alt Hacker NewsHere's my bet: with the new unlocked efficiencies, developers will no longer just work on a very small part of a system. Instead they'd be entrusted with entire business units individually or in a small group.
In those cases, the feedback loop is more direct and not necessarily relying on toy proxies like LOC or documents. My point is that it would be like grading a VP of product on how many lines their document has. That'd be stupid because VP's are seen as more mature and have longer term incentives. I don't think it should be any different for employees.
TL;DR employees will become small business owners-ish with AI.
This is just a hypothesis, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.
I disagree.
Diffusion of responsibility is the main aspect and the other factor is complexity. While AI might scale at will via the number of agents used, humans cannot.
Have you developed a platform which was business critical to the 100.000+ headcount global company that has 24/7 uptime before and after AI kicked in?
After all the amount of decisions to be made accumulate the larger the product or unit you are working on. After all, an AI is a approximation and even automating decisions away means knowing what to automate.
In this high impact and stress situation most people hide. No one wants to be held accountable. No one. That's why you have scapegoats.
Build a SaaS app with 10.000+ customers yourself. This doesn't exist on autopilot. And the moment you see humans fit for whole business units - why stop there? Where does this arbitrary border come from? This doesn't make sense, because why shouldn't AI be able to overtake this function as well?
Complex applications and decisions to be made - they also increase exponentially. And to be honest, this isn't just a matter of AI, but IQ, too. Average people want to execute a well crafted plan - only few craft them on their own or they are basic ones in comparison to huge apps.