[daxfohl]

Nah, it makes teams useless. Maybe not quite yet, but soon, one engineer will be able to do a few sprint teams' worth of work, and deliver features orders of magnitude faster than a team working in parallel. Yeah, generally at first this will be seniors only. But before long, a junior will be able to come in and learn to manage one sprint team's worth of work under the guidance of a senior and partnered with a PM, and grow the product from there. Long term, I imagine 90% workforce reduction will be the norm. Just about all software is a rinse and repeat of some other software, not much true innovation, so picking and choosing and implementing some other software's feature into your own will start to become trivial single-day projects from start to finish. Hopefully AI creates some new industries that SWEs can roll into, but I'm feeling more doomer every day.

[borzi]

Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while to catch on though, for better or worse....

[daxfohl]

Yeah, IMO one of the first things we'll see change is more of a migration back to monoliths. Right now adding a feature has to go through multiple teams, a dozen services, a coordinated implementation and deployment schedule, a Byzantine and often manual set of integration tests, etc. Yeah AI can help with that, but the point is that AI doesn't need it. On a monolith, it sucks for dev teams because parallel development at large scale is difficult and other teams' bugs can delay the launch of your unrelated project. Hence, microservices became popular. With AI, development happens so fast that it's largely serial. So there's no real coordination needed. A whole feature is one PR, one set of tests, one app to run locally if you want, one deployment, one thing to look at and roll back if there's a bug. Creates a virtuous cycle all the way up.

I imagine lots of established companies will struggle migrating back to that pattern, but I have to think most new companies will head in that direction, which should let them catch up quickly.

Anyway that's my take. We'll see.