ive been coding 5+ hours a day almost every day for 15 years. i think ai will replace 70% of SWE in the near future. not employement, but 70% of the current work done by engineers
I don’t even spend 70% of my time coding. I suspect that’s common and looking at data it’s more like 25% on average. So even if it replaces 100% of coding (unlikely) that’s the extent of the gain.
Agreed, seems it's a great day if I get close to 50% of coding time. The rest is various meetings, communication, and code review.
And even with reviews you can currently plausibly automate only the code correctness check part, the juicy part of reviews is always manual testing of the change and doing the logical reasoning if the change is doing a meaningful thing. And no, the ticket with the spec is not a reliable source of this info for an LLM as it's always just a partial understanding of the concept.
Some of my biggest productivity gains with llms come from areas that aren’t coding. Research, summation, communication and operational issues have all seen pretty dramatic improvements for me when adding llms.
I don’t think ai will replace the career of software development but I do think the tools we will be using to to it will be dramatically different.
Agreed. I see AI as a major tool upgrade in the same way the IDE was an upgrade from text editors. It will quickly replace the need to do trivial things and greatly reduce the time needed to do complex things.
And I agree. Because ultimately we don’t need that much code in the first place. We need robust data sets.
AI models will enable the data driven machine state dream. Chips that self improve models will boot strap from them and rely on humans to iteratively improve updates.
Coding like it’s 1970 in the 2020s and beyond is not that high tech.
At which point you're potentially looking at Jevon's Paradox.
Software developers do X and Y. AI thing can now do X, so it's used for that, and it's cheaper, so the number of projects increase because you get more demand at a lower price. Those projects each need someone to do Y.