It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.
I envy their optimism.
Tbh i dont see software demand being saturated anytime soon (which is why im bullish SWEs, and we're seeing both demand and compensation increase as of late), we keep moving up abstractions and increasing ambition and scope for new projects.
If all the companies use {frontier model} then your competitive advantage is what you have that is not legible to the model
Software has been saturated for a long time.
There are a bajillion apps on the app store that get little to no recognition. Most software startups fail to find a foothold and go under. An uncountable number of FOSS projects have been seen by at most a handful of people, and even fewer who have used/cloned the code.
does the world use more or less software YoY? (LLMs counts as software btw.)
the differentiating factors have changed but the underlying demand has only increased.
What is needed is a human at the beginning, to decide what needs to be done - and a human at the end, to decide whether it’s finished.
For a while at least, specialized knowledge will be a huge asset, if not necessarily strictly necessary, for the beginning and end.
Possibly even that might pass away - but I m a little more skeptical there, because a fully automated proceeds of choosing what to work on is really a whole different world altogether. It’s not just one where humans aren’t required to do menial tasks, it’s one where humanity isn’t required period - at which case, what’s the point of any of this.
I don’t see us getting to that point within my lifetime.
I've been thinking the same, this is very well put.
Nothing fortunate about it. That's the part I hate the most about today's LLMs. That you still have to do QA for them regarding the design. I should be able to arrive at cool result with 5% of current steering effort, if any. I still feel like a bottleneck between nothing and cool stuff existing. Unfortunately it's unavoidable until they read my mind and know what cool means for me.
Dont change. Software developers do not have to change anything they control their means of production and we dont HAVE to use any of this stuff. IF you are saying that there will be non-engineers willing to step in to hit enter (as in the business/product people) and LLMs will be good enough to do with it, Im ok with that.
I encourage business people to go down that path, especially since I have no organizational responsibility to help them. So if they run into even one little issue, I wont look at their code, I wont let it into a repo and I can just walk away.
There will be people who cross over and will want to help the people using LLMs and some will be technical. But it wont be in large numbers and it will be based on extraction and not pay very well at all. It will pay less every day as the LLM usage goes up to the CTOs desk.
More power to them! At the end of the day someone WILL have to hit enter, and it wont be me in some low paid slopshop.
What Im saying is the industrys future and mine are not intertwined. The tech industry is of no interest to me as a software engineer. They have jumped their own fake shark.
> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.
Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.
the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
right now the meme is we all became managers of agents. the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Why do you assume this to be the case? Look at your own company culture--has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks? What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
>the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Only if you completely misunderstand how business and economics works. The price of code is falling because it's turning into a commodity. The amount of people needed to produce it is drastically decreasing.
We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
doesn't feel like it, collaboration is more important than ever for high level direction even if nobody pair programs anymore. relationships feel more important than ever especially customer ones. theres no RL environment for competing in business
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
Yes, because there is a limit to human desire for food, as we tend to get full. is there a limit to humanity's appetite for software? I would posit probably not, because software is infinitely abstractable and can be applied to any industry and domain
the price of code is falling but the value of differentiated ideas and market alpha is rising. human attention is scarce - as the mini-ceo with your army of agents, how will you compete with the other mini-ceos with their army of agents that can produce software at a whim?
I’m not sure this analogy works. In fact I’d argue it’s the opposite. Food is an example of something that is relatively stable in terms of consumption per capita. There’s only so much food a person can eat, so if you make it easier to produce, then jobs producing it go down, as we’ve seen. But software isn’t like that at all. There’s essentially no end to how much software we can consume, and so as it becomes cheaper to produce, we’ll likely produce it in even larger quantities. Again, as we’ve seen.
You need to normalize that with world population, or a bigger population and a smaller percentage could be the same number of people.
Of course it is still a bit simple, because the distribution will not be uniform per country.
Then we need to know why 150 and see how other numbers look like, ideally per region. My guess is industrial revolution but it is mixed with different timings and political events in different places.
Regarding
> What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
Obviously talking to the client, or does your llm power itself on and starts working without any input from you?
This is what agile software development was always meant to be in fairness. It was the business people wanting to infantilise technical staff that created all the layers and walls away from users.
Now anyone who can talk can vibe code apps.
Personally I vibe code apps while driving. I still have to test them once no longer in motion, so im thinking maybe humans are still needed for testing but in a few years or more maybe not?
What a nightmare of a sentence.
Also, talking and listening to AI for directions is safer where the Ai is like an intelligent person. An example the AI giving you contextual directions like that new mechanic you are looking for is next to your favorite McDonalds in XYZ city or town (provides context to something you're familiar with so you just drive to a familiar place).
The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
I don't think this is a responsible thing to be doing unless you've completely relinquished all control of how things are built/designed/implemented to the AI.
Just because you __can__ does not mean you __should__.
Recently on a long drive I was working on an AI agent network concept talking it through and after each push to it's repo I would discuss more and prompt it to make more updates. On Wednesday at a bar with 2 unemployed software dev friends they were testing out my dating app Ive been working on in the car/in general. They provided me feedback on the dating app and boom GPT made the updates in less then minute.
"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
Maybe not for you.
>"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
You can embrace AI agents all you want, but don't risk other peoples lives by distracting yourself while driving.
Ok got it never have a handsfree phone conversation while driving if it involves a lot of brainpower. Which is super subjective and id say talk to chatGPT to create an idea of yours and see if your mind changes on this topic ;). It sounds like you have not talked to conversational AI to create software yet. cheers
No, I prefer to talk to people.
Yet i love technology and using it in novels I see many others will be embracing in time too.
Circling back to these replies: Ah yes! The best slacktivism is having the bots do it for you!