[sdepablos]

We humans reject the concept of exponential growth, specially when it can kill our way of life, and in that sense developers don't realize that 80% of our work could be automatize in the next few years.

I've been in the industry for more than 20 years now, and what's clear to me is that a lot of time is spent coding and debugging things that have been done previously plenty of times (Non Invented Here syndrome) and that in most cases are not core to our companies.

What I expect it's not so much things like Copilot or AlphaCode (that of course will be used) but serverless services that we'd plug into our solution (how many more login services do you want to implement AGAIN?), like we do right now with APIs, but at a higher level, with a standardized communication protocol between these services.

The same will happen the infra level, with only a few people creating and mantaining "low level" solutions while the rest of us will use abstracted services on top of that, like using Cloud Run instead of learning a massive APIs like k8s (I'm not saying that they're comparable right now, but at some point something evolved from Cloud Run will make learning k8s unnecessary)

What will happen once developers are freed from the most time intensive aspects of their job? Probably and for a few years the unmet demand for developers will cover our increase in productivity, but at some point I expect this job will face some of the problems you can see in other sectors.

[np-]

While this seems intuitively true, it seems to me like the opposite is happening. Every advance or increase in technological efficiency creates exponentially _more_ demand for developers. Think about every tool and library that comes out; all the JavaScript front end tooling which made things “easy” has created literal armies of front end engineers. Even going farther back, think about Java, PHP, C++, all these came out to make developers lives’ easier and ended up creating more and more developers. We can even see it in the invention of the concept of high level languages over machine code, that’s also a human simplification.

Personally, I don’t see the train suddenly stopping and going in reverse anytime soon.

[marcosdumay]

We are used to the Jevon's paradox. It must end at some point, but AFAIK there is no way to tell if automatizing 80% of our work will put us out of jobs or increase our salaries.

[rightbyte]

You don't need fancy AI to make us unemployed. Just back to basic would do. You list complex solutions which would just need even more programmers to maintain.

[codegrappler]

Was coming here to say this. Every time a more sophisticated system has been built to replace a simpler one, it requires MORE programmers, not less.

[rightbyte]

Ye. I think there is way to much "automation" nowadays.

It is like all these business systems corparations use. They would probably be better off with some secretaries with typewriters sending internal paper mail.

Systems that try to automate too much are too rigid to use in a sane way.

The nice thing with a no computer system, is that if you want to do something, just do it. An analogue would be writing math notation on paper or on a computer. I can hardly imagine even Knuth prefering the later.

Computers should be used for well defined tasks they are good at with rather simple programs, or the whole business need to adjust to what the computer allows.

[sdepablos]

Well, I think that the demand of developers is not so much because of the increase complexity of systems but because a lot of companies think they need developers, when they only need technology, and a lot other think than just adding more devs is the solution (the hyperinefficiency of the hipergrowth companies is at this point legendary, as the guy earning $1.5M/y getting and losing - but getting paid nonetheless - multiple tech jobs at the same time proved)