I'm very curious to see how this will affect the job market. All the recent CS grads, all the coding bootcamp graduates - where would they end up in? And then there's medium/senior engineers that would have to switch how they work to oversee the hordes of AI agents that all the hype evangelists are pushing on the industry.

Not an employee market, that's for sure.

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noduerme 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>> oversee the hordes of AI agents

This is the thing I don't really get. I enjoy tinkering with AI and seeing what it comes up with to solve problems. But when I need to write working code that does anything beyond simple CRUD, it's faster for me to write the code than it is to (1) describe the problem in English with sufficient detail and working theory, then (2) check the AI's work, understand what it's written, de-duplicate and dry it out.

I guess if I skipped step 2, it might save time, but it would be completely irresponsible to put it into production, so that's not an option in any world where I maintain code quality and the trust of my clients.

Plus, having AI code mixed into my projects also leaves me with an uneasy sense of being less able to diagnose future bugs. Yes, I still know where everything is, but I don't know it as well as if I'd written it myself. So I find myself going back and re-reviewing AI-written code, re-familiarizing myself with it, in order to be sure I still have a full handle on everything.

To the extent that it may save me time as an engineer, I don't mind using it. But the degree to which the evangelists can peddle it to the management of a company as a replacement for human coders seems highly correlated with whether that company's management understood the value of safe code in the first place. If they didn't, then their infrastructure may have already been garbage, but it will now become increasingly unusable garbage. At some point, I think there will be a backlash when the results in reality can no longer be denied, and engineers who can come in and clean up the mess will be in high demand. But maybe that's just wishful thinking.

	▲	Ronsenshi 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm in the same boat. Too often for me it feels easier to write code that I want to see by myself instead of opening some AI tool where I would have to describe what I need in plain English. After which I'd still have to review the code to make sure it does do what was requested. Perhaps you have to be certain type of person or work in a peculiar company where second step (review) can be ignored as long as AI says that it does. Hardcore YOLO life.

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ej88 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the top % of talent is still extremely hard to get, perhaps moreso

saw an article recently where every sector is seeing a reduction in IT/devs except for tech and ai companies

if your company is in a sector where eng is a cost-center and the product is not directly tied to your engineers / your company is pushing for efficiency it's an employer's market