it means more ambitious, higher-quality products
No … the opposite actually.
Read the article before commenting.
The literal entire thesis is that AI should maintain developer headcounts and just let them be more productive, not reduce headcount in favour of AI.
The irony is that you’re putting in less effort and critical thought into your comment than an AI would.
For the sake of benefit of the doubt, it’s possible to simultaneously understand the thesis of the article, and to hold the opinion that AI doesn’t lead to higher-quality products. That would likely involve agreeing with the premise that laying off workers is a bad idea, but disagreeing (at least partially) with the reasoning why it’s a bad idea.
And it’s intentional. Lay off the workers. Implement AI Slop. Slop does sloppy work. Hire back workers as Temps or Contractors. No benefits. Lower pay.
Like all of Capitalism. It’s a fucking scam. A conjob. A new innovation in fucking over workers. (Ironically the only “innovation” ever directly produced by Capitalism)
I remember when everyone was saying that companies would need programmers and that every kid should learn programming. Now I realize that companies were promoting that idea so they’re be a surplus of programmers competing with each other and companies could underpay and swap out workers quickly.
Yeah obviously. Whenever a company says “we can’t get enough X workers” they implicitly mean “at the price we want to pay”.
But that doesn’t mean they were wrong. Programming is still an amazingly well paying and low stress career. Being replaced by AI is a little worrying, but I think by the time AI is good enough to really replace programmers, it will also be able to replace most white collar jobs - HR, finance, etc. - and society will have bigger problems.
I don’t honestly believe that AI can save me time as a developer. I’ve tried several AI agents and every single one cost me time. I had to hold its hand while it fumbled around the code base, then fix whatever it eventually broke.
I’d imagine companies using AI will need to hire more developers to undo all the damage the AI does to their code base.
I’ve found it can just about be useful for “Here’s my data - make a schema of it” or “Here’s my function - make an argparse interface”. Stuff I could do myself but find very tedious. Then I check it, fix its various dumb assumptions, and go from there.
Mostly though it’s like working with an over-presumptuous junior. “Oh no, don’t do that, it’s a bad idea because security! What if (scenario that doesn’t apply)” (when doing something in a sandbox because the secured production bits aren’t yet online and I need to get some work done while IT fanny about fixing things for people that aren’t me).
Something I’ve found it useful for is as a natural language interface for queries that I don’t have the terminology for. As in “I’ve heard of this thing - give me an overview of what the library does?” or “I have this problem - what are popular solutions to it?”. Things where I only know one way to do it and it feels like there’s probably lots of other ways to accomplish it. I might well reject those, but it’s good to know what else exists.
In an ideal world that information would be more readily available elsewhere but search engines are such a bin fire these days.
That middle graph is absolute fucking bullshit. AI is not fucking ever going to replace 75% of developers or I’ve been working way too fucking hard for way to little pay these past 30 years. It might let you cut staff 5-10% because it enables folks to accomplish certain things a bit faster.
Christ on a fucking crutch. Ask developers who are currently using AI (not the ones working for AI companies) how much time and effort it actually saves them. They will tell you.
I use it here and there. it just seems to shift effort from writing code to reading and fixing code. the “amount” of work is about the same.
I use it so much. All my Google searches for syntax or snippets? Web searches are unuseable at this point, AI can spit it out faster. But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom
It probably does write 75% of my code by lines, but maybe 5% of the business logic is AI (sometimes I just let it take a crack at a problem, but usually if I have to type it out I might as well code it)
What it’s good at drains my concentration, so doing the grunt work for me is a real force multiplier. I don’t even use it every day, but it might be a 3x multiplier for me and could improve
But here’s the thing - programmers are not replaceable. Not by other humans, not by AI - you learn hyper specific things about what you work on
But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom
Get better at it, manually, or you’ll suck at it forever. It’s a skill like anything else.
