The Myth of Developer Obsolescence

Mid 1800s computing classic.

> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

From Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"

I believe the example you're looking for is, "seven perpendicular red lines": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

The task has been set; the soul weeps

> a square where every point is equidistant from the center

Given those requirements, I would draw a square on the surface of a sphere, making each point of the square equidistant from the sphere's center.

Is this trolling or a suggestion that AI doesn't understand that transparent gif is 100% a thing?

> people will continue to write “make the logo a square where every point is equidistant from the center” requirments.

Why wouldn't the AI deal with that the same way human developers do? Follow up with questions, or iterate requirements?

OMG this reminds me of a client (enterprise) I had who had been pushed into the role of product and he requested we build a website that "lets you bookmark every page"

Definitely. Saying no is not really denying, it's negotiating.

I think he actually had a clearer vision of the requirements than you do. In web dev jargon land (and many jargon lands) "the database" means "the instance of Postgres" etc.

But fundamentally it just means "the base of data", the same way "a codebase" doesn't just mean a Git repository. "Downloading the database" just means there's a way to download all the data, and CSV is a reasonable export format. Don't get confused into thinking it means a way to download the Postgres data folder.

I think the biggest skill I've developed is the "Yes, but..." Japanese style of saying "no" without directly saying "no." Essentially you're saying anything is possible, but you may need to expand restraints (budget, time, complexity). If your company culture expects the engineering team to evaluate and have an equal weight into making feature decisions, then a flat "no" is more acceptable. If you're in a non-tech-first company like I am, simply saying "no" makes _you_ look like the roadblock unless you give more context and allow others to weigh in on what they're willing to pay.

Saying no is the hardest part of the job, and it's only possible after you've been around a few years and already delivered a lot of value.

There's also an art to it in how you frame the response, figuring out what the clients really want, and coming up with something that gets them 90% there w/o mushrooming app complexity. Good luck with AI on that.

Yep. With a good enough team, even the technical problems are almost 100% caused by people issues.

Oh I agree. I don't really have a problem with agencies, the topic of them is not really related to my reply. My focus was more on the "disposable" part.

I like to joke with people that us programmers automated our jobs away decades ago, we just tell our fancy compilers what we want and they magically generate all the code for us!

I don't see LLMs as much different really, our jobs becoming easier just means there's more things we can do now and with more capabilities comes more demand. Not right away of course.

Those are very good points.

I am finding LLMs useful for coding in that it can do a lot of heavy lifting for me, and then I jump in and do some finishing touches.

It is also sort of decent at reviewing my code and suggesting improvements, writing unit tests etc.

Hidden in all that is I have to describe all of those things, in detail, for the LLM to do a decent job. I can of course do a "Write unit tests for me", but I notice it does a much better job if I describe what are the test cases, and even how I want things tested.

I agree, I see AI as just a level of abstraction. Make a function to do X, Y, Z? Works great. Even architect a DAG, pretty good. Integrate everything smoothly? Call in the devs.

On the bright side, the element of development that is LEAST represented in teaching and interviewing (how to structure large codebases) will be the new frontier and differentiator. But much as scripting language removed the focus on pointers and memory management, AI will abstract away discrete blocks of code.

It is kind of the dream of open source software, but advanced - don't rebuild standard functions. But also, don't bother searching for them or work out how to integrate them. Just request what you need and keep going.

My way of thinking about this has been: code is to a developer as bricks are to a builder. Writing a line of code is merely the final 10% of the work, there's a whole bunch of cognitive effort that precedes it. Just like a builder has already established a blueprint, set up straight lines, mixed cement, and what-have-you, prioir to laying a brick.

The problem with this idea is that the current systems have gone from being completely incapable of taking the developer role in this equation to somewhat capable of taking the developer role (i.e. newer agents).

At this clip it isn't very hard to imagine the developer layer becoming obsolete or reduced down to one architect directing many agents.

In fact, this is probably already somewhat possible. I don't really write code anymore, I direct claude code to make the edits. This is a much faster workflow than the old one.

+100.

I feel like a lot of people need to go re-read moon is a harsh mistress.

I suspect that any reduction in hiring is more a function of market sentiment than jobs being replaced by AI. Many companies are cutting costs rather than expanding as rapidly as possible during the capture the flag years.

They're not hiring juniors and now my roles consist of 10x as much busywork as they used to. People are expanding to fill these gaps; I'm not seeing much evidence that AI is "replacing" these people as much as businesses think they now don't need to hire junior developers. The thing is though, in 5 years there is not going to be as many seniors and if AI doesn't close that gap, businesses are going to feel it a lot more than whatever they think they're gaining by not hiring now.

There's the software factory hypothesis though that states that LLMs will bring down the level of skill required to produce software, reducing the skill bar required to produce the same software (i.e. automation leads to SWE being like working on factory line). In this scenario, unskilled cheap labor would be desired, making juniors more preferable.

My guess though is that the lack of hiring is simply a result of the over saturation of the market. Just looking at the growth of CS degrees awarded you have to conclude that we'd be in such a situation eventually.

The amount and sophistication of sailing ships increased considerably as steam ships entered the market. Only once steam ships were considerably better in almost every regard that mattered to the market did the sailing ships truly get phased out to become a mere curiosity.

I think the demand for developers will similarly fluctuate wildly while LLM:s are still being improved towards the point of being better programmers than most programmers. Then programmers will go and do other stuff.

Being able to make important decisions about what to build should be one of those things that should increase in demand as the price of building stuff goes down. Then again, making important technical decisions and understand their consequences have always been part of what developers do. So we should be good at that.

People apparently can't decide if AI is killing juniors, or if it's lowering the bar of what laymen can achieve.

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Take a look at your life and the signals you use to operate. If you are anything like me, summarizing them in a somewhat reasonable fashion feels basically impossible.

For example, my mother calls and asks if I want to come over.

How is an AI ever going to have the context to decide that for me? Given the right amount and quality of sensors starting from birth or soon after – sure, it's not theoretically impossible.

But as a grown up person that has knowledge about the things we share, and don't share, the conflicts in our present and past, the things I never talked about to anyone and that I would find hard to verbalize if I wanted to, or admit to myself that I don't.

It can check my calendar. But it can't understand that I have been thinking about doing something for a while, and I just heard someone randomly talking about something else, that resurfaced that idea and now I would really rather do that. How would the AI know? (Again, not theoretically impossible given the right sensors, but it seems fairly far away.)

I could try and explain of course. But where to start? And how would I explain how to explain this to mum? It's really fucking complicated. I am not saying that llm's would not be helpful here by generalization monsters, actually it's both insane and sobering how helpful they can be giving the amount of context that they do not have about us.

> but I think with enough context [...]

I think that's the key. The only ones who can provide enough accurate context are software developers. No POs or managers can handle such levels of detail (or abstraction) to hand them over via prompts to a chatbot; engineers are doing this on a daily basis.

I laugh at the image of a non-technical person like my PO or the manager of my manager giving "orders" to an LLM to design a high-scalable tiny component for handling payments. There are dozens of details that can go wrong if not-enough details are provided: from security, to versioning, to resilience, to deployment, to maintainability...

I think this is already what happens in social media advertising. It’s not hard to develop a pattern of behaviours for a subset of people that lead to conversion and then build a model that delivers information to people that leads them on those paths. And conversion doesn’t mean they need to buy a product it could also be accept an idea, vote for a candidate, etc. The scary thing, as you point out, is that this could happen in the real world given the massive amount of data that is passively collected about everything and everybody.

I want peace and thrive for all members of humanity¹ to the largest, starting where it makes reciprocal florishing and staying free of excluding anyone by favoring someone else.

See, "AI" don't even have to guess it, I make full public disclosure of it. If anything can help with such a goal, including automated inference (AI) devices, there is no major concern with such a tool per se.

The leviathan monopolizing the tool for its own benefit in a detrimental way for human beings is an orthogonal issue.

¹ this is a bit anthropocentric statement, but it's a good way to favor human agreement, and I believe still actually implicitely require living in harmony with the rest of our follow earth inhabitants

It can’t actively become a coding agent and make the changes, but it doesn’t do that for individual scripts now, and yet we say it can code.

And yet I can ask it how to architect my database in a logical way, and it clearly has solid ideas that again, it doesn’t script itself.

So really it teaches us or instructs us one way to do things, it’s not executing in any realm…yet

What's the point of a lever if I still have to move it?

> Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?

Windows products since the 2000s. They may have won on quality early on but today succeed mainly via compliance controls and switching costs IMO.

Also big legacy B2B digital systems of record. Pretty much any ERP. Can’t say firsthand but this is my impression of SAP products and Oracle products. Also Encompass, the system of record for a large majority of the U.S. mortgage market. Most medical software.

There are a lot of recordkeeping systems that have a massive moat from handling decades worth of nuance. Their “quality” by modern UX and performance standards is very poor but they handle all the nooks and crannies of their industry.

Thanks for calling out Rippling. Pretty poor experience for me as well.

>> Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?

Salesforce. Quickbooks. Any Oracle product.

Sorry but facebook a "high quality product"? It was a bug infested shitshow from beginning to this day, across multiple computers, spanning more than decade and a half. Not just me. Literally their only value is social graph, which they have by luck of being first, nothing more.

These days when site crashes I welcome it as a gentle reminder to not spend there even that 1 minute I sometimes do. Anyway its now mostly fake ai generated ads to obscure groups I have 0 interest in, I keep reporting them to FB but even for outrighr fraud or scams FB comes back to me with resolution in maybe 2% of the cases. EU on you you cheap scammers.

But in the past I used it for ie photo sharing with family and friends, since I was super active in adventuring and travelling around the world. Up to 10k photos over a decade.

Photo albums uploads randomly failed, or uploaded some subset, some photos twice. On stable fiber optic, while flickr or google photos never ever had such issue. Cannot comment, some internal gibberish error. Comment posted twice. Page reloads to error. Links to profiles or photos go to empty page. Sometimes even main page just empty feed or some internal error. I saw the sentence "Something went wrong" hundreds or maybe even thousands of times, it became such a classic 500 variant. And so on and on, I dont keep list around. Always on Firefox and ublock origin.

I would be properly ashamed to be ever profesionally linked with such, by huge margin, worst technical product that I ever came across. That is, if I could somehow ignore what a cancer to society I would be helping to build, but that would require advanced sociopathical mental tricks on myself I am simply neither capable nor willing to do.

Nah, FB doesnt deserve to be mentioned in same category as the rest, on any reasonable basis.

> People will start caring when their devices start bricking, loading websites takes 12sec and registering for medicaid is only possible between 9 and 11AM and then only if lucky.

I don’t know about Medicaid, but the other two are already true right now.

I'm convinced the Microsoft Teams team has gone all in on vibe coding. I have never seen so many broken features released in such a short time frame as the last couple months. This is the future as more companies go all in on AI coding.

> registering for medicaid is only possible between 9 and 11AM and then only if lucky.

When we got healthcare.gov it was pretty much this, maybe worse actually. Website was unusable and delivered like 5% of the requirements. It was pretty bad and people were pissed.

Of course in typical American government fashion, the task was outsourced to some companies in the private sector. Which then took 2 years to do it, went way over budget, and still delivered nothing.

If the current tech plateaus (but continues to come down in price, as expected) then this is a good prediction.

But, then there will be a demand for "all-in-one" reliable mega apps to replace everything else. These apps will usher in the megacorp reality William Gibson described.

> startup would have succeeded, just by providing the most barely functioning product at the cheapest prices, and making enough revenue by volume.

You've just described hustle culture. And yes, it does lead to business success. Engineers don't like hustle.

You love to see it. Nothing beats a labor of love.

> They don't care about the code behind the scenes, what framework you used, etc as long as the software a) does what they want and b) does it "quick enough" in their opinion.

Business folks love to say this, but a lot of this time this is glossing over a pretty inherent coupling between code quality and doing what users want quick enough. I've worked on a lot of projects with messy code, and that mess always translated into problems which users cared about. There isn't some magical case where the code is bad and the software is great for the users--that's not a thing that exists, at least not for very long.

I think that's just in the nature of these tools. They are better at doing things you can't do (most of the things), but worse at the things you can do (very few things).

Ex: If you're a lazy typist like most, then a code assistant can speed you up significantly, when you use it as an autocomplete plus. But if you're a very practiced vim user and your fingers fly over the keyboard, or a wizard lisp hacker who uses structural editing, then a code assistant slows you down or distracts you even.

Or as Marc Andreessen said, being a VC is the last job AI's will be able to replace :)))

> Andreessen said that venture capital might be one of the few jobs that will survive the rise of AI automation. He said this was partly because the job required several “intangible” skills and was more of an art than a science.

https://fortune.com/article/mark-andreessen-venture-capitali...

90% of the problem an architect has are people.

Yep. It's indeed like "management", where people expect to just slide into it as a reward for staying at a company for a few extra years.

Also I hate that "architect" is used as a synonym of "cloud architect". There is much more to software architecture than cloud.

> We interviewed a candidate ... didn't want to touch things like terminals ... they where looking for more of an architects role

I don't know whether you were actually looking for an architect? There are different types of architects. For example, you have got enterprise architects that indeed will never touch yaml, you have got solution architects who have a more narrow focus, and you have got engineers with a plate of overbearing work and team responsibilities. The latter are better called lead engineer. In my experience, being a good (lead) engineer doesn't make one a good architect, but companies try to make their job posting more sexy by titling it with "architect". One would imho do better by taking lead engineers seriously just in their own right.

Architects in general need to be very skilled in abstract reasoning, information processing & conceptual thinking. However, the people hiring for an "architect" often look for a 2x/nx engineer, who is able to code x widgets per hour. That is a stupid mismatch.

I would agree however that someone without previous practical experience would be rather unsuitable, especially "below" enterprise architect level.

Haha, I tried to couch this by adding "too far", but I agree. Companies should let their teams try out relevant tools in their workflows.

My point was more of a response to the inflated expectations that people have about AI. The current generation of AI tech is rife with gotchas and pitfalls. Many companies seem to be making decisions with the hope that they will out-innovate any consequences.

How so? Not enough art slop logos so they don't have to pay an artist? Other than in maximizing shareholder return I fail to see how foregoing AI is putting them "behind".

AI, especially for programming, is essentially no better than your typical foriegn offshore programming firm, with nonsensical comments and sprawling conflicting code styles.

If it eventually becomes everything the proponents say it will, they could always just start using it more.

>html was like 90% cruft.

Have you looked at much top-tier website code lately?

Code can't easily be replaced. It's "soft"ware sure, but why do you think banks are still using Cobol? Why do you think my old company is still running a deprecated version of Zend (PHP framework)?

>can be easily replaced

I guess the question is "replaced with what?" How can you be sure it's a 1:1 replacement?

If you have for example a sorting routine, coded slightly differently, in 50 different files, which one should you use? It's better to have a single file with a sorting routine that you trust.

My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...

I think you are missing the fact that it did, in fact, eliminate “coding”.

And that’s where it starts to get interesting.

Nothing fundamental needs to change. It just needs to get smarter and more reliable.

And don't think that because the crazy "everything will be AI in 6 months" predictions predictably haven't come to pass that that means it won't ever happen.

I'm old enough to remember the failure of online clothes shopping in the dot-com era. Sometimes things just take a while.

I figure if it can replace devs, any job that types is pretty much at risk, and we will all be in such trouble that there is no point in planning for that scenario

I totally agree as a developer (who sometimes uses LLMs).

They can be a useful tool, but their current capabilities and (I personally believe) their ability to improve indefinitely are wildly overhyped. And the industry as a whole has some sort of blinders on, IMO, related to how progress made with them is lumpy and kind of goes in both directions in the sense that every time someone introduces their grand new model and I play around with it I'll find some things it is better at than the previous version and some things it is worse at than the previous version. But number go up, so progress... I guess?

On one hand I can laugh this all off as yet another management fad (and to be clear, I don't think LLM usage is a fad, just the idea that this is going to be world-changing technology rather than just another tool), but what scares me most about the current AI hype isn't whether LLMs will take all of our jobs, but rather the very real damage that is likely to be caused by the cadre of rich and now politically powerful people who are pushing for massive amounts of energy production to power all of this "AI".

Some of them are practically a religious cult in that they believe in human-caused climate change, but still want to drastically ramp up power production to absurd levels by any means necessary while handwaving away the obvious impact this will have by claiming that whatever damage is caused by the ramp up in power production will be solved when the benevolent godlike AI that comes out on the other side will fix it for us.

Yeah, I uh don't see it working out that way. At all.

Landing page developers were still a thing? I thought they were replaced decades ago with FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

(only a bit /s)

> Well, let's just say no one is gonna willingly carry hundreds of business analysts salaries on their books while paying the Microsoft 365AI license anyway.

But also thousands of companies are going to be able to implement with a team of 1-10 people what before was only available to organizations of 25 or 50 thousand employees.

We have move towards higher abstractions, not natural languages. It looks like natural language because we name those abstractions from natural languages, but their semantics can be quite different.

Building a software was always about using those abstractions to solve a problem. But what clients give us are mostly wishes and wants. We turn those into a problem, then we solve that problem. It goes from "I want $this" (requirement) to "How can $this be done?" (analysis), then to "$this can be done that way" (design). We translate the last part into code. But there's still "Is $this done correctly?" (answered by testing) and "$this is no longer working" (maintenance).

So we're not moving to natural language, because the whole point of code is to ossify design. We're moving towards better representation of common design elements.