To replace all developers, we need AGI yes. To replace many developers? No. If one developer can do the same work as 5 could previously, unless the amount of work expands then 4 developers are going to be looking for a job.

Therefore, unless you for some reason believe you will be in the shrinking portion that cannot be replaced I think the question deserves more attention than “nothing”.

Frameworks, compilers, and countless other developments in computing massively expanded the efficiency of programmers and that only expanded the field.

Short of genuine AGI I’ve yet to see a compelling argument why productivity eliminates jobs, when the opposite has been true in every modern economy.

> Frameworks, compilers, and countless other developments in computing

How would those have plausibly eliminated jobs? Neither frameworks nor compilers were the totality of the tasks a single person previously was assigned. If there was a person whose job it was to convert C code to assembly by hand, yes, a compiler would have eliminated most of those jobs.

If you need an example of automation eliminating jobs, look at automated switchboard operators. The job of human switchboard operator (mostly women btw) was eliminated in a matter of years.

Except here, instead of a low-paid industry we are talking about a relatively high-paid one, so the returns would be much higher.

A good analogy can be made to outsourcing for manufacturing. For a long time Chinese products were universally of worse quality. Then they caught up. Now, in many advanced manufacturing sectors the Chinese are unmatched. It was only hubris that drove arguments that Chinese manufacturing could never match America’s.

I have a coworker who I suspect has been using LLMs to write most of his code for him. He wrote multiple PRs with thousands of lines of code over a month.

Me and the other senior dev spent weeks reviewing these PRs. Here’s what we found:

- The feature wasn’t built to spec, so even though it worked in general the details were all wrong

- The code was sloppy and didn’t adhere to the repos guidelines

- He couldn’t explain why he did things a certain way versus another, so reviews took a long time

- The code worked for the happy path, and errored for everything else

Eventually this guy got moved to a different team and we closed his PRs and rewrote the feature in less than a week.

This was an awful experience. If you told me that this is the future of software I’d laugh you out of the room, because engineers make enough money and have enough leverage to just quit. If you force engineers to work this way, all the good ones will quit and retire. So you’re gonna be stuck with the guys who can’t write code reviewing code they don’t understand.

In the short term, I share your opinion. LLMs have automated the creation of slop that resembles code.

In the long term, we SWEs (like other industries) have to own the fact that there’s a huge target on our backs, and aside from hubris there’s no law of nature or man preventing people smarter than us from building robots that do our jobs faster than us.

That’s called class consciousness, and I agree, and I think most people have already realized companies are not their friend after the last two years of layoffs.

But like I said, I’m not worried about it in the imminent future, and I have enough leverage to turn down any jobs that want me to work in that way.

I think not only is this possible, it's likely for two reasons.

1. A lot more projects get the green light when the price is 5x less, and a many more organizations can afford custom applications.

2. LLMs unlock large amounts of new applications. A lot more of the economy is now automatable with LLMs.

I think jr devs will see the biggest hit. If you're going to teach someone how to code, might as teach a domain expert. LLMs already code much better than almost all jr devs.

It’s my belief that humanity has an effectively infinite capacity for software and code. We can always recursively explore deeper complexity.

As we are able to automate more and more of the creation process, we may be able to create an infinite amount of software. However, what sustains high wages for our industry is a constrained supply of people with an ability to create good software.

I think counting the number of devs might not be the best way to go considering not all teams are equally capable or skilled in each person, and in enterprises, some people are inevitably hiding in a project or team.

Comparing only the amount of forward progress in a codebase and AI's ability to participate or cover in it might be better.

I'm not sure it is as simple as that - Induced Demand might be enough to keep the pool of human-hours steady. What that does to wages though, who can say...

Well it certainly depends on how much induced demand there is, and how much automation can multiply developer productivity.

If we are talking an 80% reduction in developers needed per project, then we would need 5x the amount of software demand in the future to avoid a workforce reduction.

That's a weird way to look at it. If one developer can do what 5 could do before, that doesn't mean I will be looking for a job, it means I will be doing 5 times more work.

5x throughput/output not 5x work

> unless the amount of work expands

This is what will happen

Even if AGI suddenly appears we will most likely have an energy feed and efficiency problem with it. These scaling problems are just not on the common roadmap at all and people forget how much effort typically has to be spent here before a new technology can take over.

This is where I’m at too. By the time we fully automate software engineering, we definitely will have already automated marketing, sales, customer success, accountants, office administrators, program managers, lawyers, etc.

At that point its total societal upheaval and losing my job will probably be the least of my worries.

1) Maybe.

2) I do see this, given the money poured into this cycle, as a potential possibility. It may not just be LLM's. To another comment you are betting against the whole capitalist systems, human ingenuity and billions/trillions? of dollars targeted at making SWE's redundant.

3) I think it can disrupt only knowledge jobs, and be some large time before it disrupts physical jobs. For SWE's this is the worst outcome - it means you are on your own w.r.t adjusting for the changes coming. Its only "world changing" as you put it to economic systems if it disrupts everyone at once. I don't think it will happen that way.

More to the point software engineers will automate themselves out before other jobs for only one reason - they understand AI better than other jobs (even if objectively it is harder to automate) and they tend not to protect the knowledge required to do so. They have the domain knowledge to know what to automate/make redundant.

The people that have the power to resist/slow down disruption (i.e. hide knowledge) will gain more pricing power, and therefore be able to earn more capital taking advantage of the efficiency gains made by jobs being redundant from AI. The last to be disrupted has the most opportunity to gain ownership of assets and capital from their economic profits preserved. The inefficient will win out of this - capital rewards scarcity/people that can remain in demand despite being inefficient relatively. Competition is for losers - its IMV the biggest flaw of the system. As a result people will see what has happened to SWE's and make sure their industry "has time" to adapt particularly since many knowledge professions are really "industry unions/licensed clubs" who have the advantage of keeping their domain knowledge harder to access.

To explain it further even if software is more complicated; there is just so much more capital it seems trying to disrupt it than other industries. Given IMV software demand is relatively inelastic to price due to scaling profits, making it cheaper to produce won't really benefit society all that much w.r.t more output (i.e. what was good economically to build would of been built anyway in an inelastic demand/scaling commodity). Generally more supply/less cost of a good has more absolute societal benefits when there is unmet and/or elastic demand. Instead costs of SWE's will go down and the benefit will be distributed to the jobs/people remaining (managers, CEO's, etc) - the people that dev's think "are inefficient" in my experience. When it is about inelastic demand its more re-distributive; the customer benefits and the supplier (in this case SWE's) lose.

I don't like saying this; but we gave AI all the advantage. No licensing requirements, open source software for training, etc.

> I think it can disrupt only knowledge jobs

What happens when a huge chunk of knowledge workers lose their job? Who is going to buy houses, roofs, cars, cabinets, furniture, amazon packages, etc. from all the the blue-collar workers?

What happens when all those former knowledge workers start flooding the job markets for cashiers and factory workers, or applying en masse to the limited spots in nursing schools or trade programs?

If GPTs take away knowledge work at any rate above "glacially slow" we will quickly see a collapse that affects every corner of the global economy.

At that point we just have to hope for a real revolution in terms of what it means to own the means of production.

- The people that are left and the people that it doesn't happen straight away on: i.e. the people who still have something "scarce". That's what capitialism and/or any system that rations resources based on price/supply/demand does. This includes people in things slower to automate (i.e. think trades, licensed work, etc) and other economic resources (landowners, capital owners, general ownership of assets). Inequality will widen and those people winning will buy the houses, cars, etc. The businesses pitching to the poor/middle classes might disappear. Even if you are disrupted eventually being slower to disrupt gives you relatively more command of income/rent/etc than the ones disrupted before you giving you a chance to transition that income into capital/land/real assets which will remain scarce. Time is money. AI is a real asset holder's dream.

- Unskilled work will become even more diminished: A lot of people in power are counting on this to solve things like aging population care, etc. Move from coding software to doing the hard work in a nursing home for example is a deflationary force and makes the older generations (who typically have more wealth) even more wealthier as the effect would be deflationary overall and amplify their wealth. The industries that will benefit (at the expense of ones that don't) will be the ones that can appeal to the winners - resources will be redirected at them.

- Uneven disruption rates: I disagree that the AU disruption force will be even - I think the academic types will be disrupted much more than the average person. My personal opinion is that anything in the digital world can be disrupted much quicker than the physical realm for a number of reasons (cost of change/failure, energy, rules of physics limitations, etc). This means that as a society there will be no revolution (i.e. it was your fault for doing that; why should the rest of society bear the cost? be adaptable...). This has massive implications for what society values long term and the type of people valued in the new world as well socially, in personal relationships, etc.

i.e. Software dev's/ML researchers/any other white collar job/etc in the long run have shot themselves in the foot IMO. The best they can hope for is that LLM's do have a limit to progres, that there is an element of risk to the job that still requires some employment, and time is given to adjust. I hope I'm wrong since I would be affected too. No one will feel sorry for them - after all other professions know better than to do this to themselves on average and they have also caused a lot of disruption themselves (taste of their own medicine as they say).