For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the company around.
Traditional programmers are no longer some of the highest paid tech people around. It's AI engineers/researchers. Obviously many software devs can transition into AI devs but it involves learning, starting from the bottom, etc. For older entrenched programmers, it's not always easy to transition from something they're familiar with.
Losing the ability to "bully" business people inside tech companies is a hard pill to swallow for many software devs. I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written. Meanwhile, he had no problem overwhelming business folks in meetings. Software devs always talked to the CEO with confidence because they knew something he didn't, the code.
When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.
/signed as someone who writes software
Yeah, software devs will probably be pretty upset in the way you describe once that happens. In the present though, what's actually happened is that product managers can have an LLM generate a project template and minimally interactive mockup in five minutes or less, and then mentally devalue the work that goes into making that into an actual product. They got it to 80% in 5 minutes after all, surely the devs can just poke and prod Claude a bit more to get the details sorted!
The jury is out on how productivity is impacted by LLM use. That makes sense, considering we never really figured out how to measure baseline productivity in any case.
What we know for sure is: non-engineers still can't do engineering work, and a lot of non-engineers are now convinced that software engineering is basically fully automated so they can finally treat their engineers like interchangeable cogs in an assembly line.
The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline. As things stand major software houses and tech companies are cutting back and regressing in quality.
I'd imagine it won't take too long until software engineers are just prompting the AI 99% of the time to build software without even looking at the code much. At that point, the line between the product manager and the software dev will become highly blurred.
I believe we only need to organize AI coding around testing. Once testing takes central place in the process it acts as your guarantee for app behavior. Instead of just "vibe following" the AI with our eyes we could be automating the validation side.
That's such a weak argument. Then why not stop driving, stop watching TV, stop using the internet? Hell... let's go back and stop using the steam engine for that matter.
You mean, we should all drive, oh I don't know, Electric powered cars?
Prior to generative AI I was (correctly) criticized once for making a 2,000 line PR, and I was told to break it up, which I did, but I think thousand-line PRs are going to be the new normal soon enough.
It is precisely the lack of knowledge and greed of leadership everywhere that's the problem.
The new screwdriver salesmen are selling them as if they are the best invention since the wheel. The naive boss having paid huge money is expecting the workers to deliver 10x work while the new screwdriver's effectiveness is nowhere closer to the sales pitch and it creates fragile items or more work at worst. People are accusing that the workers are complaining about screwdrivers because they can potentially replace them.
But the current layoffs "because AI is taking over" is pure BS, there was an overhire during the lockdowns, and now there's a correction (recall that people were complaining for a while that they landed a job at FAANG only for it to be doing... nothing)
That correction is what's affecting salaries (and "power"), not AI.
/signed someone actually interested in AI and SWE
Until then "Computer says No"
Maybe evolution will select autistic humans as the fittest to survive living with AI, because the ones who find that email enraging will blow their brains out, out of frustration...
1. My coworkers now submit PRs with absolutely insane code. When asked "why" they created that monstrosity, it is "because the AI told me to".
2. My coworkers who don't understand the difference between SFTP and SMTP will now argue with me on PRs by feeding my comments into an LLM and pasting the response verbatim. It's obvious because they are suddenly arguing about stuff they know nothing about. Before, I just had to be right. Now I have to be right AND waste a bunch of time.
3. Everyone who thinks generating a large pile of AI slop as "documentation" is a good thing. Documentation used to be valuable to read because a human thought that information was valuable enough to write down. Each word had a cost and therefore a minimum barrier to existence. Now you can fill entire libraries with valueless drivel.
4. It is automated copyright infringement. All of my side projects are released under the 0BSD license so this doesn't personally impact me, but that doesn't make stealing from less permissively licensed projects without attribution suddenly okay.
5. And then there are the impacts to society:
5a. OpenAI just made every computer for the next couple of years significantly more expensive.
5b. All the AI companies are using absurd amounts of resources, accelerating global warming and raising prices for everyone.
5c. Surveillance is about to get significantly more intrusive and comprehensive (and dangerously wrong, mistaking doritos bags for guns...).
5d. Fools are trusting LLM responses without verification. We've already seen this countless times by lawyers citing cases which do not exist. How long until your doctor misdiagnoses you because they trusted an LLM instead of using their own eyes+brain? How long until doctors are essentially forced to do that by bosses who expect 10x output because the LLM should be speeding everything up? How many minutes per patient are they going to be allowed?
5e. Astroturfing is becoming significantly cheaper and widespread.
/signed as I also write software, as I assume almost everyone on this forum does.
I'm fine if AI takes my job as a software dev. I'm not fine if it's used to replace artists, or if it's used to sink the economy or planet. Or if it's used to generate a bunch of shit code that make the state of software even worse than it is today.
You can go back to the 1960s and COBOL was making the exact same claims as Gen AI today.
The GenAI is also better at analyzing telemetry, designing features and prioritizing issues than a human product manager.
Nobody is really safe.
Hence, I'm heavily invested in compute and energy stocks. At the end of the day, the person who has more compute and energy will win.
I'll explain why I currently hate this. Today, my PM builds demos using AI tools and then goes to my director or VP to show them off. Wow, how awesome! Everybody gets excited. Now it is time to build the thing. It should take like three weeks, right? It's basically already finished. What do you mean you need four months and ongoing resourcing for maintenance? But the PM built it in a day?
But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.
Elon is way ahead, he did it with mere meatbags.
That is pretty much the only metric that matters in the end.
Everybody in the company envy the developers and they respect they get especially the sales people.
The golden era of devs as kings started crumbling.
"Senior" is much more about making sure what you're working on is polished and works as expected and understanding edge cases. Getting the first 80% of a project was always the easy part; the last 20% is the part that ends up mattering the most, and also the part that AI tends to be especially bad at.
It will certainly get better, and I'm all for it honestly, but I do find it a little annoying that people will see a quick demo of AI doing something interesting really quickly, and then conclude that that is the hard part part; even before GenAI, we had hackathons where people would make cool demos in a day or two, but there's a reason that most of those demos weren't immediately put onto store shelves without revision.
Beyond this issue of translating product specs to actual features, there is the fundamental limit that most companies don't have a lot of good ideas. The delay and cost incurred by "old style" development was in a lot of cases a helpful limiter -- it gave more time to update course, and dumb and expensive ideas were killed or not prioritized.
With LLMs, the speed of development is increasing but the good ideas remain pretty limited. So we grind out the backlog of loudest-customer requests faster, while trying to keep the tech debt from growing out of control. While dealing with shrinking staff caused by layoffs prompted by either the 2020-22 overhiring or simply peacocking from CEOs who want to demonstrate their company's AI prowess by reducing staff.
At least in my company, none of this has actually increased revenue.
So part of me thinks this will mean a durable role for the best product designers -- those with a clear vision -- and the kinds of engineers that can keep the whole system working sanely. But maybe even that will not really be a niche since anything made public can be copied so much faster.
