Is AI Going To Take Your Dev Job?

[@ALifeEngineered]

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[@carlschmidt4059]

Great content, thanks a lot! I really appreciate you notion on LLMs and how language is just a tool for us to explain and capture the things we are experiencing in our own (biased) words. Or as Gemini puts it: "We can only perceive and comprehend the world through the lens of our linguistic framework." 🤔

[@adi29verse]

Yes , let's agree that every single fact collated from different sources that are not related , when put together in a single context become complimentary to each other.

[@deicide100]

The major issue with AI is always going to be data integrity and governance. You can't continuously aggregate information and take it at face value that they're all correct. That's how we create "alternative facts". Leading AI companies still can't agree on a governance model and laws are still way too behind.

[@bhargavpandya9189]

wow what a great take! refreshing too i might add!

[@charlie64x2]

I think AI won’t replace the primordial skills of programmers: - The ability to communicate effectively and convert requirements into working solutions. - The ability to solve complex problems. - The way we coordinate, plan and collaborate with other colleagues. - The expertise we acquire after learning from our mistakes. - The creativity we have as humans. - The process of mentoring other people and help them grow in the field. And many more. But as a way to simplify things, generate data, automate processes, do the mundane tasks and help when we forget something… AI is great.

[@RedShipsofSpainAgain]

8:18. "where everything a worker does -- every meeting, every website a person goes to on a company computer is recorded. Every slack message is saved and over to the AI and it analyzes whether you're doing a good job or not." "Hi I want my manager to have more granular visibility into what what I do and more micro-management over me." -- Said literally no employee ever. Yeah, count me out; I would quit any company that used such a system faster than you can say "2 weeks' notice"

[@One-qb6yv]

Hey i listened to cal newports so good they cant ignore u book ty for the recommendation.. actually one of the most practical books ive seen in a while.. will definetly audit my actions and career plans using the frameworks preseented there 😊

[@CharithaKankanamge]

Excellent set of thoughts, Steve. I totally agree with how AI would enable engineering managers to manage 10+ SDEs, hence allowing orgs to remove unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. I see this is happening in Amazon and other big tech. The ability to build stories and put together your thoughts with data backing are some of the primary skills expected from an SDM. With AI assistants, an SDM can greatly reduce their time polishing up their recurring tasks such as writing promo narratives, building proposal blueprints, and then manually refining, etc. I think these administrative tasks take ~20% of SDMs' jobs. I foresee a future where this time will at least be cut down by 50% with AI assistants. Thanks for sharing valuable content.

[@jhors7777]

Fabulous channel my friend.

[@brianpendell6085]

AI-assisted engineering is a skill set on its own. A few-shot prompt is more likely to succeed than a zero-shot prompt , and some jobs require a step-by-step prompting rather than simply expecting the LLM to get it all done in one go. You can't just expect an AI to give you what you want with a few natural language sentences; prompt engineering is a technical skill and I'll wager business types will definitely hire for the purpose. The middle case is that we're all going to have to upskill if we want to stay competitive with the new tooling. Which we'd have to do anyway. If I still programmed in 2024 the way I did back in 2003, when there was no such things as dependency injection, I wouldn't be able to find work at all. It's the nature of our business; we adapt. Some jobs (such as assembly language programmer) disappear almost entirely due to technology, but it also creates new options. A friend of mine, laid off, was just hired as "senior AI software engineer", a position that didn't exist in 2021. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. We can either embrace change or be overwhelmed by it.

[@vectorhacker-r2]

I absolutely agree. Do I do hope that your prediction about AI being used in monitoring employees doesn't pan out or at least that the AIs aren't used as the only measure of good performance.

[@pilotashish]

Most of current SE is problem solving with established patterns. That’s what current LLMs are good at. But what’s missing is the human ingenuity, creative problem solving. Once we get to that point, computers should just be able to solve problems within the constraints given. Do why make an app when you can just ask the computer to do what you want. There will always be people who would rather buy something prebuilt than mess with an AI themselves, so don’t see the art of programming dying any time soon.

[@PapaVikingCodes]

These are correct takes 🎉

[@kacpergierycz677]

I think that Amazon's cut in management is just conversion into the Scrum that is making a manager into the Scrum master lol. Just the wording is changed but of course the number drops rofl.

[@obesechicken13]

Might be best to assume whatever ai spits out is wrong as is often the case and that you need to figure out what unit tests are missing or what test isn't coveting a use case or us using outdated libraries Edit: I'm leaving the autocorrect mistakes. Autocorrect is AI

[@Albertux]

It's not AI is the management / leadership perception of AI can take over

[@dabbieyt-xv9jd]

And what you think about UI/UX jobs? I am more interested in that job role

[@verb0ze]

To me, AI is just a new programming paradigm. It may actually open the door to more programmers by lowering barrier to entry. AI on its own doesn't know what problems to solve for humans as it doesn't care for human problems. It only solves the problems we we ask it to solve, and the person asking is in fact a programmer at the end of the day, even if they're "coding" using natural language.

[@ska2oos]

10:50 that final line had my jaw drop

[@hasensaurus]

Give devs AI and they will do code reviews instead of writing code. Oh, how devs love code reviews!

[@mehdihassan8316]

AI will only get better. It's limited now as an alright tool. But within a few years, it'll begin replacing programmers entirely. It'll chip away slowly until then. I'm not trying to be pessimistic, I think it makes sense given exponential advances in AI, future agentic capabilities, cheaper, and faster to run.

[@kacpergierycz677]

Ai are amazing until you get from them a terrible mistake that ended up to critical for your project, that AI does't recognize the mistake even when you point it out explicitly.

[@inotherwords-n7k]

Been a fan of your channel for a months now, but I think your pessimism for the medium term capabilities of AI is a bit motivated. I don't think dev jobs will be the first to go, but I think serious changes to society are likely within our lifetimes, and the view that work is infinite so humans will always have work is too optimistic 1. The current suite of LLMs were largely trained before the hype 2. The critical breakthrough that allowed AI to make such an impact was that the LLM architecture gets predictably more accurate with more compute/data investment 3. Billions of dollars and many more bright researchers and developers are rushing into this field We're rushing to creating agents that can replace human labor, and it's unclear what effect they'll have on society, let alone unintended consequences. Among AI researchers, Yann Lecun is somewhat of an outlier in his optimism. I don't really disagree with the idea that dev jobs won't be replaced by current LLMs, but I disagree with the general tone of "nothing will change soon", and "there's nothing to worry about wrt AI"

[@daranzhao]

You use the fleet manager analogy both as an example of a job that will be empowered by AI (makes it easier to manage drivers, who will be replaced) and as an example of a job that may be replaced (when you say that Amazon managers being let go will be like fleet managers being phased out). These can both be true, but presenting it like this makes your view feel arbitrary. You can say that there's a finite number of cars, which points to driving as finite work, but what's to stop someone from saying there's a finite number of computers that developers work on making that finite work? An obvious answer here is that developers are not constrained to working on a "single computer" or maybe we can even argue that virtual computers are computers and developers are really just "managing development" or maybe you argue that a developer need not be constrained by computers at all since that's the "easy" part that could be replaced by AI and the hard part is the other stuff. But then in that case will the line between dev and line managers or product managers become blurred? As a dev, none of these are my actual views on AI, but it is the chain of logic I go through while watching these videos, and I'm not really sure I know where you stand despite the amount of thoughts you've given here because of how they've been organized. Anyways - still enjoyed the video, good food for thought regardless.

[@ALifeEngineered]

Developers are not constrained by the number of computers. They are necessary proportional to the amount of work they have. I make the argument that the amount of work they have is unbounded. The number of cars is bounded by the number of trips people need to make and the number of cars in the fleet.

[@daranzhao]

@@ALifeEngineered Right - I think I address this in the hypothetical train of thought. FWIW, I 100% agree with the categorization of bounded vs unbounded work and the idea that drivers will be replaced before devs. More directly, I'm commenting on your views of the relationship between managers and devs (and how I don't think it reduces to the relationship between fleet managers and drivers - especially since it sounds like you think fleet managers will be both better off and laid off due to AI). edit to add my view: I actually think that, in the long run, line management work will continue to be unbounded as long as dev work is unbounded. Good managers should and will provide value to devs that cannot be replaced by AI.

[@jl_117]

idk why this topic makes me mad. maybe because I heard it so many times. I just don’t think its the right thing to worry about

[@LiboYin]

AI will not make devs redundant. Business people with AI will. Unless you’re in the Soviet Union.

[@pedromarques9267]

AI won’t replace you, but someone who knows how to use AI better might

[@cristianfigueredo566]

Car won’t replace horses, but a horses driving a car might

[@mahbubhossainsamm]

@@cristianfigueredo566😅

[@shantube75]

And you didn’t evaluate the cost of AI. It’s not cheap

[@ALifeEngineered]

Oh yeah, AI devs are going to cost proportionally as much as humans but do a worse job.

[@bruhmoment3731]

AI will reduce the need for drivers but it won't reduce the need for programmers?

[@vectorhacker-r2]

Forgetting the fact that fully self-driving cars are a promise that we never seem to get and that driving is more complicated than people make it out to be, developing software is more than just outputting code and is in fact a complicated endevour.

[@ALifeEngineered]

Yes exactly.

[@trumputin8235]

username checks out lol

[@eddiehuang6886]

I believe the question centers on who would assume liability in the event of unforeseen incidents, such as a crash.

[@ikusoru]

AI will increase the number of bots like you writing FUD replies on KZbin to be able to keep the AI money pump going.

[@mahbubhossainsamm]

Can’t come up with new ideas… Yeah right.. clearly you never played chess against them. 😢

[@hasensaurus]

We don't encourage students to use wikipedia or cheat, but we encourage devs to use AI. I will not employ someone who uses AI. It makes devs stupid, even when the code works.

[@painfullyhuman]

principal dev with this mic quality btw

[@AdamFiregate]

SM7b is industry standard broadcast mic. You need 5 mins of Googling for this info to research. 💛

[@FroxerBBQ]

Fist

[@ROHITSINGH-kw1oo]

Fist

[@obesechicken13]

Paper

[@ikusoru]

clickbait title

[@BladeAurora]

devs are cooked. it doesnt matter if llms hallucinates, companies dont care and with the way the financial system is, prepare to eat the bugs and slave away. it is over!

[@chrisholland6366]

lol nice bro

[@bestopinion9257]

Companies do not want to miss the AI train. It is a hurry to migrate to automation. That's the way their CEOs are thinking.