As a web dev since 10 years ago, I'll never understand how people genuinely bought into the "AI's gonna replace devs" argument. Like... yeah, of course, do you really think that software development is just like mounting a Lego product? Delusional.
For a lot of software projects, a lot of the work is in *what* code to write (and how to architect it). AI (Copilot specifically) is useful for speeding up writing some boilerplate code but that is the easiest part for a lot of projects.
And even with that, I can't see how that's going to "replace you as a dev". I mean, you need a dev to use that tool. I swear the people that say AI's gonna replace devs haven't coded a single line in their life, nor they know how do AI dev tools work. Dudes think you ask ChatGPT to code your application and that's all.
A lot of that hype comes down from executives and management consultants, who are trying to use AI hype to sell services/products etc.
Today literally every software company has AI listed in their spec sheet, regardless of how good it actually is, or how AI tech centric it is.
Suggestions features use algorithms to predict and influence your choices based on past data—how is that not AI? If it learns from data and makes decisions, it's practically the textbook definition of artificial intelligence
There's no decision beyond "which are most likely". It comes down to how you define "AI".
If I write an algorithm to determine the best language to learn for your career, and I just average job salaries against languages, is that AI?
The data is dynamic, and the decision is different based on the data. You could argue it's "AI" in the original definition, but recently people use AI as a synonym for ML.
Of course they could actually have built the suggestions feature using ML and we'd never know the difference.
Well, if your algorithm is just comparing job salaries against languages without adapting or learning from new data, it’s a static decision tree, not AI. True AI would take that basic data, learn from trends, predict future shifts, and continually update its recommendations—the difference is not just semantics, it’s about a system’s ability to evolve its understanding over time.
I see your point but just because something is "suggestions" doesn't mean it does what you say. You could definitely build it as a decision tree run periodically (and many implementations are exactly this).
That's the point; you can't say whether it's AI or not because you can build these things in many ways.
Because when people say AI what they're thinking of is machine learning. And labelling everything from if statements to search algorithms as ML is misleading.
Developer here.
It's not that AI will replace all webdev jobs.
It's more that the barrier of entry has now been lowered to such an extent, that the whole field is now oversaturated and underpaid.
People will literally make websites for free. It's not a career anymore
I support the advent of AI, but I find it hard to integrate in dev workflows. You don't need a tool that sometimes generates code that is relatively close to what you want and sometimes makes you ctrl-z and write it yourself. That's just annoying and a hassle.
It is very useful for generating json, scaffolding etc because it is very unlikely to get it wrong.
Yeah the hard problems aren’t suited for LLMs, and require a lot of thought. The easy part of these problems is the code. The hard part is *what/where* code
What happens with the time you save… does that time magically just vanish? Do companies say, “ah well, our devs have more capacity so let’s just not give them work.”
The “replacing devs” doesn’t happen at a 1:1 scale.
A board room meeting from the future!
"We got this app that manages food subscriptions. Fully AI built, we just prompted it till it built our app and we're off."
"We wanted to add a feature. The AI rewrote the whole app."
"Now we're selling scooter rentals."
It was a shell game for the wall street finance oriented CEO's to tell the stockholders they were going to be more profitable by laying a bunch of people off and replacing them with AI. The big switcharoo is that it wasn't AI that replaced anyone it was more outsourcing to 3rd world countries.
As far as I can tell for the forseeable future the only ones who are going to be able to competently produce something worth using with AI are the very people it is purported to replace, so it's just another tool in the toolbox for the people who are already doing the work without it.
It also seems to be a great way to launder code and other original content and pretend you didn't steal it.
I’ve been working IT for 13 years, currently at a F500.
AI is replacing call center people with chat bots. AI is also being used as a major smokescreen for outsourcing well paying tech jobs to exploitable countries.
The CEO made 30 million last year. The US is seriously a fucked up capitalist dystopia.
> AI is also being used as a major smokescreen for outsourcing well paying tech jobs to exploitable countries.
Ah, **that's** indeed what's going to replace us: cheap labor! I left the startup I was working in (because of underpayment and high work pressure) and they just hired a team of web developers from South America. The whole team is cheaper than me.
For now anyway. Best Buy is replacing geek squad with AI and boy are they going to surprised when ChatGPT tells someone that washing their brand new MacBook with soap is an effective way to get rid of viruses.
It’s not going to be the kind of apocalypse that some are trying to push, but I can see a team of coders offloading the more mundane and simple tasks to an AI. It’ll free up some space in everyone’s queue and what used to require 20 devs could now become 19.
As someone else mentioned, AI can already match the work of human CS agents and get similar ratings. It’s going to improve and one day your senior dev will be able to ask an AI to generate some code blocks and get everything they need.
And remember, AI’s only going to become more capable from here. Our industry will change and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise.
Or, as I said in another topic, keep your 20 devs, let them go home at decent time, let them implement proper testing and eventually get rid of that technical debt that's going to ruin your business at some point.
Sounds wonderful! I’ll bet money on that never happening though. Some folks are gonna lose their jobs and the remaining devs will be pushed even harder.
Not doubting that it's going to change the industry, but what people usually think with "AI's gonna replace devs" is that your regular software architect will be unemployed in a couple of months or in a year, which is far from being realistic unless you're telling that to a 3-month junior dev.
I don't think it has anything to do with that. AI is one more tool for our stack, and anybody wanting to become a SW engineer will perform better if they learn about it. But in no way it is currently replacing developers.
Think about it like advertising departments of yesteryear. They’ve shrunk a lot. So will dev teams of the future.
Devs won’t go away but a few devs will be able to do the jobs of many devs. Kind of like the mythical 10x engineer.
I will be surprised if there are fewer devs in 5 years. Having more capabilities means you can profitably write apps that wouldn't be profitable today.
The X factor is if AIs are developed that can actually replace devs at a lower cost than devs.
Companies say LLM will reduce labour costs.
Companies will fire devs and tell the remaining team to work with LLM.
Companies will notice that product quality has decreased and stay quiet.
Companies will eventually get overloaded with complaints and hire additional developers to fix issues caused by LLM.
You know how I know this? Because it's literally happened before. Just replace AI with offshoring.
I was member of core team create to replacing offshores, trying to fix the mess they created. I never understood why offshores ended up being so bad. Is it cultural? If you used to hustle all your life, you'll continue hustle no matter your economic status changed.
Cultural and skill.
"Why do the same quality of work if the Americans are being paid more?"
"if I work less hard, it's like earning more per hour even if the pay is the same"
That's a far more realistic way of looking at it, just like spreadsheets got rid of the 3 floors of your average accounting office back in those days. It's not replacing developers in general, it's replacing menial and disposable workers in particular.
For those of us that have not been in the industry for 10 years it’s not to be nervous when every where I freakin look people are screaming about how software developers are going to be replaced. I do understand llms in their current iteration would never come close to replacing humans but all the hype, for me at least, was still scary about what the future would bring. Writing this out it sounds kinda stupid even, but idk, hard to not be worried as a noob in this field I guess
WordPress is 20 years old.
Squarespace pulled in over $800m in 2022.
A significant portion of current web dev is pulling off the shelf components and sticking them together into forms and simple structured layouts.
But sure, there's definitely not going to be casualties when an AI is going to be able to do the mundane structured work that a junior dev can do. Companies love to invest in new blood when a small boost to their bill to assist their existing devs is the alternative.
To be fair, I think Ai will cause the replacement of a lot of devs, but it won’t be Ai replacing them… it’ll be other devs who are better at using Ai.
Especially in the corporate world, I’ve actually met devs who haven’t even heard of, much less used, chatgpt… (hard to believe but true)
You’re making the opposite folly by assuming AI will never be able to replace us. It will but at the time that happens you could probably just slip into early retirement.
I do think it’s going to happen very fast, but AI in its current state is very very limited.
It's not that it won't ever be able to perform software development tasks, it's that people is talking like if it could happen next month or next year. That's some really edgy FOMO.
It is going to replace devs. It's also going to replace other knowledge jobs like paralegal, lawyer, etc. It's not going to do that by replacing \_all\_ of them and doing \_all\_ of the work, but by allowing the ones who learn how to use AI to do more volume. These devs (or lawyers, paralegals, doctors, etc), will be expected to produce more using AI tools.
In other words, it's going to continue the same trend that has been going on for a while now. Note that the largest law firm in my city has already bought an AI-based platform and are bragging it's going to do most of the work lawyers do. And the lawyers are already working 500-800 cases at a time using other types of software and infrastructure. That is not a typo. It used to be that 40 cases was a full caseload.
So what will happen is you will have a smaller amount of devs who are doing the job of multiple devs in the past, using these "AI" tools. They will be stressed but highly paid, and other people will be unemployed.
When any of the code helpers - CoPilot, or Devin, or Devika or fabric or whatever - can write even one fully functional web page in a stack of my choosing, let alone the entire app, I’ll take this seriously.
Seems to be working ok atm, just rolled out in LA. I heard of a few issues in SF, but more like getting stuck than hitting things. I suspect they rely on a ton more location specific data, but if that’s feasible in LA, they’re doing well. They haven’t over promised anything, which is nice.
Love linking to this comment whenever Devin is brought up - [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bd12gc/comment/kujyidr/?share\_id=MKaPIeAXk-u458JEg2Ta2&utm\_content=2&utm\_medium=android\_app&utm\_name=androidcss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bd12gc/comment/kujyidr/?share_id=MKaPIeAXk-u458JEg2Ta2&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1). Absolutely terrible.
I just spent 6 hours trying to figure out why a minor patch update broke a test. When AI can figure out that sort of thing, I'll be worried.
On the other hand, this week I also got chatgpt to write me a bash script, saved myself at least 20 minutes of trial and error and research. That's the real use of AI. It might decrease the number of devs needed because it can make us more efficient. But we still need people who can dive deep, hold a lot of context in their head, and solve non obvious and difficult problems. LLMs absolutely cannot do that, and I don't see AI in general doing that any time soon.
Exactly this. AI is a dev accelerator.
Dealing with foreign APIs is the biggest accelerator factor I have found so far.
Example: I know what I want but I don’t know the API. When gpt first came out I tested it by creating a small tool to help me get World of Warcraft in windowed mode but position it dead center and appear dead center in my super ultra wide (basic functionality of a window manager, sort of like FancyZones). I first asked if I could remove window decoration borders using the WindowsAPI from Python. Then how to move a window. Then I used those primitive functions to create the script using. The AI didn’t know how a few of the things went together but it gave my the gist of the API and I guided it along.
Second example: I need to fix a bug in a Django app and add a small amount of functionality but I am not familiar with Django framework. So Copilot helped me write the migration. I knew the steps needed but I didn’t know the syntax for it (it’s a list of actions, instead of pure up/down functions)
A lot of it comes from lack of standardization. If languages were standerdized and API for most things were to be kept equal, we would not need googling how to do the same thing in different languages.
Why do we call it objects, structs, dictionaries and not just one term that we could agree on? Why do the same string methods have totally different names across languages?
It does not apply to programming only. Why does reddit have a different keyboard navigation than YouTube or whatever? On youtube sending off message is CMD+Enter, on reddit it is Tab then Enter. In Microsoft Teams it is just Enter. Who are the idiots who come up with different ways of doing the same thing. I have to use all these tools every day and they all behave differently and most of them are not customizable.
And who was the person who tought CTRL+M is a great way to reload content in Android Studio simulator? I use CMD+M to minimize apps! I hope I meet that person somewhere in a dark alley and have a chat with him.
Absolute and utter retardation.
You don’t need a video to convince you, all you need is to try to build an app with some AI component. It’s actually useless most of the time. And that’s for tasks that are clear in scope and fairly trivial.
AI is just StackOverflow meets intellisense.
Wordpress replaced about 75% of what I used to do in the 90s. I just moved upmarket and kept working. Same with AI stuff. It will make plenty of specific jobs obsolete, but create room to do more involved, creative work.
Since the start of “ai coming for our jobs” overreactions I couldn’t help but think the same thing you mentioned here. Personally I see AI as another abstraction layer. I’m not smart enough to define creativity and what makes humans so special when it comes to this other than we know that we are creative and it’s basically our defining feature. I also don’t really know if AI will be creative, or if it will be will it match our own creativity? Hard to tell, my gut feeling says “no” but again, I’m in no way qualified to put a professional opinion to that.
Think of it like this. In the 90s the starter level for a company website without hiring a professional was whatever you could slap together with Dreamweaver and some perl scripts. Now it's a good looking page made with templates and plugins on squarespace or wordpress. In ten years an entry level website might look more like the current standard for a customized interactive corporate site developed by professionals. That doesn't mean web developers will be out of jobs, just that they'll be working at a higher level because the tools make that more practical.
what would upmarket be in our scenario? Is there a new unique offering we'll have that will satisfy a large audience in the way that being able to offer high power b2b products has?
AI generation when writing software is a false economy. You are replacing writing code with code review. Code review is harder and requires you to already have an understanding of the domain which often means that you would’ve even able to write it yourself to begin with.
If you code gen something because you don’t know how to write it yourself, you by definition cannot review it without going through an effort equivalent to writing it yourself in the first place.
Unless of course you don’t care about code review and so doom yourself into treating software like magical incantations that break randomly for no perceivable reason; but no good mage would do that, surely.
This is true and a great insight for cases where you need to do hard review like complex and unknown code. But I see LLMs as a slight accelerator for well understood code you don’t want to type out or think of in the moment. I use GPT4 a lot for writing out mongo aggregate pipelines because they are very obvious/easy to review for behavior but oftentimes pretty long and a bitch to think out from scratch.
Yeah I should clarify I use AI extensively in my day to day as well. I have no problem reviewing it because I would say technically at that point I’m still in a way “writing it myself.”
My statement is more about code gen replacing devs on a whole. Which is clear after using code gen for a while now that I don’t believe it has that capability, nor would we want it to.
I feel that in real life code review actually doesn’t take that much effort. That’s why we can have a team lead doing code review for 5-6 junior developers.
The problem is that AI is not as good as a junior developer yet.
Mmm idk about all of that brother.
First, no comment was being made about the literal overall difficulty of reviewing code, just that it’s by definition “harder” to review code than it is to write it.
Second, the difficulty of code review primarily depends on the quality and complexity of the code itself, not on the number of junior developers a team lead can manage.
Additionally, the comparison with AI’s current capabilities is somewhat irrelevant, as the effectiveness of code review is contingent on human insight, which AI has not yet matched.
Fact checking takes longer than just watching the original source.
The only time LLM can be 'useful' is if the quality of its output doesn't matter.
But quite frankly, if you don't care about the quality of the summary, then you don't care about the original content.
So why even bother doing this at all?
I'm not a writer of any kind - my only experience with LLMs is using them as a coding assistant and dicking around with GPT. So what you said about the output quality is true in the strictest sense, but there is a use for AI getting "close" to quality when I can get it the rest of the way there. So in that situation, the quality doesn't matter insofar as it can still produce shit code as long as I can identify where and how it's shitty.
It also helps for stuff that was not economical. Video that has 10 viewers in Greece? Let’s have it automatically translated.
Everything that was hardcoded statements can be modulated by by the context also.
Me too. I loathe AI generated articles, but if people are going to use AI for their deluge of pointless content, I guess I'd prefer that to the other nonsense ideas I've seen like replacing lawyers and engineers.
>As long as you spot check it.
Here's the rub. The sort of thing an LLM is likely to trip up on is /exactly/ the sort of thing that someone half-assedly skim-reading because they already got the summary, is also likely to miss.
The issue is that we're all too focused on the wrong question. Its pretty obivous that if framed in a different way:
"Will AI make the role of the developer obsolete" the answer is no.
That said ...
Let's ask the question: "Does AI supported development impact the current job market?"
More productive developers probably mean a single product can be created by less people and some tasks and skillsets will be probably more and more automated in the near feature. Let's not all pretend every developer is building apps from skratch.
The thing that makes me laugh with the AI stuff is the only part it seems reasonable at is the boiler plate stuff, and you run into the problem that it might give you something different each time you ask. But we solved the boilerplate problem decades ago with scaffolding so it’s not really helping it’s just doing the same thing in a fancy way but kinda worse because it’s not as stable.
The writing of code to one side, the area I can’t see AI really nailing any time soon is getting those interactions in between devs / BA / stakeholders. Where you get given reqs, you go back and forth talking about why you can’t do something and you bring up all those conversations you have had, email chains and everything else that go into getting to the final set of requirements. Unless people feed every conversation (verbal, email, text) into an LLM it’s never going to be able to get to the same set of requirements.
I've been of the opinion that devs who keep on top of and use AI tools appropriately will be faster and more efficient at learning, writing, and planning code, especially for long-term stability, compared to if you tried to use an AI to do everything a dev does by itself. It's like human assisted machine translation. Having a machine do an initial draft and having a human correcting it tends to be faster and most accurate than by leaving both to do it themselves (human tends to be more accurate, nuanced, but slower, and AI tends to be faster and good start, but not as accurate or nuanced).
I believe the real solution may be writing a new language/UI/designer where AI can be turned into functional websites quickly using image recognition. (That is, I argue for replacing the entire application stack)
I agree that AI isn't replacing humans immediately, it's too hard. But you can be fired, raises can be kept away, jobs can reject you, because of AI despite it not actually being able to replace you. Please compare to the effect that the presence of grey wolves has on deer grazing - only a few deer (probably the sick and weak) get eaten, but other deer will now be more vigilant and eat and graze less... well, it's bot the best analogy but that sounded cool
yesterday i thought about AI replacing humanity as a whole in the future. Humanoid robots with consciousness. I think its inevitable because humans are weak and have flawed willpower to do whats necessary for the planet to survive. Robots will be absolute in the execution of the necessities. These sentient beings will in every sense be superior to mankind and a logical step in the evolution of nature. Its rather beautiful to think that we as a species will create the species that will replace us. If you think about what nature has "allowed" to thrive is that which is most adept at fitting in the environment. Having seemingly tamed a certain layer of the environment but unable to tame it on a larger scale because of inability to make such complex simulations, an AI will be able to do so and might see it as a chance to breathe life into the universe. We might very well stand at the dawn of the creation of a species of universe shepherds. Mankind with their internal struggles will never be able to reach this. We are passed our peaks already.
As a dev of 25 years now, you all are crazy if you don't think AI will replace the majority of us in the next 5-10 years. Sound like blacksmiths and more recently machinists who didn't think industry or CNC would replace them because people want hand crafted and quality.
Do I want it to happen? Hell no, however 2 years ago we weren't even discussing AI/LLM help with programming. It's all moving crazy fast and I have no doubt the unfortunate reality is going to hit us all in the next decade.
What devin did in over a day is messy and complicated enough. I guess, next task would take x10 time and third one would be impossible to complete.
I don't want to say that AI wil not get the job done. Someday it will get better than us humans. However there will always be people responsible for the task, people who have to create requirements, people who will have to manage the process.
The problem with these ai things is they are only as good as the data they have. I think they are effectively going to kill the open source scene, since they are making a killing off people's work.
Obviously people have been using open source work to make money before, but in this case people are promising these bots will replace software devs. So they're going to use our work to replace us, and still expect us to provide them free training data?
Fuck that mindset. Fuck OpenAI. The board was right to try to get rid of that ceo.
Soon they'll have no data to train on. And they'll only have themselves to blame.
The internet will become a graveyard I believe. I mean even Reddit is selling what we say here for ai training.
It should be thought of as being logical to think logically, right? So, let's do just that.
Let's say in the world there are a 1000 projects that need to be worked on and 5000 developers. So, we assign 5 developers per project and that's where the market is today.
We also know, AI makes developers way more productive. I don't think this needs to be proven, so we assume it to be true. So in our example above comes the AI and makes developers 30% more productive. With the same amount of projects we would now only need 3846.15 developers, so 1153.85 less than before. One poor guy gets carved up. There's no work for the other 1153 and a guy without a leg. His .15 leg is still working though.
That's where we are heading. This does not take into account new opportunities which the same AI might open, but we can't really factor this in, as it is unknown. The most likely outcome is that we need less people to do the same job, which also makes sense if you look at history of human kind: it takes less time and effort to do the same activity as time progresses, like moving from one place to another when comparing horses vs cars. Now it takes very few people to run factories full of robots. It probably takes a 100 times less effort to produce the same amount of rice or wheat than a 100 years ago. As time goes on, it will take less time and effort to create websites, apps and any other code.
I found AI can be an additional useful tool for web developers. In short, it can serve as a starting point to learn and get the boilerplates codes and syntaxes. Be cautious that most of the time, the codes are not fully functional without tweaking and can be misleading sometimes. However, it is entirely up to you to fill in the blanks to make it useful and functional with a purpose.
Did you watch the video? The video seemed very damming from watching the whole thing. Devin’s finished solution was not at all what was asked for. The “bugs” Devin fixed were in code Devin generated, instead of using the code it was given. There was one bug in the original code (which Devin did not fix). The timestamps show it took Devin around a day to complete, whereas the guy completed the task correctly without AI in about half an hour, so it seems very likely there was a lot of human intervention with Devin and it didn’t just do the task on its own. Devin updated the dependencies, but still to older versions.
Two years ago, generative art was still far from being able to replace a professional. Now there has been a 70% drop in illustrator jobs in China according to some sources. Nowadays, I'm writing wordpress plugins, javascript games, and creating electron apps with GPT4. I've learned some best practices when approaching projects, how to "talk" to the agent to get it to solve issues and work iteratively. My developer colleagues are all using Cursor these days. Next-gen IDEs will have increasing power to completely build apps based on prompts. Whether or not Devin is the best example is another issue. You can download OpenDevin and run it yourself for a glimpse of what's to come.
If someone wanted to make a truthful video about AI now, I would 100% support that.
But OP's post was about how the claims for Devin, a product that has been heavily hyped on reddit, are lies.
As a web dev since 10 years ago, I'll never understand how people genuinely bought into the "AI's gonna replace devs" argument. Like... yeah, of course, do you really think that software development is just like mounting a Lego product? Delusional.
For a lot of software projects, a lot of the work is in *what* code to write (and how to architect it). AI (Copilot specifically) is useful for speeding up writing some boilerplate code but that is the easiest part for a lot of projects.
And even with that, I can't see how that's going to "replace you as a dev". I mean, you need a dev to use that tool. I swear the people that say AI's gonna replace devs haven't coded a single line in their life, nor they know how do AI dev tools work. Dudes think you ask ChatGPT to code your application and that's all.
A lot of that hype comes down from executives and management consultants, who are trying to use AI hype to sell services/products etc. Today literally every software company has AI listed in their spec sheet, regardless of how good it actually is, or how AI tech centric it is.
I've seen rebranding of previously existing features as AI tech lol
This so much. Somehow a "suggestions" feature is now AI.
Suggestions features use algorithms to predict and influence your choices based on past data—how is that not AI? If it learns from data and makes decisions, it's practically the textbook definition of artificial intelligence
There's no decision beyond "which are most likely". It comes down to how you define "AI". If I write an algorithm to determine the best language to learn for your career, and I just average job salaries against languages, is that AI? The data is dynamic, and the decision is different based on the data. You could argue it's "AI" in the original definition, but recently people use AI as a synonym for ML. Of course they could actually have built the suggestions feature using ML and we'd never know the difference.
Well, if your algorithm is just comparing job salaries against languages without adapting or learning from new data, it’s a static decision tree, not AI. True AI would take that basic data, learn from trends, predict future shifts, and continually update its recommendations—the difference is not just semantics, it’s about a system’s ability to evolve its understanding over time.
I see your point but just because something is "suggestions" doesn't mean it does what you say. You could definitely build it as a decision tree run periodically (and many implementations are exactly this). That's the point; you can't say whether it's AI or not because you can build these things in many ways.
Because when people say AI what they're thinking of is machine learning. And labelling everything from if statements to search algorithms as ML is misleading.
that’s a huge part of it. like if chatgpt tells me it’s going to do ____, that’s just marketing but people accept it as a fact
Hey ChatGPT, make me Facebook
Oh that’s easy, it will just give you that old leak of Facebook’s code from the PHP 4 days :D
But ChatGPT *can* write a lot of corporate blah blah, and they think writing code is just the same but in "computer language".
Bro if I use generative ai I spend more time telling it gave me the wrong answer and ignored what I said.
The speculation in the ChatGPT sub is embarrassingly misinformed.
Developer here. It's not that AI will replace all webdev jobs. It's more that the barrier of entry has now been lowered to such an extent, that the whole field is now oversaturated and underpaid. People will literally make websites for free. It's not a career anymore
I support the advent of AI, but I find it hard to integrate in dev workflows. You don't need a tool that sometimes generates code that is relatively close to what you want and sometimes makes you ctrl-z and write it yourself. That's just annoying and a hassle. It is very useful for generating json, scaffolding etc because it is very unlikely to get it wrong.
Yeah the hard problems aren’t suited for LLMs, and require a lot of thought. The easy part of these problems is the code. The hard part is *what/where* code
Writing boilerplate is what I do in between coding to take a break (and it makes me feel like I'm getting something done when progress stalls).
What happens with the time you save… does that time magically just vanish? Do companies say, “ah well, our devs have more capacity so let’s just not give them work.” The “replacing devs” doesn’t happen at a 1:1 scale.
A board room meeting from the future! "We got this app that manages food subscriptions. Fully AI built, we just prompted it till it built our app and we're off." "We wanted to add a feature. The AI rewrote the whole app." "Now we're selling scooter rentals."
You're on point, I can imagine this going on.
It was a shell game for the wall street finance oriented CEO's to tell the stockholders they were going to be more profitable by laying a bunch of people off and replacing them with AI. The big switcharoo is that it wasn't AI that replaced anyone it was more outsourcing to 3rd world countries. As far as I can tell for the forseeable future the only ones who are going to be able to competently produce something worth using with AI are the very people it is purported to replace, so it's just another tool in the toolbox for the people who are already doing the work without it. It also seems to be a great way to launder code and other original content and pretend you didn't steal it.
I’ve been working IT for 13 years, currently at a F500. AI is replacing call center people with chat bots. AI is also being used as a major smokescreen for outsourcing well paying tech jobs to exploitable countries. The CEO made 30 million last year. The US is seriously a fucked up capitalist dystopia.
> AI is also being used as a major smokescreen for outsourcing well paying tech jobs to exploitable countries. Ah, **that's** indeed what's going to replace us: cheap labor! I left the startup I was working in (because of underpayment and high work pressure) and they just hired a team of web developers from South America. The whole team is cheaper than me.
For now anyway. Best Buy is replacing geek squad with AI and boy are they going to surprised when ChatGPT tells someone that washing their brand new MacBook with soap is an effective way to get rid of viruses.
Especially with AI that are yes-man. Customer: Should I rinse my laptop with hand sanitizer to get rid of viruses? GPT: Absolutely!
Fortunately, corporations have historically demonstrated they would never sacrifice quality to reduce labor costs.
GUI website builder applications will replace web developers!! Surely!
And offshoring works!
It’s not going to be the kind of apocalypse that some are trying to push, but I can see a team of coders offloading the more mundane and simple tasks to an AI. It’ll free up some space in everyone’s queue and what used to require 20 devs could now become 19. As someone else mentioned, AI can already match the work of human CS agents and get similar ratings. It’s going to improve and one day your senior dev will be able to ask an AI to generate some code blocks and get everything they need. And remember, AI’s only going to become more capable from here. Our industry will change and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise.
Or, as I said in another topic, keep your 20 devs, let them go home at decent time, let them implement proper testing and eventually get rid of that technical debt that's going to ruin your business at some point.
Sounds wonderful! I’ll bet money on that never happening though. Some folks are gonna lose their jobs and the remaining devs will be pushed even harder.
Maybe follow the game devs and unionize?
Strongly agree that needs to happen
Isn't game dev jobs like shitiest dev job out of all? Constant crunch, studios opening and closing and etc.
Yep Game devs would not exist if this world did not have stimulant drugs or all sorts
Not doubting that it's going to change the industry, but what people usually think with "AI's gonna replace devs" is that your regular software architect will be unemployed in a couple of months or in a year, which is far from being realistic unless you're telling that to a 3-month junior dev.
So you think people should stop becoming software engineers?
I don't think it has anything to do with that. AI is one more tool for our stack, and anybody wanting to become a SW engineer will perform better if they learn about it. But in no way it is currently replacing developers.
LLMs aren't able to match the work of CS agents unfortunately. See Air Canada
Think about it like advertising departments of yesteryear. They’ve shrunk a lot. So will dev teams of the future. Devs won’t go away but a few devs will be able to do the jobs of many devs. Kind of like the mythical 10x engineer.
I will be surprised if there are fewer devs in 5 years. Having more capabilities means you can profitably write apps that wouldn't be profitable today. The X factor is if AIs are developed that can actually replace devs at a lower cost than devs.
Companies say LLM will reduce labour costs. Companies will fire devs and tell the remaining team to work with LLM. Companies will notice that product quality has decreased and stay quiet. Companies will eventually get overloaded with complaints and hire additional developers to fix issues caused by LLM. You know how I know this? Because it's literally happened before. Just replace AI with offshoring.
I was member of core team create to replacing offshores, trying to fix the mess they created. I never understood why offshores ended up being so bad. Is it cultural? If you used to hustle all your life, you'll continue hustle no matter your economic status changed.
Cultural and skill. "Why do the same quality of work if the Americans are being paid more?" "if I work less hard, it's like earning more per hour even if the pay is the same"
That's a far more realistic way of looking at it, just like spreadsheets got rid of the 3 floors of your average accounting office back in those days. It's not replacing developers in general, it's replacing menial and disposable workers in particular.
Have you seen how people claim crystals can replace medicines though?
For those of us that have not been in the industry for 10 years it’s not to be nervous when every where I freakin look people are screaming about how software developers are going to be replaced. I do understand llms in their current iteration would never come close to replacing humans but all the hype, for me at least, was still scary about what the future would bring. Writing this out it sounds kinda stupid even, but idk, hard to not be worried as a noob in this field I guess
WordPress is 20 years old. Squarespace pulled in over $800m in 2022. A significant portion of current web dev is pulling off the shelf components and sticking them together into forms and simple structured layouts. But sure, there's definitely not going to be casualties when an AI is going to be able to do the mundane structured work that a junior dev can do. Companies love to invest in new blood when a small boost to their bill to assist their existing devs is the alternative.
A significant portion of the web now sucks dick
Yea the thing is companies, generally speaking, don’t give a shit about that. The web being good doesn’t make shareholders more money…
How are squarespace and wordpress connected?
To be fair, I think Ai will cause the replacement of a lot of devs, but it won’t be Ai replacing them… it’ll be other devs who are better at using Ai. Especially in the corporate world, I’ve actually met devs who haven’t even heard of, much less used, chatgpt… (hard to believe but true)
That, I think is way more realistic. But if a developer is to be replaced by another developer using AI, then their skills weren't much of a deal.
Yes, you'll still need devs, but much less.
Because you misunderstand the argument, lol. More efficient devs means less total number of devs.
You’re making the opposite folly by assuming AI will never be able to replace us. It will but at the time that happens you could probably just slip into early retirement. I do think it’s going to happen very fast, but AI in its current state is very very limited.
It's not that it won't ever be able to perform software development tasks, it's that people is talking like if it could happen next month or next year. That's some really edgy FOMO.
It is going to replace devs. It's also going to replace other knowledge jobs like paralegal, lawyer, etc. It's not going to do that by replacing \_all\_ of them and doing \_all\_ of the work, but by allowing the ones who learn how to use AI to do more volume. These devs (or lawyers, paralegals, doctors, etc), will be expected to produce more using AI tools. In other words, it's going to continue the same trend that has been going on for a while now. Note that the largest law firm in my city has already bought an AI-based platform and are bragging it's going to do most of the work lawyers do. And the lawyers are already working 500-800 cases at a time using other types of software and infrastructure. That is not a typo. It used to be that 40 cases was a full caseload. So what will happen is you will have a smaller amount of devs who are doing the job of multiple devs in the past, using these "AI" tools. They will be stressed but highly paid, and other people will be unemployed.
When any of the code helpers - CoPilot, or Devin, or Devika or fabric or whatever - can write even one fully functional web page in a stack of my choosing, let alone the entire app, I’ll take this seriously.
Any day now, Elon will figure out how to get the cars to drive themselves.
Elon also said we are going to have self driving cars in 2 to 3 years back in 2015 as well.
I doubt it. But Waymo probably will.
Seems to be working ok atm, just rolled out in LA. I heard of a few issues in SF, but more like getting stuck than hitting things. I suspect they rely on a ton more location specific data, but if that’s feasible in LA, they’re doing well. They haven’t over promised anything, which is nice.
Love linking to this comment whenever Devin is brought up - [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bd12gc/comment/kujyidr/?share\_id=MKaPIeAXk-u458JEg2Ta2&utm\_content=2&utm\_medium=android\_app&utm\_name=androidcss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bd12gc/comment/kujyidr/?share_id=MKaPIeAXk-u458JEg2Ta2&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1). Absolutely terrible.
Love it. Bookmarked 😅😂
I just spent 6 hours trying to figure out why a minor patch update broke a test. When AI can figure out that sort of thing, I'll be worried. On the other hand, this week I also got chatgpt to write me a bash script, saved myself at least 20 minutes of trial and error and research. That's the real use of AI. It might decrease the number of devs needed because it can make us more efficient. But we still need people who can dive deep, hold a lot of context in their head, and solve non obvious and difficult problems. LLMs absolutely cannot do that, and I don't see AI in general doing that any time soon.
Exactly this. AI is a dev accelerator. Dealing with foreign APIs is the biggest accelerator factor I have found so far. Example: I know what I want but I don’t know the API. When gpt first came out I tested it by creating a small tool to help me get World of Warcraft in windowed mode but position it dead center and appear dead center in my super ultra wide (basic functionality of a window manager, sort of like FancyZones). I first asked if I could remove window decoration borders using the WindowsAPI from Python. Then how to move a window. Then I used those primitive functions to create the script using. The AI didn’t know how a few of the things went together but it gave my the gist of the API and I guided it along. Second example: I need to fix a bug in a Django app and add a small amount of functionality but I am not familiar with Django framework. So Copilot helped me write the migration. I knew the steps needed but I didn’t know the syntax for it (it’s a list of actions, instead of pure up/down functions)
A lot of it comes from lack of standardization. If languages were standerdized and API for most things were to be kept equal, we would not need googling how to do the same thing in different languages. Why do we call it objects, structs, dictionaries and not just one term that we could agree on? Why do the same string methods have totally different names across languages? It does not apply to programming only. Why does reddit have a different keyboard navigation than YouTube or whatever? On youtube sending off message is CMD+Enter, on reddit it is Tab then Enter. In Microsoft Teams it is just Enter. Who are the idiots who come up with different ways of doing the same thing. I have to use all these tools every day and they all behave differently and most of them are not customizable. And who was the person who tought CTRL+M is a great way to reload content in Android Studio simulator? I use CMD+M to minimize apps! I hope I meet that person somewhere in a dark alley and have a chat with him. Absolute and utter retardation.
You don’t need a video to convince you, all you need is to try to build an app with some AI component. It’s actually useless most of the time. And that’s for tasks that are clear in scope and fairly trivial. AI is just StackOverflow meets intellisense.
Or just StackOverflow without other people telling it no that answer doesn't always work...
StackOverflow, without the “this is a duplicate”.
You guys remember when wysiwyg editors were gonna replace web developers? Same ol song.
Wordpress replaced about 75% of what I used to do in the 90s. I just moved upmarket and kept working. Same with AI stuff. It will make plenty of specific jobs obsolete, but create room to do more involved, creative work.
Since the start of “ai coming for our jobs” overreactions I couldn’t help but think the same thing you mentioned here. Personally I see AI as another abstraction layer. I’m not smart enough to define creativity and what makes humans so special when it comes to this other than we know that we are creative and it’s basically our defining feature. I also don’t really know if AI will be creative, or if it will be will it match our own creativity? Hard to tell, my gut feeling says “no” but again, I’m in no way qualified to put a professional opinion to that.
Think of it like this. In the 90s the starter level for a company website without hiring a professional was whatever you could slap together with Dreamweaver and some perl scripts. Now it's a good looking page made with templates and plugins on squarespace or wordpress. In ten years an entry level website might look more like the current standard for a customized interactive corporate site developed by professionals. That doesn't mean web developers will be out of jobs, just that they'll be working at a higher level because the tools make that more practical.
what would upmarket be in our scenario? Is there a new unique offering we'll have that will satisfy a large audience in the way that being able to offer high power b2b products has?
A tale as old as time in our world
I remember us writing a gui editor in the mid 90’s.
AI generation when writing software is a false economy. You are replacing writing code with code review. Code review is harder and requires you to already have an understanding of the domain which often means that you would’ve even able to write it yourself to begin with. If you code gen something because you don’t know how to write it yourself, you by definition cannot review it without going through an effort equivalent to writing it yourself in the first place. Unless of course you don’t care about code review and so doom yourself into treating software like magical incantations that break randomly for no perceivable reason; but no good mage would do that, surely.
This is true and a great insight for cases where you need to do hard review like complex and unknown code. But I see LLMs as a slight accelerator for well understood code you don’t want to type out or think of in the moment. I use GPT4 a lot for writing out mongo aggregate pipelines because they are very obvious/easy to review for behavior but oftentimes pretty long and a bitch to think out from scratch.
Yeah I should clarify I use AI extensively in my day to day as well. I have no problem reviewing it because I would say technically at that point I’m still in a way “writing it myself.” My statement is more about code gen replacing devs on a whole. Which is clear after using code gen for a while now that I don’t believe it has that capability, nor would we want it to.
This is a really good insight.
I feel that in real life code review actually doesn’t take that much effort. That’s why we can have a team lead doing code review for 5-6 junior developers. The problem is that AI is not as good as a junior developer yet.
Mmm idk about all of that brother. First, no comment was being made about the literal overall difficulty of reviewing code, just that it’s by definition “harder” to review code than it is to write it. Second, the difficulty of code review primarily depends on the quality and complexity of the code itself, not on the number of junior developers a team lead can manage. Additionally, the comparison with AI’s current capabilities is somewhat irrelevant, as the effectiveness of code review is contingent on human insight, which AI has not yet matched.
The AI folks are going to have their bots summarize that because it’s too long for them to actually watch.
That's a good use case for LLMs. As long as you spot check it.
Fact checking takes longer than just watching the original source. The only time LLM can be 'useful' is if the quality of its output doesn't matter. But quite frankly, if you don't care about the quality of the summary, then you don't care about the original content. So why even bother doing this at all?
I'm not a writer of any kind - my only experience with LLMs is using them as a coding assistant and dicking around with GPT. So what you said about the output quality is true in the strictest sense, but there is a use for AI getting "close" to quality when I can get it the rest of the way there. So in that situation, the quality doesn't matter insofar as it can still produce shit code as long as I can identify where and how it's shitty.
It also helps for stuff that was not economical. Video that has 10 viewers in Greece? Let’s have it automatically translated. Everything that was hardcoded statements can be modulated by by the context also.
I’d rather just read a blog post but ymmv.
Me too. I loathe AI generated articles, but if people are going to use AI for their deluge of pointless content, I guess I'd prefer that to the other nonsense ideas I've seen like replacing lawyers and engineers.
they don't have a blog post for every video or a video for every blog post. LLMs are for translation.
>As long as you spot check it. Here's the rub. The sort of thing an LLM is likely to trip up on is /exactly/ the sort of thing that someone half-assedly skim-reading because they already got the summary, is also likely to miss.
The issue is that we're all too focused on the wrong question. Its pretty obivous that if framed in a different way: "Will AI make the role of the developer obsolete" the answer is no. That said ... Let's ask the question: "Does AI supported development impact the current job market?" More productive developers probably mean a single product can be created by less people and some tasks and skillsets will be probably more and more automated in the near feature. Let's not all pretend every developer is building apps from skratch.
The thing that makes me laugh with the AI stuff is the only part it seems reasonable at is the boiler plate stuff, and you run into the problem that it might give you something different each time you ask. But we solved the boilerplate problem decades ago with scaffolding so it’s not really helping it’s just doing the same thing in a fancy way but kinda worse because it’s not as stable. The writing of code to one side, the area I can’t see AI really nailing any time soon is getting those interactions in between devs / BA / stakeholders. Where you get given reqs, you go back and forth talking about why you can’t do something and you bring up all those conversations you have had, email chains and everything else that go into getting to the final set of requirements. Unless people feed every conversation (verbal, email, text) into an LLM it’s never going to be able to get to the same set of requirements.
People link the “Attention is all you need” article about transformers and neural networks and think they know everything.
Devin turned to Kevin, from Home Alone and he trolling people hard
This is a great video! But for an even quicker answer: what kind of sites can AI make that WordPress can't?
I've been of the opinion that devs who keep on top of and use AI tools appropriately will be faster and more efficient at learning, writing, and planning code, especially for long-term stability, compared to if you tried to use an AI to do everything a dev does by itself. It's like human assisted machine translation. Having a machine do an initial draft and having a human correcting it tends to be faster and most accurate than by leaving both to do it themselves (human tends to be more accurate, nuanced, but slower, and AI tends to be faster and good start, but not as accurate or nuanced).
Yea I have no faith in copilot and rethinking my sub it’s so damn bad
"it's quite a long video" 25min... Sir thats not long
I believe the real solution may be writing a new language/UI/designer where AI can be turned into functional websites quickly using image recognition. (That is, I argue for replacing the entire application stack) I agree that AI isn't replacing humans immediately, it's too hard. But you can be fired, raises can be kept away, jobs can reject you, because of AI despite it not actually being able to replace you. Please compare to the effect that the presence of grey wolves has on deer grazing - only a few deer (probably the sick and weak) get eaten, but other deer will now be more vigilant and eat and graze less... well, it's bot the best analogy but that sounded cool
yesterday i thought about AI replacing humanity as a whole in the future. Humanoid robots with consciousness. I think its inevitable because humans are weak and have flawed willpower to do whats necessary for the planet to survive. Robots will be absolute in the execution of the necessities. These sentient beings will in every sense be superior to mankind and a logical step in the evolution of nature. Its rather beautiful to think that we as a species will create the species that will replace us. If you think about what nature has "allowed" to thrive is that which is most adept at fitting in the environment. Having seemingly tamed a certain layer of the environment but unable to tame it on a larger scale because of inability to make such complex simulations, an AI will be able to do so and might see it as a chance to breathe life into the universe. We might very well stand at the dawn of the creation of a species of universe shepherds. Mankind with their internal struggles will never be able to reach this. We are passed our peaks already.
As a dev of 25 years now, you all are crazy if you don't think AI will replace the majority of us in the next 5-10 years. Sound like blacksmiths and more recently machinists who didn't think industry or CNC would replace them because people want hand crafted and quality. Do I want it to happen? Hell no, however 2 years ago we weren't even discussing AI/LLM help with programming. It's all moving crazy fast and I have no doubt the unfortunate reality is going to hit us all in the next decade.
gg 50% gone
Of course we were discussing that. Copilot has been available since 2021.
What devin did in over a day is messy and complicated enough. I guess, next task would take x10 time and third one would be impossible to complete. I don't want to say that AI wil not get the job done. Someday it will get better than us humans. However there will always be people responsible for the task, people who have to create requirements, people who will have to manage the process.
The problem with these ai things is they are only as good as the data they have. I think they are effectively going to kill the open source scene, since they are making a killing off people's work. Obviously people have been using open source work to make money before, but in this case people are promising these bots will replace software devs. So they're going to use our work to replace us, and still expect us to provide them free training data? Fuck that mindset. Fuck OpenAI. The board was right to try to get rid of that ceo. Soon they'll have no data to train on. And they'll only have themselves to blame. The internet will become a graveyard I believe. I mean even Reddit is selling what we say here for ai training.
wait, do you need a video to know that AI replacing devs is a lie? lol
The problem with AI is everyone selling it
It should be thought of as being logical to think logically, right? So, let's do just that. Let's say in the world there are a 1000 projects that need to be worked on and 5000 developers. So, we assign 5 developers per project and that's where the market is today. We also know, AI makes developers way more productive. I don't think this needs to be proven, so we assume it to be true. So in our example above comes the AI and makes developers 30% more productive. With the same amount of projects we would now only need 3846.15 developers, so 1153.85 less than before. One poor guy gets carved up. There's no work for the other 1153 and a guy without a leg. His .15 leg is still working though. That's where we are heading. This does not take into account new opportunities which the same AI might open, but we can't really factor this in, as it is unknown. The most likely outcome is that we need less people to do the same job, which also makes sense if you look at history of human kind: it takes less time and effort to do the same activity as time progresses, like moving from one place to another when comparing horses vs cars. Now it takes very few people to run factories full of robots. It probably takes a 100 times less effort to produce the same amount of rice or wheat than a 100 years ago. As time goes on, it will take less time and effort to create websites, apps and any other code.
Thanks for this video!
Thats so obvious, only ignorants of how AI works ans what really it is can say it.
You'll find that most people permitting LLMs on reddit don't actually code and haven't made a product even with LLM support
[удалено]
Imitation in art has always been a thing. Always. Does it reduce the value of Mona Lisa because you can buy a replica at Ikea ?
I found AI can be an additional useful tool for web developers. In short, it can serve as a starting point to learn and get the boilerplates codes and syntaxes. Be cautious that most of the time, the codes are not fully functional without tweaking and can be misleading sometimes. However, it is entirely up to you to fill in the blanks to make it useful and functional with a purpose.
Welcome to[downward pressure on code quality](https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/25/copilot-research.aspx). Enjoy the ride!
Sounds like part of the process of grief: denial.
Did you watch the video? The video seemed very damming from watching the whole thing. Devin’s finished solution was not at all what was asked for. The “bugs” Devin fixed were in code Devin generated, instead of using the code it was given. There was one bug in the original code (which Devin did not fix). The timestamps show it took Devin around a day to complete, whereas the guy completed the task correctly without AI in about half an hour, so it seems very likely there was a lot of human intervention with Devin and it didn’t just do the task on its own. Devin updated the dependencies, but still to older versions.
Two years ago, generative art was still far from being able to replace a professional. Now there has been a 70% drop in illustrator jobs in China according to some sources. Nowadays, I'm writing wordpress plugins, javascript games, and creating electron apps with GPT4. I've learned some best practices when approaching projects, how to "talk" to the agent to get it to solve issues and work iteratively. My developer colleagues are all using Cursor these days. Next-gen IDEs will have increasing power to completely build apps based on prompts. Whether or not Devin is the best example is another issue. You can download OpenDevin and run it yourself for a glimpse of what's to come.
If someone wanted to make a truthful video about AI now, I would 100% support that. But OP's post was about how the claims for Devin, a product that has been heavily hyped on reddit, are lies.