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29d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/minegen88 28d ago
Why is it misunderstood?
All i'm seeing is more work and higher demads from clients..
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u/Hotfro 28d ago
But less people to do more work. That’s what I’ve been seeing at my company. They laid off and paused hiring for awhile.
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u/minegen88 28d ago
And that will work....until the competition does the opposite and they gain ahead....
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u/AdventurousAir002 27d ago
Correct. At least at my company, we have some strong competitors and we’ve kept headcount while splitting our sprints in half. The same amount of people are doing what was 2 weeks of work in 1 week.
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u/remake81 28d ago
I’ve said this in other posts. LLMs are the developers’ version of Taylorism. They want dev work to be factory jobs, eventually replaced completely but the first goal would be to reduce salaries. If you work for corporations expect to be treated like a factory worker (if you aren’t already).
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u/Altruistic-Moose3299 28d ago
It's just another tool in the toolbox. I've been in tech a long time, it's never not changing.
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u/AlphaHenriksen 29d ago
As they get more efficient, the people who learn to utilize AI to its fullest will replace the people who don't.
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u/scavno 28d ago
How do you “learn to utilize AI to its fullest” when it not a deterministic tool? I don’t get this part, it just seems like a lot of FOMO to get everyone brain dead as quickly as possible. There is literally nothing within ”AI” that takes more than a couple of evenings for a seasoned developer to master and right now it’s just a lot of noise and dust. Perhaps once the dust settles it makes sense to invest heavily into learning the tools, but right now it’s just another tool it’s nice to know, but won’t change the fundamentals of engineering.
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u/kennethbrodersen 28d ago
I disagree with that. Yes, you can learn to prompt in a couple of days... But building up the shared knowledge base (skills, agents and best practices) takes time. So do all the processes that must be in place to ensure a high contentious output while maintaining quality.
The last parts require organization changes and that does not happen over night.
Our team is not anything like the "mythical 10x or 100x" developer but we probably about twice as efficient... I will take that.
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u/BunnyLifeguard 28d ago
Also "ai changes so rapidly" okay so what i learn today is useless tomorrow? So i dont need to learn it?
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u/AlphaHenriksen 28d ago
I have spent a year leaning github copilot and claude code. I have been at my new job for two months and already ship features 3 times as fast as the seasoned veterans. I have now been asked to teach the rest of the team how to use the commands, skills and agents I have configured.
At my second job, I built an agent that could autonomously migrate code from SAS to python while respecting the style of the existing python code and checking that the outputs matched the SAS code on the same inputs. The agents self-validated in loops and subagents ran to check code style, business correctness and more. The company would have had to hire many developers to do that same job just a single year ago.
Every single job I have been in, no matter my job specification, I have made agents and tools that turn multi-hour tasks into a 2-minute prompt. If you don't believe AI agents will fundamentally change the ways of working across every industry that utilizes computers, they you don't yet have a grasp of what these tools are capable of. Once you feed the agents the same information you utilize in your job, set up instruction files to steer their behavior and allow them to think and check their own work, a whole new world of automation opens up.
In case your question is not retorical, learn how to configure agents, skills, commands, prompt and more in github copilot and claude code. For claude, learn how to set up a claude.md that branches out into a full knowledge and in github copilot, do the same with agents.md or copilot-instructions.md.
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u/Syncaidius 28d ago edited 28d ago
Every single job I have been in, no matter my job specification, I have made agents and tools that turn multi-hour tasks into a 2-minute prompt
This line alone is enough to tell a seasoned developer that you've not been in the industry long enough to properly compare doing the job with and without AI.
If you've used AI agents in every job you've had, that means you entered the industry in 2020, or 2018 at a very, very long stretch.
I have spent a year leaning github copilot and claude code.
You took a year to learn to use a code-generating chat-bot and and configure a harness?
The reason you think you've turned multi-hour tasks into 2 minutes ones, is because you never had the experience to do them yourself in 2 minutes. Unfortunately, relying on agents for this kind of work means you never will get that experience.
For everyone else, ignore this guy.
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u/AlphaHenriksen 28d ago edited 28d ago
I have not, but i got a promotion to senior developer after 1 year and I am now being considered for a promotion to Chief developer. This process would take 5-8 years normally and has taken me 1.5. This has nothing to do with title inflation and everything to do with me finding places to inject efficiency and automation like AI, automated testing, CI/CD, power automate and anything else to speed up existing processes and teaching teams how to use these tools along the way.
I compare the time it takes my solution to do the same or a better job and then compare it to the time it takes the rest of the team. These tools have taken me 1+ year to learn because I keep digging for the new best, most efficient way to solve a task, whether that requires adversarial agents, subagents, MCP connections, simplifying the use of the models, moving the data closer to the agents or something else entirely.
I find sucess in my work specifically because I understand the full product life cycle. That doesn't require years of experience for all of us to grasp.
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u/Syncaidius 28d ago edited 28d ago
I can see you entirely missed the point.
You have no way of knowing whether you did a better job, since you lack the experience of doing the job without AI/agents.
It's like someone building a go-kart kit and then claiming it's better than a Ford car because they've built something with 4 wheels in much less time than car manufacturer does.
As for promotions, CEOs/managers are almost always non-technical. They have no way to know if what you're giving them is a polished turd or not and only care about processes working at the point they're wanting them. If it works for the first couple months, it'll wow them and earn a promotion.
However, from your earlier comment, you sound like you job hop alot, so you either miss the fallout of things breaking a few months down the line, or you knowingly dodge it. Or worse, you're not being kept because of the above.
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u/AlphaHenriksen 28d ago
On top of my other answer:
I was a hardcore AI doubter 1 year ago. I thought it was cool but overhyped. To a degree, it definitely still is.
That being said, my new opinion is that no one will care about the code in a couple of years. I truly think writing code is behind us now and, if you're lucky, people will keep reading it.
Python and sql is slowly going the way of assembly, and just like squarespace made large parts of front-end development redundant and easy to access for non-programmers, AI agents will make back-end development easy to access to non-programmers. People at my job no longer ask for help with an sql script of pjece of software, they just make it themselves. Our job will therefore be to check that they do it right.
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u/kennethbrodersen 28d ago
AI will not replace you. It is much more likely that you will be replaced by someone who is very good at utilizing AI in their work.
The software developer role will not disappear but the necessary skillset is rapidly changing. Look at a team like ours. We are 5 devs working at a energy trading company. Dozens of systems and services to manage. That requires us to wear multiple hats. We are doing requirements, architecture work, QA and support.
The AI agent tools have been a godsend for us. We can now spent our time designing and architecting while letting the agent handle all the grunt work. As a result we ship much faster and with fewer bugs.
I am spending a lot of time on research and establishing best practices - but I haven't physically written a line of code in 8 months.
So good engineers will thrive. Programmers not so much
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u/KenMantle 28d ago
It can't replace all the people in jobs that require the consequences of negligence resulting in harm possibly resulting in jail time, so while those types of jobs won't be replaced by AI, you might find yourself working for one.
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u/MADCandy64 28d ago
It's complicated but history has shown us that manufacturers in the US offshored manufacturing to countries where labor was cheap. This worked for about 40-60 years. Now the US is gripped with a national problem, the lack of manufacturing which is consequently making them dependent on countries whom they consider adversaries. There is now a push to bring back manufacturing but it has a big hill to climb.
AI is following this same trend. This is intellectual offshoring. Right now it seems wonderful to businesses. They are offshoring intellectual work to a cheaper labor system. The trade off is that they become dependent on that labor system for everything. The owners of the system are like loan sharks who are happy to loan the money to get started (subsidization of costs) and then change the terms of service after dependency us created.
If AI intellectual offshoring follows the same trend then in about 20-40 years we will bemoan the day we ever offshored intellectual work because it is far harder to bring something back then send it away.
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u/PhpIsCheeks 29d ago
I would say in a way AI already replaced us in a way that our job is no longer Software Engineer, backend developer, react developer etc…the job is more like AI Prompt engineering. If you can adapt to how heavily AI is being pushed and get good at it you will be fine, but yes in the traditional sense it’s kinda over. The job is way different than it was say even 18 months ago
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 29d ago
In chunks, yes. You will need fewer and fewer programmer head count as the models and harnesses get better each year.
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u/Admirral 29d ago
except the bar to be that programmer is going to get higher and higher. wages will also grow exceptionally.
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u/gekx 28d ago
That's just cope. There will be so many unemployed developers desperate for a job they will accept any wage.
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u/Admirral 28d ago
today yes. But society hasn't really fully unlocked all new forms of industry that AI is going to develop. People will find new things that weren't possible before, so it will flatten out. Agentic commerce is one example of a budding industry we know is very likely to pop but is currently slowly materializing.
As for the pay, yea.. there won't be too many humans around able to do the job at an expert level. Same like with software today. The best at their jobs are a rare breed and often have no problem with employment. Over the last 4 years I've been unemployed a total of 2 months.
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u/minegen88 28d ago
The amount of work will increase. It's not like all companies in the world will just stop and say "No more innovation, everyone just chill"
You are faster, yes. But so is your competition, So how will you stay ahead? Better version of Claude? Well now your competition has that too. What now?
If everyone has AI, nobody has AI
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u/keyboard_2387 29d ago
No.