alt Hacker NewsAI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.
Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.
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There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim.
There is also plenty of freelance / artistry type people who would of had work before (i.e creating Halloween, mothers day, Easter, etc) promotional material which is now just outsourced to AI. You see some of the biggest companies on Earth posting AI stuff for special event, etc.
Most aren't at the stage of using full AI "art" for advertisements (except maybe Coke) but some of these companies would already have full time artists, which they've bypassed. Their jobs are not forever and eventually will get killed.
> AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.
I disagree. AI is often depicted as autonomous agents YOLOing features, but they excel at pattern matching from free form text and examples, and execute feedback loops. This means that they are particularly apt at small maintenance tasks spread across the project following clear high level guidance.
This is your typical junior task, the kind of task that is plausibly very boring and repetitive that is validation-heavy until it stumbles upon an unexpected turn and forces a senior to step in.
Once you offload these tasks to an agent running on a background, what exactly is left for a junior to do?
Juniors can arguably lean on AI coding agents to tackle more complex and more extensive work, but the truth if the matter is that they lack the skill and tools to effectively address this sort of work. They can get things to build but they fail to get things to make sense or be maintainable.
So what is a junior dev to do?
Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category.
There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github.
I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.
AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.
AI is absolutely directly responsible. Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer. Most people are taking credits, and internships are getting cancelled left and right.
At the moment is the significant part, how long do we expect this to last now that AI is capable of generating novel ideas like solutions to Erdos conjectures?
The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.