alt Hacker NewsI agree with what you said. And perhaps my belief that “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion.
If AI replaces everything, then I become unnecessary. So maybe I am simply trying to convince myself that developers like me are still needed.
That said, realistically, I still think there are limits unless the essence of architecture itself changes. I also acknowledge part of your perspective.
Those of us who are not in the AI field tend to experience AI progress not as a linear or continuous process, but as a series of discrete events, such as major model releases. Because of that, there is inevitably a gap in perspective.
People inside the industry, at least those who are not just promoting hype, often seem to feel that technological progress is exponential. But since we are not part of that industry, we experience it more episodically, as separate events.
At the same time, capital has a self-fulfilling quality. If enough capital concentrates in one direction, what looked like linear progress may suddenly accelerate in an almost exponential way.
However, even that kind of model can eventually hit a specific limit. I do not know when that limit will arrive, because I am not an AI industry insider. More precisely, I am closer to someone who uses Hugging Face models, builds around them, and serves them, rather than someone working on AI R&D itself.
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I have a more optimistic take. Those of us who have done it by hand for a while are armed with that experience. Yes you can just use an LLM to do everything now, but I think it's tough to supervise it on tasks that you've never actually had to do. Maybe that won't be as important as I think, but I think that I'd have learned a lot less in school if I just used an LLM to code everything.
Day to day, the resolution of our work is probably different. We're zooming out and spending more time strategizing and managing the AI tooling. This might mean less jobs. It might also mean we just get more done.
I don't work on AI directly either, but I'm finding a lot of value in learning the new tooling. I think being able to competently leverage these tools is going to be a key skill from now on.
I'm with you at the "bargaining" phase of AI grief (sure AI is useful but it won't replace me!).
I think my reasoning is you still need a tech person to translate from feature to architecture. AI can do both but not everyone knows they need the latter.
Most of what these PMs can produce nowadays turns boardroom heads, sure. But it's just that: visuals and just enough prototype functionality that it fools the people you're demoing to. Seen enough of these in the recent past.
Will there be some PMs that can become "software developers" while armed with an LLM? Sure!
But that's not the majority. On the other hand, yes there are going to be "software developers" that will be out of a job because of LLMs, because the devs that were FS and could take an idea from 0-1 with very little overhead even in the past can now do so much faster and further without handing off to the intermediates and juniors. They mentor their LLM intern rather than their intermediates and juniors. The perpetual intermediate devs with 20 years of experience are the ones that are gonna have a larger and larger problem I'd say.
The Staff engineer that was able to run circles around others all along? They'll teach their LLM intern into an intermediate rather than having to "10 times" a bunch of perpetual intermediates with 20 years of experience.