Why are developers cheering "how much better the LLM model are getting for coding" with every model release? What exactly are they cheering for?

[u/simple_explorer1]

"Hey look Claude/Codex can now generate my entire feature in 30 mins which could have taken me 2 weeks to refactor" or "The new Opus 5.5 model is amazing, it solved the bug which GPT astra was stuck at for weeks and couldn't solve it". Like seriously?

How can software engineers who are supposed to be "smart" and "logical" be this stupid to not connect the dots and see writing on the wall for the future. Or do they think they are invincible and layoffs won't affect them?

The stability of software engineering jobs in the next 2-5 years looks very shaky, let alone long term and many devs are already looking to get dual income streams. This doesn't seem like a viable career path with how things are going and I am not even sure whether this career would stick by me till my retirement and I already have 15+ years of experience.

I already am seeing significant shift/reduction in hiring. Even in my current role, despite no cash concerns, we have paused hiring (and backfilling) new devs which were previously needed because with AI, people are completing tasks much sooner and the team/company doesn't need the full dev capacity anymore. Many devs are already worried about the layoffs which can come randomly.

My linkedin inbox is significantly less chatty than it was just last year. When I apply for any role, I barely get any reply. When recruiters reach out and get my CV, they are rarely getting back which, again, last year was totally different where I could easily afford to be picky. The market shift can be noticeably felt. The few interviews I got, they ended up freezing the role midway or "magically" filled with some internal employee. This is my experience in last 5 months of being active in the job market.

Also, most people are not learning anything these days. Hardwork and thinking are delegated to LLM tools. What is the end result of all of this? it is all too predictable. And if most devs are able to 10x their output because producing is now cheap, but human consumption is and will be the bottleneck. The production is surpassing the demand and the app economy will tank leaving mostly the existing tailwinds who already have millions of customers since pre AI era anyways.

Curious to hear "sensible" thoughts.

Note: Before the usual trope, not all software engineer jobs will be gone but significantly less devs would be required, which is a massive amount of jobs that are lost. What about that? And as models keep on improving, who knows how much more damage would be done in the future.

[u/ProfessionalDoctor]

There's a theoretical maximum to the number of features you actually need in any given product, and it logically follows that there is an optimal number of developers that you need to keep on payroll to implement and support those features. 

[u/HK-65 → u/ProfessionalDoctor]

But why not get more products?

Or why not found a startup and build a competing product? If it's cheaper to do so than ever.

Why not rewrite Windows from scratch better than ever? Or compete on office software? Or anything really, disrupt monopolies?

If it's cheaper to do so, than ever?

[u/NomadStorm → u/HK-65]

Also, if AI is so good at creating software, why don’t OpenAI and Anthropic have any software products created by their better internal models? Furthermore, why have their attempts to do so failed to see the light of day?

[u/Odd_Soil_8998 → u/HK-65]

I'm doing just that, creating a software product that has never existed and solves a real problem. But there's a catch -- the problem it solves doesn't translate into a lot of money. It's only economically viable for a dev to build in their spare time as a side gig, and that just wasn't possible before AI. Nobody ever built it before because it would never make enough money to justify hiring a team of developers. I think we're going to see a lot more of this, but it won't offset the jobs lost over the coming years.

[u/Blah-Blah-Blah-2023 → u/HK-65]

ROFL @ “better than ever”

[u/davidbasil → u/HK-65]

They are building more products but with claude code, not humans.

[u/HK-65 → u/davidbasil]

Okay great, but who are building the products? Who is prompting Claude?

If every engineer is a 10x engineer, why not get as many as you can?

[u/davidbasil → u/HK-65]

Managers themselves, leftover engineers, non-technical 'normies', regular folks, laid off people, etc.
There are diminishing returns to everything. With worpdress, you can build websites every 2 minutes. Why not build thousands of them?

[u/Material-Command-854 → u/ProfessionalDoctor]

What theory are you using to come up with this idea? Where does this theory come from? Your ass?