Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
Finally free from the Golden Handcuffs, I’d use my extra time to do something I’ve always wanted, like music production, which would also inevitably be taken over by AI.
They’re probably gonna laugh at the absurdity of the situation because some new popular language will come along and the AI will be back to pushing out broken code. That, or laugh because the code in well used languages will include a shit ton of vulnerabilities that wouldn’t be present if real devs had to double check code before pushing it out to the public.
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When did it ever not push out broken code?
In this hypothetical situation?
In this hypothetical, why would we create new languages? What benefit does that have for AI-gen code?
So either we’re going to improve AI-gen to the point where we rely on it, or human devs are still important in which case new languages matter. The main exception here are languages specifically designed for AI, in which case error-rate would go down.
So either AI pushes out broken code and human devs are still important, or AI doesn’t push out broken code and new languages aren’t valuable.
Someone still has to write the instructions. AI might not become a replacement for the engineer, but a more powerful compiler, that is still fed with code written by engineers.
Yeah, I agree that’s the more likely scenario. People seem to worry way too much about AI, when it’s really only going to replace junior devs, and only for short-sighted companies.
But I mean many people have already lost their job because AI automated it away.
True, and many people have lost jobs because something else automated it away, like toll booth workers, grocery clerks, and telephone switchers, and computers (i.e. people who would compute things by hand).
Jobs disappearing because technology advances is natural. It sucks for those impacted, but it’s natural, and IMO it’s only a problem of new jobs aren’t created fast enough, or whole industries disappear. Fighting to keep jobs in spite of automation runs the risk of having an entire industry disappear, such as if dock workers win the fight to prevent automation on the docks, they’ll just all lose their jobs at the same time once automation can replace them all at once.
The better plan is to adjust and adapt as technology changes. If you’re entering CS or a recent grad, make sure you understand concepts and focus less on syntax. If you’re a mid level, learn to incorporate AI into your workflow to improve productivity. If you’re a senior, work toward becoming an architect and understand how to mitigate risks with poor quality code.
Fighting AI will at best delay things.
I think both can happen at the same time. There’s a lot of fkn nerds out there. (I’m a software developer myself)
They’re going to keep doing their job, good luck to some manager who thinks they can be verbose enough to get their idea across
Fixing broken software some robot pushed to prod
Same thing the rest of us replaced by AI are gonna do: live on the dole or starve
I’m not a programmer, but I don’t think I’d pay for code that was 95% accurate. That sounds buggy af
I am a programmer, and I also wouldn’t stand for that either. We also introduce bugs and are probably around that 95% rate, but at least we know the most important uses are correct and the person who introduced them can usually fix them quickly. With AI, there’s no guarantee where the bugs will occur.
You don’t have to pay for it. The billionaires do, and they will do it without hesitation
Thats a whole lot of heavy assumptions, doing some really heavy lifting.
Ai-herder or Robot-farmer or Llama-raiser etc etc
devs still needed to ensure code is sane and not some insane hallucination.
Coding is just a part of the overall “programming” problem. Most problematic areas are in translating what the customer wants into code (requirements analysis), modifying code to overcome specific constraints, integration, etc and etc
Retire. All I ever wanted to be was a programmer. If I can’t do that anymore I’ll just retire. I’m saving/investing every penny I can just in case.
Same. If I can retire before my job is irrelevant, I’ll work on my own projects on my own terms. If I don’t, at least I have a nice pile of assets and can coast with another job.
That said, I don’t think people like you and I will have problems, because we’ll adapt. It’s the “programming is just a job” crowd that would have a lot of issues.
Once AI can develop code it can be used to improve itself in a feedback loop that would take short time to reach skynet.
We’d be the last of our species once it would want more resources than we’d be able to give it
There is a term but I forget but its something like ai-slop or ai collective hallucinations. If you feed enough ai-gen output back as ai input it becomes some insane garbage.
Writing code is last thing you want to do as senior SWE because every line of code is potential debt and maintenence problem.
The just write code bro, figure out things later attitude is good for R&D, MVP and POC that is like 10% of job.Just like with art, writing code like drawing is just a skill. AI is trying to replace the obvious part (that is actually the reward from thinking and describing problem in your head) because it can’t replace thinking. Removing rewards bring us to depression, depression bring us to death.
Ergo AI will kill economy with no people left to replace it so we will end up to being monkas.
That’s why I’d say SWE will go to farm and wait untill people in cities will start starving to death because AI stopped working and there is nobody left to fix it.It’s funny how all trends extrapolated out lead to the plot of Idiocracy.
Honestly people are getting distracted here. Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive thats a huge boost for smaller companies with only handful of developers.
Many companies are only thinking about reducing costs for themselves but at the same time they’re freeing up a lot of talent for new and old competitors.
Here’s some food for thought:
- Open source developers may use A.I to develop better software to close gap between paid alternatives. (Blender, Gimp, Krita, Linux distributions, mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed)
- Many LLM’s can already be ran freely and locally. These will only get better as technology progresses. This can make selling/profiting from A.I services a lot harder
- A.I may be used to block ads or obfuscate (create bunch of fake data) user data that is sold to advertisers.
- Some media sites are already using A.I to write articles. Whats the point when users may just use chatbot to get all the information without ever wngaging with the source.
These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.
Then I’ll train my own model to make others lose their jobs, too. I bet an AI will then be able to do all calculations a civil engineer can do. Or manage any project.
Not it can’t replace a civil engineer. Gen AI is very bad at math and reasoning. There is a study from Apple about this topic.
I’ll take what money I have stashed away and buy a nice secluded parcel of property with dummy low taxes away from people.
I’ll grow my own food, hunt, forage, etc.
I’ll do odd jobs to fill in the gaps when needed. anything from tech consulting to roof repairs.
I’ll refuse to use any technology unless a job requires it.
and I’ll wait for the inevitable collapse of technological society because a vulnerability was baked into the AI every company is using and nobody knows how to fix it.
I refuse to be a part of a system that denies me a seat at the table.
Combine harvesters are used to till, plow , sow seed , spray, water, reap and manage farms and most livestock have dedicated automated farming tools like cow milkers, feeders, shearers, etc. How long before no humans needed to hunt or forage or farm? When food is even cheaper to produce( of course the ai overlords and ai royalty ) but will hunger games everyone to get the artificially shortage and scarcity farm for vast amounts of resources to select groups.
