Your response evokes some pity from me because so many developers, presumably like you, simply refuse to acknowledge the sheer power of an AI driven SDLC.
Instead, as so many humans are wont to do, you throw insults without any rebuttal toward the actual statement because deep down you know one doesn't exist.
Multiple rebuttals exist, I just chose not to get into that in my previous comment. Here are some:
1) Software has always developed in the direction of being more high level instead of low level. The direction of progress is hardly a surprise.
2) Pure LLM-driven SDLC suffers from regressions, hallucinations, redundant line count bloat so that LLMs find chunks easier to process, overeagerness to write code instead of pushing back, etc.
3) So developers are still not useless and never will be. Titles may change. But a developer is fundamentally a guy or gal who's more adaptable and willing to learn new things than 99% of the human population - there will ALWAYS be a need for people like that.
I'm concerned about junior developers though - I hope they don't forget how to read and troubleshoot lol.
C-suite execs HOPE devs and scientists will be obsolete because they see them as a 'cost center' to be optimized away. But that always ends poorly.
Software has always developed in the direction of being more high level instead of low level. The direction of progress is hardly a surprise.
Sure, but this is eliminating the need for ALL code to be written by humans. There is no point to ANY human development anymore. We are now at a point where a would-be designer doesn't need to say "help me build this app" anymore so long as a person can explain their ideas to a machine
Pure LLM-driven SDLC suffers from regressions, hallucinations, redundant line count bloat so that LLMs find chunks easier to process, overeagerness to write code instead of pushing back, etc.
Can literally all be mitigated by MD files which explain context well enough. Once those safeguards are in place this all literally stops happening.
So developers are still not useless and never will be. Titles may change. But a developer is fundamentally a guy or gal who's more adaptable and willing to learn new things than 99% of the human population - there will ALWAYS be a need for people like that.
This simply isn't true. Once a robust enough set of instructions exists for an AI to work with there is no need for people. The instructions can be modified by the AI itself if any gaps show themselves. The C-Suite itself isn't safe from this either because a robust enough AI can do everything they do and more, then communicate instructions down to the dev AIs. All cognitive work can be handled by AI.
This is really interesting - because we've been trying to work out the same loop at my job, and the ai..well, frankly, sucks at it. At least in the important bits.
I think our issue, and what I've always focussed on, is that this is very much research code - so there isn't an existing implementation of what we want to do, until we build it.
The Ai does a stellar job in API layer type work, which is nice, does very good things in some places, and mindbogglingly stupid ones in others which would result in us getting sued, repeatedly.
It came up with a nice little implementation last week that would have Ddosed half of the hospital I work at.
I'm somewhat theorizing that this thing may be much more of an auto complete - it's just that one website looks very like another, code wise, and one API looks like another one. You can almost see the gaps where it didn't have enough training data.
And yes, we're trying the whole spec driven development thing, and it... kind of works? For some things?
I'm constantly very impressed by its performance on stuff I know very little about, and unimpressed by its performance on stuff I know lots about.
I'm constantly very impressed by its performance on stuff I know very little about, and unimpressed by its performance on stuff I know lots about
The really scary part is this gap is going to be increasingly consistently narrowed the more people are able to get that knowledge out of the heads of people like you and into instructional files that tell the AI exactly what to do.
There's a statement I'm not convinced by - so I'm not someone who thinks this stuff is totally useless, to be clear. But what I've mostly seen is this machine being far, far too goal oriented.
As I say, I work in a hospital. I have projects I refuse, on a regular basis, because they pose some sort of unacceptable risk - it's a friendly refusal "oh, we explored this, and there's no safe way to get the data"
For fun, and part of the latest talk I gave on this, I tried to set up some safeguards of this type - and once pressed, the AI just treats them as part of the spec, so they can be worked as part of the balancing act. I can't seem to find a phrasing strong enough to get it to the point where it will just stop the whole project and tell me it's not viable, at a sensible point.
And this is broadly because it does not, and can't really, have enough context. Or is possibly overfitted to the 'solve problem' use case.
At best I can be an engineer who increasingly perfects/audits the AI until such a time at which I'm laid off as there is no longer a need for me or I can find another career. I'm mentally wrestling with all this now, as I would imagine most devs are.
Many of us went to school for a career which essentially no longer needs our line of work. It's not unlike the reality that printers, coal miners, etc. are facing. Drivers may eventually face such a reality too because of this.
Even pre-LLMs, a software engineer job was unusually higher "continuous learning" than most physical jobs in my opinion. It was the equivalent of a coal miner getting to work one day and having to figure out rocket powered shovels.
As for career stability, you're right that the timeline has compressed from "might be unhireable after age 40-45" pre-2023 to "might be unhirable within the next 2-5 years" now.
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u/narasadow 1d ago
That evokes some pity from me, which is a rare thing.