alt Hacker NewsIt’s been like that for a while, economic gains went to a small fraction of people, before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side. Think about how much the US economy is growing right now and who really profits from that growth. My guess is that 90 % of the growth goes to 10 % of people, with AI maybe 99 % might go to the 1 %. Or who do you think will gain from the tokenization of development? You’re just supposed to be more productive and the gains the company achieves will just go to the owners as they are in a great position right now and developers are scared shitless to get fired, so no one is increasing salaries or time off, instead most companies hang the threat of layoffs over people’s head to keep them in line. And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us. But I guess most people didn’t care as they made good money while it lasted.
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We’re going to be fine. I see daily what non-engineers that build stuff with AI come up with.
> before software developers were among those that were on the winning side, now they’re on the losing side.
are you sure about that? i'm a software engineer and i feel like i'm on the wining side now, even more than before. I'm considering quitting my 500K a year job to go compete against the employers. they seem like dinosaurs to me.
> And the funny thing is we developers did this to ourselves, by doing free open source work for the greater good, which now feeds AI models that are replacing many of us.
Open source is not to blame here. AI companies used the code, in some cases against the license, to train their models.
Nobody is actually getting replaced - it's just that layoffs are in vogue now. If there was productivity to gain here, it would be used to do more and capture more of the market.