Everyone was going to be laid off because of AI within two years in 2022. Well, many have been, but technically not because of AI. Well, not because AI took over their jobs proper, anyways.
AI used to always be 5-10 years away. Now AI is here. What's 5-10 years away now is all the reconfigured or reconstructed economic infrastructure around it.
It may be easy to convince me that tools like this can take over development of web apps. It's harder to convince me that, in the timeframe where these tools actually eliminate web app jobs, that we will be worried about our web app building capacity.
The most generalized economic pipeline is (labor + capital) -> production -> welfare. We're obviously going to be reconfiguring a lot of labor, a lot of capital is going buh-bye, much of production will look nothing like it used to, and we haven't even started discussing whose welfare we're going to be maximizing (hopefully it's people in general rather than real estate owners.)
That's similar to my thinking. It seems we're still (or again?) in an age where an incredible amount of software is being written to validate value propositions and business models. Does anybody need something like this? Does anybody want something like this? What would people pay for it? Surprisingly often, this isn't done too well, and a lot of devs are thrown into working on stuff that is unlikely to be useful to anyone mid term. Many of us are just building lottery tickets.
Tools like this can potentially lead to this on absolute steroids (even as less capital is available), insane amounts of experiments around new products, features and businesses. That way we'd discover more valuable software, and need more developers to scale and maintain that stuff. Because the economics do reverse: At some point in a product's life cycle, that dev salary is well within the profit margin, and not really worth saving. Quite different from the experimentation phase where quantity>quality.
Another thing that could happen is that individuals build their own software more, like Excel on steroids. There would still be value in solving problems for users at scale, but this whole experimentation process wouldn't be so breadth-first anymore. And I suppose funding would be pretty dry for companies "just" solving one problem.
"AI" isn't even the biggest factor here, I believe. Tools to quickly run experiments and cheap labour are readily available. It kinda seems the times where every company felt they need to hire as many developers as possible are pretty much over.
In both scenarios, I suppose good times might be ahead for competent developers that can earn a client's/CEO's trust, and/or excel at solving problems automated tools fail at. Bad times might be ahead for anyone who just executes experiments other people came up with. Unfortunately, I fear that's the majority of us. It might just get more painful before our industry normalises after this prolonged phase of non-stop growth. But I do believe it will. Demographic change leading to shrinking work forces in most developed countries should help soften the blow.
We systematically get posts and blogs and real-world experience showing that software development is actually about maintenance.
Yesterday we had an article about so many half-arsed software in maintenance mode that the world would be ending soon, crumbling under the weight of not-maintained enough software.
So far I've seen LLMs (I pay for GTP 4o btw) very good at producing boilerplate code. Does it help? Heck, yup.
Does it produce even more code needing ever more maintenance? You bet so.
At this rate it looks like we're going to need way more software developers, not less.
Two years is good for me. So long as my tenant isn't also laid off and the stock market doesn't crash as a result of this… or at least everyone gets UBI.
AI used to always be 5-10 years away. Now AI is here. What's 5-10 years away now is all the reconfigured or reconstructed economic infrastructure around it.
It may be easy to convince me that tools like this can take over development of web apps. It's harder to convince me that, in the timeframe where these tools actually eliminate web app jobs, that we will be worried about our web app building capacity.
The most generalized economic pipeline is (labor + capital) -> production -> welfare. We're obviously going to be reconfiguring a lot of labor, a lot of capital is going buh-bye, much of production will look nothing like it used to, and we haven't even started discussing whose welfare we're going to be maximizing (hopefully it's people in general rather than real estate owners.)