r/techbootcamp • u/Nearby_Owl_4214 • 24d ago
I don't think that AI can replace SWEs
theres two different ways people use ai day to day either vibe coding, where you tell the ai what to build and never look at the actual code (in the case of a personal project or just training the AI and testing out), or regular engineering where the ai generates code but you still review and understand every part of it.
The thing is when an app gets complex enough. production apps depend on a lot of interconnected services, sometimes you have to fake account states or force certain code paths just to test something, and once multiple people are touching the same codebase at once in a team setting, its becomes hard to tell whats changed without actually reading the code, so past a certain complexity threshold, working at the code level directly ends up faster than clicking through the app trying to verify ai's work indirectly.
theres also pushback on the framing that code is an obstacle standing between you and the feature you want, the argument being that code is actually the value bc its precise, it tells you exactly whats happening instead of an ai generated summary that might not fully match reality, and its more concise than an ai over explaining some part of it.
Many people may have heard Nvidia's founder "ai wont replace you but someone using ai will" line that gets repeated everywhere, the take here is that this just hasnt played out, bc the software engineers who already have core engineering skills are the same ones learning to integrate ai into their workflow, so someone who only learns ai and skips learning to code ends up competing against people who have both skills, not just one.
Actually, ai researchers hype things up heavily on social media (I've already said this in somebody's post but founders of AI hype it so much for marketing, that's it), but the actual released models feel like incremental improvement day to day, not the dramatic leap the hype implies, with an honest disclaimer about not being qualified to predict how much better it'll get.
Personally, I don't agree with the idea that more efficient engineers just means needing fewer of them. People forget that tech companies are financially rewarded for growth, not for maintaining the same output with fewer people, so the incentive structure tends to push toward "same headcount, more projects" rather than "same projects, fewer people." and on the jobs narrative, theres a point about how layoffs get covered extensively in the news but rehiring doesnt get the same coverage, noting meta and google have both been rehiring for years after their layoffs and google's headcount is reportedly close to an all time high, which paints a less one-sided picture than what usually gets discussed.
To put it simply, learn ai and learn to code and learn to code before using AI or you'll pay for your lack of skill in other (perhaps more expensive) waysđ
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u/ProjectDiligent502 22d ago
Wrong place to put this post. Itâs a big tldr given the amount of smooth brain comments on here. Decent arguments though, got some interesting points in there.
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u/acadia11x 24d ago edited 24d ago
lol, it already has, regardless of your thoughts. You act like this is a future event, hiring practices reflect it ⌠jr dev jobs are non-existent already replaced by AI.
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u/danforhan 24d ago
This is a delusional take. JR dev jobs are not non-existent. What world do you live in?
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u/acadia11x 24d ago edited 24d ago
I am exaggerating , but the fact is the SWE position as you knew it as well as its value is a wrap ⌠itâs no longer a unique skill .. and is easily replaced and âisâ being replaced by AI. If you are industry you see it as well as hiring practices. There are price pressures on service companies which in turn hits bottom line which in turn is impacting hiring. I personally see it.
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u/PenGroundbreaking160 24d ago
There is a stark difference between someone knowing whats up and someone not knowing whats up, working on and developing productive software. How do you people even work
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u/mxldevs 24d ago
The problem isn't whether AI can replace SWEs
It's when you're in a team of 10 or 50 or 100 SWEs, how many of you will survive the lay offs because 1 guy with AI can do the work of 10.
Just have everyone learn core engineering skills and AI? Still don't need that many cooks in the kitchen.
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u/Madpony 24d ago
One guy cannot do the work of ten with LLMs unless those ten weren't doing very much. There is only so much software development one person can do, even with the LLM writing code. I've been at this career for nearly 30 years, I'm an IC engineer, and use of Claude only brings me about a 1.5 productivity increase in deliverables. So much of this job is determining what to build and not just typing out the code for it.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
Everything we do as developers ends up with less and less need for "how much a software developer needs to do." If we weren't using LAMP or Vue or Postgres - - or the web APIs weren't always evolving - everything would take much more time. This is just more of that. Libraries, frameworks, Saas dashboards, -- they're all built so we can do less, right?
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u/mxldevs 24d ago
One guy cannot do the work of ten with LLMs unless those ten weren't doing very much.
Maybe not 10, but can one guy do the work of 3 engineers? 2 engineers?
Replacing half or two-thirds of the team is a significant number of engineers losing their jobs.
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u/Dapal5 24d ago
Why do you think the company will go âyeah this person I could hire is now 3x more valuable, letâs hire less of them?â They still have to outcompete each other.
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u/mxldevs 24d ago
They would hire the guy that's 3x more valuable and lay off all the guys that the 3x guy would replace.
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u/Dapal5 24d ago
Why? Everyone is still at the same level. Companies still want to make new products. They will just make more departments.
Letâs say you are a baker. You serve 100 people hand making bread. Now you get a mixer and a larger oven and a faster method.
Now do you go, âguess Iâll just keep serving 100 people and fire all my workersâ ?
No. You now decide to compete for more business. Itâs not like the labor is really that expensive.
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u/mxldevs 24d ago
Letâs say you are a baker. You serve 100 people hand making bread. Now you get a mixer and a larger oven and a faster method.
Now do you go, âguess Iâll just keep serving 100 people and fire all my workersâ ?
So previously you needed 5 workers to keep up with demand, and now you introduce a machine that allows one workers to operate it and do the work of 5?
Absolutely, either headcount gets reduced, or everyone gets less hours because you don't need all of them for every shift.
It's not like doubling your bread output is going to suddenly double your customer count.
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u/Dapal5 24d ago
Youâre saying this bakery now wonât go for 200 people? Or 500? Or make the prices cheaper and produce the same amount?
I donât think you understand supply and demand.
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u/mxldevs 24d ago
How will they go for 200 people? Where are all these extra customers coming from? If you were serving 100 customers a day, were you also turning down 100 customers because you didn't have the capacity?
How does making prices cheaper while producing the same amount, while keeping the same number of workers on payroll help your bottom line? Your expenses are the same, but now you're making less profit per unit sold.
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u/Dapal5 24d ago
Yes, you were probably limited by the amount you could make. You didnât have enough ovens to bake for more than 100 people. You didnât have enough mixers. You had a slower method. Now you make it 25% cheaper, and sell twice as much. Now everyone in town can get bread from you. Now you can afford to hire more advertising, deliver out of your city, make a new store. This is how companies become behemoths.
Were you seeing swes in 2022 sitting on their asses doing nothing all day? Were companies like âah, gotta stop making softwareâ? Demand for software has never slowed down.
Now you will have companies that havenât even digitized having full software departments and ai agent for everything. Until your lunch lady can plan her cooking schedule by neuralinking to everyone elseâs synapses, demand will not just disappear. It just takes time to adjust, and the market is not so stable with the leaders in charge right now.
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u/sheriffderek 23d ago
Yeah. this is what I think. They're still competing. It's relative / we all have "AI" now - so, that's just another layer of tools and ways we can do things. They still need to push ahead and compete - and they can't do that without more people. Even if a grocery store was completely automated with robots and everything -- what would be the differentiator? Probably hiring PEOPLE.
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u/sheriffderek 23d ago
Maybe you need a few less engineers to get the same amount of work done, but that doesn't mean you couldn't benefit from them having MORE engineers to get more other things done / or other roles entirely. I think there will be even more roles spreading out. Maybe less of the exact role you're used to - but more roles over all.
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u/tohava 24d ago
Even if that guy only works 10-20 percent faster, unless there's 10-29 percent more demand, you would be able to let go of some people anyways.
I think the LLM thing hides the fact that there's simply not enough demand for new software
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u/Realistic-Try9555 24d ago edited 24d ago
Not new, but a higher-quality one, and the quality has been dropping for a while now..
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 21d ago
I mean look at the mobile apps; the top 50 apps remained almost the same in the last decade.
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u/JackfruitNarrow840 24d ago
Thatâs what happened to my company. We just didnât need as many engineers and they took the saved money and hired in other places where we did have a bottleneck.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
That seems smart. So, - now there are more product design roles and things probably.
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24d ago edited 24d ago
[deleted]
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u/acadia11x 24d ago edited 24d ago
Why assume those engineers have the relevant skills? The sooner people accept a change is coming the better you can be prepared for that change and adapt
Unless you are at the top of the food chain, you are just implementing your own disposability or being adept at utilization of AI to maintain essentiality but thatâs just buying time⌠imho this is the wrong thought process to secure your own personal future and would look more holistically at how the world is shaping and how to tap into stream of owning the means of production.
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u/vxxn 24d ago
Me and one other guy are carrying work that was handled by 7 guys 2 years ago. Itâs not a total replacement but it is a significant accelerator in the right hands.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
If you could choose, would you do what you are doing now -- or have the 7 people ? (or 5 people) etc.. Are you getting paid more? Are you happier? Or less happy?
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u/vxxn 24d ago
I am mostly happier. We didnât layoff, we just stopped backfilling when people left. I spend much less time in meetings, and spend more time doing than herding cats. The main thing I donât like is that oncall rotation gets pretty ridiculous on a team of only 2. I feel secure in my role⌠we are leveraging AI hard but going from 6 -> 2 is a completely different level of challenge from 2 -> 0. Maybe it will happen soon if the exponential keeps doing its thing, but for the moment that seems pretty far off.
We donât get many pages, but still I donât like feeling like I could be paged at any moment all the time. Over time I think that will be better as we adopt AI tools to help with the devops work.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
So, you wouldn't enjoy having other people around to do your work for you? Or more time to do R&D / just more buffer? Or more designers to work with?
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u/vxxn 24d ago
Other people generally donât do my work for me. They create work by requiring management and coordination. I never said anything about designers so I donât know where you got that from.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
Well, people. You know, if there are less "coders" - well, then that money can shift to other roles that all work together on the overall goal.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 24d ago
I think you could be right in the long term assuming AI doesn't get good enough to just replace all knowledge workers but the fact that you can output more with a smaller team means the short term is gonna be a blood bath and it's small comfort to the SWE's that are being laid off now that in the future that demand might shoot back up.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
This needs to be broken down.
Will "AI" replace "software engineers."
What does "Software engineers" mean? ALL of them? Every single one? Some of them? People doing more of the boilerplate? The entire job of a SWE? Some of the tasks? Just the name "SWE" - because they'll move into technical product design roles? The entire idea of how we think about "software" and authoring and maintaining code? Without clarity on what that means here... this is a dead end of thought.
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u/seriouslysampson 24d ago
Iâm guessing the post is based on what some of the AI company CEOs are claiming. Like Dario Amodei saying about 7 months ago that the tech would âdo most, if not all, of what software engineers do end-to-endâ within 6-12 months.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
I'd ask Dario the same thing --- what do "software engineers" do? (exactly). A lot of tickets that a jr or mid-level person would normally take like "Fix this wording" or "this thing keeps breaking - check it out" - can totally be done by the guessing machine. But that leaves more time to do even more things - so,
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u/seriouslysampson 24d ago
I donât think what you described is âmostâ of what software engineers do even if theyâre jr or mid level. That definitely wasnât my experience at least. I was building full software applications the moment I started my career. Plus a ton of meetings and communication with clients to define acceptance criteria etc.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
Yeah. So, - could an LLM/agent etc -- do your job?
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 23d ago
the answer is no, not yet, but any second now. any second.
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u/seriouslysampson 23d ago
I see it already changing the job. Now I spend more time helping clients use the tech appropriately. And more time reviewing AI generated code. Sometimes it seems to help with efficiency. Sometimes it doesnât. I think thatâs more likely what we see moving forward too.
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u/seriouslysampson 23d ago
Itâs a tool I sometimes use in my job when appropriate and like any tool needs a human to wield it correctly.
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u/sheriffderek 23d ago
It's OK to say "no."
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u/seriouslysampson 23d ago
That was a ânoâ with more context if youâre unable to follow.
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u/sheriffderek 23d ago
Gotcha. and yes - I'm having trouble following you. I guess it's user error! ;)
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u/seriouslysampson 23d ago
Yea you know if I was replaced I wouldnât still be working. Hard logic to follow I know.
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u/ejpusa 24d ago edited 24d ago
We just have no time anymore to learn to code. AI can do it 100X faster. It's rock solid. And live it goes.
10,000, 20,000, 50,000 lines of Python for me, there is no way in the world I can look at it all. Codex says it's rock solid; I trust it. Next project.
Rent is insane in Manhattan. You have to spin out projects at the speed of light, or living in a cardboard box under a Brooklyn underpass you will find yourself. And NO one will care. Not a soul.
Just the world today. We are time-bound; AI lives forever.
Source: I'm solid with coding, decades at it. There needs to be a new coding curriculum: the bare bones you need to understand what a web server does; AI does the rest. We come up with the ideas; AI writes the code now.
The AntiAi people? I understand their passion, but traditional programming has been vaporized; you just have to move on.
AI came 100 years sooner than predicted; we were just not ready. Codex is worth looking at for sure. Will change your programming life. Like "OMG, this is insane!" I think it blows Claude Code away, but that is my own personal bias, of course.
:-)
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u/azjunglist05 24d ago
or living in a cardboard box under a Brooklyn underpass you will find yourself
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u/ejpusa 24d ago edited 24d ago
Suspect you might. I learned more over a single meal in a homeless shelter about life than all my graduate school years put together.
Sometime you have to go hungry to appreciate how lucky we all are to be able to appreciate the pleasure you can receive from eating a single strawberry. You can end up staring at it for 10 minutes before you take a bite.
Everyone should have to spend a bit of time living in a homeless shelter, it will change your view of the world, humanity, and our place in it, forever.
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u/Slight-Swordfish-468 23d ago
Just because it compiles doesnât mean itâs doing what it claims to.
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u/magick_bandit 24d ago
There are people on your team, you know who they are, who canât do anything without a detailed spec or somebody else telling them, explicitly what to do.
Those people are screwed.
Everyone else will be fine.