[gokhan]

> Not software engineers being kicked out ... but rather experienced engineers using AI to generate bits of code and then meticulously reviewing and testing them.

But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question.

And the author is implementing a fairly technical project in this case. How about routine LoB app development?

[thewebguyd]

> But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question.

This is likely where all this will end up. I have doubts that AI will replace all engineers, but I have no doubt in my mind that we'll certainly need a lot less engineers.

A not so dissimilar thing happened in the sysadmin world (my career) when everything transitioned from ClickOps to the cloud & Infrastructure as Code. Infrastructure that needed 10 sysadmins to manage now only needed 1 or 2 infrastructure folks.

The role still exists, but the quantity needed is drastically reduced. The work that I do now by myself would have needed an entire team before AWS/Ansible/Terraform, etc.

[kentonv]

I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them.

But if the time it takes an engineer to build any one thing goes down, now there are a lot more things that are cost effective.

Consider niche use cases. Every company tends to have custom processes and workflows. Think about being an accountant at one company vs. another -- while a lot of the job is the same, there will always be parts that are significantly different. Those bespoke processes often involve manual labor because off-the-shelf accounting software cannot add custom features for every company.

But what if it could? What if an engineer working with AI could knock out customer-specific features 10x as fast as they could in the past. Now it actually makes sense to build those features, to improve the productivity of each company's accounting department.

It's hard to say if demand for engineers will go down or up. I'm not pretending to know for sure. But I can see a possibility that we actually have way more developers in coming years!

[mikeocool]

Though arguably cloud infra made it so that a lot more companies who never would have built out a data center or leased a chunk of space in one were spinning up some serious infra in AWS or Azure -- and thus hiring at least 1-2 devops engineers.

Before the end of zero interest rate policy, all the sysadmins I knew who the made the transition to devops were never stuck looking for a job for long.

[achierius]

To be clear, the number of people employed as "SREs" or "production engineers" is actually far, far higher (at least an order of magnitude) than in the days before cloud became a thing. There are simply far more apps / companies / businesses / etc. who use cloud hosting than there ever were doing on-prem work.

[tkiolp4]

I don’t think we would need less engineers… the work to be done will increase instead. Example: now it takes 10 engineers to release a product in 10 months without AI. With AI it takes lets say 1 engineer to release the same product in 1 month. What’s the company gonna do now? Release 10 products in 10 months without AI 10 engineers (each using AI).

It’s an exaggeration I know, but you get the point.

[intended]

I’m going to bet that it’s going to need far less AI.

There was another article posted somewhere that made a parallel between the AI hype and no-code, outsourcing and other waves that have come.

[paxys]

Increased productivity means increased opportuntity. There isn't going to be a time (at least not anytime soon) when we can all sit back and say "yup, we have accomplished everything there is to do with software and don't need more engineers".

[spiderice]

But there very well might be a time very soon where human's no longer offer economic value to the software engineering process. If you could (and currently you can't) pay an AI $10k/year to do what a human could do in a year, why would you pay the human 6 figures? Or even $20k?

Nobody is claiming that human's won't have jobs simply because "we have accomplished everything this is to do". It's that humans will offer zero economic value compared to AI because AI gets so good and so cheap.

[simonw]

I guess I have trouble emphasizing with "But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end?" because I'm an open source oriented developer.

What's open source for if not allowing 2 developers to achieve projects that previously would have taken 20?