[gokhan]

> Not software engineers being kicked out ... but rather experienced engineers using AI to generate bits of code and then meticulously reviewing and testing them.

But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question.

And the author is implementing a fairly technical project in this case. How about routine LoB app development?

[thewebguyd]

> But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question.

This is likely where all this will end up. I have doubts that AI will replace all engineers, but I have no doubt in my mind that we'll certainly need a lot less engineers.

A not so dissimilar thing happened in the sysadmin world (my career) when everything transitioned from ClickOps to the cloud & Infrastructure as Code. Infrastructure that needed 10 sysadmins to manage now only needed 1 or 2 infrastructure folks.

The role still exists, but the quantity needed is drastically reduced. The work that I do now by myself would have needed an entire team before AWS/Ansible/Terraform, etc.

[kentonv]

I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them.

But if the time it takes an engineer to build any one thing goes down, now there are a lot more things that are cost effective.

Consider niche use cases. Every company tends to have custom processes and workflows. Think about being an accountant at one company vs. another -- while a lot of the job is the same, there will always be parts that are significantly different. Those bespoke processes often involve manual labor because off-the-shelf accounting software cannot add custom features for every company.

But what if it could? What if an engineer working with AI could knock out customer-specific features 10x as fast as they could in the past. Now it actually makes sense to build those features, to improve the productivity of each company's accounting department.

It's hard to say if demand for engineers will go down or up. I'm not pretending to know for sure. But I can see a possibility that we actually have way more developers in coming years!

[thewebguyd]

> I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them.

That's definitely an interesting area, but I think we'll actually see (maybe) individual employees solving some of these problems on their own without involving IT/the dev team.

We kind of see it already - a lot of these problem spaces are being solved with complex Excel workflows, crappy Access databases, etc. because the team needed their problem solved now, and resources couldn't be given to them.

Maybe AI is the answer to that so that instead of building a house of cards on Excel, these non-tech teams can have something a little more robust.

It's interesting you mentioned accounting, because that's the one department/area I see taking off and running with it the most. They are already the department that's effectively programming already with Excel workflows & DSLs in whatever ERP du jour.

So it doesn't necessarily open up more dev jobs, but maybe fulfills the old the mantra of "everyone will become a programmer." and we see more advanced computing become a commodity thanks to AI - much like everyone can click their way through an office suite with little experience or training, everyone will be able to use AI to automate large chunks of their job or departmental processes.

[ktzar]

If we shiver at the sight of some of those accounting-created excels, which we only learn about when they fail and they can't understand them anymore, wait for them to hand over a vibe-coded 200k loc Python codebase "which is not working anymore" and nobody had ever reviewed a single line of code.

[kentonv]

> I think we'll actually see (maybe) individual employees solving some of these problems on their own without involving IT/the dev team.

I agree, but in my book, those employees are now developers. And so by that definition, there will be a lot more developers.

Will we see more or fewer people whose primary job is software development? That's harder to answer. I do think we'll see a lot more consultant-type roles, with experienced software developers helping other people write their own personal automations.

[motorest]

> I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them.

LLMs don't change that. If a business does not have the budget for a software engineer, LLMs won't make up budget headroom for it either. What LLMs do is allow engineers to iterate faster, and work on more tasks. This means less jobs.

[petersellers]

If a business has the budget for 1 or 2 engineers though, they might be able to task them with work that previously required 5-10 engineers (in theory, anyways).

[motorest]

Right, but even the way you opted to frame this discussion is based on the idea that there is a drop in demand for software engineers. You need less engineers, not more. A few can get more done, but you need fewer to accomplish your tasks too.

[simiones]

This is like claiming that there are fewer people who work in construction now than in the year 1000 because a machine can do what it would have literally taken 100 people to accomplish back then.

But what has happened instead is that we are now building much more buildings and much more complex ones than we ever would have even conceived of back then. The Three Gorges dam required the work of thousands or even tens of thousands of people when it was built, and it would have required the work of millions in the year 1000. But it didn't actually generate millions of jobs in the year 1000: it was in fact never even conceived of as a possibility, much less attempted.

Of course, the opposite can also happen. The number of carpenters has reduced to almost nothing, when it used to be a major profession, and there are many other professions that have entirely disappeared.

[petersellers]

I didn't frame it that way - perhaps you are thinking of the person you replied to?

Nevertheless, I don't think they are trying to frame it that way, either. The point is that making software development easier can actually increase the demand of software engineers in some cases (where projects that were previously not considered due to budget constraints are now feasible).

[hn_acc1]

After 30+ years in the software field, and a user for 40+, having at times heavily customized my desktop or editor, for example - I've concluded that the best thing for most apps is for me to learn to use them with stock settings.

Why? Inevitably, I changed positions / jobs / platforms, and all that effort was lost / inapplicable, and I had to relearn to use the stock settings anyway.

Now, I understand that some companies have different setups, but it might just make more sense to change the company's accounting procedures (if possible) to conform to most accounting software defaults, rather than invest heavily in modifying the setup, unless you're a huge conglomerate and can keep people on staff. Why? Because someone, somewhere will have to maintain those changes. Sure, you can then hire someone else to update those changes - but guess what? Most likely, unless they open-source their changes, no LLM will have seen those changes, and even if they are allowed to fine-tune on it, they'll have seen exactly ONE instance of these changes. Odds they'll get everything right, AND the person using the LLM will recognize when it doesn't go right? Oh right, they invested in hundreds of unit tests to ensure everything works as expected even with changes, and I'm the tooth fairy..

[blharr]

This just isn't true and will probably never be true. Using all the defaults is... probably optimal in the general sense and when things come to scale, but most companies (or just leadership) at some point want to leave the "standards" with custom design or additions. Also, any company providing payroll/accounting/ software has an inherent interest in going against standardization and providing features to promote lock-in.

[kentonv]

There are good arguments to just conform. But it is in fact true nevertheless that many companies and teams continue to choose bespoke workflows over standardized ones. So I guess there must be something driving that.

I don't actually think this is going to take the form of LLMs implementing custom patches to off-the-shelf software. I think instead it's going to look like LLMs writing code that uses APIs offered by off-the-shelf software to script specific workflows.

[int_19h]

It's interesting that you bring up accounting software as an example. In jurisdictions where legal requirements around it are a lot more specific than in e.g. US, accounting suites usually already come with a lot of customization hooks (up to and including full-fledged scripting DSLs), and there are software engineers and companies who specialize in using those to implement bespoke accounting requirements.

[kentonv]

I admit I have no specific knowledge of accounting and just meant to reference any random department that isn't engineering.

(Though I think it's true of engineering too. We all have our own weird team-specific processes for code reviews and CI and deployments which could probably use better automation.)

But even where lots of customization exists today (such as in engineering!), more is always possible. It's always just a question of whether the automation saves as much time as it took to build. If the automations can be built faster, then it makes sense to build more of them.

[etruong42]

This is precisely why I compare this technological revolution with the electronic spreadsheet. Before the electronic spreadsheet, what used to take several accountants several days to "compute a whole spreadsheet" after changing "a few inputs" is serviced by a single accountant in a few minutes. That kind of service that was only available to enormous firms with teams of dozens of accountants is now available to firms with a technically proficient employee who do that kind of accounting as only a small part of their role.

It took time as different firms adapted to adopt computer technologies in their various business needs and workflows. It's hard to precisely predict how labor roles will change with each revolutionary technology.

[aerhardt]

I work for SMEs as a consulting CTO, and this is exactly where I see things going in this domain. I can take care of workloads that would've been prohibitively expensive in the past. In the case of SMEs, this may cover critical problems whose resolution can unlock new levels of growth. LLMs can be an absolute boon for them, and I'm fairly optimistic about being able to capitalize on the opportunity.

[intended]

Which solves the now problem for the tomorrow problem.

We assume quite a bit about the challenge when we say it’s getting feature out.

It’s sort of like saying we can sprint faster with these tools, when the race is a marathon.

Or a better example is Coke vs Pepsi.

How do LLMs impact long term project, firm, process viability ?

[the_sleaze_]

Banking allegedly runs on ancient cobalt cathedrals and mystical runes.

Will AI be able translate all that into rust?

[mikeocool]

Though arguably cloud infra made it so that a lot more companies who never would have built out a data center or leased a chunk of space in one were spinning up some serious infra in AWS or Azure -- and thus hiring at least 1-2 devops engineers.

Before the end of zero interest rate policy, all the sysadmins I knew who the made the transition to devops were never stuck looking for a job for long.

[achierius]

To be clear, the number of people employed as "SREs" or "production engineers" is actually far, far higher (at least an order of magnitude) than in the days before cloud became a thing. There are simply far more apps / companies / businesses / etc. who use cloud hosting than there ever were doing on-prem work.

[tkiolp4]

I don’t think we would need less engineers… the work to be done will increase instead. Example: now it takes 10 engineers to release a product in 10 months without AI. With AI it takes lets say 1 engineer to release the same product in 1 month. What’s the company gonna do now? Release 10 products in 10 months without AI 10 engineers (each using AI).

It’s an exaggeration I know, but you get the point.

[motorest]

> What’s the company gonna do now? Release 10 products in 10 months without AI 10 engineers (each using AI).

Software is often not the bottleneck. If instead of 10 engineers you just need the one, the company will shed headcount it doesn't need. This might mean, for example, that instead of 10 developers and a software testing engineer, now a team changes to perhaps add testers while firing half of the developers.

[intended]

I’m going to bet that it’s going to need far less AI.

There was another article posted somewhere that made a parallel between the AI hype and no-code, outsourcing and other waves that have come.

[paxys]

Increased productivity means increased opportuntity. There isn't going to be a time (at least not anytime soon) when we can all sit back and say "yup, we have accomplished everything there is to do with software and don't need more engineers".

[spiderice]

But there very well might be a time very soon where human's no longer offer economic value to the software engineering process. If you could (and currently you can't) pay an AI $10k/year to do what a human could do in a year, why would you pay the human 6 figures? Or even $20k?

Nobody is claiming that human's won't have jobs simply because "we have accomplished everything this is to do". It's that humans will offer zero economic value compared to AI because AI gets so good and so cheap.

[paxys]

And there might be a giant asteroid that strikes the earth a few years down the line ending human civilization.

If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it. Until that happens this entire discussion is science fiction.

[alastairr]

You don’t need to completely replace a whole 200k engineer. You just need to increase each engineer’s productivity sufficiently that you can reduce the total number of engineers in your company.

[motorest]

> If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it.

I think you have multiple offers of that very AI dangling in front of you, but you might be refusing to acknowledge them. One of the problems is the way you opt to frame the issue. Does "replacing" means firing the guy hoping to replace him with a Slack webhook? Or does it mean your team decides they don't need the same headcount of medior/senior engineers because a team of junior engineers mentored by someone focusing on quality ends up being more productive?

[spiderice]

If experts were saying the astroid will hit earth in the next 5 years, would it still be science fiction?

You acting like those two scenarios are the same is disingenuous. Fuck that.

[lukeschlather]

Experts understand orbital mechanics pretty well. If experts say an asteroid in the next 5 years it's pretty similar to saying that a rock dropped from the top of a skyscraper will hit the ground. It happens billions of times every day, we know the cause and effect.

With AI, there's no real expertise involved in saying "well, it was very stupid 5 years ago, now it's starting to seem smart, if we extrapolate it's going to be smarter than me in 5 years." But no one really knows what level of effort is required to make it smarter than me. No one is an expert in something that doesn't exist yet.

[paxys]

Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (running AI startups, selling AI courses, wanting to pump their company's stock price by associating with AI) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view.

[TeMPOraL]

Yup, because it's a stupid view. Good enough AI is right here, right now, today; it's already impacting day-to-day work in the software industry. That one is blindingly obvious to anyone who actually bothers to look around. You don't need experts to tell you the water is wet. It takes something special to try and deny this.

It may not manifest as job loss yet, but the market response to changes is a whole other thing. For one, it's likely to first manifest as slowing down hiring relative to amount of projects being started and then released. Software is a growing market after all.

[motorest]

> Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (...) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view.

You might seek comfort in your conspiracy theories, but back in the real world the likes of me were already quite capable of creating complete and fully working projects from scratch using yesterday's LLMs.

We are talking about afternoons where you grab your coffee, saying to yourself "let's see what this vibecode thing is all about", and challenging yourself to create projects from scratch using nothing but a definition of done, LLM prompts, and a free-tier LLM configured to run in agent mode.

What, then?

You then can proceed to nitpick about code quality and bugs, but I can also say the same thing about your work, which you take far longer to deliver.

[TeMPOraL]

It's not. Consider that replacing the only $200k software engineer on the project is different than replacing the third or tenth $200k software engineer on the project. To the extent AI is improving productivity of those engineers, it reduces the need for adding more engineers to that team. That may mean firing some of them, or just not hiring new ones (or fewer of them) as the project expands, as existing ones + AI can keep up with increased workload.

[nand_gate]

I'm biased but my money's on the end result of AI being fewer engineers per team but also teams as a concept becoming obsolete.

Why keep legacy structures, with luxuries like POs or PMs if AI becomes powerful as you say - it'll just be 'one man startups' for better or worse.

Any empire-building VP should probably fear the wishful AI future they're praying for!

[TeMPOraL]

> it'll just be 'one man startups' for better or worse.

Not necessarily. The reality is, whatever some people can do individually, if they team up, they can do more together. The teams and small startups will remain for now, and so will big companies.

I do imagine however that the internal structure will change. As the AI gets better and able to do more independently, people will shift from pair programming to more of a PM role (this is happening now), and this I imagine will quickly collapse further.

Even today, LLMs seem more suited for project management than doing actual coding - it's just the space in-between that's the problem. I.e. LLMs can code great in the small, and can break down work very well, but keeping the changes consistent and following the plan is where they still struggle. As that gap closes, I'm not really sure how the team composition would look like. But I don't doubt there'd still be teams.

[hooverd]

You run into knowledge collapse because nobody is socially reproducing that knowledge.

[amanaplanacanal]

This seems an important thing that somebody should be concerned about. How do we get the next generation of engineers? And how will they even be able to do the senior engineer work of validating the LLM output if they haven't had the years of experience writing code themselves?

[tonyhart7]

well they just need an information archive to learn that knowledge online, no human needed

in software atleast but if you involve in hardware. good things AI cant just replace you outright

[nand_gate]

In this scenario who would be buying this product that offers 'zero economic value compared to AI because AI gets so good and so cheap'.

[lanthissa]

it doesn't even have to be that. software engineer used to be a medium pay job, theres no law of the universe that says it cant go back to that.

[simonw]

I guess I have trouble emphasizing with "But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end?" because I'm an open source oriented developer.

What's open source for if not allowing 2 developers to achieve projects that previously would have taken 20?