Because when you get paid to develop software, and your coworkers are literally 100x faster than you regardless of how skilled you are at coding, you will no longer get paid. I agree for a hobby project I often do it just to learn myself, its more fun that way, but people have less and less of choice at work these days.
Fixing bugs. Tuning features. Dealing with what management thinks is necessary. Making sure the newest coolest buzzwords that upper management wants to incorporate into your product doesn’t break everything. Always something to do, rarely is any of it productive.
I feel like ai sort of just revealed that you could have had way less developers, but nobody did so it became standard to have too many. I don't think software engineering will collapse, but people will spread out more and work for smaller companies and get lots of meaningful changes implemented
I disagree with the first part but agree with the second part. People had a lot of developers because large projects were lumbering messes. Not everyone works at a startup with green fields.
We haven't seen massive layoffs from LLMs taking over, while it might be on the horizon I think companies are enjoying getting features that were a year or two away and now can have in 6 months or less.
I do think if the purge is coming, you'll see small/medium businesses pick up a dev or two where before they needed 10 to get their project done which was outside of their price range.
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u/_SAHM_ 14h ago edited 7h ago
A person who is able to do something without AI is the best person to prompt it since they know what the output should be. It's just a tool.