Whenever one reads articles like this, it's a bit of a consolation to remember that the same factors are shaking up the journalists' world much more and much sooner. This article, like many of its kind, could've easily been written by AI or by a contractor in a cheap country; in fact, this time it just may have been.
My friend dubbed this effect "AIrony"
Well seriously what profession is immune? Robotics took a lot of manufacturing and farming away in the 80s and 90s, AI added to that will kill off swaths of designers.
Most of this country checks out their own groceries and AI has started stocking shelves.
Creative industries are becoming commodities due to tooling.
All I can come up with when I search for safe jobs is athletes, politicians, and live music performers.
I posit that computer programming is one of the least vulnerable among the creative professions, because how "meta" it is, and how we're all just abstracting on top of other abstractions. AI is yet another abstraction to build on top of.
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2022/asimov-programming-and-th...
Well, until AGI, of course. But then we're probably all toast anyway
I posit that programming is vulnerable, because upper management does not realize that even the most sophisticated AIs can only barely do the simplest jobs of junior developers.
Of course, they're going to destroy their companies when they layoff their developers and replace them with under-skilled prompt engineers. But by then, the damage will be done, both among the employers and the employees.
> All I can come up with when I search for safe jobs is athletes, politicians, and live music performers.
Anything where the point is specifically human effort rather than the actual result, plus ones that set their own rules.
So yes, athletes and politicians; for the moment also prostitutes (pending better bioprinting, not because it's in either category); but also some art — not all art, just the art where the point is to show off how rich you are; most live music was automated away a century ago, what remains is likely also the category of art where the expense is the point.
> ones that set their own rules.
So also doctors, lawyers, teachers, soldiers and government workers.
It's not that they can't be replaced by AI, they just won't legally be allowed to.
> So also doctors, lawyers, teachers, soldiers and government workers.
No, those are all subordinate to the whims of the leaders.
That said, I should have been clearer and said "leaders" rather than simply agreeing with the word "politicans": a military general who seizes power may have a different title, that title doesn't matter, it is the power that is the point.
Right now most of us are in democracies where the government answers to the people, and the people could set any law requiring any given job be done by humans — but that's not automatically guaranteed going forward, many democracies have falled in the past.
I can see soldiers being replaced by AI if the latter becomes demonstrably more cost effective. Laws won't be able to stop this, because the other side will use AI if it's better (cheaper, cost effective, etc).
Teachers cannot be replaced by AI if you see them as more than just "knowledge passing". If you think the human component of the teacher-student interaction is fundamental, as I do, teachers won't be replaced, though they may use AI to assist them.
> If you think the human component of the teacher-student interaction is fundamental
What is the "human component" to teaching? How can't that be solved via AGI? AGI can do human emotions, current AI already can pretty well for most things.
"AGI can do human emotions" is a bold statement since AGI doesn't exist yet, and it's not a stated goal to do human emotions.
The "human component" to (good) teaching is human beings teaching other human beings to be human. A teacher is not a mechanism for offloading knowledge into a child-shaped container.
LLMs are disturbingly capable of acting like they have emotions, regard of which definition of AGI* you want to use:
https://old.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1fr31h8/noteboo...
* there's disagreement about each letter, and treating them as boolean values rather than continuous.
> LLMs are disturbingly capable of acting like they have emotions
But I want human teachers behaving truly human to students, not something that can act "disturbingly capable of emotions" or fake it. AGI is nowhere near this (and there's no good definition of what AGI is, anyway).
Again, the human component is an essential part of the teacher-student relationship. Teachers are not simply offloaders of knowledge. Just like I don't want parent-like robots nursing and raising children (raising humans and being raised by them is essential to the human experience), I don't want teacher-like robots "disturbingly capable" of acting as if they have emotions.
Think of it this way: a sociopath [1] is a human that can act as if they had cooperative/empathetic feelings towards other humans, when in reality acting callously in their own self-interest all the time. Would you want a sociopath teaching children? I wouldn't; whether the sociopath can pass knowledge well and can fake as if they had normal human emotions won't sway my opinion.
Real human connection is what makes us human. AIs are not human by definition. Therefore, AIs cannot replace humans in those situations where human connection matters. And we shouldn't want them to either, because otherwise what's the point of existence? Asimov's fictional planet of Solaria was a dystopia, not something to aspire to.
----
[1] or the pop culture understanding of them, anyway. Let's not get caught up in definitions.
> The "human component" to (good) teaching is human beings teaching other human beings to be human
You learn that before you enter school, school teaches you how to be less human and more robotic.
> school teaches you how to be less human and more robotic
That's a very cynical take, and in my opinion, false too.
You can find examples of bad anything everywhere, including teaching. What you describe hasn't been my own experience as a child, nor my silblings', nor my own children.
> You learn [to be human] before you enter school
Hard disagree. You never stop learning how to be human till the day you die, but your most important formative years in this sense occur during childhood and early adulthood.
There exists art where the human connection and effort is the point, and this is not because you want to show off how rich you are ("owning" this kind of art is not what most of us are after).
However, Transformers movies and equivalent "art as a product" will be made by algorithm or GenAI, if they aren't already.
> Well seriously what profession is immune?
Any job that requires general purpose hands and feet to to "real work". Like the thousands of people fixing infrastructure right now everywhere after Helene.
That's such a blah mindset. Sure my job might be on the line but at least they come for the other guys first.
I think Cursor is great, it's really boosted what I can do.
I think it's made me 3 -> 5x more valuable.
Now, maybe it's done the same for other people as well, but I think my co-efficient was high, and I continue to insist that I've never worked anywhere that had enough resource focused on software development. The demand has always massively exceeded the organisations ability to fund supply.
And, as many have noted lower costs can also boost demand.
Finally, off shore devs are on a longer cycle time for many reasons. If cost onshore are reduced then that cycle time will crush offshore competitive advantage. I don't see any prospect of me getting work from India or Indonesia, but I do see AI as a driver that will reduce work leaving the UK for other places.
3 to 5 times more valuable is a huge leap. How do you measure this? Are you a software engineer?
> I think it's made me 3 -> 5x more valuable.
You should negotiate a corresponding raise!
The AI will sue for a part of the proceeds....
I think we are simply seeing mean reversion from the previous far from equilibrium state.
I am a terrible programmer but probably could have BSed my way into a jr front end role with enough effort circa 2019.
The reason I didn't is exactly because of right now. I would be unemployed and chasing dev jobs with zero chance of landing.
Instead I was learning Julia today with the help of language models because I can stretch out and explore with not needing a job.
Right now is just the shake out of the pretender software engineers like I would have been.
People like you will be fine. People like me should be doing something else anyway.
the execs are just salivating to commodotize us. my experience with outsourcing tells me we are fine.
It's fine right up until it isn't. The chance that "this time it's different" can't even be reasonably inferred from the inside.
Induction from the perspective of the seasonal turkey: https://mashimo.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/bertrand-russells-i...
If offshore humans can't beat on shore humans what chance does AI have in the near future?
If I could predict that, I could beat the market. Inventing the difference would be both a fun technical challenge and a way to get a terrifying lynch mob at my door. Merely knowing how far away it is would help me know how to plan early retirement (kinda already could except for being a migrant).
The “paradox” (or whatever you might want to call it) with software is if I can describe the business case, with all of its side effects and outputs for unhappy paths, in enough detail, I’ve just done all the hard part of writing software. If AI can help with that last 20ish percent then great. The challenge with offshoring, and now LLMs, is that it takes as much time to describe the problem and outputs than it doesn’t to just write the dang code.
It is rare to ever see a software project with all behaviors spelled out in English. I think the effort required to do that is rarely necessary, and people just write code instead. "Documentation" usually means that you wrote down how to use the thing, plus some non-obvious details.
Exactly. It’s always been possible to commoditize software engineering _if_ you could find the right developers overseas but the fact is we are where we are because it’s hard and almost impossible to manage.
And either way, talented developers from developing countries are often brought on with visas and end up with salaries close to the industry norm. I’ve been involved with large mergers with overseas dev teams and that’s how it’s always been.
At best, AI is just good documentation. This whole craze is the equivalent of saying doctors won’t be necessary because you can just google how to do x procedure.
If they commoditize us, then they will have commoditized themselves.
Executive isn't a "job", its a status, its not a skill, its just a position in the hierarchy, so no they will not have commoditized themselves
Being an executive totally requires skills. Are they unique skills that only executives have? Not really. But people management and resource management in general require skills, wisdom, etc. If someone is made an executive and they don't have the required skills, they will usually blow up their project or company.
I don't doubt that an executive requires a certain temperament that lots of people don't have and that the people who become executives are generally intelligent and capable. What I'm saying is that it is not a "trade" or "profession" that has specific teachable skills, knowledge bases and responsibilities like "engineer" or "lawyer" or "plumber"
Right. By the time I’m automated we pretty much have AGI.
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> You are a commodity.
If I am, then so are the execs. They aren't special. They just rewrite their institutional rules so it is heads they win, tails you lose.
They absolutely are. Companies spend huge amounts of time cutting out management fat, as they should.
It's Darwinian. You either evolve or die. It's a good thing.
Management fat? Sure. C-Suite level? Nah. Boeing's last two failed CEOs left with tens of millions of dollars worth of golden parachute; we've seen a massive upwards trend in CEO pay over the last few decades.
Musk got $44 billion for being a part-time CEO at Tesla, even.
CEO is the riskiest, high profile hire. Million dollar golden parachutes are a rounding error distraction. I'm not justifying them, but it's generally just contractual, and the cost of getting rid of a low performer (which is no different to the rank and file, just at a much lower unit cost).
> CEO is the riskiest, high profile hire.
How risky can it possibly be if three years of failure gets you $60M severance? What's the risk?
Adam Neumann is a billionaire!
Risky for the company, not for the individual. Hence why they are happy to pay what is, at the corporate level, a paltry sum to make a problem go away. It just happens to be a rather large sum at the individual level.
A bad CEO can easily ruin hundreds of billions or trillions in value. Some tens of millions to be rid of the problem is a no brainer.
> Some tens of millions to be rid of the problem is a no brainer.
But... they can just be fired. Like the rest of us.
I think you misunderstand what a golden parachute is, or more accurately in this instance, what severance is.
It's not some evil cabal gifting each other money. It's a contractual issue.
> It's not some evil cabal gifting each other money.
Oh, they absolutely sit on each others boards and rubber stamp such packages.
> It's a contractual issue.
Yes. They should stop adding multi-million dollar golden parachutes for failures to said contracts.
> If management believes it can source labor at a lower cost, they have a legal fiduciary duty to do so.
Only if that's the only variable, which it never is.
Exactly. Execs see the monthly spend, people actually doing the work see the long-term externalities and hidden costs. Many, many people I know would and do buy more expensive (often Made in USA but not always) products when doing so means that the products will last longer and need less maintenance. Treating labor as commodities implies that the labor is interchangeable. Everyone who's actually done the work knows that it's not. There's no shortcut to paying for good talent.
Sure, and they will quickly discover when the quality deteriorates unacceptably.
But that is no reason to stick your head in the sand and pretend there aren't alternatives.
You don't understand people being worried their lives and families are going to be destroyed?
You are describing the entire history of the human race.
It's not different this time. And yet, somehow, every century has been better than the last.
for sure so let's ignore any suffering or complaints and celebrate every tragedy because it's worth it in the end for someone else?
just hand wave anyones pain away because it works for you? I guess people are used to it
If you were to chart the pain and suffering of the human race over the last 10,000 years, or even over the last 100 years, it is steeply down and to the right.
I'm not hand waving anything away. It's unfortunately ruthlessly statistical.
I feel like creating software applications is not what leads to high salaries as a software developer.
Its creating software applications and then signing up to support said software codebase for 100K+ users and agreeing to pager duty and triage management for it for more than a 5-10 years.
Perhaps AI purveyors should focus on automating customer/bizdev support by creating frameworks/workflows for AI pager duty and AI triage management.
This again? What year is it?
We need to move past this type of thinking. Most professional services could be automated and yet they are not for a number of reasons. For developers, the unescapable complexity that keeps creeping into projects if you don't know what you are doing will keep us employed.
Code generation was a thing for decades but there are still jobs writing CRUD based apps by hand.
In my observation, the software written even now--by people who are bothered to both learn the language and put their brain to work--are of potato quality. Brace ourselves for a world where the authors don't have even the same qualification producing even worse: autocomplete-driven development. A world of zero accountability, responsibility, and traceability.
We are going to see a massive creativity expansion with the many, many people who will have access to amateur level coding. Think of it like the expansion of visual images once the first personal camera was widely adopted. There are still professional photographers, but they are now dwarfed by the number of amateurs (everyone with a modern phone).
Except this analogy breaks down because photography is but a sliver of what is possible with ubiquitous programmability. It's going to be more, different, and somewhat unexpected.
Get ready!
I doubt it ... most people are by nature consumers not makers.
It's like the web which was originally thought to be the means for people to be creating their own web sites rather than consuming TV content, but look how that went.
I guess nowadays there are an elite few professional youtubers making regular content, and teenagers posting TikTok videos, but that's about it.
This a 1000%. Go to CivitAI and look up the list of most recently submitted images over the past year. 99.99999% of them are porn or porn-adjacent banal drivel.
I think we can all agree on those points but this is a very superficial analysis. Now that the barriers to coding are lowered, will that increase or decrease supply, what types of new tasks (or job titles) will AI create?
Everyone is getting accelerated learning and task completion, but what does that mean for the market? I think there are more fundemental things to this change that are needed to be fleshed out. Pre LLM programmers and post LLM programmers will be very different.
More software is not better. Software is a burden that must be maintained to keep its value. Having more software, written by people who don't know how to write software, will not be creating value. It will be creating an ongoing maintenance burden. That they will attempt to address with AI, which digs the hole deeper.
In the second chart "Software developer median salary", the bar for Germany is very likely wrong: I am very sure that the wages are quite a lot lower (rather in the 5-figure range instead of low 6-figure range).
This might help with building new software. But large part of the job is maintenance and changes. How long will next outage take to understand without people with deep understanding of the code.
> engineers helped build Teams, Microsoft’s video-streaming service, as well as designing chips and software for “connected cars”,
Ah yes, software famously loved by users. Microsoft teams and in-car software.
not sure where they got that info for the "software developer median salary" but pretty sure thats not the median salary for software developers in the Netherlands. It's about half that.
Yeah the fine print says developers with 3-5 years experience. Even the US numbers are inflated for devs with that level of experience. Certainly outside of the Bay Area and maybe NYC.
soo… just like every other job, they’re getting 3rd country workers to work for pennies and trying to pretend it’s a fair thing?
I don’t see what’s unfair about it if every employment agreement is voluntarily entered into.
Starving can be voluntary.
I wonder why Silicon Valley companies had to collude on salaries...
https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
They tried this in the early 00s too.
One of my first blog posts was on this topic: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/47
I'm not saying that the job of developers won't change or they won't be forced to be more efficient, but the work of turning abstract requirements into something a computer can execute isn't going away any time soon, even in countries with expensive labor.
Who are they?
What I don't get is, how on earth developers in the USA jumped on the boat of WFH.
Isn't it obvious that if a job can be done from anywhere that would mean that you are opening yourself to world wide competition when subsidizing your company with your own facilities?
Was it hubris? Do Americans believed that only they can do this coding stuff? Not only that the job market was opened to global competition, it allowed tech and capital transfer. On the grand scheme its great, now everyone does all these things but from workers perspective its very bad idea.
It has been quite some time to see some outstanding American innovation. OpenAI and the generative AI was one but it didn't took much time for China to leap ahead. Maybe its nationalism, maybe its the language barrier but I see a lot of Asian innovations that don't catch much attention in the Anglosphere. American techies pumping Sora on Twitter over some demos when Chinese are having it open to use by the public was amusing.
There's this narrative on Twitter and elsewhere about how EU over regulated tech and fell behind US but this whole narrative is based on dismissing the Asian innovations. You have to omit China and other Asian countries from the graphs that show Europe is falling behind so to claim that free market and libertarianism is driving innovation and growth, because if you include Asia you end up claiming that its communism and centralized economies are actually the big success stories.
> What I don't get is, how on earth developers in the USA jumped on the boat of WFH.
I think the general US ethos is something like “if we can offshore it, we will… find something where you can add more value”.
That said, I think a lot of non-US-based programmers grossly over-estimate the value of pure programming skills versus things like understanding a market, problem solving, empathy, English proficiency, similar time zone, professional trust, etc. on top of programming skills goes a long way.
No good programmer is afraid of their employment status, imho.
On the other hand, the number of offshoring nightmare stories abound, just like we did last time offshoring was the next hot thing.
> It has been quite some time to see some outstanding American innovation.
At a minimum, there is plenty of innovation that is not publicly known.
Is the US as prolific as some times in the past? Probably not.
Is that a fair comparison? Also probably not.
> Was it hubris? … because if you include Asia you end up claiming that its communism and centralized economies are actually the big success stories.
This sounds like sock puppet rhetoric.
As someone with a bit of experience in asia, including China, I’m happy to bet on Asia being good and sometimes the best at certain things, especially areas of incremental improvement.
That said, I’m willing to make large bets that Asian ascendency to the top of the general innovation leaderboard will not happen in my lifetime.
> That said, I think a lot of non-US-based programmers grossly over-estimate the value of pure programming skills versus things like understanding a market, problem solving, empathy, English proficiency, similar time zone, professional trust, etc. on top of programming skills goes a long way.
I agree, but IMHO when WFH many of these are weakened or even completely lost for the local American employees too. When WFH, the cultural integration(which provides the empathy, market understanding and other) gets reduced into whatever they can get from their neighborhood and from the internet. The internet part is available to everyone globally and the neighborhood culture is already not very strong in the USA apart from few places like NY. The rest are skills people can develop just as they can develop their programming.
It's true that good programmers don't have to be afraid but there're good programmers all over the word and when the market is not as hot, even the best will feel it.
> I agree, but IMHO when WFH many of these are weakened or even completely lost for the local American employees too.
Fair point, but that’s WFH done poorly, imho.
“100% remote” wfh teams should almost always have periodic get togethers on the company dime (among other things) to enhance/develop the relationships within the company.
Programmers will definitely lose some of their current market power in the future, but I don’t think that off-shoring will be seen as the main culprit.
I can’t tell you how much off-shoring is largely seen as a joke except by the VPs who are trying to get a promotion via cost-cutting. The quality of work needed is just not there at scale.
Companies are going to offshore no matter where US employees work.
>You have to omit China and other Asian countries from the graphs that show Europe is falling behind so to claim that free market and libertarianism is driving innovation and growth, because if you include Asia you end up claiming that its communism and centralized economies are actually the big success stories.
See, you have to realize that China is "still in the process of democratizing from free market exposure" and "the world is more peaceful now than it ever has been because of economic interdependence". Thanks Milton Friedman! /s
Admitting that offshoring was actually prioritizing lower prices (through regulatory arbitrage and human suffering based subsidies) over national economic and skills maintenance security will get you shooed out of the room. Yeah. Look at all the Indians lifted out of poverty... Shipbreaking multi-decade old ships, rebuilding lead batteries by hand (without PPE). Look at all the uplifting of the Global South! ...Often ruining their own environment to do things that absolutely would not fly here. Look at all the inroads we've made making the world more peaceful by shipping all the most advanced manufacturing infra over to a hostile regime that culturally values patience and tends to think further ahead than a 200 year old upstart.
There was a period of complete retardation in full swing in the 80's to early 10's that I truly wish it were easier to articulate in media res as opposed to in hindsight. But that's life for ya.
This is a bit sensationalist of course. But the notion that AIs are enhancing developer productivity is real. I use LLMs for different tasks with coding. Is it perfect or amazing? No. Does it save me time. Yes. Document this code; write me test for x. Cover these cases as well. Give me some quick feedback on what I just wrote. Did I overlook anything? Etc. If you look at my chatgpt history, I'm constantly interrogating it about whatever I'm working on. That saves me a lot of time. It's a productivity enhancer.
Of course the history of computer science is that we've had a continuous stream of productivity enhancing things that helped us become more productive. Whenever that happens, what doesn't happen is a decline in demand for programmers. As what we do becomes cheaper or easier, people want more of it. So far, there's little sign of demand for programmers declining. If anything, it's now so easy that lots of non programmers start getting their hands dirty as well. And why not? That just frees me up to do a bit higher level, more interesting stuff. A lot of programming work is tedious and repetitive. Getting some help with that is very welcome as far as I'm concerned. That just means I can build whatever I have in my head faster. So, it costs less for whomever is buying that. So, they might get back for some more; or raise the ambition level a bit. It's not a zero sum game.
The second thing that the article brought up (outsourcing) is an interesting one. Because they missed one important thing that LLMs also do: which is translating. Outsourcing programming work has been historically hard because of language barriers. Miscommunication due to people not speaking each other's language very well is a big challenge. You can make it work but it takes a bit of effort. I've worked with people that I can barely understand or that barely understand me. It's tedious and frustrating if you can't understand each other.
That language barrier is melting away as translating between languages gets easier. We're not quite at the babelfish level just yet but you can get pretty close if you have some patience. Meetings can get transcribed & subtitled (imperfectly) and those transcriptions can be translated. Anything in text form is easy to translate into whatever. In short, we still have cultural barriers but the language barriers are becoming less of a hurdle. The quality and speed of the translations keeps getting better. Real time conversation translations are basically no longer science fiction. And the quality of the translations is more than good enough for a lot of things now. Certainly better than two non native speakers trying to speak English with each other (I'm not a native speaker).
The value of hiring locally is mainly in that you can communicate with people directly. And that's just hard if you don't speak the same language. But that's not going to be as big of a deal as it used to be. The value of being local is still there but it's worth less.
The two added together means a vast increase in the number of programmers. But also in the number of customers. There are a lot of growth economies in the world. And they are all going to need programming work done. And they will want to hire the best they can afford and won't be hiring locally necessarily. We're not talking impoverished third world countries here either.
So, I'm not that worried. The opposite actually.
People also dont realize that this will kill SAAS margins. If anyone can quickly build working software, the whole moat is gone.
If you dont think this will not happen, you have not used cursor.sh with sonnet 3.5. I am working on a startup that is effectively a copy of existing products. My flow goes:
1. Screen shot competitor UX
2. Drop screen shot into cursor.sh, ask it to code it (there will be issues)
3. Screen shot individual components in the above screenshot
4. Have cursor.sh fix each component one by one
5. Go back through and tell it each issue by highlighting the code
6. Iterate a bit
7. 90% of the UI has been copied in one day, with a working backend.
This is with a next.js/supabase app deployed on vercel. For complex B2B saas.
Its over. In a year the models will get so much better
>This is with a next.js/supabase app deployed on vercel. For complex B2B saas.
I have seen this said before. Would you show some of these sites that you have knocked out in one day fully working? If not, would you be willing to do the community a service and over the course of a weekend, live-stream or video yourself duplicating this site[0]? Just the publicly available parts.
It would be eye-opening for many I think, and in the process would make you one of the most famous developers in the world (or at least in the US), since at least two very well-known developers/influencers do not think it is currently possible and dunking on them live or on video screen recording would really be a sea-change in our sector. Not to mention, settling once and for all the "LLMs are going to take our jobs" vs. "lol, that are just a fancier autocomplete" argument within the industry.
I am not joking about this or trying to bait you, I would seriously like to know if I am wasting my time with traditional development and really need to re-orient my skills and job prospects. So far, I have seen many people do demos, but none were anything other than relatively simple, error-prone, SPA apps. It is more complex ones, I am interested in. The link below[0] is not that complex for a traditional developer, but it isn't super-simple either. From your comment, it sounds like you have the experience and ability to do it.
The collective backlog of every software company probably stretches into centuries.
This gives us the tooling to A.) burn through those faster. B.) solve more complex problems.
If your entire job as an engineer is “take tickets with very clear acceptance criteria and turn into component / basic business logic”, I’d be worried for sure. I was initially worried myself when all this landed two years ago, but using it daily and now building enterprise scale apps with it, I know we’ve got at least another decade or two before it’s able to tackle the full breadth of an engineers role.
This sounds like the software engineering equivalent of setting up an Amazon business account to get into drop shipping. IMO if it becomes easier for any random person to dump AI generated SAAS apps it will only strengthen the current big players.
Remember how Brick and Mortar was dead because of online shopping? Who knew in 2024 I'd be more likely to head out to an actual store than risk purchasing some sketchy product off Amazon, but I can imagine that if we do eventually actually get to a future where the world is filled with the white noise of SAAS garbage coming out left and right anyone actually interested in mitigating risk for their business is going to learn quickly to err on the side of caution.
If anyone and everyone can emit noise then that becomes the baseline, and people will catch on quick to find those that rise above.
1. Install wordpress 2. Install theme
It’s over! All websites can now just be slightly tweaked templates. Go home, we no longer need any web dev whatsoever.
It’s not like the bar will raise. No, everyone will expect the exact same level of quality as of 2024 and bloated, AI diarrhea using 200x resources is fine now and will always be fine.
Nobody needs to differentiate and we will all copy each other endlessly and eventually the whole software world will be basically one single product.
One important thing to remember is the cost right now is not being passed to you. I wonder how this all changes when companies are forced to charge you the actual costs vs being heavily subsidized.
While this is true, I would bet that the cost is less than hiring a software engineer in the United States
What happens if you have to maintain and extend the codebase over many years? Will your workflow work for fixing complex bugs reported by users?
Is anything you've made by this process publicly available?
This sounds a lot like programming, from 10k feet.
Interesting! So is the marketing and sales process going to be even more of a differentiator than it is now?
In the short run yes, but i have no idea what happens in the long run
Copying has never been a hard problem.
Yeah but you couldn't copy major functionality in one day. The same can be done from a figma. This will bleed into every area of software
What if you want to make things that are new?
Just put it in Figma. Its not that much different. This is going to kill software margins, any piece of saas can be quickly copied
Poor on-call guys
A big part of tools is hiding complexity from you - how does this workflow handle that?
My experience with this tech is you’re not nearly as able to solve problems because you didn’t actually write the code. So now you need to be better at reading code you didn’t write. The models can’t do a number of common programming tasks, but they are indeed super useful.
This tech currently just makes each engineer more efficient. There’s an infinite space of problems to solve. I guess we’ll must be digging through that space faster and wider from now on.
This is about making a quick buck with throwaway products and deceive customers into thinking this product has any future.
Besides, any sufficiently complex field has a lot of business rules that you can't derive from screenshots.
The level of delusion regarding AI makes me want to completely ignore anything that touches it and come back in 10-20 years when people learned something.
Maybe OP meant "all CRUD TODO-like SaaS is toasted".
I recommend trying it out. Just don’t drink the Kool-aid.
SaaS type software has been so easy to build for so long and the margins have remained strong. I think the reason for that is that the SaaS software is an artifact of defining exactly what is needed for a particular function and that remains valuable and expensive