[faangguyindia]

I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India. AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.

As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.

will it also happen to developers in other countries? I've no idea.

When I tell this to others, they go in disbelief, but people don't care till their own job is gone.

[weakfish]

Did AI replace their job, or did the cost of having AI skyrocket so the companies did layoffs to make budget? There’s a difference.

[Gomotono]

There are plenty of use cases were you can easily replace a person with AI today.

AI is very good in creating a working website. We do not have the issue of internet explorer 6 anymore, frontend doesn't host security relevant code and it shouuld also not have the business logic. So its easy to let ai create a website which talks to a secure api endpoint.

Plenty of basic android apps are just the same thing: Some API Endpoint calling Frontend.

I know plenty of people i worked with, which I would replace tomorrow if i got the choice of more tokens vs. having to work with them, putting in a lot of effort in Code Review and not seeing real benefits.

If the industry thinks we don't want to grow anymore, than the market gets saturated -> issue 1. Issue 2 -> if the market is saturated and tokens costs a lot of money budget wise, you will have to reduce your team size to compensate for the budget -> further reduction of market capacity.

We know that AI is replacing jobs

[weakfish]

The problem with this assertion is cost. You say that if tokens cost a lot of money, you will _have_ to reduce team size. This is a questionable premise and a trap that companies are falling into.

I don't have hard data on it, but if someone is spending $1.5k a month on Claude (the limit of some folks I know) that shakes out to $18k a year. In my experience, I'd MUCH rather use the $18k of a few developer's Claude budget to hire another dev instead of trying to get a robot to do stuff.

AI is useful, but it's can't f*cking learn like a human can and improve at something.

And, honestly, if your job can be replaced by AI, then your job was more susceptible to offshoring/layoffs/any other for m of cost cutting already.

[Gomotono]

So I have tried mentoring and teaching a person in my team for 2 years now.

I would replace that person in a heart beat tbh.

And when I look back, i can list a handful of people of top of my head which I would replace for these tokens too.