Ask HN: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs?
Hi folks,
I can't be the only one noticing that AI coding agents are making us work more, not less.
Here's the math that's been bugging me. If a developer used to write 100 lines of code per day (illustrative) but now AI writes 90% of the code, so you'd think that the load will go down to 10 lines, right? What I find is that the scope has exploded. Developers are now able to crank 1000 lines per day total and while you may say that AI writes 90% of them we are still writing 100 lines of the hard stuff.
Every feature that seemed too expensive before is suddenly doable. Every prototype becomes production system. The bottleneck shifted from typing to thinking, but the thinking load just got 10x bigger. We have also single-handedly increased the demand of that 10% chunk which is not as easy to scale as machines. Am I the only one noticing this?
The demand for actual Engineering skills won't go away anytime soon. The thing about Engineers is accountability and responsibility. If you're responsible for outcomes, you must exercise authority over the process. This gives you bargaining power for wages, which FAANG and others don't want you to have.
Where I live, if an engineer signs off on a bridge design and the bridge personally collapses, they are personally liable for harm done to folks on the bridge. As far as I’m aware software engineering does not have something like that.
Of course I am not entertaining the idea of AGI because at that point it will no longer matter as much but if we assume that AI will improve but still require human resourcing the demand for these resources will increase. Don't you think?
This is what makes sense to me at least.
Instead I really wish there were was more emphasis, like at my current employment, all focused on ownership, training, and retention.
Time to retire. Unless one enjoys debugging instead of coding.
What I am speculating that we will see is an increasing demand for developers. While AI will be churning more code the work that cannot be done by AI will require more developers overall then ever before.
So if the demand for developers increases at all, that increase will be minimal. And bear in mind that every aspect of every software process will be optimized as much as possible for AI automation, including languages used, so the set of work that "cannot be done by AI" will also be minimized.
Peak coal jobs was in the 1980s but peak output was in the early 2000s, while employment went from 200k to about 75k in that period. Sure, coal might have been cheaper but it didn't translate into more jobs overall.