> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.

You know what they mean by that term, it's about building things without needing to put in the learning effort. I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something they would not have done via learning to code and typing it manually.

It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative difference in the people now able to generate whatever they want versus needing to draw something by hand, so saying "they could've just learned to draw themselves" is not very convincing. People don't want to do that yet still get an output, and I see nothing wrong with that, and if you do, it's just another sort of gatekeeping, that the "proper" way is to learn it by hand.

Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.

Nobody needs to maintain the average painting. The average painting doesn't have security vulnerabilities.

This is like democratizing house building.

> I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding

They are not building anything; they are paying Anthropic to do it.

> Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.

Good luck running them when the megacorporations have bought out all hardware.

Okay, they are paying Anthropic, I don't really care about the semantics when at the end of the day they get an output they didn't get before.

Open weight models run on consumer hardware, if you think corporations will make every single piece of hardware unaffordable then I'm not sure what to tell you.

What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this?

One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume.

But..cost = revenue. What is a cost to one party is a revenue to another party. The revenue is what pays salaries.

So when software costs go down the revenues will go down too. When revenues go down lay offs will happen, salary cuts will happen.

This is not fictional. Markets already reacted to this and many software service companies took a hit.

If AI completely erases the profession of software developer, I'll find something else to do. Like I can't in good faith ever oppose a technology just because it's going to make my job redundant, that would be insane.

Take that to its extreme. Suppose there was a technology that you do not own that would make everyone's job redundant. Everyone out of a job. There is no need for education, for skills to be mastered, for expertise. Would it still be insane to complain?

Then society needs to collectively decide how to allocate resources. Uh oh!

The owners of the AI companies will collectively decide how to allocate resources, rather.

the resources go to the guys with the AI duh

Isnt' that what old-school software did for many years? It used to take jobs, just not from developers. If you implement software that takes accounting from 10 people to 2, 8 just got fired. If you have Support solution helping one support rep answer 100 requests instead of 20, you just optimised support force by the rate of 1 to 5.

I'm in the boat of SaaS myself, but feel a bit dishonesty from Senior devs complaining about technology stealing jobs. When it was them doing the stealing, it was fine. Now that the tables have turned, it's not technology is bad

Jevons' paradox still exists. Making X cheaper (usually by needing fewer people to do one unit of X) can and often does lead to more people being needed for X.

You still need education, skills to be mastered and expertise even in a world without jobs. How would you play any game or sport without skills?

There are bigger issues if everyone is out of a job.

A world where there is no need for work? Oh no, my steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery.

A world where there is no need for workers--not at all the same thing.

You may not end up with a seat at the table.

take that to absolute extreme. Why do we even need a job? If all our physical needs are met maybe humanity can finally focus on real problems (spiritual, mental, inter personal) that no amount of "jobs" can solve...

Because greedy capitalists control the world which means that most people's most basic needs aren't met if they don't have a job.

I believe that if situation gets that bad, then we will actually do some new kind of revolution, even in the West.

There may not be a job for you in an office setting. What would you do?

That's when the problem shifts from individual to systemic, and only systemic solutions fix systemic problems.

I think that a what a lot of anti-AI folks are trying to argue without saying it explicitly is that it already is a systemic problem. They're not necessarily against the technology on its own, but against the systemic problems it would introduce if society doesn't take a stance against it.

I'd buy some good gloves and steel-toed boots.

I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to.

But my take on this is that accountability will still be a purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM, and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3 words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff). When I confronted him about them, he said the AI generated them.

So I told him that:

1. That's not an excuse, his job is to verify what it generated and ensure it's still good.

2. That actually makes it look WORSE, that not only did he do nearly 0 work, that he didn't even check the most basic outputs. And I'm not anti-AI, I expressly said that we should absolutely use AI tools to accelerate our work. But that's not what happened here.

So you won't get to say (at least I think for another few years) "my AI was at fault" – you are ultimately responsible, not your tools. So people will still want to delegate those things down the chain. But ultimately they'll have to delegate to fewer people.

In general I agree. But it’s somehow very unlikely for the AI to generate a three word ticket. That’s what humans do. AI might generate an overly verbose and specific ticket instead.

What drives that behavior is what I like to call human slop :)

>What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this?

I'm assuming that the software factory of the future is going to need Millwrights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwright

But, builders are builders. These tools turn ideas into things, a builders dream.

Just sold a house/moved out after being laid off in mid-January from a govt IT contractor(there for 8 great years and mostly remote). I started my UX Research, Design and Front End Web Design coding career in 2009, but now I think it's almost a stupid go nowhere vanishing career, thanks to AI.

I think much like you that AI is and will just continue to destroy the economy! At least I got to sell a house and make a profit--stash it away for when the big AI market crash happens (hopefully not a 2030 great depression tho). As then it's a down market and buying stocks, bitcoin and houses is always cheaper.

Any given system will still need people around to steer the AI and ensure the thing gets built and maintained responsibly. I'm working on a small team of in-house devs at a financial company, and not worried about my future at all. As an IC I'm providing more value than ever, and the backlog of potential projects is still basically endless- why would anyone want to fire me?

Why would it need people to steer the AI? I can easily see a future where companies that don't rely on the physical world (like manufacturing) are completely autonomous, just machines making money for their owner.

Yours is a naive sight. You learn a bit about engineering and feedback control and realize that the world is too complex for that.

It's easy to imagine but there's still a vast amount of innovation and development that has to happen before something like that becomes realistic. At that point the whole system of capitalism would need to be reconsidered. Not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

> why would anyone want to fire me?

Because they can hire some "prompt engineer" to "steer the AI" for $30-50k instead of $150-$250k.

The difference between having a non-technical person and someone who is capable of understanding the code being generated and the systems running it is immense, and will continue to be so over the foreseeable future.

Just because somebody has a bunch of power tools doesn't mean I'd ask them to build my house.

Anyone that only costs $30k-50k would either be doing this part-time, or have some limit that prevented them from earning $150k-250k.

Or not living in US?

"One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume.

But..cost = revenue."

That is Karl Marx's Labor theory of value that has been completely disproven.

You don't charge what it costs to build something, you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay.

The price is determined by SUPPLY and demand, and being able to write software quickly using LLMS would move the supply curve.

Congrats - you caused me to create an account to reply, due to the sheer density of your incorrectness.

- First, the LTV was not Marx's idea. Adam Smith held the same view, as did many many others during this era. Marx refined this idea, but there's nothing about your point that is unique to his version of it.

- Second, while LTV is not widely used today, this is not because it was "completely disproven" (can you cite anything to back this claim up?). It is because economics shifted to a different paradigm based on marginal utility. These two frameworks operate at different levels of abstraction and address different aspects of the price of goods. There is actually empirical evidence of a correlation between the cost of a good and the cost of the labour, at an aggregate level.

- Third, Marx explicitly differentiated between _value_ and _price_. LTV deals with value exclusively (in other words, what happens when externalities impacting price are accounted for). He would have had no issue accepting that externalities impacting supply and demand would impact price.

The final irony of your comment is that the commenter's claim that you are incorrectly analysing is actually also fully defensible under your (presumably) neoclassical view of economics. In competitive markets, reduced production costs lead to reduced equilibrium prices as competitors undercut each other. The proposition that in the long run, under competition, price tends toward cost is a standard result in microeconomics. The idea that "you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay" only holds without qualification in monopoly or monopolistic competition with strong differentiation, which are precisely the conditions that increased software supply would erode.

Efficient markets barely exist anywhere, especially in tech, it's all monopolistic competition that's bad for the consumer and increases inequality.

> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Here's the other edge of that sword. A couple back-end devs in my department vibe-coded up a standard AI-tailwind front-end of their vision of revamping our entire platform at once, which is completely at odds with the modular approach that most of the team wants to take, and would involve building out a whole system based around one concrete app and 4 vaporware future maybe apps.

And of course the higher-ups are like “But this is halfway done! With AI we can build things in 2 weeks that used to six months! Let’s just build everything now!” Nevermind that we don’t even have the requirements now, and nailing those down is the hardest part of the whole project. But the higher-ups never live through that grind.

This scenario is not new with AI at all though? 14 years ago I watched a group of 3 front-end devs spin up a proof of concept in ember.js that has a flashy front end, all fake data, and demo it to execs. They wowed the execs and every time the execs asked "how long would it take to fix (blank) to actually show (blank)?" the devs hit f12, inspect element, and typed in what they asked for and said "already done!".

It was missing years of backend and had maybe 1/20th feature parity with what we already had and it would have, in hindsight, been literally impossible to implement some of the things we would need in the future if we had went down that path. But they were amazed by this flashy new thing that devs made in a weekend that looked great but was actually a disaster.

I fail to see how this is any different than what people are complaining about with vibe coded LLM stuff a decade and a half later now? This was always being done and will continue to be done; it's not a new problem.

The difference is now anyone can spin up a vibe-coded site that wows execs.

It reemphasizes the question of importance. Would a user accept their data needing a AI implementation of a ("manual") migration and their flow completely changing? Does reliability to existing users even matter in the companies plans?

If it isn't a product that needs to solve problems reliably over time then it was kind of silly to use a DBA that cost twice the Backend engineer and only handled the data niche. We progressed from there or regressed from there depending on why we are developing software.

The models will not keep betting better. We have pased "peak LLM" already, by my estimate. Some of the parlour tricks that are wrapped around the models will make some incremental improvements, but the underlying models are done. More data, more parameters, are no longer doing to do anything.

AI will have to take a different direction.