[JimDabell]

We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we become more productive, the goalposts move.

There’s two things that could put an end to this. Firstly, we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far.

Secondly, if AI becomes superhuman at software engineering when acting autonomously. Specifically, AI+human developer no longer outperforms AI alone. So far, all the available evidence seems to show AI as a force multiplier for developers and that for good results, at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things.

There isn’t strong evidence that either of these situations is going to happen in the near future, so I think software engineers are safe for now. But if you have a narrow skill set and you are focused in particular areas (e.g. front-end web development), then I would worry more, because even if AI cannot replace software engineers in general, it’s quite likely to be able to completely consume specific domains with generalists holding the reins.

[vitally3643]

I think we're not too many years away from the end state of software. We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious.

The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.

The overwhelming trend in commercial software these past few decades has been hyper-aggressive anti-customization, anti-personalization, anti-user. Commercial software has been reduced to one single happy path and if that doesn't suit your needs, then fuck off. No one is making commercial software for everyday people. Even open source is trending away from everyday users.

Soon, regular everyday people who simply need some software to solve a problem the way they want it solved will have the ability to do so. In the bast majority of those cases, the quality and correctness of said software really doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform.

[altern8]

> I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI

People can't be bothered to cook for themselves, and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs 10 times as much just so they don't have to cook.

Now they're going to build their own software every time they think they need an app..?

[saltcured]

I think this is an interesting analogy. If AI is really progressing as rapidly as some describe, should we expect a robotics renaissance with automated-chef appliances etc?

In other words, when will we really see a transition from "yet another token generator" to something that appears to coherently observe, perceive, form intent, plan, and act in a way that is compatible with an existing, long-running human context?

(And, also, do this with enough determinism to be a viable product and not some gaping liability...)

[llbbdd]

Gemini at least will produce small functional inline sample apps without being explicitly told to, particularly if you're trying to learn about something, it'll produce an interactive diagram or similar. I can see a future where these kinds of end users aren't necessarily saying "I can build an app for this", but their AI can just produce one when appropriate.

[SoftTalker]

If they can do it from their couch by talking to their phone, they might.

[altern8]

While eating the junk food I was talking about :-D

[seydor]

They can be bothered to order food. The machine will figure out the rest with the help of other machines and the network

[altern8]

So, machines will allow ordering an app.

[eigencoder]

Yeah, I think this will really be a thing. I have been using `exe.dev` lately, and I was at an AirBnB with my family where we wanted to play a game, but it needed pencil and paper for each person, but we didn't have those. I thought it would be nice to have a little web app where you could write your input and then vote on other people's responses directly from your phone. I just spun up a VM on exe.dev, asked the AI to write the app, and then made the VM public-facing. It was a little buggy, but it worked well enough and we had a fun time.

[seydor]

i assume the food will be made by machines too

[rambojohnson]

the thing is they won't need to "cook" anymore to get it done. they can just... describe what they want to eat.

[the_af]

> Now they're going to build their own software every time they think they need an app..?

As others have said, this will be more like ordering food than "building". It's not there yet, but soon-ish it might be.

[thewebguyd]

> The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI.

I think you're right here. Even for myself, AI has enabled me to actually finish a plethora of personal projects that I've always wanted to built but just never bothered.

These aren't things to share, nor would they be particularly useful to others necessarily, but now I actually have the time to make a little custom utility for very specific problems.

I still think it remains to be seen if "normal" people will do this though. Like, yeah I managed to replace a ton of little paid macOS utilities with my own software now, but AI still only got me about ~90% or so of the way there. I still had to rely on my own knowledge and experience to finish them.

Very impressive, but still a far cry from, say, the average user at my employer who struggles to even operate a non-mobile OS, being able to do this. Maybe we'll get there eventually, but for that to happen, the agent needs to be able to make these utilities 100% on its own with a very vague prompt, and be able to infer what the user actually wants when they don't (and they won't) explicitly state every use case they have in mind.

[smazga]

Slightly off topic, but it feels cyberpunk to me in a way. In those stories, everybody always has their own bespoke technology stack:

NullVoid added the traffic cam feed to his HUD so he could make his deliveries faster"

That sort of thing. In the stories, it makes you think that everyone is just some sort of genius, but we're kind of heading there where anybody can, theoretically, create a personalized tech stack with the help of a programming agent.

I haven't put a lot of energy into it, but your first paragraph triggered that thought.

[asielen]

I feel the same way about bespoke software as I do about 3D printing. For a small subset of people who like to tinker it is amazing, but there is a pretty big market for paying other people to please to 3D print for you.

For technical people who are developers or in other technical roles, sure. For everyone else, no way.

The hard part isn't the code, for most problems it never was. The hard part is being able to think logically about what problem you are trying to solve, making sure the guardrails are in place so you don't accidentally wipe your whole photo library, and staying on top of the specs for multiple walled gardens that you want to interface with. In short, maintenance.

Building is fun, maintaining is a slog. This is also why saas isn't going anywhere. There is a benefit from not reinventing the wheel, having a shared language and shared ecosystem.

On the other hand, I do think that the software that is going to succeed is the software that is the easiest to build on top of.

[pphysch]

3D printing is similar but also a vastly smaller market than information systems. 100% of businesses need information systems, but only a small percentage need custom plastic components.

(Actually I would argue every business past a tiny size should have access to a 3D printer, it can save a lot of money in subtle ways, though its rarely business-critical)

[dasil003]

I agree we have more software than most people want, but I don't think bespoke software is the answer. Sure, that is an interesting new area that AI makes possible, but I don't think it's more than a niche because people don't fundamentally want software, they want certain problems to be solved, and if AI creates a custom solution and it doesn't work, they won't be able to get help from anyone. More fundamentally, there is value in standardization and polish on well-worn paths. Even if you're right and people do end up with personal AI driving everything, I still think the lower layers need to be standardized because of the nature of distributed data. For example, you still need to talk to your bank to get your financial state and automate any payments, and that stuff has to be rigorous, with strong consistency and accounting guarantees.

For these reasons, I think people are overestimating the end-state impact of AI. Right now the hype cycle is fierce, and it definitely changes the economics of producing software (with a lot of negative effects forcing adjustments in open source ways of working), but I don't think in the end state the core landscape of software changes all that much. Well worn and hardened infrastructure like the Linux kernel is infinitely more valuable than CRUD apps used with small user populations on the edge. User space libraries and frameworks fall somewhere in between. AI increases the volume of new software, yes, but I see it as mostly fractal bits filling in the margins.

[zeroonetwothree]

This has "why pay for Dropbox" vibes.

[corndoge]

I am tired of reading this comment

[mattbettinson]

Its a HN truism, now, though.

[prerok]

I think it now has a slightly different lens. The DropBox argument was that anyone can build this in five minutes, so why use this? Now, with LLMs, the argument is that anyone can build its own.

I have to say I find it pretty funny.

[esafak]

I don't. Do you?

[bilater]

This is like saying we only need 100 websites when the internet came out. We have no idea what second third fourth order effects of frictionless and abundance are. What you think is software itself will change.

[zingar]

I thought we were very close until recently but I’ve just seen a long string of very promising openings from myself and others turn into “yeh dunno, it doesn’t work, I gave up”.

The effort to start is way down and drives new demand for software (at least in my own portfolio of side projects) but the effort to keep going is still above this threshold.

[datsci_est_2015]

> The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.

I think you vastly overestimate the amount of B2C software and underestimate the amount of B2B and “internal” software. Consider also how much more complex “business” processes are than “personal” processes.

[xnx]

I agree with this more than the parent, but think about apps is probably too last generation. The rich don't use apps. They have assistants to do things and tell them what they need to know when they need to know it. AI is more likely to be like that type of assistant.

[rco8786]

> We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants

You'll need to qualify that statement...

[torben-friis]

>We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious.

I think you're right in the second part of the quote, but the first doesn't follow.

The software space has moved from value propositions to grifts like crypto, but that has more to do with what investors are willing to fund than with user needs. Modest, sustainable businesses don't have the absurd levels of growth that's currently on demand.

Consumer perception is that everything's reducing in quality and increasing in price, digital or otherwise. It will have to give at some point.

[LogicFailsMe]

I do this already scraping web sites for descriptions of what they provide and then tell the agent to build the part I want and nothing more. There's a lot broken about the web and software today that can be addressed by these agents. Just getting a newsfeed of news I want to read free of the mandatory click and enrage bait would be progress for me IMO. But I'd never ship a product that did that because of how Google treated ad-blockers on chrome.

[thisisit]

> What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform

This sounds like an utopian dream. The surveillance is baked into this AI built to create the software. It will be built into the platform used to host and run the software. Why wouldn't AWS want that sweet sweet data to train their models. How many people can really self host? You seem to be overestimating average people's ability to learn how to self host.

Its like saying "we have vaccine related information at our finger tips so there are no longer going to be vaccine skeptics". Existence of information doesn't necessarily lead to application of such information.

The other thing which I feel these kinds of utopian dreams miss is that if something is commoditized and you can't really tell the difference between software A and B - because of AI, there is more incentive for companies to form cliques and raise prices while still delivering commoditized terrible software.

[photochemsyn]

Really? People will just have their AI build OCR apps for converting handwritten notes (with equations) into LaTex, transcription apps for spoken language-to-text for understanding foreign language speakers, custom audio apps for recording and playing music files, etc.?

This sounds good. But technically it seems highly implausible, just as a thriving human civilization on Mars sounds highly implausible. Nice plot for a sci-fi novel though.

[coldtea]

>Really? People will just have their AI build OCR apps for converting handwritten notes (with equations) into LaTex, transcription apps for spoken language-to-text for understanding foreign language speakers, custom audio apps for recording and playing music files, etc.?

Yes.

With a tiny subset of people building core modules and libs to be used for the above (eg. an OCR module, plenty of which already exist, and an AI can trivially hook them with other functionality into an app form).

Most of what you write can be built already quite easily. An example "Custom audio apps for recording and playing music files"*:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW4rIXft0Bg

[Brendinooo]

>e.g. front-end web development

It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.

I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.

[tracerbulletx]

Yeah everyone thinks its great at the things they don't personally know that much about or appreciate and I think it's kind of embarrassing to proclaim its going to do someone else's speciality great but not theirs and just reveals an underlying ignorance.

[technomoloch]

I'm solidly a generalist, I custom create designs for products and implement them, and also work on backends and large scale production ml systems. I would actually have to agree with the person you are replying to - simply because backends are text problems, (an LLMs domain), and frontends are visual - llms are just still not quite as good at seeing details as humans, whereas they can scan a large codebase for possible problems much faster than any human could. Both areas need careful supervision and feedback loops, adversarial reviews etc - but for the frontend, I find myself having to do much more manual work actually checking myself, because an llm just doesn't get symmetry if it doesn't perfectly correlate to margin being 16px on both sides of a box, etc, ie symmetry you can see in code. Or whether a design "feels" nice to look at, etc. But with backend, you give it proper guidance to create tests, do benchmarking, follow sane design patterns, etc, and its very effective.

[JimDabell]

I’ve been writing front-end code for more than a quarter of a century. I can assure you I’m not saying this because I’m unfamiliar with the field.

[jaggederest]

Honestly I think it's great at the things I do know about. I've been doing this stuff soup to nuts since javascript was released, and it's tactically better across the board - presentation, ux, frontend ui, api, backend, databases, even systems and devops.

It's taste can be atrocious, so we're not replacing engineers entirely yet, but it's clear that it's almost hands off for any task I would have done as a consultant in 2012, for example. And, contrary to my opinion a couple months ago, I think taste is a pretty shallow moat, ultimately. Many of my clients when I was operating a consultancy had plenty of taste, if that's all they required, and I think it'd be foolish to assume frontier models won't acquire taste eventually.

I do think that, ultimately, the tippy top of the pinnacle for things like truly original design work, truly original work of any kind, will take a long time to replace. But most software engineering isn't moving the boundaries of the possibilities of humanity, it's making sure that we can turn $0.10 of infra spend into $2 of revenue reliably.

[tripleee]

I feel people saying this are imagining front-end web dev is all just HTML tables and centering divs. AI does better with back-end in my experience

[sdellis]

I agree with you. Maybe AI can generate designs that look moderately good and aesthetically pleasing for UIs that solve known problems in a prototypical way.[0] That is useful, especially for simple utilities, internal tools, or hobby projects. However, I have yet to see AI solve new design problems, improve on old problems, and create a unique design style that defines a brand and separates it from competition.

[0] https://research.google/pubs/the-role-of-visual-complexity-a...

[JimDabell]

Most organisations need a high quality design system and to be able to assemble pages from it. Totally bespoke design will start with the designer using an agent. So the way I see it, the everyday stuff will be the first to go, followed by designers taking the rest of it. Front-end developers have their area eroded from the bottom then the top.

As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when dealing with the backend. Frontend problems tend to be more transient. So the stakes are lower, which means that the accountability of humans has less value.

[nec4b]

The frontend feedback is much harder for AI. AI needs to be able to see the page with all the moving parts and sounds and have a bit of sense for the layout and taste in colors etc. I think it much harder for AI to recognize what feels good for the human user. Backend is devoid of that personal touch. By definition you are building for the machine. You have APIs, databases and infrastructure which is logical and easy for LLM to interact with. "All it needs" is curl and it can run in a loop the whole day improving backend software.

[avgDev]

Codex has been great for me for backend wiring, mapping and creating boiler plate code in C#. However, it seems when I go in to fix things its 60% front-end.

Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.

[cloverich]

> provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.

The AI is not intelligent. Its really hard to grasp cleanly. But it can't do anything logically like we do. Its pattern matching. It has to be a pattern its seen; then it can assemble them. If there are competing patterns - it'll trip up being consistent. Long established libraries and languages that change the least, it'll be best at. Anything newer it'll be bad at - even with documentation. The only way out is to give it tests, then it can loop over several simpler problems, where the errors (failed tests) match well onto the more basic primitives that don't really change (wrong string, wrong type, wrong structure, etc)

[throw-the-towel]

You know what else is pattern matching? Experience.

I think I finally have a way to describe how AI works: infinite experience, none of the smarts.

[some-guy]

At $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_COMPANY, I've found that if you have:

1) A designer that uses Figma correctly (using well defined components / design systems) 2) A front-end framework as close to HTML / CSS as possible for the visuals (I have success with Web Components / Lit) with Figma MCP

The front-end is usually one-shot using frontier models. However in my experience, designers are all over the place with using Figma correctly.

[evilduck]

I'll second this, with the caveat that I've not yet tried to build anything with Fable.

Every engineer can now produce things in the front end that doesn't look like complete and utter garbage, sure, but everyone is also producing the new-era of Twitter Bootstrap pages. It all has the same touched-by-AI look and it might as well be customer kryptonite from everything I've experienced at my workplace with customer surveys and collaboration. It has raised the floor substantially for internal tools and admin pages though.

[jbreckmckye]

> I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different

It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.

There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.

In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users

Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)

Their analysis is on pg42-43

> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far

I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.

Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?

[TheDong]

> money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start.

Right now, people pay all sorts of money for real interactions with real people, most notably friendship and dating.

Tiktok has done a good job at starting to disrupt this, but with AI and better VR technology, maybe we can finish the job and disrupt all human relationships, all romantic relationships, all friendships. It's a huge addressable market (all humans), and if even just 5% of all humans buy a $5 virtual coffee (free to produce, pure profit) for their AI partner each day, that would be a massive increase in software spend.

Once we hit "The Matrix", that'll mean software has nowhere left to go.

[Henchman21]

I’m going to assume this lacks the /s that seems relevant. Because if not:

Do you want to live in this world? Why? Because you envision yourself receiving said money?

You should be ashamed of yourself for writing such a thing.

[nicoburns]

> There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.

Isn't the likely explanation for this that the updraft is a huge number of sloppy AI-generated apps that nobody wants to use because they're just bad?

[pzo]

You also need to have time to play all those great games, watch all those great shows and read all those books.

There is a lot of software that are constrained by human eyeballs (entertainment or ads monetized)

[JimDabell]

> when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing

I’m not talking about growth here. I’m merely saying that it won’t recede. My argument is that we won’t use the increased productivity to spend less money producing the same amount of software – we’ll use the increased productivity to spend the same amount of money to produce a larger amount of software.

[vanuatu]

It's unclear whether mobile apps as a segment has a correlation with the elasticity of software in general

In aggregate software comes out of R&D, operations, and labor spend. Good software increases revenue and decreases costs for companies, which grows the economic pie, and frees up more spend and more companies spin up and start spending

A world where we've saturated out software would seem utopian compared to right now

[rkozik1989]

"The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far."

Yeah, I don't that does not necessarily mean everyone is looking for the latest and greatest. Many businesses are still reliant on technologies like custom spreadsheets and Microsoft Access because they do exactly what they want them to do, have a fixed rate, and rarely require any additional modifications/maintenance. Once you step outside of the bubble so many of us are stuck in you'll realize that many, many people aren't interested in upgrades, but rather they just want the old shit they know to just work.

[nitwit005]

The classic pattern is they become a larger company, and either those processes stop working well, or a custom solution becomes worthwhile due to scale.

The row count limit in Excel has been hit many times over the years.

[vanuatu]

that kind of implies theres a ton of room for progress right?

imagine if we got new shit that worked better

[packetlost]

That violates the worse is better principle which has held true since the inception of software.

Switching costs are real. It's not that hard to make an improvement, but it's very hard to make an improvement that justifies the cost in both money and time.

[vanuatu]

i think my point stands

clearly we were able to keep making improvements! the ceiling is nowhere near reached yet

[amelius]

> at best you can have AI doing 90% of the work as long as an expert developer is driving things.

But that puts 90% of developers out of a job.

And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.

[JimDabell]

No, you are ignoring my central point by assuming that the amount of software that is being produced remains fixed. Every other time we have increased software engineer productivity, we have responded by producing more software.

[pulse7]

So it's similar to "Andy and Bill's Law" [1]: "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away".

If Windows would stay the same (and not grow) it would be much faster on newer CPUs...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

[amelius]

Yes, it addresses your second point.

I'm not saying your entire point is invalid, just that half of it is not correct, and so things might turn out worse than expected.

[poidos]

It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.

[aurareturn]

Exactly. I see software engineering going the way of accounting or lawyer.

Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies, employing a software dev was simply not a thing.

Nowadays, your kindergarten might employ a full time or part time software engineer to build custom software. One dev can build a lot more a lot faster.

That said, I think the average or below average dev won’t earn $200k/year anymore. However, the top devs will earn more than ever. If AI increases an average dev’s productivity by 10x, then it will increase a top tier dev’s by 100x.

[vanuatu]

It's even better than accounting or lawyers, because good software engineers can build incredible businesses from scratch instead of being tied to the number of businesses that exist

SWEs are more leveraged than ever and we've seen comp drastically rise for top performers

[euwuw]

“ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ”

No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.

[aurareturn]

It’s already happening. Top tier devs have two ways of earning way more than before:

1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own.

2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more.

I’m in the #2 camp right now. My team shrank by 50% through attrition in the last year. We didn’t hire anyone new when someone left. My pay has increased.

[euwuw]

lol you’re a developer so I can see why you’re desperately making this argument and hope it lasts.

I’m a CEO and I don’t see this at all. There will be more consolidation for whom the economics are viable to pay good wage rates. The rest? Nah.

The crap ones will be out of a job. The best ones will fight fiercely amongst each other to keep their jobs and existing wage rates. Let alone increase.

[borski]

It does, in the higher echelons of performance / seniority.

Junior wages won’t change, and may even get lower.

But, at least at present, the top devs are earning more than ever as their skills are much more leveraged.

I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

[vanuatu]

curious as to why

most top swe comp comes from equity in the company, which benefits from productivity

not only that but the leveraged nature of swe means top performers are in perpetual shortage and low performers contribute negative productivity

anecdotally weve seen comp rise as the best candidates have multiple competing offers as well as the freedom to start their own business

[aurareturn]

Because companies can hire one great Dev for $300k instead of 5 mediocre ones for $150k each and get better results.

[amelius]

> “ However, the top devs will earn more than ever. ”

The AI companies will skim all the extra profits.

[swid]

Because there is so much money for kindergarten teachers, paying an extra salary for a software dev for every kindergarten will certainly lead to better outcomes. The computer programs will make up for the lost teacher economically by teaching the children instead of people, raising the market share of my local kindergarten, or enticing people to have more babies. \s

[SecretDreams]

How much does the appetite for good* software need to grow to not have loss of jobs?

[the_af]

> It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.

...or if there's an increase of demand for software, but mostly of the kind that can be completely automated by AI, no need for developers.

[ChrisLTD]

I agree with most of what you're saying, but it's also funny that front-end developers are catching strays in your conclusion. As long as human beings are interfacing with software, there's going to be a lot of judgement and nuance necessary for building good UIs. Data structures, back-end infra, can all be alien and still work. But your UI can't be alien.

[Lutger]

We all tend to assume AI will only ever be good at the execute part, but what if AI will also be good at decide-deliver? What if some day, we could put AI in charge of not only running a company, but coming up with a business idea, getting funded, driving sales, pivoting until product-market fit and then scaling?

Who would profit from such a company?

[dron57]

The capital backing it would profit. Your scenario is a real doom loop of runaway capital building up without any corresponding returns to human labour.

See Thomas Picketty and his “Capital in the 21st Century”.

[seydor]

You can't expect that timeline to continue forever. AI is a whole different beast than programming. It is in fact what programming set out to be in the 1940s: A replica of the brain. Automating programming tasks has only gotten us so far, but that timeline is probably ending now. We no longer need to automate programming because we can talk to the machine.

[pzo]

> Firstly, we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software. I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far.

Not all software but how many movies you can watch, books read? Similarly how many games you can play? How many ads you can watch during a day?

Eventually projects will have to be profitable. And even if everybody will make a great game most of them won’t be profitable because you competing for limited eyeballs time

[foolserrandboy]

4 day work week could help with this like weekends help sell more automobiles.

[s_dev]

>Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly.

Jervons Paradox

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

[basch]

>Specifically, AI+human developer no longer outperforms AI alone. So far, all the available evidence seems to show AI as a force multiplier for developers and that for good results

Or humans are relegated to the co-processor role. The AI does 99% of the thinking and work and consults the human for the 1% it needs. Whether that extra contribution is essentially a random number generation, creativity / outside the box input, or esoteric problem solving remains to be seen.

[JimDabell]

This is called a “reverse centaur”.

[_diyar]

Your argument holds across the supply-curve of software-engineering-skills. However, there must be some threshold where a previously employed dev is now sol because AI+Human outcompetes him (ie the supply curve has shifted, and the point they used to occupy is not unprofitable)

[Aefiam]

Even if the budget for software development were to stay constant, if an ever increasing part of it is spent on llm usage, it will reduce the money left for developers, resulting in mass layoffs and/or mass salary cuts.

[epochbtc]

My opinion throughout this AI revolution of the past few years is: appetite for software is insatiable. AI tooling will 3x-10x the output and sophistication of software but will not meaningfully decrease employment over the long haul, except perhaps in legacy or not-forward-thinking organizations.

[coldtea]

>We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry. Every time we do so, we are able to build bigger, better things more quickly. When this happens, our work becomes more valuable and expectations rise to match. The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far. AI hasn’t replaced software engineers because every time we become more productive, the goalposts move.

Anytime we became more productive in the past we become in a way that didn't remove engineers, just increased the abstraction an engineer would work in. And we did it at times of rapid expansion of computing and internet, meaning way more need for engineers counter-balancing the increased productivity.

>The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far.

Has it? The expansion of IT has reached global saturation, we're getting desparate, and try to push shit like Blockchain and IoT, and shoving "smart" features even where people don't want them.

And the world is full of software nobody or very few care for or use/subscribe/buy. App Store have huge "long tails" of stuff nobody cares for.

And with autonomous agents we designed something to replace the engineer altogether. So even if the demand for software increases, that can be like "spawn more agents" not "get more developers".

Some human supervisors per N agents? Sure. Equal human demand as what's now? Unlikely.

In general "we did it 5 times, to we'll surely do it 6" is not a real argument, just a hope that something will never end.

[tossandthrow]

Quite a few developers will likely loose their jobs. In particular the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models - the ones who are forever junior.

The engineers who can manage large scale projects using agents will, on the other hand, probably get a hefty salary bump.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I've worked in many places on many teams and never met anyone that essentially does nothing besides write code...

I question the obsession engineers have with their "code writing" being replaced by a machine.

Do you really think that's the value you bring to the table?

Non-engineers don't want to sit down and think about anything, they don't want to sit down and test that thinks actually work, they don't want to think about all the failure cases that could go wrong besides a few shallow tests, and they definitely don't want to have to pick up the mess if something does go wrong...

This is what you get paid to do. Coding is a small part of that.

[tossandthrow]

You are on point: The developers of the future need to hold much more of the domain that is being developed for. It is not a job to write JSX and tailwind classes anymore, so you need to move up in abstraction - and complexity.

Not all can do that.

[allajfjwbwkwja]

> the ones who don't have mental capacity to work with models

Those people don't exist.

[tossandthrow]

Sure they do - there are a lot of people who thrive working with concrete technologies and solve relatively straight forward issues (implement this component - style work).

These people will see a brutal job market that is forcing them to take more responsibility and work at a higher level of abstraction.

This is nothing new - A bunch of people simply don't thrive well as knowledge workers. The bar for being a knowledge worker is going to go up - by a lot.

[allajfjwbwkwja]

The latest tools will walk any monkey through the process of planning out and thinking through whatever they're supposed to be doing, and will then write the documentation for it. The bar is likely to go down, actually.

[tossandthrow]

Yes, so when a tool is walking any monkey through a process, it does bit have a value anymore.

This is why people stopped adding word, excel and googling skills into their resumes - it is assumed that you know how to use the office suite and a browser.

[allajfjwbwkwja]

State of the art tools will soon be even better at being generalists and handling abstraction than at coding. Even GPT 4 could do a better job planning a project than implementing it. The main bottleneck is context, which all of the big companies are solving by hoovering up all their internal data that's in writing into agentic knowledge graphs. The end game is fully autonomous teams of agents, led by other agents.

[franktankbank]

> we might finally become productive enough to exhaust the world’s appetite for software.

I think we are past this point personally. Lots of blasphemously useless crap being built.

[JimDabell]

When I use any moderately complex piece of software, for instance a word processor, the UI is stacked full of things I don’t use, making it less convenient for me to use. At the same time, simple features that would be useful to me are not present. Software is currently aimed at the highest common factor so that it appeals to as many people as possible, which paradoxically makes it suboptimal for everybody.

If I wanted to build something that is specific to my needs, this would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Even today with all the latest models – even if what I want is relatively mundane.

To add on to that, what would be produced would be ideal for me but less ideal for other people. Other people need things that I don’t, and they don’t need things that I do. And people’s needs change over time. So the actual range of software that there is appetite for is the result of a huge combinatorial explosion of features, for every single type of application out there.

The appetite you are thinking is satisfied today is merely “there is an app that does X” but the appetite that is actually present once we are able to create software much more efficiently is more along the lines of “everybody gets their own custom app that does X”.

I don’t think the appetite for software can be quenched until we have just-in-time feature generation. That is definitely not within present day capabilities.

[jayd16]

Part of the reason software ate the world is standardized tooling. Going back to everyone having completely bespoke ways of doing things would be a nightmare.

[fragmede]

The useless box dates back to 1952, and the pet rock was a phenomenon for a while. If useless software bothers you, you've got to be pretty bothered quite a number of things. What do you think of video games?

[vitally3643]

We're talking about things like a flashlight app on your phone with a subscription and that requests every system permission available, or the ten trillion todo apps.

[LogicFailsMe]

Haven't played them personally since the double whammy of the Zynga playbook and the pandemic of DLC. But I have been building my own games to play that are free of these infestations. The enshittification surrounds us and penetrates us.

Edit: Yes, I see, as a former gamer and game developer, I am unemploying myself by creating games with AI to play myself instead of ennriching the pockets of Gabe Newell and other billionaires, hence the downvote.

[Rooster61]

This has very little to do with the actual demand for good software though. People very much still want good software that works. The issue is the group of people in the industry that have learned they can push blasphemously useless crap, charge a premium, and have people be forced to consume it due to poor governance over market practices (monopolies, blatantly anti-consumer features, etc).

[empath75]

> We have been aggressively and enthusiastically automating away software engineering for the entire history of the computer industry.

I used to work at an overnight NOC many years ago, and I literally learned bash and python just to save time so I could spend more time watching netflix or whatever instead of working. Instead, my scripts handled so many alerts that they laid off someone and gave me a promotion to being a sys admin :(

I've been chasing the dream of automating my job away and collecting a paycheck for doing nothing for decades now, and I keep getting promoted...

[reinitctxoffset]

In every regime where we have meaningful longitudinal data about the long run outcomes of introducing technology that is superhuman at some or all of a human's job, the combination of the machine and an expert human outperforms either alone, with probably the clearest parallel structurally being chess, though this is true of all of the hard sciences and all of frontier engineering (semiconductor design).

There will never be a human who can beat Stockfish ever again, digital intelligence has simply accelerated away from human intelligence in that regime.

There is no other human alive who can beat Magnus Carlsen. Stockfish crushes Magnus.

But Magnus and Stockfish playing together crush any conceivable combination of just human or just computer. And no serious chess player would train without a computer or decline the assist if the contest mattered.

And this is in a regime where the dominance of the machine is total, structural, and permanent, far more so than any existing AI's impact on the outcome distribution of any recent development on any white-collar knowledge work include even the most sophisticated software engineering done anywhere. The demonstrated as opposed to completely conjectural lift on SWE outcomes with Claude Code (and even that's controversial, let's take the high end of the claims) is real and changes the geometry of the situation not at all.

Nor is there any apparent limit on how much arbitrarily sophisticated software the world has an appetite for, you could take someone at the absolute top of the field (I'm a big Carmack fan let's go with Carmack), and give him cutting edge AI assist, and the best program a person can write just got better. Sweet!

And this applies anywhere from junior to Carmack: however good they were, they're better now. We can build harder things. We can have extreme quality software where previously we were stuck with some Electron jank, across the board. Does anyone think Slack would lose market share if it went back to its gaming roots and was gorgeously 3D accelerated on every surface against a backend that could instant and perfectly synchronize an arbitrary workspace on a flakey cell connection and never have an outage or data loss? Or would they rapidly shred the remaining competition and become the favored tool of everyone?

In adversarial regimes like trading or drone warfare, you better believe the best hackers have arbitrary assist if you're going to play against them.

I think the thing to be hand-wringing about isn't AI, it's that capitalism no longer seems to be an adversarial regime. The worst software rivalries in the industry look more like a pillow fight than a battle of will.

And if there is any lasting reduction in headcount, it's leaders lacking ambition agreeing tacitly to not play very hard, not AI, that is to blame for that. None of the HFT shops nor amusingly the frontier labs have reduced their hiring or compensation at all. If anything, it's going up!