this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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What are devs displaced by AI going to do in the future? Is there an actual plan? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Let's assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed.... What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?

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[–] Vipsu@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Honestly people are getting distracted here. Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive thats a huge boost for smaller companies with only handful of developers.

Many companies are only thinking about reducing costs for themselves but at the same time they're freeing up a lot of talent for new and old competitors.

Here's some food for thought:

  • Open source developers may use A.I to develop better software to close gap between paid alternatives. (Blender, Gimp, Krita, Linux distributions, mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed)
  • Many LLM's can already be ran freely and locally. These will only get better as technology progresses. This can make selling/profiting from A.I services a lot harder
  • A.I may be used to block ads or obfuscate (create bunch of fake data) user data that is sold to advertisers.
  • Some media sites are already using A.I to write articles. Whats the point when users may just use chatbot to get all the information without ever engaging with the source.

These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive

That's wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.

Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.

The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful.

This glorified parrot tool of LLMs is one of the coolest we have seen in awhile, but it's not going to materially fix the awful state of the field of software development.

The average software development team doesn't understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.

AI may mildly improve the delivery timelines of the still very incorrect and over-budget solutions delivered by the average development team.

[–] Vipsu@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.

Yes the value is wildly optimistic to match the expectations driven by all the hype from these companies pushing their LLM services.

Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.

The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful. The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.

You're oversimplifying things here there are a lot more variables that influence success in software projects. The company you work for might have oversold the project, the client might only have vague understanding of what they really want, project management may fail to keep the costs, developers or timeline in check, client or the company you work for might have high employee turnover causing delays as new employees need proper induction to the project, the initial tech stack may become deprecated or obsolete mid-way the project, etc

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 1 points 1 hour ago

You're oversimplifying things here there are a lot

I think... we're agreeing?

My point is that what is currently possible with AI doesn't solve any of that.

People in this thread keep discussing growth in programmer productivity as if programmer typing speed and number of languages known are the limiting factors of programmer productivity. They are not. It's all the other bullshit that makes (the vast majority of) programming projects fail.

My source: I know so many programming languages and I type insanely fast. My team is also productive beyond all reason. These two tidbits are only related in that I tried and failed with the first before succeeding with the second.