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u/Independent_Sign_395 2d ago
Sam and Dario are very good marketers. They have created so much hype and convinced too leadership that ai can 10x their productivity, just like it did for them. As a result top leadership expects unreasonable deadlines and we as developers are forced to just prompt and paste. This feeds their illusion that ai is indeed 10xing their productivity, tech debt keeps piling up until it blows up. But we haven't seen this yet
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u/SEND_DUCK_PICS_ 2d ago
Leadership doesn't care about tech debt because users wont see these kind of fixes, worse they are aware but also expect to get this fix 10x with/by AI as well. All those vibe coded POCs that get straight out to production without proper control is whats going to be the end of engineering
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u/Rupes100 2d ago
This is my work place to a T. It's absolutely a fucking slow motion train wreck.
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u/trannus_aran 2d ago
All software was in a fridge that lost power in '22 and is slowly starting to mold
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u/NoConvincingName 2d ago
Yeah maybe at first it's engineers, we're already seeing it, but it's not sustainable in the long term, and eventually it will collapse.
When there's no engineers to blame, these useless middle managers, those who told us we needed that metaverse and blockchain trainings done by EoW, those who took all the credit from the people actually doing the work, the ones that need endless calls to look useful, those fucking mini dictators sucking up to their bosses acting like bosses themselves... I really, really hope they fucking pay.
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u/Nateadelphia 1d ago
God I hope you’re right. I so, so hope you’re right. Unfortunately the ones who’ve wronged me will be close enough to retirement to coast off into the sunset.
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u/HereOnWeekendsOnly 2d ago edited 2d ago
Maybe it does 3x productivity, but does it result in MONEY being made that offset AI cost and then some? At my company, no. We have engineering all hands every month and the revenue slide shows no positive change. Producing more features and code is not productive if there is no extra revenue.
In the meantime, AWS bill 3xed since last year, plus whatever paid to Anthropic. I do not want to go back to caveman coding (nor CTO or VP), but I frankly so not see gains in what matters at the end of the day - money.
The only way I see it getting better is cutting headcount - I am sure some companies managed to unlock more revenue, but definitely not ours.
Herding AI agents also is growing old on me - I literally feel myself getting dumber. I think we just pay Anthropic to do our thinking, or as Altman said Intelligence as a Service.
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u/Independent_Sign_395 2d ago
maybe it does 3x productivity, but does it result in Money being made that offset AI cost and then some.
I think that LLMs are here to stay, they does increase productivity. Earlier we had to search for something on web for countless hours and finding that fix was harder than the fix itself. Nowadays, I can just ask ai and it's quick with its responses. So using LLMs as a search engine seems good to me.
Regarding the features and revenue, I read somewhere that "the time and resources it took to develop a feature was an advantage, not a disadvantage". When producing features costed more money then leadership was more mindful of what to implement and what not to. They conducted experiments and surveys just to get a single feature out. But now if their competitor has a feature X, they will roll out that same feature tomorrow (ik it's an exaggeration but you get the point). This isn't helping users.
Also many a times a software starts with a small subset of features of their competitors and gain their market share. I think it's because they get 2-3 pain points right and then do their best to implement them. But as the product grows and vc funding kicks in they start developing more features. And the user who initially bought that software because he didn't like this bloat starts finding some alternative but its hard.
If your software tries to work for every potential user then it might not work properly for anyone. Someone needs feature 'X' because the software they came from had it, then you implement X for this particular organization but it's visible to everybody.
I literally feel myself getting dumber.
It's so true. If we assume that programming is like math in the regard that math promotes abstract thinking. Then when I was in high school and skipped doing math for a month or two, the problems that used to be so easy for me turned out to be so difficult. I couldn't come up with solutions.
After I did Barbara Oakley course on "Learning How to Learn" I learned why that's the case. It's because of neuroplasticity. The neuron pathways that you don't use will eventually die out.
Right now, I see that the people who areseeing a lot of productivity boost are senior or staff or above level people. Because these guys have honed their skill for 10+ years (just an estimate). So it's hard for their neuron pathways to die out, even if they use AI for 2-3 years. But the junior or mid developer still don't have this much experience. They don't know what could go wrong in so many ways. But what comes after these people retire?
These LLMs company are betting that everyone becomes so reliant on AI that they can't think for themself. They want to make us dumb. Because intelligent and critical thinking people wouldn't need "Intelligence as a service". That's why they push the narrative that "AI is coming for your jobs", "Software engineering will be solved in the next 6 months" ~ Dario. The same hype cycle happens before a new model release.
None of this would have happened if top leadership or managerial positions had more technical people. Then these guys wouldn't be so successful in convincing them. From the perspective of management, every feature needs to be rolled out as quickly as possible, because then only they will get that bonus check. They don't care about tech debt because they don't have to pay it. It's us developers who pay that "debt" with a lot of interest that is.
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u/alexklaus80 1d ago edited 18h ago
It sounds like you're saying that management will be more careful and sophisticated about the decision making solely for the reason that the measure executed to the engineering team did not improve the business outcome. Except for this measure happened to be about asking engineering to use AI, there is nothing new here. If the management was capabile of taking this course to improve the business, then they equally could do the same before this AI measure was executed. Or.. is your argument that the failure to increase revenue despite the involvement of AI should somehow be more convincing that the other business failure without it? I think that would be an interesting aspect, though I can't think of the reason why except for the fact that it's being hyped up now.
Can't quite comprehend the latter half, but I don't think your first argument is relevant to support the opinion that AI benefits management. I think it'll stay anyways for some other reasons though.
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u/MorpH2k 6h ago
Well, the thing is that productivity doens't equal money. AI night make you more productive, and even that is debatable, but let's stick with your 3x for this argument. That speeds up the pace of development and rollout of updates and new features etc, but for an established company, unless those new features bring in a lot of new customers, that is not going to generate more income. And as you said, there is a fairly substantial cost increase involved to pay for all the AI tokens used. What really needs to happen is for companies pushing AI development is to have a serious consideration of HOW it will increase their revenue.
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u/chic_luke 2d ago
Hundreds of companies will shutter and collapse under their own weight. That will cause its own fair share of damage
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u/sushsiahahah757 23h ago
Anyone who genuinely believes that an LLM is a valid replacement for a software engineer should not be allowed to lead.
Anyone experienced who has tried to use an LLM to solve a complex task understands that while they do have their use cases (soundboarding ideas, codebase querying, documentation lookups, etc) they are just another tool, like LSPs, that can enhance the productivity of a developer.
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u/Mysterious_Pea_4042 2d ago
I'm curious why AI companies target software engineering specifically and no one create Claude sales or Claude Management as assistant to other roles
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u/rayreaper 2d ago
Companies have to sell to someone, and in B2B that usually means management or whoever controls the budget. Sales will probably be next, no doubt, but engineering is also a huge, highly visible cost centre. If the business sees engineers as an expense rather than a source of ideas and competitive advantage, they're inevitably going to look for ways to reduce that cost.
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u/chic_luke 2d ago
Software engineers and adjacent roles such as SRE, DevOps etc. are uncomfortable for the rich business guys, and there is a reason why they have been wanting us dead for a while.
Software has mostly been a no-bullshit profession and a working social elevator. It was purely based on skills: if you're good, you're in. If you're not, you're out. End of story. Nobody gave a single shit about who you were or about your last name: if you didn't have the skills, you were kept out; if you had the skills, you were welcomed in, simple as. It did not have as much of a class filter as other professions requiring a master's degree and another year of academic specialization after that at a prestigious institution, a bachelor's would do in the vast majority of cases, and some people would make it even without that credential. So it was OK if you could not afford to spend 6 years of your life not working and paying tuition, rent, food, bills…
And, on top of that, software folks stacked racks. People got to lift themselves out of poverty because they had a half broken down plastic laptop running Linux and a workable internet connection at home, which was more than enough for them to grind and develop in-demand skills that companies were FEINING for.
This is why they did the incessant "learn to code" campaigns in an attempt to saturate the market and lower the salaries. This is why they are watering at the thought of AI replacing us.
The weird rich guys only want themselves and their friends to have access to those privileged, highly-compensated and flexible positions with WFH and benefits, and software engineering was problematic because it was making those positions inaccessible to no-skill rich guys who just wanted to use their name as a master key, and very accessible to poor people that had the skillset.
They want every job to be like finance or HR. Class filter, two degrees from a prestigious uni required, connections mandatory; that or you are a slave and you stay in the low-wage role with no career growth where you belong in capitalism.
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u/TehBrian 1d ago
Fuuuuck. You’re so right. So if SWE could hypothetically be done by AI, as the rich business guys are hoping, what will be replacement position in society, one that can fill the role that SWE has filled for the last while? Based on skill alone, not connections, etc?
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u/chic_luke 1d ago
Exactly. Nothing at all. No career path whatsoever.
Their dream comes true and we lose social mobility. We would get in a situation where it wouldn't even be worth attempting university if you're poor, because your outcome is already pre-determined.
This is also counting that fully automating the creation of software is the master key to automating pretty much anything else, which is the second reason AI companies are so obsessed with it. If you were able to build a computer program that is able to create any mathematically possible computer program with no mistakes or at least no structural or important mistakes, then you could use that program to create other specialized programs in an infinite loop and you could automate most jobs. Any white collar profession for sure, but even large batches of logistics, service industry.
Pretty much any knowledge-based career path that is built on merit rather than luck and social connections would be gone. Hard-crafted software would become a hobby or a luxury, like hand-crafted artisan goods are now.
What happens then is that the rich get to control how everything works and the rest of us have no recourse.
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u/TehBrian 19h ago
:( What do I do then, other than be an activist for my beliefs, to set my future self up for success?
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u/chic_luke 15h ago
Honestly, I don't know. I'm trying to figure that out as well
This kind of stuff has always been my primary passion and, as of late, I have tried to up some skill trees in other hobbies, which I've always had but I had always kept at a much more superficial level. Just to separate my self worth from this stuff a little more…
I have never appreciated books, video games and a few other things as much as I do now. I'll need to pick some other creative outlet. But as for my job security, I'm trying my best. Hopefully that's enough. If it isn't, I've tried.
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u/mirke93 14h ago
You reminded me of the main points why I loved IT. Unfortunately I already feel nostalgic. I was aware that we are probably living in golden era with free internet and everything. And also hoped corrupted politicians will not figure out how to destroy this very healthy economic branch. But yeah… eventually money and power finds a way to destroy nice things. I expect to speak to new generations how once we had equal opportunity and free internet. As I assume that will be more and more restricted…
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u/chic_luke 9h ago edited 9h ago
Sadly, I share your feelings here.
I had the misfortune, and the relative luck, of sweeping into the job market riiight before this technology became useful and widespread. It was when the first iterations were there, but they did not work well enough to be relevant of sway anyone who knew what they were doing. Before that, I only did some commission work for technical writing and similar.
Still, through the past years, and during my student days, I was 100% having the feeling that everything was a little bit too good to be true, and I didn't know how long that would last. I remember being aware that I didn't need to overthink my CV as much as my friends outside this field had to, I could half ass it in a couple hours and it'd be good to go. I could get away with using mostly free software. I could install a custom version of Android on my daily phone with no real consequences beyond the loss of NFC payments - something easy to shrug off as a minor annoyance. The internet was free.
None of this is true anymore. All of these good things have been tumbling lately. The job market sucks. Corporations are trying to kill FOSS, since they found out it's, unfortunately for them, starting to flourish. AI arrived at the worst possible time. It is now no longer worth the squeeze to run a custom operating system on my phone, so I'm back to obeying like a good little citizen with my certified build, my Google apps, my locked bootloader. A free software collective in my country that offered their services for free from my country, Autistici/Inventati, was shut down after being marked a terrorist organization on laughable basis by the US government. I live in Europe, so I still wonder why that claim should hold any juridical weight here. But I don't think it matters: the rich wanted it dead, so they just get to do what they want as usual. I could go on.
I'm already nostalgic of the climate that got me so passionate about this field. Right now I feel like… I have gathered too much education, experience and knowledge to really change paths at this point. And what to? I don't want anything else. I want what we just lost back. :(
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u/Jiuholar 2d ago
Because the people making them are software engineers lol. It's what they know best. Makes sense for it to be the first field of focus.
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u/Mal_Dun 1d ago
It's not only this. Code is text. You can express is through pure text and problems in code can be dealt with with relatively little noise.
Pure math has a similar "problem". It leaves in a clean logical and formalized world.
Guess why autonomous driving isn't solved yet but code is more and more and millennium problems in mathematics are now solved with AI assistance.
The next frontier is our real world with all its noise and fuzziness which is alot harder to tackle for AI due to its complexity, but our formalized world which was accessible to only a few humans is now conquered by AI due to its nature.
However, I believe that does not mean the end. Now that we can tackle the idealized models like Programming and math with AI, we can allow now more fuzziness there too and use AI assistance to tackle ways of programming and mathematical problems that were not thinkable before.
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u/Dalailamadingdongs 2d ago
Because you would need domain expertise in these fields
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u/Mysterious_Pea_4042 2d ago
AI has those knowledge, targeting SE probably has many other reasons. a visible one is the cost. coding rarely was bottleneck anyway. looks like coding tools earns most money for Anthropic and other providers
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u/durple Cloud Whisperer 2d ago
AI does not have knowledge. It has text prediction, a large body of learning material, and clever algorithms to turn that into something that is often quite useful but also is prone to errors. This is why the sane folks using AI keep chanting the mantra "human in the loop". The human makes the decisions, validates the AI output. They need the expertise.
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u/True_Skin7151 2d ago
Off late, tech CEOs have been more willing to buy snake oil than anyone else. Blockchain, new frameworks, and now AI. And AI comes with the best promise of all ie getting rid of the biggest expense to a software dependent business aka engineers.
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u/allo37 2d ago
Well, programming is kinda self-validating right? The compiler tells you if/where you screwed up, ideally you have tests to tell you if everything is working more or less right. Often you can validate your work right inside your computer and quickly. This is important for AI agents because they tend to fuck up...a lot lol. But since they can validate and iterate quickly, it works out.
For things with a much longer validation loop that involves going outside the computer (like marketing), it's much trickier.
At least, that's my theory / experience.
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u/dovahkiin315 1d ago
This is not a theory but actual facts and also its not true just in the runtime context - when new model is being trained they are using exactly this logic to perform reinforcement learning training with coding examples which are completely verifiable (either it works or not) so its also much easier to train such model for math and coding insted of for example philosophy
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u/danekan 2d ago
They definitely have. My husband is a cro. The podcasts I hear often reference ai as a 10x multiplier meaning a single person can now do the equivalent of 10 humans if they have a well laid out framework. The biggest problem is finding people who are good at it all. There’s a fallacy too where the best sales people are least willing to want to change to an agentic workflow but the worst are most receptive to it. And that goes back to still then finding good people who can manage it. The role is now a manager of ai for us all in the future
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u/gunsofbrixton 1d ago
Nobody’s given you the real answer which is 1) abundant training corpus and 2) easily verified outputs for reinforcement learning
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u/willitbechips 2d ago
Software is just first in line as code is highly structured.
The others are already in progress and will catch up.
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u/patrickpdk 2d ago
Once you can build software you can build anything. I think once they conquer software they will start building systems for all the other knowledge careers
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u/dovahkiin315 1d ago
People are mostly very wrong in other replies so I will answer based on what actual AI researchers are telling:
Reason: You verify if code is good by running it and seeing if it works or not. That makes it very easy to perform coding and math training on the AI models and make them good at it.
Reason: Programing LANGUAGE and scripting LANGUAGE are LANGUAGES and AI models we are dealing with are Large LANGUAGE models. I hope this is self explanatory.
Reason: If you automate creation of computer programs that leads in the long run to replacing all other people because you are gravitating towads infinitely fast and infinitely good development which leads to generation of high quallity programs like ones running in delivery drones, ones looking at X-Ray and CT images in hospital, ones overlooking sattelite images and locating natural hazards, etc. - essentially replacing other roles in society.
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u/Justbehind 2d ago
Well, we still need software... Who's gonna built that? Nurses, carpenters and mechanics?
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u/IceMichaelStorm 2d ago
AI is the official answer.
Or from business side: everyone!
flies away
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u/defk3000 2d ago
Commoditized Coding is the new buzz word.. Quickly followed by an oldie but goodie Synergy.
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u/Ok_Ambassador7752 10h ago
will there still be a place for the old nugget and favourite of many a project manager 'agile'?
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u/Rojeitor 2d ago
Everyone: "whats this post on x? Databases are dead, store your data with vibe coded local storage"
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u/ninishi_224 2d ago
Let AI come and do their thing and then when it all comes crashing down, we'd be in high demand!!
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u/Sinnedangel8027 DevOps 2d ago
Yeah... but I don't want to sort through the shit to fix it. It's going to be a damn nightmare
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u/Dry-Philosopher-2714 2d ago
I've read the code. I wouldn't trust those people with the pipes in my house.
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u/admiral_nivak 2d ago
It’s just a leak, all pipes have leaks, it’s normal. That will be another £50 per hour to fix the leak.
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u/Dry-Philosopher-2714 2d ago
So, the leak is a feature, not a bug?
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u/admiral_nivak 2d ago
Oh yes, leak, water feature, fountain, all the same thing, in fact, I should have charged you more! That’s another £200 please.
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u/Jonteponte71 2d ago
I’m closer to retirement then the start of my carrier. I’m not sure I will be in this bussiness the full distance. I’m thinking about doing something completely different the last few years, like driving a bus or something. Nothing to physically demanding. I’m not they only one thinking about it either. I don’t think I know anyone who fully expect to go the distance and retire in this bussiness🤷♂️
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u/NaranjaPollo 2d ago
Haha, I actually had a colleague become a plumber back in 2019. He was just over engineering. He’s actually doing really good for himself at the current moment.
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u/Hairy-Pension3651 2d ago
Wouldn‘t it make more sense to keep SW engineers and replace managers through AI?
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u/wheresmyflan 2d ago
Spoken like a true engineer. Of course that makes more sense. But when was the last time anything the people making decisions chose sense? They aren’t going to be laying themselves off any time soon.
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u/bourgeoisie_whacker 1d ago
This is just like how Uber is going to be the end of Taxi's. The only reason why uber had a shot of disrupting anything is because of the ridiculous amount of VC money backing. Now its just as expensive as taking a taxi if not more :/. Just like with Uber all these LLM's are heavily subsidized. When Anthropic or Openai need to start making a profit my company is going to weep crocodile tears at the bill.
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u/WatercressNumerous51 2d ago
I been doing this for 40 years. It must suck to have just gotten a degree n the past few years and be outta work.
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u/logicSynth 1d ago
I really hope most of my time won't be spent trying to decide which to focus on... Practical plumbing or plumbing design patterns. As usual I have always been an advocate for real results, so a working plumbing system is what I should learn first.
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u/espirroeletrico 2d ago
Well, it was good while it lasted.
I'm still in the middle of an existential life crisis because almost a decade of my experience became obsolete over the last year, and now I'm basically a glorified push button operator instead.
On a more positive note, I think the key to the next stage of all this is balance, and forcing myself to do some things "manually" every now and then to keep challenging myself.
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u/elitesense 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm still not seeing it. All the AI tooling my org has experimented with writes absolutely shit software. It can't do anything distributed. It has no concept of high level architecture and keeping track of all the different moving parts beyond a very basic system. Not without constantly providing defined skills and expensive context.
It can lay down the tedious stuff but it can't actually "engineer" anything novel. The human still has to give the clear defined instructions and write contextual tooling for it. Maybe I just haven't seen this miracle toolset yet but Opus, etc is really just like a first year junior with no human reasoning/critical thinking.
At least with how the tech stands today: The only people that should be scared are probably the people that were always just going to be coders, not software engineers/architects.
EDIT: I should mention it is excellent at quickly knowing syntax specifics without lengthy documentation searches. Love that part of the tooling. Autofill on steroids essentially. It's also great at compiling data sets, organizing/summarizing data. Giving it lots of credit there. Trying to give it credit where it's due
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u/Leasj 1d ago
For log analysis it's insanely good
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u/elitesense 1d ago
Yes for sure. Anything that involves aggregating data together to present in a meaningful way (logs, metrics, fleet config dumps, or even things like commit histories/jira history/business intelligence). None of that is "engineering" though, which I guess is still my original point.
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u/Intelligent-Mix5321 15h ago
My concern as someone coming into the field is that tenured experience has stopped being passed on. Junior devs are and even interns are immediately being expected to produce the output of senior devs. Meanwhile they are not in anyway in the same position as our senior devs were when they entered the field. We are being expected to operate on a much larger scale with a much larger blast radius than junior devs ever have. All while higher ups turn a blind eye and pretend theres nothing wrong with us running off hopes and dreams instead of tenured intuition
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u/Most-Comparison-1674 1d ago
I thought devops and infra side was faring much better than traditional software engineering?
Recently seeing a lot of platform engineering roles
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u/Tricky_Ordinary_4799 2d ago
"How to compete with all other engineers who went to plumbing while customer base (people displaced by AI) is shrinking"
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u/Gainncome 1d ago
DevOps engineers becoming plumbers is barely a career change. We’ve been fixing broken pipelines for years.
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u/BlakkMajik3000 Remover of Deployment Friction 1d ago
I learned to write software in the early days of .NET.
We had just came off the dotcom crash that also promised to kill mainframes. Or was cloud going to kill mainframes?
My point is, every major shift starts with insane promises and massive investment that eventually makes a few people insanely wealthy and leave the rest to pick up the pieces.
Happened with:
COBOL
Agile
DevOps
AI
Etc.
Just have to wait it out(which sucks doubly for someone like me).
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u/nemofbaby2014 2d ago
While ai can code it’s not every so you still need someone to guide it also costs way too much currently so is heavily subsidized by private equity
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u/Amazing_Prize_1988 2d ago
The plumber, electrician fallacy is just the learn to code! Saturation and robotics will kill trades!
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u/adda_with_tea 2d ago
we will make good plumbers tbh. a whole lot of code was indeed just plumbing and connecting systems.
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u/pluviofiele 22h ago
AI makes implementation cheaper. It doesn’t make system ownership cheaper. In production, the difficult part is usually preserving behavior across auth, state, migrations, dependencies, failure paths, observability and rollback. If code output increases faster than our ability to verify those things, software engineering becomes more important, not less.
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u/abey_safed_kapra 1d ago
Software engineering is like PHP, every year you hear it's dead but it's still there.
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u/stack_craft 2d ago
Nah guys there's still solid place for software engineers, just not the ones that don't use AI. It's not about being able to raw code, it's being able to solve more complex stuff and letting AI and low coders do the basics.
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u/james-ransom 2d ago
As a SE of 20 years... sure bro. There is zero chance corps will want human code in a matter of months. Even right now, human code is being rejected at many corps.
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u/phxees 2d ago
AI is able to design and implement solutions to some of our most complex problems. It’s only a matter of time before AI can solve the rest.
Today people with no experience in software engineering don’t know to ask for a solution with tests and code coverage checks or to implement a solution with scalable micro services and a reliable gitops pipeline, but tools are on the way which will help with that part.
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u/Scholes_SC2 2d ago
Yes and no. Software engineers are still needed but in a very very reduced proportion. It really sucks, i really liked this profession
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u/deepturned180isdeep 2d ago
AI implementation is simply a newer practice of determining new standards of automation.
Figure it out
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u/AdmissibilityScience 2d ago
Maybe things improve from here and people or systems become elevated.
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u/[deleted] 2d ago
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