Good enough AI is right here, right now, today; it's already impacting day-to-day work in the software industry. That one is blindingly obvious to anyone who actually bothers to look around. You don't need experts to tell you the water is wet. It takes something special to try and deny this. It may not manifest as job loss yet, but the market response to changes is a whole other thing. For one, it's likely to first manifest as slowing down hiring relative to amount of projects being started and then released. Software is a growing market after all.
        motorest 1y ago
        > Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (...) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view. You might seek comfort in your conspiracy theories, but back in the real world the likes of me were already quite capable of creating complete and fully working projects from scratch using yesterday's LLMs. We are talking about afternoons where you grab your coffee, saying to yourself "let's see what this vibecode thing is all about", and challenging yourself to create projects from scratch using nothing but a definition of done, LLM prompts, and a free-tier LLM configured to run in agent mode. What, then? You then can proceed to nitpick about code quality and bugs, but I can also say the same thing about your work, which you take far longer to deliver.
      - lukeschlather 1y ago
        Experts understand orbital mechanics pretty well. If experts say an asteroid in the next 5 years it's pretty similar to saying that a rock dropped from the top of a skyscraper will hit the ground. It happens billions of times every day, we know the cause and effect. With AI, there's no real expertise involved in saying "well, it was very stupid 5 years ago, now it's starting to seem smart, if we extrapolate it's going to be smarter than me in 5 years." But no one really knows what level of effort is required to make it smarter than me. No one is an expert in something that doesn't exist yet.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      It's not. Consider that replacing the only $200k software engineer on the project is different than replacing the third or tenth $200k software engineer on the project. To the extent AI is improving productivity of those engineers, it reduces the need for adding more engineers to that team. That may mean firing some of them, or just not hiring new ones (or fewer of them) as the project expands, as existing ones + AI can keep up with increased workload.
      - nand_gate 1y ago
        I'm biased but my money's on the end result of AI being fewer engineers per team but also teams as a concept becoming obsolete. Why keep legacy structures, with luxuries like POs or PMs if AI becomes powerful as you say - it'll just be 'one man startups' for better or worse. Any empire-building VP should probably fear the wishful AI future they're praying for!
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        > it'll just be 'one man startups' for better or worse. Not necessarily. The reality is, whatever some people can do individually, if they team up, they can do more together. The teams and small startups will remain for now, and so will big companies. I do imagine however that the internal structure will change. As the AI gets better and able to do more independently, people will shift from pair programming to more of a PM role (this is happening now), and this I imagine will quickly collapse further. Even today, LLMs seem more suited for project management than doing actual coding - it's just the space in-between that's the problem. I.e. LLMs can code great in the small, and can break down work very well, but keeping the changes consistent and following the plan is where they still struggle. As that gap closes, I'm not really sure how the team composition would look like. But I don't doubt there'd still be teams.
    - alastairr 1y ago
      You don’t need to completely replace a whole 200k engineer. You just need to increase each engineer’s productivity sufficiently that you can reduce the total number of engineers in your company.
    - motorest 1y ago
      > If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it. I think you have multiple offers of that very AI dangling in front of you, but you might be refusing to acknowledge them. One of the problems is the way you opt to frame the issue. Does "replacing" means firing the guy hoping to replace him with a Slack webhook? Or does it mean your team decides they don't need the same headcount of medior/senior engineers because a team of junior engineers mentored by someone focusing on quality ends up being more productive?
  - hooverd 1y ago
    You run into knowledge collapse because nobody is socially reproducing that knowledge.
    - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
      This seems an important thing that somebody should be concerned about. How do we get the next generation of engineers? And how will they even be able to do the senior engineer work of validating the LLM output if they haven't had the years of experience writing code themselves?
      - tonyhart7 1y ago
        well they just need an information archive to learn that knowledge online, no human needed in software atleast but if you involve in hardware. good things AI cant just replace you outright
  - lanthissa 1y ago
    it doesn't even have to be that. software engineer used to be a medium pay job, theres no law of the universe that says it cant go back to that.
  - nand_gate 1y ago
    In this scenario who would be buying this product that offers 'zero economic value compared to AI because AI gets so good and so cheap'.
thewebguyd 1y ago
> But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question. This is likely where all this will end up. I have doubts that AI will replace all engineers, but I have no doubt in my mind that we'll certainly need a lot less engineers. A not so dissimilar thing happened in the sysadmin world (my career) when everything transitioned from ClickOps to the cloud & Infrastructure as Code. Infrastructure that needed 10 sysadmins to manage now only needed 1 or 2 infrastructure folks. The role still exists, but the quantity needed is drastically reduced. The work that I do now by myself would have needed an entire team before AWS/Ansible/Terraform, etc.
- mikeocool 1y ago
  Though arguably cloud infra made it so that a lot more companies who never would have built out a data center or leased a chunk of space in one were spinning up some serious infra in AWS or Azure -- and thus hiring at least 1-2 devops engineers. Before the end of zero interest rate policy, all the sysadmins I knew who the made the transition to devops were never stuck looking for a job for long.
- achierius 1y ago
  To be clear, the number of people employed as "SREs" or "production engineers" is actually far, far higher (at least an order of magnitude) than in the days before cloud became a thing. There are simply far more apps / companies / businesses / etc. who use cloud hosting than there ever were doing on-prem work.
- kentonv 1y ago
  I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them. But if the time it takes an engineer to build any one thing goes down, now there are a lot more things that are cost effective. Consider niche use cases. Every company tends to have custom processes and workflows. Think about being an accountant at one company vs. another -- while a lot of the job is the same, there will always be parts that are significantly different. Those bespoke processes often involve manual labor because off-the-shelf accounting software cannot add custom features for every company. But what if it could? What if an engineer working with AI could knock out customer-specific features 10x as fast as they could in the past. Now it actually makes sense to build those features, to improve the productivity of each company's accounting department. It's hard to say if demand for engineers will go down or up. I'm not pretending to know for sure. But I can see a possibility that we actually have way more developers in coming years!
simonw 1y ago
I guess I have trouble emphasizing with "But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end?" because I'm an open source oriented developer. What's open source for if not allowing 2 developers to achieve projects that previously would have taken 20?

by gokhan 1y ago

paxys 1y ago

Increased productivity means increased opportuntity. There isn't going to be a time (at least not anytime soon) when we can all sit back and say "yup, we have accomplished everything there is to do with software and don't need more engineers".

spiderice 1y ago
But there very well might be a time very soon where human's no longer offer economic value to the software engineering process. If you could (and currently you can't) pay an AI $10k/year to do what a human could do in a year, why would you pay the human 6 figures? Or even $20k? Nobody is claiming that human's won't have jobs simply because "we have accomplished everything this is to do". It's that humans will offer zero economic value compared to AI because AI gets so good and so cheap.
- paxys 1y ago
  And there might be a giant asteroid that strikes the earth a few years down the line ending human civilization. If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it. Until that happens this entire discussion is science fiction.
  - spiderice 1y ago
    If experts were saying the astroid will hit earth in the next 5 years, would it still be science fiction? You acting like those two scenarios are the same is disingenuous. Fuck that.
    - paxys 1y ago
      Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (running AI startups, selling AI courses, wanting to pump their company's stock price by associating with AI) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view.
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        Yup, because it's a stupid view. Good enough AI is right here, right now, today; it's already impacting day-to-day work in the software industry. That one is blindingly obvious to anyone who actually bothers to look around. You don't need experts to tell you the water is wet. It takes something special to try and deny this. It may not manifest as job loss yet, but the market response to changes is a whole other thing. For one, it's likely to first manifest as slowing down hiring relative to amount of projects being started and then released. Software is a growing market after all.
      - motorest 1y ago
        > Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (...) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view. You might seek comfort in your conspiracy theories, but back in the real world the likes of me were already quite capable of creating complete and fully working projects from scratch using yesterday's LLMs. We are talking about afternoons where you grab your coffee, saying to yourself "let's see what this vibecode thing is all about", and challenging yourself to create projects from scratch using nothing but a definition of done, LLM prompts, and a free-tier LLM configured to run in agent mode. What, then? You then can proceed to nitpick about code quality and bugs, but I can also say the same thing about your work, which you take far longer to deliver.
    - lukeschlather 1y ago
      Experts understand orbital mechanics pretty well. If experts say an asteroid in the next 5 years it's pretty similar to saying that a rock dropped from the top of a skyscraper will hit the ground. It happens billions of times every day, we know the cause and effect. With AI, there's no real expertise involved in saying "well, it was very stupid 5 years ago, now it's starting to seem smart, if we extrapolate it's going to be smarter than me in 5 years." But no one really knows what level of effort is required to make it smarter than me. No one is an expert in something that doesn't exist yet.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    It's not. Consider that replacing the only $200k software engineer on the project is different than replacing the third or tenth $200k software engineer on the project. To the extent AI is improving productivity of those engineers, it reduces the need for adding more engineers to that team. That may mean firing some of them, or just not hiring new ones (or fewer of them) as the project expands, as existing ones + AI can keep up with increased workload.
    - nand_gate 1y ago
      I'm biased but my money's on the end result of AI being fewer engineers per team but also teams as a concept becoming obsolete. Why keep legacy structures, with luxuries like POs or PMs if AI becomes powerful as you say - it'll just be 'one man startups' for better or worse. Any empire-building VP should probably fear the wishful AI future they're praying for!
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        > it'll just be 'one man startups' for better or worse. Not necessarily. The reality is, whatever some people can do individually, if they team up, they can do more together. The teams and small startups will remain for now, and so will big companies. I do imagine however that the internal structure will change. As the AI gets better and able to do more independently, people will shift from pair programming to more of a PM role (this is happening now), and this I imagine will quickly collapse further. Even today, LLMs seem more suited for project management than doing actual coding - it's just the space in-between that's the problem. I.e. LLMs can code great in the small, and can break down work very well, but keeping the changes consistent and following the plan is where they still struggle. As that gap closes, I'm not really sure how the team composition would look like. But I don't doubt there'd still be teams.
  - alastairr 1y ago
    You don’t need to completely replace a whole 200k engineer. You just need to increase each engineer’s productivity sufficiently that you can reduce the total number of engineers in your company.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it. I think you have multiple offers of that very AI dangling in front of you, but you might be refusing to acknowledge them. One of the problems is the way you opt to frame the issue. Does "replacing" means firing the guy hoping to replace him with a Slack webhook? Or does it mean your team decides they don't need the same headcount of medior/senior engineers because a team of junior engineers mentored by someone focusing on quality ends up being more productive?
- hooverd 1y ago
  You run into knowledge collapse because nobody is socially reproducing that knowledge.
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    This seems an important thing that somebody should be concerned about. How do we get the next generation of engineers? And how will they even be able to do the senior engineer work of validating the LLM output if they haven't had the years of experience writing code themselves?
    - tonyhart7 1y ago
      well they just need an information archive to learn that knowledge online, no human needed in software atleast but if you involve in hardware. good things AI cant just replace you outright
- lanthissa 1y ago
  it doesn't even have to be that. software engineer used to be a medium pay job, theres no law of the universe that says it cant go back to that.
- nand_gate 1y ago
  In this scenario who would be buying this product that offers 'zero economic value compared to AI because AI gets so good and so cheap'.

thewebguyd 1y ago

> But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question. This is likely where all this will end up. I have doubts that AI will replace all engineers, but I have no doubt in my mind that we'll certainly need a lot less engineers. A not so dissimilar thing happened in the sysadmin world (my career) when everything transitioned from ClickOps to the cloud & Infrastructure as Code. Infrastructure that needed 10 sysadmins to manage now only needed 1 or 2 infrastructure folks. The role still exists, but the quantity needed is drastically reduced. The work that I do now by myself would have needed an entire team before AWS/Ansible/Terraform, etc.

mikeocool 1y ago
Though arguably cloud infra made it so that a lot more companies who never would have built out a data center or leased a chunk of space in one were spinning up some serious infra in AWS or Azure -- and thus hiring at least 1-2 devops engineers. Before the end of zero interest rate policy, all the sysadmins I knew who the made the transition to devops were never stuck looking for a job for long.
achierius 1y ago
To be clear, the number of people employed as "SREs" or "production engineers" is actually far, far higher (at least an order of magnitude) than in the days before cloud became a thing. There are simply far more apps / companies / businesses / etc. who use cloud hosting than there ever were doing on-prem work.
kentonv 1y ago
I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them. But if the time it takes an engineer to build any one thing goes down, now there are a lot more things that are cost effective. Consider niche use cases. Every company tends to have custom processes and workflows. Think about being an accountant at one company vs. another -- while a lot of the job is the same, there will always be parts that are significantly different. Those bespoke processes often involve manual labor because off-the-shelf accounting software cannot add custom features for every company. But what if it could? What if an engineer working with AI could knock out customer-specific features 10x as fast as they could in the past. Now it actually makes sense to build those features, to improve the productivity of each company's accounting department. It's hard to say if demand for engineers will go down or up. I'm not pretending to know for sure. But I can see a possibility that we actually have way more developers in coming years!

simonw 1y ago

I guess I have trouble emphasizing with "But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end?" because I'm an open source oriented developer. What's open source for if not allowing 2 developers to achieve projects that previously would have taken 20?