It's really depressing watching brilliant software developers and engineers producing the worst, unmaintainable code imaginable, and being okay with shipping it because it's passing the test suite. Assuming the test suite is any good anyway (because holy crap, the nonsensical tests AI writes...)

Your code used to be a masterpiece, so well crafted it's easy for AI to tweak and modify because you've got everything so logically organised and scoped... and now this is what you're producing? Hard to debug monstrosities that only an LLM can realistically bolt new features or tweaks onto, because it can do the kinds of refactoring necessary each time.

We use to talk about the fact that code should be readable because you spend more time reading it than writing it, but I think that misses the key part that readable code is also typically easier to debug. If you can read and understand the code, you can follow the logic when things are wrong in production, and you can more easily reason about the emergent properties of interactions between the complex systems that are involved.

this is so accurate it hurts. the amount of my coworkers who just outright have handed any and all thinking over to the computer is staggering. its not just senior either, plenty of devs at the lead and staff level are producing complete garbage that has to be rolled back within an hour of deploy because it is extremely broken, no one verified, and it passed automated checks.

there are several features over the last few months that were obviously made and deployed and no one even launched the dev server and tried a single thing to verify if it was right. just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."

Right, that's a possibility. When that happens we won't need senior software engineers. We won't need a "thriving mathematical community" either.

Would we need doctors, accountants or analysts? Probably not. At some point farming will be fully automated too, and so will grocery distribution and food preparation. At that point we will have arrived in the post-scarcity world. This is the promise of AI.

The problem is that the post-scarcity world will arrive gradually, not suddenly. Some jobs will be automated sooner than others. The ones that are not yet automated will expect payment for services. People who just lost jobs to automation won't have income to pay for those not-yet-automated services. But that's only until all jobs are automated.

There will be tremendous social upheaval and unrest during the transition to post-scarcity world.

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Aren't you forgetting that they need to eat? Pay rent?

> There is nothing preventing Junior Developers to develop their own systems and understand it.

Eh? Apart from it not being what they are paid to do on their 9/9/6 jobs, when will they have the time to make it happen?

What is going to happen is that the remnants of the open source community will do the job of educating juniors for free, when the university degree system collapses. Just like it currently keeps a bunch of systems going with inadequate compensation.

The corporate world gets the problem off its balance sheet. Again.

The argument you respond to here is "it is impossible for anyone to be Junior Software Engineer because AI". That is a straw-man.

The actual argument is "there will be no jobs for Junior Engineers, so there will be far fewer, and as a result there will be a huge shortage of Senior Software Engineers".

You are responding to the problem as if it some kind of extinction event, like a rare bird, where if we can find a breeding population we save the day. A few curious people, self training for the love of the game, and as a result we still have a few Software Engineers so everything is fine. It is not like that, and I haven't heard anyone suggest that is the issue. The potential problem is a massive shortage of workers with skills that are currently essential to the functioning of a large fraction of the economy, whom we might still need in the future.

The continued existence of talented enthusiasts does not establish an adequate workforce pipeline. If paid entry level experience contracts, what replaces it, and why should we expect that replacement to operate at sufficient scale?

Going fast, and sustained speed, are very different things. I've often felt, in many different areas of life, that a shortcut will pay off in the short term, but if you take nothing but shortcuts then you will do terribly long term.

You have to do the hard thing eventually, or you never get anywhere.

Yes. As machhine power and memory increased, and as as programming abstractions advanced, software grew larger and more bloated, therefore what used to run on a single core in KB of RAM now takes multiple cores and GB of ram.

The developers who knew how to write efficient low-level code found that there were no jobs for that anynmore, so today the developers who can work at that level are very few.

The same will happen with AI being the new abstraction. In another decade or two, very few people will be able to write code by hand. We'll need a rack of compute in a data center and multiple KW of power to do what we used to do on a desktop PC drawing a couple of hundred Watts.

Those abstractions are deterministic. LLMs are not.

Why do people think that people displaced by AI in one industry will get a job in another industry?

The entire valuation of the AI industry is predicated on people not just losing individual jobs, but being taken out of the workforce entirely on an economic level.

They are talking about the workforce of the entire economy shrinking. People will lose their livelihoods for good.

This has the potential to be even worse than the second agricultural revolution to industrial revolution phase, which made ordinary workers lives absolutely miserable for maybe a hundred and fifty years.

This time, there will be no jobs. If you are displaced from one industry by AI, you will end up in another industry also being decimated by AI; if you get a job at all, you will do so by working lower pay than other workers, who will in turn be pushed down the ladder.

And that is if you are lucky: if you have only IT skills, why should you be the first to get a fruit picking or plumbing job?

I would argue that how it goes ends up with the main downstream effect of shifting knowledge growth and therefore expertise and therefore economic power away from the people who outsource it and to the people who do that outsourced work.

In this case with AI that power will shift to the companies that run the AIs

> Give it a couple of years and the companies will not need senior software engineers. They will need someone to steer the AI, maybe. Why would anyone need senior software engineers?

Right, companies won't need software engineers. They'll just need someone who can use tools to produce source code and maintain the generated artifacts, plus make domain-specific technical decisions like "what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time" or "how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed".

We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.

Because the models do what you ask them. "Claude, do this thing, be thorough, no mistakes" is not a good prompt.

What do you think "steering the AI" means? It is not like we need someone to sit at a desk and type "yes, implement it". Of course if you are a sane person you mean someone who will determine if the AI is doing "the right thing" and change its direction if it is wrong. That person is almost by definition a senior engineer.

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So how was the result?

It does remain to be seen.

By the progress of AI from ChatGPT to now is horrifyingly fast.

Trendlines and basic reasoning point to a most probable future where the AI is superior. We can’t just say “that remains to be seen” because the alternative is the least probable future.

Anticipate the change and act prior.

This ship kinda sailed when OpenAI came out of the barn by claiming it could replace people. The narrative of the AI bubble has always been this cynical management driven replace your human capital/labor with stupid bots.

Trying to actually get the framing to be more reasonable is just hard because so many people have oversold it and large swaths of the public are sick of hearing about it.

Hopefully, there are some sustainable, profitable companies that keep a low profile now and will take over after the "self correction" happens, and whoever invested in them will become very rich.