It's easy to fall into a negative mindset when there are legions of pointy haired bosses and bandwagoning CEOs who (wrongly) point at breakthroughs like this as justification for AI mandates or layoffs.
It's easy to fall into a negative mindset because the justification is real and what we see is just the beginning.
Obviously we are not at a point where developers aren't needed. But One developer can do more. And that is a legitimate reason to higher less developers.
The impending reality of the upward moving trendline is that AI becomes so capable that it can replace the majority of developers. That future is so horrifying that people need to scaffold logic to unjustifiy it.
The "pointy-haired boss" was a character in the Dilbert comics, an archetypical know-nothing manager who spews jargon, jumps on trends, and takes credit for ideas that aren't his.
Crazy that an honest question like this gets downvoted.
I honestly think the downvote button is pretty trash for online communities. It kills diversity of thought and discussion and leaves you with an echo chamber.
If you disagree with or dislike something, leave a response. Express your view. Save the downvotes for racism, calls for violence, etc.
Downvotes eventually turn all online communities into echo chambers, definitely. It is only a matter of time for HN, and you can see it accelerating in the past 1-2 years (though mostly on AI stuff, and mostly in downvote behaviour - it still remains surprisingly resilient overall).
I feel like the only upside of the downvote is to act as sort of a mob moderation system, allowing offensive comments to naturally sink to the bottom.
Maybe in the future, platforms can have high quality auto moderation using AI to read every post and delete/flag those not following community guidelines.
I’m sure this would work well today, though not sure about the cost.
Yes, all of these stories, and frequent model releases are just intended to psyop "decision makers" into validating their longstanding belief that the labour shouldn't be as big of a line item in a companies expenses, and perhaps can be removed altogether.. They can finally go back to the good old days of having slaves (in the form of "agentic" bots), they yearn to own slaves again.
CEOs/decision makers would rather give all their labour budget to tokens if they could just to validate this belief. They are bitter that anyone from a lower class could hold any bargaining chips, and thus any influence over them. It has nothing to do with saving money, they would gladly pay the exact same engineering budget to Anthropic for tokens (just like the ruling class in times past would gladly pay for slaves) if it can patch that bitterness they have for the working class's influence over them.
The inference companies (who are also from this same class of people) know this, and are exploiting this desire. They know if they create the idea that AI progress is at an unstoppable velocity decision makers will begin handing them their engineering budgets. These things don't even have to work well, they just need to be perceived as effective, or soon to be for decision makers to start laying people off.
I suspect this is going to backfire on them in one of two ways.
1. French Revolution V2, they all get their heads cutoff in 15 years, or an early retirement on a concrete floor.
2. Many decisions makers will make fools of themselves, destroy their businesses and come begging to the working class for our labor, giving the working class more bargaining chips in the process.
Either outcome is going to be painful for everyone, lets hope people wake up before we push this dumb experiment too far.
I’m reminded of Dan Wang’s commentary on US-China relations:
> Competition will be dynamic because people have agency. The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform. … That drive will mean that competition will go on for years and decades.
The future is not predetermined by trends today. So it’s entirely possible that the dinosaur companies of today can’t figure out how to automate effectively, but get outcompeted by a nimble team of engineers using these tools tomorrow. As a concrete example, a lot of SaaS companies like Salesforce are at risk of this.
I think it will be over automation that does them in, most normies I know are not down with this all this automation and will totally opt for the human focused product experienced, not the one devoid of it because it was built and ran by a souless NN powered autocomplete. We certainly aren't going to let a bunch of autocomplete models (sold to us as intelligent agents), replace our labor. We aren't stupid.
Much like there is a premium for handmade clothing, and from scratch food. Automation does nothing but lower the value of your product (unless its absolutely required like electronics perhaps), when there is an alternative, the one made with human input/intention is always worth more.
And the idea that small nimble teams are going to outpace larger corporations is such a psyop. You really mostly hear CEOs saying these things on podcast. This is to appease the working class, to give them hope that they too one day can be a billionaire...
Also, the vast majority of people who occupy computer i/o focused jobs, whos jobs will be replaced, need to work to eat and they don't all want to go form nimble automated SaaS companies lmao, this is such a farce.. Bad things to come all around.
The question is to what extent there is a market for more stuff. If the cost of making software drops 10x we can still make 10x the software. There are projects which wouldn’t be done before that can now be done.
I know with respect to personal projects more projects are getting “funded” with my time. I’m able to get done in a couple of hours with coding agents what would’ve taken me a couple of weekends to finish if I stayed motivated to. The upshot is I’m able get much closer to “done” than before.
It's easy to fall into a negative mindset because the justification is real and what we see is just the beginning.
Obviously we are not at a point where developers aren't needed. But One developer can do more. And that is a legitimate reason to higher less developers.
The impending reality of the upward moving trendline is that AI becomes so capable that it can replace the majority of developers. That future is so horrifying that people need to scaffold logic to unjustifiy it.