The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants.

I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies.

Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each

What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each

What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each

Same number of engineers.

We are about to enter an era of explosive software production, not from big tech but from small companies. I don't think this will only apply to the software industry. I expect this to apply to every industry.

▲ storus an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It will lead to hollowing out of the substance everywhere. The constant march to more abstraction and simplicity will inevitably end up with AI doing all the work and nobody understanding what is going on underneath, turning technology into magic again. We have seen people losing touch with how things work with every single move towards abstraction, machine code -> C -> Java -> JavaScript -> async/await -> ... -> LLM code generation, producing generations of devs that are more and more detached from the metal and living in a vastly simplified landscape not understanding trade-offs of the abstractions they are using, which leads to some unsolvable problems in production that inevitably arise due to the choices made for them by the abstractions.

▲ matwood 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> smaller companies

And large companies. The first half of my career was spent writing internal software for large companies. I believe it's still the case that the majority of software written is for internal software. AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it easier for every company big and small to have custom software for its exact use case(s).

	▲	ch4s3 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it easier for every company big and small to have custom software Big cos often have the problem of defining the internal problems they’re trying to solve. Once identified they have to create organizational permission structures to allow the solutions. Then they need to stay on tasks long enough to build and use the software to solve the problem. Only one of these steps is easily improved with AI.
	▲	dgoldstein0 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And thenb potentially suffer from integration hell. The benefit of using off the shelf software is that many of the integration problems get solved by other people. Heck you may not even know you have a problem and they may already have a solution. Custom software on the other hand could just breed more demand for custom software. We gotta be careful how much custom stuff we do lest it get completely out of hand

▲ kilroy123 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think we were headed that way before LLMs came on to hunt scene.

LLMs just accelerated this trend.

▲ itake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yeah, I agree.

When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

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aurareturn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever.

Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we should even do it.

Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. The original developers left the company. All I know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why. The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change something, I double and triple check the logic and I know how to test the changes.

No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job. But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed drastically and so has my productivity.

When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it wrong or don't know how to use it.

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alternatex 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Now if only companies knew how to correctly assess actual impact and not perceived impact.

	▲	itake 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think this is an AI problem. Even before AI, FANGA companies famously optimize promotions on perceived impact. During the promo review, people will look how many projects were done and the impact of those projects.

▲ roncesvalles 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By and large "AI assistant" is not a real thing. Everyone talks about it but no one can point you to one, because it doesn't exist (at least not in a form that any fair non-disingenuous reading of that term would imply). It's one big collective hallucination.

▲ mirsadm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This seems like a bot comment.

	▲	aurareturn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		So is yours.

▲ lnsru 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That means the system will collapse in the future. Now from bunch of people some good programmers are made. Rest go into marketing, sales, agile or other not really technical roles. When the initial crowd will be gone there will be no experienced users of AI. Crappy inexperienced developer will make more crap without prior experience and ability to judge the design decisions. Basically no seniors without juniors.

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aurareturn 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This implies that writing code by hand will remain the best way to create software.

The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools.

Maybe people will become more of generalists rather than specialists.

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lnsru 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Generalist is not automatically bad. I design digital high speed hardware and write (probably crappy) Qt code. The thing is that I have experience to judge my work. Greenhorns can’t and this will lead to crapification of the whole industry. I often ask AI tools for an advice. Sometimes it’s very useful, sometimes it’s complete hallucination. On average it definitely makes me better developer. Having rather abstract answer I can derive exact solution. But that comes from my previous experience. Without experience it’s a macabre guessing game.

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xienze 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools.

That’s putting it mildly. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an entire generation of software developers who’ve only ever known “just ask the LLM to do it” are unleashed on the world. I think these people will have close to no understanding of how computing works on a fundamental level. Sort of like the difference between Gen-X/millenial (and earlier) developers who grew up having to interact with computers primarily through CLIs (e.g., DOS), having to at least have some understanding of memory management, low-level programming, etc. versus the Gen-Z developers who’ve only ever known computers through extremely high level interfaces like iPads.

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aurareturn 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I barely know how assembly, CPUs, GPUs, compilers, networking work. Yet, software that I've designed and written have been used by hundreds of millions of people.

Sure, maybe you would have caught the bug if you wrote assembly instead of C. But the C programmer still released much better software than you faster. By the time you shipped v1 in assembly, the C program has already iterated 100 times and found product market fit.

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gzread 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Casey Muratori says that every programmer should understand how computers work and if you don't understand how computers work you can't be a good programmer.

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aurareturn 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I might not be a good programmer but I've been a very productive one.

Someone who is good at writing code isn't always good at making money.

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gzread an hour ago | parent [-]

AI slop books made more money than JK Rowling, too.

	▲	aurareturn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe in the future, yea. Most likely not because creating books is much easier now but total reading time can't increase nearly as fast. More books chasing the same amount of reading time.

▲ vjk800 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies.

This would be strange, because all other technology development in history has taken things the exact opposite direction; larger companies that can do things on scale and outcompete smaller ones.

	▲	aurareturn 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		`This would be strange, because all other technology development in history has taken things the exact opposite direction; larger companies that can do things on scale and outcompete smaller ones.` I don't think this has always been true. Youtube allowed many more small media production companies - sometimes just one person in their garage. Shopify allowed many more small retailers. Steam & cheap game engines allowed many more indie game developers instead of just a few big studios. It likely depends on the stage of the tech development. I can see Youtube channels consolidating into a few very large channels. But today, there are far more media production companies than 30 years ago.