alt Hacker NewsThe future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants.
I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies.
Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each
What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each
What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each
Same number of engineers.
We are about to enter an era of explosive software production, not from big tech but from small companies. I don't think this will only apply to the software industry. I expect this to apply to every industry.
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And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-saturated markets?
Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?
> smaller companies
And large companies. The first half of my career was spent writing internal software for large companies. I believe it's still the case that the majority of software written is for internal software. AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it easier for every company big and small to have custom software for its exact use case(s).
yeah, I agree.
When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.
That means the system will collapse in the future. Now from bunch of people some good programmers are made. Rest go into marketing, sales, agile or other not really technical roles. When the initial crowd will be gone there will be no experienced users of AI. Crappy inexperienced developer will make more crap without prior experience and ability to judge the design decisions. Basically no seniors without juniors.
I think we were headed that way before LLMs came on to hunt scene.
LLMs just accelerated this trend.
By and large "AI assistant" is not a real thing. Everyone talks about it but no one can point you to one, because it doesn't exist (at least not in a form that any fair non-disingenuous reading of that term would imply). It's one big collective hallucination.
> I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies.
This would be strange, because all other technology development in history has taken things the exact opposite direction; larger companies that can do things on scale and outcompete smaller ones.
It will lead to hollowing out of the substance everywhere. The constant march to more abstraction and simplicity will inevitably end up with AI doing all the work and nobody understanding what is going on underneath, turning technology into magic again. We have seen people losing touch with how things work with every single move towards abstraction, machine code -> C -> Java -> JavaScript -> async/await -> ... -> LLM code generation, producing generations of devs that are more and more detached from the metal and living in a vastly simplified landscape not understanding trade-offs of the abstractions they are using, which leads to some unsolvable problems in production that inevitably arise due to the choices made for them by the abstractions.