It's not that the AI is autonomous as a coder. It's more like a senior dev going without the junior trainy for menial tasks. Both needed supervision and handholding, but one is substantially cheaper.
How this will impact the developer ecosystem remains to be seem.
AI has enabled my team to essentially all become polyglots. It's really amazing to be able to jump between languages, using the best tools for the domain.
* JS/TS - FE
* Ruby on Rails - Most of our business logic
* Python - Doc and LLM specific code
* Misc. other languages - niche features that make the most sense in specific languages.
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Previously, we'd spend a lot of time on dumb little things. Things that you probably take for granted in your primary language, but can become super frustrating in a new language.
It’s wild how people never seem to say “wow, now our team of 12 can be twice as productive. Think about how much less stressed they’ll be and more productive we’ll be able to be for the company!”.
Because if you start making more widgets then now your support, marketing, sales acquisition et al costs also have to scale.
But that needs foresight...
And until the AI workforce comes for those too, it's easier to claim short term victory.
Great answer that addresses the business incentives. Scaling is hard (perhaps impossible in some markets) and possibly expensive, while cutting labor costs has an immediate benefit to the bottom line.
Could. Also might not, depends on a lot of things. But I have to say, there are a still plenty of horse and buggy drivers today, weavers, typewriter manufacturers. I'm sure they'll still be many programmers with AI advances.
How this will impact the developer ecosystem remains to be seem.