[treelover]

"If you're a software developer and you're worried about your job, you haven't spent enough time actually using these AI agents. Anyone who spent eight hours plus a day over the last year using these agents is not at all scared of these agents taking their jobs. They're not... Your job is not going anywhere."

I agree with this take... for now. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI agents improved exponentially (in the next few years) to the point where his statement is no longer true.

[teucris]

Software developers should be worried about their jobs, not because these tools are capable of replacing them or reducing a company’s need for human developers, but rather because the _perception_ that they can/will replace developers is causing a major disruption in hiring practices.

I truly don’t know how this is going to play out. Will the software industry just be a total mess until agents can actually replace developers? Or will companies come to their senses and learn that they still need to hire humans - just humans that know how to use agents to augment their work?

[thefourthchime]

Software development hiring is terrible right now, but hiring has been pretty slow in general. We gained 2 million jobs in 2024 and only 500,000 in 2025.

[AstroBen]

That can't possibly be a long term disruption. If it doesn't work it doesn't work

If AI can't replace developers, companies can't replace developers with it. They can try — and then they'll be met with the reality. Good or bad

[rekabis]

> the _perception_ that they can/will replace developers is causing a major disruption in hiring practices.

Bingo.

And it’s causing the careers of a majority of juniors to experience fatal delays. Juniors need to leap into their careers and build up a good head of steam by demonstrating acquired experience, or they will wander off into other industries and fail to acquire said experience.

And when others who haven’t even gone through training yet see how juniors have an abysmally hard time finding a job, this will discourage them from even considering the industry before they ever begin to learn how to code.

But when no-one is hiring such that even students reconsider their career choice, this “failure to launch” will cause a massive developer shortage in the next 5-15 years, to the point where I believe entire governments will have this as a policy pain point.

After all, when companies are loathe to actually conduct any kind of on-the-job training, and demand 2-5 years of experience in an whole IT department’s worth of skills for “entry level” jobs, an entire generation of potential applicants with a fraction of that (or none at all) will cause the industry to have figurative kittens.

I mean, it will be the industry’s own footgun that has hurt them so badly. I would posit it may even become a leggun. The schadenfreude will be copious and well-deserved. But it’s going to produce massive amounts of economic pain.

[pdpi]

I expect it'll be a sigmoid curve — we're in the exponential growth phase, but it'll flatten out. Then we'll need to wait for the next Big Idea to give us another the next sigmoid.

[throwup238]

That’s what I said about self driving cars nearly a decade ago!

The 80/20 rule is a painful lesson to internalize but it’s damn near a universal constant now. That last exponential improvement that takes LLMs over the finish line will take a lot longer than we think.

[strange_quark]

I think self driving cars is a good analog. We got lane centering and adaptive cruise control pretty much universally, and some systems are more advanced, but you cannot buy a fully autonomous car. Sure there’s Waymo and others pushing at the edge in very very limited contexts, but most people are still driving their own cars, just with some additional support. I suspect the same will be true for software engineering.

[cess11]

I'm not sure what "exponential improvement" would mean in this context, but large models have been a massively hyped and invested thing for what, three-four years or so, right?

And what do they run on? Information. The production of which is throttled by the technology itself, in part because the salespeople claim it can (and should) "replace" workers and thinkers, in part because many people have really low standards for entertainment and accept so called slop instead of cheap tropes manually stitched together.

So it would seem unlikely that they'll get the required information fed into them that would be needed for them to outpace the public internet och and widely pirated books and so on.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Counterpoint…

I am not worried about losing my programming role to AI.

I am worried about hiring employees and contractors. I haven’t had to hire anyone i office since, but I have specially avoided Upwork and new contractors. It’s too hard to tell if anyone knows anything anymore.

Everyone has the right or right enough answers for an interview or test.

The bar to detect bullshit has been moved deeper into the non-detectable range. It’s like everyone has open-book testing for interviews.

Even if I can sus out who is full of shit in a video or phone interview… the number of people I need to sort through is too large to be effective.

For Upwork specifically, this was an issue for years already. With people buying US accounts and lying about their location or subcontracting to cheaper foreign labor.

So, is vibe coding something I want to hire? Absolutely not. But, I don’t see being able to avoid it or at least not suffering from someone cutting corners.