Obs.: I’m using “[REDACTED]” to not look like I’m doing some advertising.

Sorry to bring AI subject here, but I’m terrified by how efficient AI generation code became in the past few years.

Last year I was seeing a designer community with desperate people because of AI generative images, many people hopeless because how more convenient it is, way more than paying for a freelance to do something reasonable.

Now I’m with the same feeling as a programmer. I just decided to take a look into AI a little deeper, as I don’t use it very often. So I tried the recent [REDACTED] editor, which is just [REDACTED] with AI agent features (an AI that does more than just generate text, it create files, make decisions etc…). And I must say, programming jobs will be reduced a lot.

The app was able to do a entire module of a side project, integrating with another API and following the same conventions I did. It worked in the first try. It created all the files and everything.

Many people bring this argument: AI won’t replace devs, we’ll always need devs to check code etc. Ok, I agree with that, but if before we needed 5 devs to do a job, now we just need 1 to revise all the job an AI did alone equivalent to 5 devs programming.

So, there’s no way it won’t impact the devs market. I’m being optimistic here, because the future is still unclear, but if it keeps the same rate we can reduce the dev jobs to near zero.

This is what every executive always wanted, get rid of devs, and now they can. Devs were always an inconvenience to executives, but they couldn’t get the job done without devs.

Now they can focus all money on AI research until it gets nearly perfect, reduce the skill needed to deal with code and build projects without too much knowledge, and get rid of many devs too.

It’s undeniable that AI jobs WILL be affected in a negative way. I’m seriously considering leaving this area and use programming just as a hobby, nothing more.

  • 6nk06@sh.itjust.works
    34·
    2 months ago

    I deny your undeniability. Prove it by showing a real application vibe-coded, something useful that is not yet another electron POS. And where are all the bugs fixed in open-source projects? I have asked this question a hundred times.

    Curl is spammed by fake bug reports for example.

    Every AI user has something to sell but nothing to show. Make a difference for once.

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      3·
      2 months ago

      But actual results and bugs have very little to do with corporate firings or open positions, as 30 years of history show us.

      If corporations “think” they can fire people, with AI as an excuse, and put that cost in their pockets, they will do it. We are already seeing it in the US tech-bro sphere.

      Companies will tank themselves in the medium-long term to make short term profits. Which I think is the “dev market” that OP is talking about. It shouldn’t affect the market, but it will because you have MBAs making technical decisions. I could be wrong, but the tech market is very predictable as far as behavior. They will hire a skeleton crew and work them to burnout to fix the AI slop. (Tech industry needs unions now)

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    8·
    2 months ago

    There will always be stuff to code. Even if the task of coding itself were completely removed, being able to use AI for coding will require knowledge of the subject matter and an ability to express one’s needs.

    If you go onto any bug list, most people are unable to express the most basic information to dill in a bug report form. “What are you using”, “What did you do”, “What did you expect to happen”, “What happened instead”. Just that. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge, just the rudimentary ability to describe events and desires and yet they still fail.

    AI assisted coding requires the ability to understand ambiguity too. “Solve world hunger” can be solved by killing all of humanity so that nobody is hungry anymore, putting porridge in front of evey human being until the end of time, hooking up every human to a feeding tube and harnessing energy from it, modifying human genes to not know what hunger is, or rebuilding society to give everybody equal access to nutrition that they enjoy.

  • monkeyman512@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    Brandon Sanderson talked about it in the context art, “Making art with AI doesn’t make you an artist, it makes you an art director.” People who only understand grunt level coding work are at risk. The work in the future will require higher level skill sets in engineering, architecture, and project management.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      Low code is a real practical way to increase developer productivity. And some of the current tools achieve exactly that already.

      Of course, that usually lead to a increase on the number of jobs. The AI people want to believe it will completely replace developers, what can only lead to fewer jobs.

  • iByteABit@programming.dev
    1·
    2 months ago

    At best it’s going to make a lot of developer jobs insufferable because they’re going to be cleaning up the large pile of horseshit that an AI produced to “reduce costs”.

    Though besides the “AI coding independently” area which I believe is still science fiction for the time being, I do think Software Engineer jobs will be reduced and wages lowered due to the massive productivity increase each developer has from using AI to deal with the repetitive stuff or faster troubleshooting and learning, that previously had to be done by looking at many Stackoverflow posts or parsing through other messy sites to find how something is done.

  • Lucy :3@feddit.org
    1·
    2 months ago

    It’s only used as a minor tool in real-life, non-faked projects. A tool that’s very expensive and rarely of objective usage. As soon as the bubble pops, the market will essentially wipe it out.