alt Hacker News"But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming." - could you explain what do you mean by it?
"But make no mistake the 'creative destruction' is occurring in full force and will wipe out any firm that's not ready for what's coming." - could you explain what do you mean by it?
Engineers in the US are by and large writing a lot less manual code now than they were 6 months ago. There are engineers who are not writing any code at all by hand.
Is this a skill that makes up the bulk of the economic value of a SWE? That's up for debate. Either way, it is a skill that commanded premium salaries not that long ago and was a non-trivial cost for any forward thinking technology company.
That has all changed very abruptly. It is _cheap_ now to produce source code. The expectation is that this will reduce the labor cost and make companies more productive i.e. productivity = output (software) / input (labor cost).
There are whole classes of companies whose service was to provide tools for SWEs (i.e. devtools) that have no foundation to build on now. The entire SaaS ecosystem is predicated (in part) on the cost of standing up a fit-for-purpose web app to solve some internal business problem being too high to be worth it for most large enterprises. Hence why they are okay spending hundreds of thousands or millions per year in subscriptions to these companies. That's changed now with AI being able to spin up entire products soup to nuts at the cost of a few hundred dollars worth of tokens.
In summary, the changes in how we work within the past 6 months to a year have been nothing short of seismic. If you or your firm are not experimenting with AI tools then it's important that you pay attention now because the chance that your business will be gone or your job will be eliminated has increased 100x. Whether you like it or not the job description for being a software developer has changed.