[crote]

It's missing one critical point: if AI makes a good developer 10% more productive, the industry needs 10% less developers to achieve the same output.

You're not getting replaced by AI. You're getting replaced by a coworker using AI. It doesn't matter how poorly AI performs at any remotely complicated task, what matters is how many developer-hours it saves by not having to manually write as much boilerplate.

[MyOutfitIsVague]

My company has had a backlog thousands of developer-hours long for years. Maybe eventually somebody will get fired because we're not needed, but the LLM would have to actually 10x our productivity for us to get through the backlog in a year.

[ripped_britches]

That backlog almost certainly is just stuff you care about and not related to revenue

Or someone would have been added to headcount to work on it

[sarchertech]

No one knows what will bring in revenue. It’s all just a guess and at most bigcos there are far more people who can create tickets than there are people who can close them.

Every PM I’ve ever worked with had 10x more things they wanted to add than they had devs to add them.

[codr7]

That's insane.

You would likely lose absolutely nothing by throwing away most of it, and gain a lot.

[MyOutfitIsVague]

You're almost certainly right.

[simonw]

Alternatively: if AI makes a good developer 2x more productive (which I do think is possible based on my own experience), developers are now 2x more valuable to employers. The cost of building software drops in half, which means employers that previously wouldn't have developed their own software (too expensive) are now in the market for custom solutions. Demand for developers goes up.

If you believe that making developers 10% more productive results in a need for ~10% less developers, why didn't open source software over the past ~20 years harm our profession?

Working with open source packages from npm and PyPI has given me WAY more than a 10% boost - so much stuff I don't have to write from scratch now!

[codr7]

Yeah, define productive.

Because I suspect that comes with learning a lot less in the process and lower quality output.

[simonw]

My own usage of LLMs to help me code has resulted in me learning more and producing higher quality output.

You have to use them diligently, but it's definitely possible to avoid the obvious downsides of working in this way.

[codr7]

And what kind of experience do you have?

Because I suspect it depends a lot on skill level.

[simonw]

25+ years getting paid money to write software.

[codr7]

shrugs Sorry, I have no explanation then.

Because I have the same level of experience and to me, for my way of working, they're obviously mostly useless.

[bdangubic]

same and 100% sure can do it for another 25+ if I wanted to work that long

[loloquwowndueo]

Dunno man, the times I’ve used AI to help me code, it got the solution wrong. I spent more time backtracking and fixing things than if I’d done it by hand in the first place. So it actually made me 20% less productive.

[codr7]

Finally some actual, non-wishful thinking truth.

Very refreshing!

[epolanski]

> the industry needs 10% less developers to achieve the same output

Maybe. Or maybe the industry will simply churn even more software due to increased possibilities and everything stays the same.

[askonomm]

So far more efficient development tools have resulted in more tech companies / products being created, resulting in a increase in net total developers needed. The idea that 10% more efficient devs would mean less devs needed assumes that we're living on a flat line of productivity and invention, which is simply not true.

[rollcat]

> You're not getting replaced by AI. You're getting replaced by a coworker using AI.

How long until people realise AI cannot take responsibility? Sure, that coworker can do 10% more coding. But can they handle 10% increase in mental workload to juggle all the hard problems? What about 20%? At what point do people start cracking?

[Madmallard]

Probably as much as companies can get away with, which likely will just be more and more as AI tools get better.

[SoftTalker]

Writing boilerplate is not what I spend time on. Boilerplate generation is easily automated you don’t need AI for that.

[aprilthird2021]

This is missing one critical fact. The economy and the web are not zero sum games or pies such that if one person has a piece another cannot have it.

Economies can grow and the output of economies can grow and thus the number of jobs can grow

[mr_toad]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox