ProgrammerHumor
aiWillOvertakeMyJob
Discussion
Don't worry about the AI hype. During covid companies massively overhired, and AI is the scapegoat, so they don't look like idiots to stakeholders.
No CEO will ever say: "well we overhired by 50% oops, get fucked"
While yes, also no.
Microsoft is actually leveraging AI as a development driver and this is noticeable in the lack of quality of their patches and current products. Start menu: bug. Windows explorer multi-tab: bug. Notepad multi tab: bug. Kernel : one big fucking bug partially remediated in 24h2
To be fair, the same applied before AI
Yeah, I don't get how they attribute this to AI. Most consumer- and developer-facing software Microsoft has been developing has sucked for at least a decade.
Writing something is very important for actually remembering it. This is important for the long term maintenance of code, and while it's not perfect, the better I know code, the more likely I am to be able to quickly diagnose and accurately fix bugs. This is doubly helpful if I need to, say, refactor something.
However, if I let AI write the code, I lose all of that. Instead I'm in a position where I technically own the code, and there's no one I can really ask about it anymore. At least I can say I know what the code is intended to do, but that's not the whole picture. And I very much doubt I'm the only one who thinks this.
So yes, software often has bugs. This is not an insightful statement; certainly not in a sub populated primarily by people with at least an interest in programming. However, I firmly believe that long term overuse of AI in development will result in larger tech debt and more bug, which will also take longer to fix properly.
To that too I would say "does it matter?" Because I am aware (don't quote me on that it's based on what I heard from I believe a documentary about the development of Halo Infinite, so trust me bro) that the Xbox Game Studios fancy themselves in hiring developers just long enough to not have to pay them employee benefits, which leads to massive problems with maintaining legacy code because most of the people that worked on something are already gone again, which is pretty much the same situation as if AI was being used, right?
The reason I think Microsoft might be doing this as a company as well is that they keep trying to push web development everywhere, presumably because it's easier to constantly find new web developers than once that would learn the frameworks Microsoft actually has themselves for native app dev. I'd say that more web development is also for cost cutting measures, but seeing how Microsoft teams barely seem to collaborate and each one kinda sorta just builds their own controls from scratch, that can't possibly be any easier or faster than just using the native frameworks, especially for things that are only going to be on Windows anyways, like the start menu, widgets panel, weather app, etc., right?
That said, overuse of AI is still terrible, but I'd assume Microsoft is the company that this affects the least because their code base is already in a terrible enough state for it to not make as much of a difference anymore.
Edit: needless to say, Microsoft also has core engineers who actually stay there, like the ones working on the Windows kernel, but those weren't necessarily the kinds of products that I was complaining about. With Windows, for example, the kernel is much less so a problem than the shell. Yes, it's also bloated, but at least I don't die inside while using it unlike when I open the weather app and it's a Metro UI wrapper for a fluent-ish website that loads slowly.
C suite isn't really paid to do "long term" thinking. It's all short term. Next quarter, or at most, the next few years while they still run the company. They see "shiny new thing that might cut costs", and they literally cannot help themselves.
So when this short term strategy accumulates tech debt in the span of months and nobody understands why the code is written like this and it starts ballooning costs to fix the issues, then yes, it's going to matter.
Yea I’m predicting a bunch of cascading failures in a short amount of time, coupled with a massive cloud bill for most companies before they start looking to fix their problems. That’s assuming venture capitalists don’t pick up on the trend and start funding smaller startups consisting of the former engineers of these companies who will make the successors to the current tech giants.
This is why I firmly believe that the skills of senior programmers, leads, etc. are crucial. These people spend as much or more time focusing on developing test cases, reviewing changes, creating user stories, and documenting interfaces as they do writing code. Those skills remain crucial since they are what keeps any coder (human or AI) pointed in the right direction, and from making breaking changes.
The big problem is that it takes time and experience having broken things to develop that skill set, and without entry level roles for new developers to learn those skills we risk running out of people with them.
It's always sucked. It's also always been the only real option. Yeah Linux exists, but your average person can't handle that power. Apple is too restrictive, so MS wins.
Every OS sucks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
Thanks for this 👍
When did Three Dead Trolls In Baggie become One Dead Troll?
Apple is too restrictive
...what?
I can upgrade the ram in my PC in moments very inexpensively. How's that work on a Mac again?
For some reason people have this perception that Macs are like iPhones in how locked down they are, but the reality is they’ll do pretty much anything you want except for serious gaming (and that’s only because the game studios aren’t targeting Mac).
Hell, if you’re doing light or occasional gaming, the M series Macs can run a whole bunch of AAA titles smoothly through Parallels emulating Windows.
There’s a reason Macs are almost universally preferred by developers. The only real “restriction” you’re going to run into is the price, which to be fair is enough to deter many people.
Tell that to my inability to have application volume sliders without buying software for my mac.
That’s a missing feature, not a restriction. A restriction implies that you can’t accomplish something without doing something like jail-breaking your device, not that they just didn’t implement a feature that you’d like, but is available from someone else who decided to implement that feature and charge for it.
I think you have become too proficient in arguing with Product Managers, friend :)
Fair enough. Still stupid.
I'm not arguing that MacBooks aren't the best laptop for things that aren't gaming, because they are, but I hate it.
Universally preferred? What bubble are you living in?
Outside of C#/.NET devs, do you know someone who has worked on a Mac in the last ten years who would willingly choose Windows if they were given the choice and budget? Theres an argument to be made for running Linux (and I’ve been one of those people before I moved to a mac) but the percentage of devs who actually do that are a minority.
They used unskilled labor as AI, so their model doesn't change.
Anyone remember windows Vista? You can't blame ai for bad quality of this one
The OS was dogshit but I unironically love the composited aero blur effect from Windows Vista desktop. Genuinely the best-looking era for MS in my opinion.
I’d use that effect in my current theme if kwin’s blur plugin didn’t keep breaking on Wayland for some reason. Always fails on my work machine, and worked after an update on my personal machine only to break again.
breaking on Wayland
By that time, there was Kompiz to pimp the desktop and it had a very nice blurry transparency too.
Windows Vista made me try Linux for the first time and I didn't fully came back to windows after 7.
Vista was ok as long as the computer was good enough, but a lot of computers sold as "vista ready" or with Vista already installed were absolutely not Vista ready. They were low to midrange XP ready, which meant Vista ran like shit because it needed a pretty decent bump in specs to run well.
If PC vendors had sold XP machines as XP machines instead of claiming they were good enough for Vista, I think a lot of the hate would have been avoided.
Wasn't Vista primarily bad decision making?
AI = fake intelligence = not intelligent = development of vista
Partially why I can't wait to hop over to steamOS.
Why does it have to be steamOS? There is nothing magical about it and depending on your use case it might not even be a good distro for you
While i've studied CS in university, i have "only" found job as QA. As of now, sadly, i'm a gamer first, hobby developer second.
While I still like to code, and enjoy solving stuff, I don't need extensive OS support for it.
Therefore, steamOS is enough.
Why wait? Look into installing Bazzite. It’s a steamOS clone that’s available now.
Haven’t they specifically said it isn’t a desktop OS and is only meant for handhelds though?
they are planning to port it over for desktop usage as well
I’ve got back into gaming after a decade plus hiatus and I’m loving CachyOS personally despite having spent most of my life in debian-like land and macOS.
It’s basically Arch with sensible defaults out of the box and some nice creature comforts if you can’t really be arsed to deal with ordinary Arch - there was very minimal farting around getting my GPU to behave for example.
At present, I do trust Steam to do right by their users. That's maybe something worth considering.
I actually use multiple tabs in Windows Explorer a heck of a lot. Makes it a lot easier when I need 3 folders for the same project. Wish they had a shortcut for saving all those tabs so I can just open them the next day and continue from where I was before.
I also use multiple tabs in Notepad++, but don’t really use Notepad anymore.
Well u will be relieved to find that KDE Plasma's built-in file manager "Dolphin" supports multi-tabs way before Windows did
Probably copied from there.
But tried KDE already and didn’t like it.
Dude I still manage my windows like I have windows 3.11
I just stand my windows up like solitaire cards and click the window I want to work on for the moment lol
This feels like a big heaping pile of "citation needed."
Not that updates have come out bug-free (although I'd like sources for those specific call-outs too), but also "these were explicitly caused by AI-driven development." Which is something that, unless one has a peek at the source code or actually worked in-house, would be pretty difficult to do!
So, ball's in your court.
Yeah I'm too lazy to look for the articles. I work maintaining a windows platform, so I see this shit everyday.
I will take the ball home. Can you sign it?
While yes, and while also no, also yes - I guess?
I mean, sooner or later somebody's got the tech debt. Right now there are just a few bugs. What happens in the next, say, 5 years?
The bet is that AI will get better, so capable of getting more complex stuff together.
Okay but those 50% still got layed off anyway; you are either saying the domain is oversaturated or AI is reducing it's size
Tell that to me bring laid off and unemployed for 2 years with 10 years of experience.
Ok, explain no junior jobs then.
Junior jobs are still there, there's just a flood of applicants because the "learn to code" mania added in a lot of low quality devs to the job market.
Also the aspect of devwork that AI is actually really good at is the kind of shit you'd throw juniors on to keep them busy for a day, so there's less need for juniors to handle rote work.
So how am I supposed to start working, or even get an internship at this point
Apply like a motherfucker even to "low end" jobs that pay shitty just to build experience and ride out the market, attend dev events and try to make connections, open up a linkedin page if you don't have one and see if you can get the cloud of recruiters to get you any opportunities.
5 years before covid hit people were saying the same shit about the impossibility of getting junior jobs, and my bad-GPA ass got my foot in the door, you can too.
Companies looking for unicorns with junior pay, so they keep reposting the same job while refusing to hire someone. My record so far is seeing the same job for 7 months in a row. It's not enough that you have education in the subject matter, it's not enough that you're in the specialty (software dev, webdev, infrastructure, etc.), they want a specialty within the specialty, someone who's had that exact same title, worked with their exact tech stack and done so for 10 years. I recently applied to a job that wanted 10+ years in one of two technologies that have only existed for 11 and 12 years.
Companies looking for unicorns with junior pay, so they keep reposting the same job while refusing to hire someone.
10 years ago I walked into an in-person interview in Fargo ND where the manager bitched me out for wasting his time for not being a 5 year veteran coming in to apply for a 40k/yr job.
The Corporate recruiter I worked with up to that point vented about how moronic that subsidiary was when she called me back to let me know I shockingly wasn't getting the position.
Easy: juniors are less productive (especially at anything beyond coding grunt work), so if you're looking to slim headcount you get a lot more bang for your buck with seniors even if we're more expensive per FTE.
It's incredibly short-sighted since today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, but no one ever accused big companies of being good at planning beyond the next fiscal year or even the next quarter.
I really do feel for y'all who are still in school or got laid off as juniors. There are still junior jobs out there, but the lower end of the skill/experience spectrum is crazy oversaturated for the current economic landscape
so if you're looking to slim headcount you get a lot more bang for your buck with seniors even if we're more expensive per FTE
You'd think so but from what I see in the industry, it's often "let's get rid of those expensive developers and have some open minds fresh from uni for a third of the price".
nah ive definitely seen that that almost exact verbiage, substitute get fucked with the buinsness/hr/legal way of saying get fucked
Also, most tech companies are transitioning out of growth mode and into maintenance mode for maximum extraction.
They have built their empires, and now it's time to squeeze every dollar out of their customers. This doesn't require lots of new devs building out new features.
Just maintenance and enshittification.
Like, I get weekly updates on my Microsoft products, but nothing new really happens. Buttons move around and the layout changes, cool, but it's the same product. Why do they need 250k employees to keep the same products going exactly as they always have? They don't, and the playoffs represent that realization.
Sort of. They laid off devs who were trained in building wep applications (basically how software architecture was for the past 15 years) and hired devs who had expertise in AI. All these big tech companies are racing to be the first to build AGI, and so they need a different kind of talent for that.
why are they pointers
To c # the target
Seems very unsafe
I got that reference.
My Skill Enters The Chat
Leaves the chat right away (humiliated by the recruiters)
Recruiters be like: “Sorry, we’re looking for someone with 10 years’ experience in surviving plot twists.”
Actual AI is the least of concerns, but CEO faith in imagined AI is one of the most
AI hype will burst 100%. as its going now it wont be sustainable for the long term
At the very least, I can't wait for the "it's popular to laypeople" bubble to pop.
That way we don't have to deal with everything under the sun shoveling "✨ AI - Powered ✨" onto every little thing, even when the product has no actual "AI" in use. The marketing is absurd.
sorry i only wipe my ass on AI powered toilet paper.
That's never going to go away. AI is just too easy for lay people to use. Even if they know it can be wildly inaccurate, the ease of use is just too much for them to give it up. As long as there is a free AI they can ask, they will keep using it to replace any and all critical thinking. And with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and everyone else integrating AI into the very structure of their services, these free AIs will never disappear.
Ease of use has nothing to do with it.
The reality is that it'll be a passing fad, in the eye of the public. "Oh this has AI in it? So does everything else, who cares."
Your example demonstrates that it won't go away. If everything has AI, it's not gone away.
At some point they have to be monetized, the companies making the models have yet to find a way to make money and they can't keep losing billions forever. I get the feeling that all the AI companies now keep dumping money into it because they've dumped so much money in it already. That and they're worried someone else might finally break through with a way to make money on it.
Access to these free AI chatbots might go away, but that doesn't mean they're gone. Customers will expect companies to have AI chat on their help pages, AI telephone services, AI search on Google or their Start menu. The companies will pay to have access to ChatGPT or Grok or Copilot, etc. and pass the cost onto the customers.
That doesn't mean that its going away. This is like any heavy market saturation, there will be winners that stay and many that close shop. While there is a ton of hype for AI that won't last or doesn't reflect what it can do, the current systems have found a home in the next stage of automation and tool support.
People keep acting like its going to up and vanish when that's not going to happen. It's also not going to replace all the jobs like people worry, but it will reduce the needed workforce by a larger margin than prior innovations.
The real kicker, is that unlike many other industry changes, AI isn't limited to one field. It currently is capable enough of replacing your bottom end and average workers in a majority of office jobs.
For example, customer service roles, data entry clerks, basic bookkeeping, paralegals, legal assistants, technical support jobs (particularly first-tier troubleshooting), transcription, market research analysis, content moderation, copywriting. Even things like Self-checks are becoming a common place thing.
Then we have administrative and scheduling tasks, such as sorting emails or managing calendars, are increasingly managed by virtual assistants and growing in ability and scale.
If anything, the fact we're in this sort of second wave push for AI (first was getting it functional enough to be popular for the general masses to gain interests), means that enough people see value in it, which is leading to this over saturation (kinda like when coffee places and Starbucks arrived, it was a good model is why everyone tried to open one, not the other way around).
It took electricity decades to saturate the economy and truly change everything. Same for the internet. Same for the steam engine, same for cars, etc.
The point that all these AI hype people are missing is that, yes, AI will massively alter the economy, but it will take decades. Not because the tech isn't necessarily ready, but because it takes that long for business processes to be rebuilt around the new tech. As evidenced by the history of every single economy wide changing new technology ever built.
I am short term pessimistic about AI, long term optimistic. My 3 year old son will reach adulthood and find a world dominated by AI. Meanwhile, I will not lose my job to AI before I retire. Both those things are true.
Bro... I got laid off in march and it's been absolute hell trying to even get interviews right now... I've been writing software for 20 years...
have you tried learning to code?
Edit: sorry. that came off mean. Meant it tongue-in-cheek. But I hit post and yeesh.
lol, at this point I don't even know if I can anymore...
The only difference being ALL white collar jobs are at risk, not only SWE
If AI were replacing everyone, why did Microsoft cancel all of the laid-off people's projects?
Relatable, but software at the core should be about adaptability. I'd wager human dev + ai > ai only for quite a while.
Forever, as long as the AI in question is an LLM. LLM has no chance of fully replacing skilled humans ever, it simply can not create brand-new, innovative solutions for anything it hasn’t seen already in some form.
A new AI paradigm and approach will be needed for anything to truly replace humans, and no one outside of probably a few tiny research labs are working on that currently. Eventually even the CEOs will realize that there is a ceiling with language models
Ugh, I'd argue that this is false. Not only are the best AI models very capable of creating (minor) but "new content", this idea that the skill to create "brand-new, innovative solutions" is valuable is very flawed.
Most solutions can, should, and offer more value, when they are simple.
You might have a need for a complex solution, but at the bottom that complex solution is 99.9% of the time just a bunch of small solutions easily written by AI. A site that does xyz? Just a bunch of button snippets, calls to a backend. The backend is just a bunch of queries, etc.
AIs, from my POV, are already superior to your average dev when coding simple html/frontnend interfaces since those are very modular/isolated/can be just copy pasted from somewhere else.
Sonnet 4 can somewhat reasonably write good snippets of backend code, and offer insights on how to solve complex problems, but I never got it to do both at once (ie, one chat I ask how to solve something, read the message, build a skeleton architecture, ask again to fill the gaps I've left. If left to build the skeleton, it almost never conforms to the actual proposed solution in chat 1)
The only issue with AI replacing devs, is that at that point, AI/softwares will have replaced everyone else too, so it's true that it's a bit moot to worry about this (since when it hit devs, everyone else will have been replaced and we will have much, much more serious problems to focus on)
I agree the vast majority of additions are simple code, the thing is the majority of the work of any tech person is either complex additions or simple changes that have to integrate into a complex environment. That's why I agree with the first person about AI (LLMs) as a tool only, they save me time looking up documentation or the syntax of a particular language or tool, but I still have to tweak the complex parts into what I'm doing.
You’re 100% right. Unless there’s a massive sea change in how AI works (possible) skilled devs will always be worth their weight in gold.
The reason I think is because ultimately all software is built for humans. As long as this is the case, human debugging and software system design will be necessary. Sure, you could probably get up and running via vibe coding on your cool new app idea, but sooner or later something will go wrong and you’ll need a human that can understand the code and modify it (perhaps with the help of AI).
I think right now we are in the equivalent of the 1950s/60s when tech was advancing so rapidly everyone was convinced we would soon all be driving flying cars and ordering around robot nannies. I could be wrong, but I believe AI is already starting to hit a wall, the explosive growth in LLM quality is diminishing and cannot go on forever.
Just take over ais job of taking over your job.
Derk der
First time?
happened for:
- y2k
- .com crash
- 2008
- web2.0
- Covid
- ai...
We go from incredible harvest to famine every 5 years...
My company was bought by another one recently, a big chunk of our staff was laid off yesterday, I felt it was pure luck that the division I worked for was the one our new owner wanted to keep.
I am someone who comes from outside the tech field. I am finishing up my masters in CSC and desperately want to get into the industry, but there is just no foothold for me. I cannot due internships because I am married with a kid on the way.
Ai is just a fancy chat bot, its useless without some to understand it
Trust me, vibe coders have proven its far off from taking your job as a debugger.
Anyone remember Rational Rose? Was just starting out when IBM bought it and claimed that anyone could build software with the right UML. How about Frontpage? LOL I cleaned up so much bad boiler plate code.
AI code gen is just a different verse of the same song. Don't get me wrong, I use it ALL the time but I put about the same trust in it's work as a I do low-code/no-code solutions.
Don‘t know about you guys, but I‘m doing just fine. Got a new job about a year ago, the only one I applied for. I‘m in germany though, but here it doesn‘t seem that bad. Theres hope guys, don‘t give up.
\me hoping to make it to retirement as a senior software engineer.*
Seriously... 8 years to go.
To people outside the US, the FAANG salaries are completely insane and there is a huge economic incentive to reduce that cost. Even if (for now) AI just does the boring monkey-see-monkey-do work, it reduces headcount. For reference, in Australia a general physician earns like USD$150-200k and a surgeon USD$300k+. Getting a doctor's salary for fucking around in Visual Studio Code just isn't sustainable.
salary is NEVER tied to actual skill or effort. Fireman get paid less, snipers in military earn less, etc etc but somehow CEOs, middle managers and other crap producers earn much more than surgeons. Is that sustainable?
Medical, legal and other well-paying fields largely work within the same confines, you go to school, gain experience and you'll get there eventually as long as you can keep up. Those high paying tech jobs aren't your majority, they're both the top of the industry as well as creating new things that don't exist before. In other words, you have to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, an average tech person isn't earning those salaries, and a top doctor with their own practice, writing books, researching, teaching at a top university and involved in the business side of their field (authority figures, administrators) are earning a hell of a lot more. In fact, I'd be surprised if an average dermatologist in NYC or LA isn't earning a hell of a lot more than those USD$150k-200k, much less those in the top of the field that go for extras like books or research.
Why is AI Hype stabbing itself a bit?
Heh, first time?
now let's not do any research on how those three are related hm
I think it is cycle. You need apprenticeships so you can replace your master craftsmen. So even if AI can do the work of a jr, you still need to hire and train them for the senior roles.
But to argue against my apprentice to master analogy. The usa lost almost all its tool and die makers for manufacturing. The masters stay on till retirement or death without training the next generation.
Software graduates now have it hella rough - software graduates in 5 years will probably be fine
So far, the only problems AI can solve in terms of programming are those that are more or less already "solved" ones that have solutions you can look up.
On account of the fact these "AI" solutions are just pulling those solutions from their training data.
For anything else, they start to hallucinate rapidly.
Glad I chose network engineering
Ai Hype and Layoffs are the same image.
Tbh AI is gonna take the product/project manager job, and you'll be expected to do their job while also reviewing, testing, and debugging the AI generated code.
Everyone, both managers and engineers, are assuming AI will cause managers to replace engineers, but in actuality, it's going to cause engineers to replace managers as its easier to teach the business to the engineer than it is to teach the engineering to the manager.
AI is the new Blockchain - promises the world, deliver very little.
Is there a way to unsubscribe from these doom fueled memes? I know it’s tough, crying about it at every opportunity does not make it easier.
I don't get these gloom and doom posts. Not only is this sub supposed to be funny (hence the name) but where do you all live that finding a SWE job is so difficult? Is this just USA? Are you guys only applying at the top 1% companies or something?
I have tons of SWE friends and when we switch jobs we find a new one in about 3 weeks (because that's how long the interview process takes). I've switched jobs 3 times so far in 15 years, and each time I applied to one job and got it.
Every time I see posts like this I can't help but think OP is either massively pessimistic or is doing something wrong.
Or maybe it's fun to terrify newcomers to the industry. I dunno. I find it in bad taste. Everything is fucking fine out here if you pull your heads out your asses and do the work.
Poland, entering the market is nearly impossible And don't give me the bullshit "you guys are only applying for 1% and 10k pay." No i fucking do not
For someone already in the industry and with quite some experience, it's generally easier. Seniors have no problems finding new positions, except for in some areas where there was massive overhiring during Corona.
But Juniors...man...
I know a lot of them (Europe) and it's extremely hard getting into the industry since basically no economy is doing really well, there's barely any growth so companies rather hire "safe" seniors to improve revenue instead of "risky" juniors that might or might not be good employees in the future. And with that they're thinning down the market for seniors, since juniors don't get the experience they need to become intermediates or seniors. Next step is wondering why there aren't any seniors to hire anymore.
Maybe one day they'll realize that seniors don't grow on trees.
They won't. They'll just say no one wants to work anymore and outsource to places like India with indentured servitude levels of pay.
Well then they will get indentured servitude levels of software 🤷🏻
I have switched jobs 5 times over the past 14 years, but the last 2-2.5 years have been particularly difficult, at least in a country with a highly competitive environment and high salaries. I'm not sure though how the situation compares in countries with lower salaries that attract a lot of outsourcing.
I do this job since 2020. I have switched 2022 and exactly one year ago.
..and I could do that again. Within weeks. I have sent a quick apply on indeed just to see how the situation is and got a mail for an interview 2 hours later.
I have to add tho: I live in germany in a city with 14k people. The biggest city withing 30 minutes driving has 250k. They just can't find programmers here.
Yeah, maybe more remote areas that few people are willing to relocate to are better, I don't really know because I have only worked in big cities.
Yes, ok. I did move here in 2022 for the job. So yea, that might be necessary... but if people are not willing to do that, they shouldn't complain about the market.
USA I have applied for 200 positions since February I've been a finalist for 13 and I'm still delivering packages for Amazon right now.
Few careers have more security than software dev lol
Tell me you're a bad software engineer without telling me you're a bad software enginner
Ah, classic. Dreaming of a stable dev career while AI, layoffs, and economic chaos knock at the door. Feels like the perfect storm, doesn’t it? 😅 But hey, at least we’ve got memes to survive it all! But honestly it's just the AI hype. upskill as much as you can.
ai ahh comment
Ahh, classic. Lol
The thing about tech debt is that sooner or later you have to pay the bill. And AI is generating tech debt like nobodies business. I see it as a great step for ensuring job security for devs who actually know how to code while acting as a filter for the deadweight who just used to copy past from Stackoverflow. There's going to be a rough couple of years, but when it's time to pay the debt off it's going to be one hell of a bill. The inevitable wake up call from all this vibe coding crap is going to be fascinating.
Same story 20+ years ago. "Let's offshore for cheap! Pay teams that are pennies on the dollar and promise to deliver quality super fast! What could go wrong!"
3 times the budget and 2 years overdue project later...
Same thing happened when no code solutions came a long.
You always are going to need a real engineer for real work. What tools they use and how things work will change, but it takes dedication to make sure things work if we rely on LLMs
My last year working for state govt, they made a huge push for ServiceNow and talked about how it could be done so much cheaper than just whipping together an ASP site or WPF app and connecting it to a new sql database.
The flagship projects developed by the consulting team that sold management on it were years overdue and ran insanely over budget.
The best part is you keep paying to upgrade it
don't forget licensing fees!
Given the track record of consultants, I honestly don't understand why they keep getting work.
No Code works as long as you're looking for an adequate, simple solution for an equally adequate and simple problem and stick to it. If you want to make complex custom changes (à la "can you just make this small change?") then shit's gonna hit the fan, but it's perfect for an individual or small business who just needs a small cookie cutter informational website, online shop or app.
Indeed. The "wow we don't need devs, we have this CMS/etc. that lets us add the content ourselves" solution works for small sites or other applications that don't need a whole lot.
The instant you want to deviate from the cookie cutter, however, is when "yeah we need it customized by a developer" realization sets in.
And I can say from personal experience, nobody wanted just the cookie cutter.
Yet everyone yells they want it, until they have it.
everyone is still offshoring and when they're not doing that, they are importing devs from india/vietnam lol
my wife's entire team got replaced with vietnameese devs. Company went broke after 2 years for some reason though (wonder what happened)
the damage these vibe coders are doing is unfathomable
it’s brutal at startup’s where you wanna have the prototype out asap and then you end up with a vibe product which is not gonna scale and be a pain to refactor
ai has accelerated stupidity, if only it was used sparingly
To be fair, any coder I know started copying stack overflow as a junior and eventually saw so much they transitioned to being unnecessarily elitist on stack overflow.
Well still want those juniors so they can grow into seniors and fix the tech debt. AI is shown to be bad for learning. The future is going to be a weird place.
Yeah who didn’t start out copying from stack overflow?
I actually started with this book. But I'm old.
Well, let me tell ya youngun, there wasn't any stack overflow when I started, heck there wasn't even a world wide web
I don't believe for a moment that vibe coders are carefully reading their code enough to actually know what it does. Maybe some put in that extra effort, but at that point, are you saving any time? You don't have that problem when you have to reason through and write your own code.
That's my major issue with AI code generation. I'm spending time to prompt the bot, then spending time to understand and quality check all the changes it made, then prompting it to fix its code. How does this make me more effective? I may have saved some keystrokes, but that is not the time consuming part of my job.
There are valid use cases for it, when you're not using it in the sense of "hey AI, write everything for me."
Yesterday for example: Writing some database queries in a language I'm not too familiar with. "Hey AI, I'm trying to do XYZ in [database I'm working in], how do I do it?" Gave me the syntax and I was on my way.
(And yes this was something more complex than "how do I update a record in a db table.")
AI has replaced a lot of my Google searches and stackoverflow usage. And I'll ask for snippets for refactors a lot. I just can't trust it to add code directly in my codebase.
I like using it to double check complex query logic.
Well the problem is that this is hitting the same people hard as the ones that you say will be screwed, people new to the field. So your comment says to me, yeah they’re screwed now but just wait and you’ll be screwed but for a different reason lol.
There is a world of difference between capable grads and incompetent ones. Once this nonsense levels out companies will go to hiring new devs again. Same as they did when offshoring failed to deliver, same as after the 2008 crash, same as the dot com bubble bursting. Shocks to the industry happen all the time and this won't turn out very different. The upside being that at least this shock will generate a lot more work.
The problem is that sorting through all that crap is the least fun part of being a dev.
There will be years of sorting through obnoxious refactor work. I'd almost rather just be out of a job.
Sorting through mostly buggy chaotic code amd refactoring it: hell
Finding that one edge case bug that took 2 weeks to find: heaven.
A rough couple of years, but also a couple of years where the deadweight could learn to actually code.
Potential Silver Lining.
Gonna be offering my services for 1k/hour to fix their non-working AI slop
If you extrapolate on the rate of improvement in LLMs, tooling and integrations, I think the ability for AI agents to comprehend and maintain the tech debt will easily outstrip the speed that the tech debt is being created right now by vibecoding in its infancy.
And if you extrapolate on my age year on year you might conclude that I'll live forever. But that ain't going to happen either.
Your health will not improve year on year (sorry)
Lucky for us, the fundamental realities of diminishing returns have our backs. Doesn't mean things are safe though. There's a huge fucking bubble that's going to burst, and it's going to cause absolute chaos in the affected industries, which, obviously, includes us.
Yeah okay, can't wait to see that happen, wake me up when it does bro
They don’t want to hear this.
The progress in the past year has been insignificant. Can't still code for shit. The moment you have a bug, letting it debug for you ends in chaos.
Can’t say the same. I’m using Claude/Gemini/o3 all day everyday and have been for a while. They code as well as you can direct them to. If you have a good understanding of the problem domain it’s much easier to work with them.
They’ve been especially good for debugging.
But ymmv.
I kind of don't want this to be true either, as my job security is also on the line.
Your job security will be fine. It’s a tool for us to use, not a replacement for the tool users.
I'm sorry but that just sounds like incredible cope