alt Hacker News> Yes, about 2-5% of the time.
There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%.
> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions
The AI is coming for that too.
You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not even the majority of devs.
People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.
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There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities.
However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"?
AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work:
- Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback
There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.
> The AI is coming for that too.
That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.
> The AI is coming for that too.
Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker.
> People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away.
I'm not sure anyone is actually working on those. People talk about spending all day writing CRUD apps here, but if you suggest there are already low code tools to build those, they will promptly tell you it's too complex for that to work.
> The AI is coming for that too.
Current AI tech giants prove over and over and over again that this is not the case
>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions
> The AI is coming for that too.
If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. I'm still not convinced by that. But I am convinced that the part of software development that involves typing code manually into an IDE all day is likely gone forever.
Even if AI advances continue, for quite a while there's likely still going to be the 'Steve Jobs' role. That is, even if AI coding agents can, in the future, replace entire teams of SWEs, competently making all implementation decisions with no guidance from a tech-savvy human, the best software will likely still involve a human deciding what should be built and being very picky about how, exactly, it should externally behave.
I don't know if it makes sense to call that person an SWE, and some people currently employed as SWEs either won't be good at this or aren't interested in doing it. But the existing pool of SWEs is probably the largest concentration of people who'll end up doing this job, because it's the largest concentration of people who've thought a lot about, and developed taste with respect to, how software should work.
I swear to God, it's like majority of IT workers are spineless worms without an iota of self-respect. What are the reasons for this? Is it because most are nerds who were bullied in school, or some form weird elitism-inferiority complex?
Only in tech I see people hating and not taking any pride in their work. Ask a lawyer or a doctor and they'll fight you to the death if you threaten their status. But here it is not only acceptable, but also for some reason encouraged to feel inferior. You're earning shitton of money? Well, you're just a lucky insect who taps on a keyboard while X does real job, about time AI has put you on the street. Disgusting. If some AI reckoning does come, I hope it will hit you first.
> The AI is coming for that too.
That's where we fundamentally disagree about.
Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit.
Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM parameter count.
> The AI is coming for that too.
To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need.
This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs and suchlike. He spent 6 months working in the company. On the factory floor, in the logistics department, in procurement, in accounting and even shadowing the board. Then he delivered a proposal for how to restructure the parts of the company, change manufacturing processes, and show how logistics and procurement could be optimized if you saw them as two parts in a bigger dance.
He redesigned the company so that it could a) be automated, and b) leverage automation to increase the efficiency of several parts of the business. THEN, he started planning how to write the software (this was the 80s after all), and then we started implementing it.
Now think about what went into this. For instance we changed a lot of what happened on the factory floor. Because my boss had actually worked it. So he knew what pain points existed. Pain points even the factory workers didn't know how to address because they didn't know that they could be addressed.
I was naive. I thought this was how everyone approached "software projects". People generally don't. But it did teach me that the job isn't writing code. It is reasoning about complex systems that often are not even known to those who are parts of it.
And this is for _boring_ software that requires very little creativity and mostly zero novelty. Now imagine how you do novel things.
> People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.
You make it sound like it is a bad thing that certain tasks become easier.
I spent a lot of time writing CRUD stuff. Because the things i really want to work on depend on them. I don't enjoy what is essentially boilerplate. Who does? If you can do the same job in 1/20 the time, then how is this a bad thing?
It is only a bad thing if writing CRUD webapps is the limit of your ability. We don't argue for banning excavators because it puts people with shovels out of work. We find more meaningful things for them to do and become more productive. New classes of work becomes low-skilled jobs.
If you have been doing software for a while, you are probably doing some subset of this. But these things are hard to articulate. It is hard to articulate because it is not something we think about. Like walking: easy for us to do, hard to program a robot to do it.
>> Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.
Anecdotal evidence to support this.
I work with both dev and design teams. Upper management has already gone through several layoffs and offshoring of the two dev teams I work with. The devs they did keep were exactly what you said. The capable ones who reliably closed their Jira tickets. Never missed a deadline for building their features or components. And now? Their work has tripled and now the only help they get from management? "Start to figure out how to leverage AI, we're going to be a in hiring freeze for the next 10 months."
The double whammy of losing onshore team members and not getting any help from management to fix the problem they just created and essentially just telling them to figure out how to use AI to keep up is pretty staggering.
I would echo what one of the devs told me, "If this is the new "AI era" than you can count me right the fuck out of it."
>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions
> The AI is coming for that too.
In that case all [1] non manual work is doomed, until robotics has an LLM moment.
[1] With the exception of all fields protected by politics or nepotism.
Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good.
I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.
Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing.
One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability.
Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends and other copy/paste junk. But as per industry classification they are just part of same Coder/Developer/IT Engineer group. And their bleak prospects is not some future scenario, it is playing out right now with tons of them getting laid off. And whole lot of people with IT degrees, certifications are not finding any jobs in this field.