> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack for standardized tests (Leetcode) and the time to grid some prep.
The compensation and hiring for that kind of inexpert work were completely out of sync with anything sustainable but held up for almost a decade because money was cheap. Now, money is held much more tightly and we stumbled into a tech that can cheaply regurgitate a lot of so the trivial inexpert work, meaning the bottom fell out of these untenable, overpaid jobs.
You and I may not be effected, having charted a different path through the industry and built some kind of professional career foundation, but these kids who were (irresponsibly) promised an easy upper middle class life are still real people with real life plans, who are now finding themselves in a deeply disappointing and disorienting situation. They didn't believe the correction would come, let alone so suddenly, and now they don't know how they're supposed to get themselves back on track for the luxury lifestyle they thought they legitimately earned.
While that is part of the equation it's not at all that simple. If the average business owner wants a custom piece of software for their workflow how are they getting it now? For decades the answer would have been new hires, agencies, consultants, and freelancers. It didn't matter that most software boiled down to a simple CRUD backend and a flashy frontend. There was still a need for developers to create every piece of software.
Now AI makes it unbelievably easy to make those simple but bespoke software packages. The business owner can boot up Lovable and get something that is good enough. The non-software folk generally aren't scrutinizing the software they use. It doesn't matter if the backend is spaghetti code or if there are bugs here and there. If it works well enough then they're happy.
In my opinion that's the unfortunate truth of AI software development. It's dirt cheap, fast, and good enough for most people. Computer's couldn't write software before and now they can. Obviously that is real devaluation, right?
So far, the tools help many programmers write simple code more quickly.
For technically adept professionals who are not programmers, though, we still haven't seen anything really break through the ceiling consistently encountered by previous low-code/no-code tools like FoxPro, Access, Excel, VBA, IFTTT, Zapier, Salesforce etc.
The LLM-based tools for this market work differently than the comparable tools that preceded them over the last 40 years, in that they have a much richer vocabulary of output, but the ceiling that all of these tools encountered in the last has been a human one: most non-programmers don't know how to describe what they need with sufficient detail for anything much beyond a fragile, narrow toy.
Maybe GPT-8 or Gemini 6 or whatever will somehow finally be able to shatter this ceiling, and somebody will make finally make a no-code software builder that devours the market for custom/domain software. But that hasn't happened yet and it's at least as easy to be skeptical as it is to be convinced.
I'm fairly certain that it's happening right now. There is no threshold that LLMs need to "break through" to see adoption. The number of non-technical using them to write software is growing every day.
I was working freelance through late 2023 - mid 2025 and the shift seemed quite obvious to me. Other freelancers, agency managers, etc that I talked to could see it too. The volume of clients, and their expectations, is changing very rapidly in that space.
When I first earned money for coding (circa 20 years ago) it was small e-commerce shop. Today nobody does them, because there's woocomerce, shopify, FB marketplace. All dirt cheap and fast.
It isn't devaluation. It's good - it freed a lot of people to work on more ambitious things.
Nailed it. It's a pendulum and we're swinging back to baseline. We just finished our last big swing (zirp, post COVID dev glut) and are now in full free fall.
I love this post. It really encapsulates a lot of what my take on the situation is as well. It has just been so blatantly obvious that a lot of people have a very protectionist mindset surrounding AI, and a legitimate fear that they are going to be replaced by it.
> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession
You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now.
But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it.
Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor quality outputs imo. And as that ignorance moat gets smaller, this becomes harder to pull off.
This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions.
Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs.
LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow and Google.
I can tell you where I am seeing it change things for sure, at the early stages. If you wanted to work at a startup I advise or invest in, based on what I'm seeing, it might be more difficult than it was 5 years because there is a slightly different calculus at the early stage. often your go to market and discovery processes seed/pre-seed are either: not working well yet, nonexistent, or decoupled from prod and eng, the goal obviously is over time to bring it all together into a complete system (a business) - as long as I've been around early stage startup there has always been a tension between engineering and growth on budget division, and the dance of how you place resources across them such that they come together well is quite difficult. Now what I'm seeing is: engineering could do with being a bit faster, but too much faster and they're going to be sitting around waiting for the business teams to get their shit together, where as before they would look at hiring a junior, now they will just hire some AI tools, or invest more time in AI scaffolding etc... allowing them to go a little bit faster, but it's understood: not as fast as hiring a jr engineer. I noticed this trend starting in the spring this year, and i've been watching to see if the teams who did this then "graduate" out of it to hiring a jr, so far only one team has hired and it seems they skipped jr and went straight to a more sr dev.
Around 80% of my work is easy while the remaining 20% is very hard. At this stage the hard stuff is far outside the capability of LLM but the easy stuff is very much within its capabilities. I used to hire contractors to help with that 80% work but now I use LLMs instead. It’s far cheaper, better quality, and zero hassle. That’s 3 junior / mid level jobs that are gone now. Since the hard stuff is combinatorial complexity I think by the time LLM is good enough to do that then it’s probably good enough to do just about everything and we’ll be living in an entirely different world.
Exactly this, I lead cloud consulting + app dev projects. Before I would have staffed my projects with at least me leading it and doing the project management + stakeholder meetings and some of the work and bringing a couple of others in to do some of the grunt work. Now with Gen AI even just using ChatGPT and feeding it a lot of context - diagrams I put together, statements of work, etc - I can do it all myself without having to go through the coordination effort of working with two other people.
On the other hand, when I was staffed to lead a project that did have another senior developer who is one level below me, I tried to split up the actual work but it became such a coordination nightmare once we started refining the project because he could just use Claude code and it would make all of the modifications needed for a feature from the front end work, to the backend APIs, to the Terraform and the deployment scripts.
Today's high-end LLMs can do a lot of unsupervised work. Debug iterations are at least junior level. Audio and visual output verification is still very week (i.e. to verify web page layout and component reactivity). Once the visual model is good enough to look at the screen pixels and understand, it will instantly replace junior devs. Currently if you have only text output all new LLMs can iterate flawlessly and solve problems on it. New backend dev from scratch is completely doable with vibe coding now, with some exceptions around race conditions and legacy code comprehension.
> Once the visual model is good enough to look at the screen pixels and understand, it will instantly replace junior devs
Curious if you gave Antigravity a try yet? It auto-launches a browser and you can watch it move the mouse and click around. It's able to review what it sees and iterate or report success according to your specs. It takes screen recordings and saves them as an artifact for you to verify.
I only tried some simple things with it so far but it worked well.
Right, and as a hiring manager, I'm more inclined to hire junior devs since they eventually learn the intricacies of the business, whereas LLMs are limited in that capacity.
I'd rather babysit a junior dev and give them some work to do until they can stand on their own than babysit an LLM indefinitely. That just sounds like more work for me.
Completely agree. I use LLM like I use stackoverflow, except this time i get straight to the answer and no one closes my question and marks it as a duplicate, or stupid.
I dont want it integrated into my IDE, i'd rather just give it the information it needs to get me my result. But yeah, just another google or stackoverflow.
You're mostly right but very few teams are hiring in the grand scheme of things. The job market is not friendly for devs right now (not saying that's related to AI, just a bad market right now)
It's me. I'm the LM having work assigned to me that junior dev used to get. I'm actually just a highly proficient BA who has always almost read code, followed and understood news about software development here and on /. before, but generally avoided writing code out of sheer laziness. It's always been more convenient to find something easier and more lucrative in those moments if decision where I actually considered shifting to coding as my profession.
But here I am now. After filling in for lazy architects above me for 20 years while guiding developers to follow standards and build good habits and learning important lessons from talking to senior devs along the wa, guess what, I can magically do it myself now. The LM is the junior developer that I used to painstakingly explain the design to, and it screws it up half as much as the braindead and uncaring jr Dev used to. Maybe I'm not a typical case, but it shows a hint of where things might be going. This will only get easier as the tools become more capable and mature into something more reliable.
Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. AI is brand new bleeding edge technology right now, and adaption always takes time, especially when the integration with IDEs and such is even more bleeding edge than the underlying AI systems themselves.
And speaking about the future, I wouldn't just worry about it replacing the programmer, I'd worry about it replacing the program. The future we are heading into might be one where the AI is your OS. If you need an app to do something, you can just make it up on the spot, a lot of classic programs will no longer need to exist.
> Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years.
And where will it be in 5-10 years?
Because right now, the trajectory looks like "right about where it is today, with maybe some better integrations".
Yes, LLMs experienced a period of explosive growth over the past 5-8 years or so. But then they hit diminishing returns, and they hit them hard. Right now, it looks like a veritable plateau.
If we want the difference between now and 5-10 years from now and the difference between now and 5-10 years ago to look similar, we're going to need a new breakthrough. And those don't come on command.
Right about where it is today with better integrations?
One year is the difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Opus 4.5. We're not hitting diminishing returns yet (mostly because of exponential capex scaling, but still). We're already committed to ~3 years of the current trajectory, which means we can expect similar performance boosts year over year.
The key to keep in mind is that LLMs are a giant bag of capabilities, and just because we hit diminishing returns on one capability, that doesn't say much if anything about your ability to scale other capabilities.
The depreciation schedule is debatable (and that's currently a big issue!). We've been depreciating based on availability of next generation chips rather than useful life, but I've seen 8 year old research clusters with low replacement rates. If we stop spending on infra now, that would still give us an engine well into the next decade.
But humans have vastly lower error rates than llms. And in a multi-step process that means that those error rates compound. And when that happens, you end up with a 50/50 or worse
And, more importantly, a given human can, and usually will, learn from their mistakes and do better in a reasonably consistent pattern.
And when humans do make mistakes, they're also in patterns that are fairly predictable and easy for other humans to understand, because we make mistakes due to a few different well-known categories of errors of thought and behavior.
LLMs, meanwhile, make mistakes simply because they happen to have randomly generated incorrect text that time. Or, to look at it another way, they get things right simply because they happen to have randomly generated correct text that time.
Individual humans can be highly reliable. Humans can consciously make tradeoffs between speed and reliability. Individual unreliable humans can become more reliable through time and effort.
It's a trope that people say this and then someone points out that while the comment was being drafted another model or product was released that took a substantial step up on problem solving power.
I use LLMs all day every day. There is no plateau. Every generation of models has resulted in substantial gains in capability. The types of tasks (both in complexity and scope) that I can assign to an LLM with high confidence is frankly absurd, and I could not even dream of it eight months ago.
What are your talking about? You seem to live in a parallel universe.
Every single time I tried this or someone of my colleagues, this task failed tremendously hard.
> But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it.
This sounds kind of logical, but really isn't.
In reality you can ASSIGN a task to a junior dev and expect them to eventually complete it, and learn from the experience as well. Sure there'll likely be some interaction between the junior dev and mentor, and this is part of the learning process - something DESIREABLE since it leads to the developer getting better.
In contrast, you really cant "assign" something to an LLM. You can of course try to, and give it some "vibe coding" assignment like "build me a backend component to read the data from the database", but the LLM/agent isn't an autonomous entity that can take ownership of the assignment and be expected to do whatever it takes (e.g. coming back to you and asking for help) to get it done. With todays "AI" technology it's the AI that needs all the handholding, and the person using the AI is the one who has effectively taken the assignment, not the LLM.
Also, given the inability of LLMs to learn on the job, using an LLM as a tool to help get things done is going to be a groundhog day experience of having to micro-manage the process in the same way over and over again each time you use it... time that would have been better invested in helping a junior dev get up to speed and in the future be an independent developer that tasks can indeed be assigned to.
Doesn't matter. First, yes, a modern AI will come back and ask questions. Second, the AI is so much faster at interactions than a human is, that you can use that saved time to glance at its work and redirect it. The AI will come back with 10 prototype attempts in an hour, while a human will take a week for each, with more interupt questions for you about easy things
Sure, LLMs are a useful tool, and fast, but the point is they don't have human level intelligence, can't learn, and are not autonomous outside of an agent that will attempt to complete a narrow task (but with no ownership and guarantee of eventual success).
We'll presumably get there eventually and build "artificial humans", but for now what we've got is LLMs - tools for language task automation.
If you want to ASSIGN a task to something/someone then you need a human or artificial human. For now that means assigning the task to a human, who will in turn use the LLM as a tool. Sure there may be some productivity increase (although some studies have indicated the exact opposite), but ultimately if you want to be able to get more work done in parallel then you need more entities that you can assign tasks do, and for time being that means humans.
> the point is they don't have human level intelligence
> If you want to ASSIGN a task to something/someone then you need a human or artificial human
Maybe you haven't experienced it but a lot of junior devs don't really display that much intelligence. Their operating input is a clean task list, and they take it and convert it into code. It's more like "code entry" ("data entry", but with code).
The person assigning tasks to them is doing the thinking. And they are still responsible for the final output, so if they find a computer better and cheaper at "code entry" than a human well then that's who they're assign it to. As you can see in this thread many are already doing this.
The difference is the LLM is predictable and repeatable. Whereas a junior dev could go AWOL, leave unexpectedly for a new job, or be generally difficult to work with, LLMs fit my schedule, show constant progress and are generally less anxiety inducing than pouring hundreds of thousands into a worker who may not pan out. This sentiment may be showing my lack of expertise in team building but at worst shows that LLMs represent a legitimate alternative to building a large team to achieve a vision.
Funny you mention this because Opus 4.5 did this just yesterday. I accidentally gave it a task with conflicting goals, and after working through it for a few minutes it realized what was going on, summarized the conflict and asked me which goal should be prioritized, along with detailed pros and cons of each approach. It’s exactly how I would expect a mid level developer to operate, except much faster and more thorough.
Yes, they continue to get better, but they are not at human level (and jr devs are humans too) yet, and I doubt the next level "AGI" that people like Demis Hassabis are projecting to still be 10 years away will be human level either.
No doubt it depends on the company, but I'd say that in many places only 10% of what a developer does is coding, and the percentage is less and less the more senior you become and have other responsibilities.
In many companies, product development is very cyclic - new products and enhancement/modernization cycles come and result in months, maybe years, of intense development (architecture, design, maybe prototyping before coding) but then there may be many months of "downtime" before the next major development cycle, where coding gives way to ongoing support, tuning, bug triaging, etc.
Maybe in some large companies there are highly compartmentalized roles like business analyst, systems architect, developers, perhaps "coders" as a separate or junior category (I have never worked anyplace where "coders" was a thing, although some people seem to insist that it still is). My experience, of a lifetime of software development, mostly at smaller companies, is that "software developers" are expected to do all of the above as well as production support, documentation, mentoring, new technology evaluation, etc, etc. The boss wants to give you a high level assignment, and get back a product. At one company I worked it was literally "build us an EKG machine at this price point", which might be a bit of an extreme example.
The other thing a human software developer does during any "downtime" is self-initiated projects such as creating tools and infrastructure, automation, self-learning, refactoring, etc, and in my experience these self-initiated efforts can be just as, if not more, important to the overall productivity, and output quality, of the team as that of the product development cycles.
LLMs primary use is coding, although they can also be of use for conversational brainstorming about design, tooling, etc. If you are "vibe coding" (just ask the LLM to do it, and cross your fingers) then the LLM is also doing in effect doing architecture, design, tool selection etc.
Notwithstanding agents, which the AI companies proudly state may run for hours before messing up, LLMs are not autonomous entities that can replace developers and be handed high level assignments and will do what it takes (incl. communication with all stake holders, etc) to get the job done. They will not run in the background "taking care of the business" when you are not prompting them.
> “…exploiting our employer's lack of information…”
I agree in the sense that those of us who work in for-profit businesses have benefited from employer’s willingness to spend on dev budgets (salaries included)—without having to spend their own _time_ becoming increasingly involved in the work. As “AI” develops it will blur the boundaries of roles and reshape how capital can be invested to deliver results and have impact. And if the power dynamics shift (ie. out of the class of educated programmers to, I dunno, philosophy majors) then you’re in trouble.
I had hired 3 junior/mid lvl devs and paid them to do nothing but study to improve their skills, it was my investment in their future, I had a big project on the horizon that I needed help with. After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow. Books that should have taken a week to get through were taking 6 weeks. Since then LLM have completely surpassed them. I think it’s reasonable to think that some day, maybe soon, LLMs will surpass me. Like everyone else, I have to the best I can while I can.
But this is an issue of worker you're hiring. I've worked with senior engineers who a) did nothing (as - really not write any thing within the sprint, nor do any other work) b) worked on things they wanted to work on c) did ONLY things that they were assigned in the sprint (= if there were 10 tickets in the sprint and they were assigned 1 of these tickets then they would finish that ticket and not pick up anything else, staying quiet) d) worked only on tickets that have requirements explicitly stated step by step (open file a, change line 89 to be `checkBar` instead of `checkFoo`... - having to write this would take longer than doing the changes yourself as I was really writing in Jira ticket what I wanted the engineer to code, otherwise they would come back with "not enough spec, can't proceed"). All of these cases - senior people!
Sure - LLMs will do what they're told (to a specific value of "do" and "what they're told")
Sure there is a wide spectrum of skills, having worked in FANG and top tier research I have a pretty good idea of the capability at the top of the spectrum. I know I wasn't hiring at that level. I was paying 2x the local market rate (non-US) and pulling from the functional programming talent pool. These were not the top 1% but I think they were easily top 10% and probably in the top 5%.
I use LLMs to build isolated components and I do the work needed to specialize them for my tasks and integrate them together. The LLMs take fewer instructions to do this and handle ambiguity far better. Additionally because of the immediate feedback look on the specs I can try first with a minimally defined spec and interactively refine as needed. It takes me far less work to write specs for LLMs than it does for other devs.
You're (unwittingly?) making an argument for using an LLM: you know what you're going to get. It does not take six months to evaluate one; six minutes suffice.
The argument I'm trying to make is that hiring a real person or using LLMs has upsides and downsides. People have their own agendas, can leave, can affect your business in many ways, unrelated to code etc, but also can learn, can be creative and address problems that you've not even surfaced. LLM will not and will not be capable of that.
With LLMs you know what you're going to get to a certain value. Will it not listen to you? No. Will it not follow your instructions? Maybe. Will it produce unmaintainable garbage? Most certainly. Does that matter for nondevs? Sometimes
And even if their progress had been faster, now they are a capable developer who can command higher compensation that statistically your company won’t give them and they are going to jump ship anyway.
One didn't even wait, they immediately tried to sub-contract the work out to a third party and make a transition from a consultant to a consultancy company. I had to be clear that they are hired as named person and I very much do care about who does the work.While not FANG comp it was ~2x the market rates, statistically I think they'd have a hard time matching that somewhere else. I think in part because I was offering these rates they got rather excited about the perceived opportunity in being a consultancy company, i.e. the appetite grows with the eating. I'm not sure if it's something that could be solved with more money, I guess in theory with FANG money but it's not like those companies are without their dysfunctions. With LLMs I can solve the same problem with far less money.
Maybe see it less as a junior and replacement for humans. See it more as a tool for you! A tool so you can do stuff you used to delegate/dump to a junior, do now yourself.
Actually it does, if you put those concepts in documentation in your repository…
Those concepts will be in your repository long after that junior dev jumps ship because your company refused to pay him at market rates as he improved so he had to jump ship to make more money - “salary compression” is real and often out of your manager’s control.
Claude gets better as Claude's managers explain concepts to it. It doesn't learn the way a human does. AI is not human. The benefit is that when Claude learns something, it doesn't need to run a MOOC to teach the same things to millions of individuals. Every copy of Claude instantly knows.
You need to hit that thumbs down with the explanation so the model is trained with the penalty applied. Otherwise your explanations are not in the training corpus
> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it
Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.
I mean, not anywhere, and the data absolutely annihilates their ridiculous claims. In subsequent posts they've retreated back to "yeah, but someone somewhere has it worse", invalidating this whole absurd thread.
Their comment has little correlation with reality, and seems to be a contrived, self-comforting fiction. Most firms have implemented hiring freezes if not actively downsizing their dev staff. Many extremely experienced devs are finding the market absolutely atrocious, getting zero bites.
And for all of the "well us senior devs are safe" sentiment often seen on here, many shops seem to be more comfortable hiring cheap and eager junior devs and foregoing seniors because LLMs fill in a lot of the "grizzled wisdom". The junior to senior ratio is rapidly increasing, and devs who lived on golden handshakes are suddenly finding their ego bruised and a market where they're fighting for low-pay jobs.
Again, compare this to other professions, don't look at in isolation, and you'll see why you're still (or will have, seems you're a student still) having a much more pleasant life than others.
This is completely irrelevant. The point is that the profession is being devalued, i.e. losing value relative to where it was. If, for example, the US dollar loses value, it's not a "counterargument" to point out that it's still much more valuable than the Zimbabwe dollar.
It isn't though, none of our lives are happening in isolation, even if you don't believe it, there are other humans out there, with real responsibilities outside of computers.
Even if the competition is fierce, do you think it isn't for other professions, or what's the point? Of course a job that is well-paid, has few drawbacks and let you sit indoors in front of computer, probably doing something you enjoy in general, is popular and has competition.
Do other professions expect you to work during personal time? At least blue collar people are done when they get told they're done
I get your viewpoint though, physically exhausting work is probably much worse. I do want to point out that 40 hours has always been above average, and right now its the default
> Do other professions expect you to work during personal time? At least blue collar people are done when they get told they're done
No, and after my first programming job, neither does it happen in development. Make sure you join the right place, have the right boss, and set expectations up front, and you too can surely avoid it if it's important to you :) Usually you can throw in "work/life balance" somehow to gauge how they feel about it.
And yes, plenty of blue collar people are expected to be available during your personal time, for various reasons. Sometimes just quick questions (especially if you're a manager and you're having time off), sometimes emergencies that requires you to head on over to the place. Ask anyone who owned or even just managed a restaurant about that specific thing, and maybe you'll be surprised.
This “compare it to other professions” thing doesn’t really work when those other professions are not the one you actually do. The idea that someone should never be miserable in their job because other more miserable jobs exist is not realistic.
It's a useful thing to look at when you feel like all hope is lost and "wow is so difficult being a programmer" strikes, because it'll make you realize how easy you have it compared to non-programmers/nom-tech people.
Realizing how supposedly “easy” you have it compared to other people is not as encouraging or motivational as you’re implying it is. And how “easy” do you have it if you can’t find a job in your field?
Might be worth investigating why it isn't if so. People stressed about their situation usually find some solace in being helped realize what their position in the world actually is, as everything is always relative, not absolute.
> And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
What do you think they're building all those datacenters for? Why do you think so much money is pouring into AI companies?
It's not to help make developers more efficient with code assistants.
Traditional computation will be replaced with bots in every aspect of software. The goal is to devalue our labor and replace it with computation performed by machines owned by the wealthy, who can lease this out.
If you can't see this coming you lack both imagination and historical perspective.
Five years ago Claude Code would have been essentially unimaginable. Consider this.
So sure, enjoy your job churning out buggy whips while you can, but you better have a plan B for when the automobiles truly arrive.
I agree with all this, except there is no plan B. What could plan B possibly be when white collar work collapses? You can go into a trade, but who will be hiring the tradespeople?
The companies who now have piles of cash because they eliminated a huge chunk of labor will spend far more on new projects, many of which will require tradesmen.
Economic waves never hit one sector and stop. The waves continues across the entire economy. You can’t think “companies will get rid of huge amounts of labor” and then stop asking questions. You need to then ask “what will companies do with decreased labor costs?” And “what could that investment look like, who will they need to hit to fulfill it?” and then “what will those workers do after their demand increases?” And so on.
I would look at the secondary consequences of the totaling of white collar labor in the same way. Without the upper-middle-class spending their disposable income, consumer spending shrivels, advertising dollars dry up, and investment in growth no longer makes sense in most industries. It looks like a path to total economic destruction to me.
Unless they do, or are severely weakened. Consider the net worth of the 1% over the last few decades. Even corrected for inflation, its growth is staggering. The wealth gap is widening, and that wealth came from somewhere.
So yes, when there is an economic boom, investment happens. However, the growth of that top %1 tells me that they've been taking more and more off the top. Sure, some near the bottom may win with the decreased labor costs and whatnot, but my point is less and less do every cycle.
Full disclosure: I'm not an economist. Hell, I probably have a highschool-level of econ knowledge at best, so this should probably be taken as a "common-sense" take on it, which I already know often fails spectacularly when economics is at play. So I'm more than open to be corrected here.
That’s a discussion about where wealth gains are going, however my comment was about the concept of excess capital, investment, and jobs.
Yes, the wealth of the 1% has increased over the decades, but so has investment. The economy still dwarfs what it was decades ago. There are more jobs than there were decades ago.
Hopefully you see my point but now. The “waves” of economics effects objectively didn’t stop at the rich.
Jeff Bezos has a 233 billion net worth. It's not because Amazon users overpaid by a 233 billion but because his share in Amazon is highly valued by investors.
My own Amazon investment in my pension has also gone up by 10x in the last 10 years, just like Jeff's. Where did the value increase come from?
Is this idea of the stock market good for us? I don't know, but it's paper money until you sell it.
Optimistically, there will be many more small companies, as people will be able to do more while remaining competitive with less. And smaller companies are more conducive to job satisfaction, as you are a bigger cog in the machine.
I think it’s much more likely they’ll be used for mass surveillance purposes. The tech is already there, they just need the compute (and a lot of it).
Most of the economy is making things that aren’t really needed. Why bother keeping that afloat when it’s 90% trinkets for the proles? Once they’ve got the infra to ensure compliance why bother with all the fake work which is the real opium of the masses.
I consider the devaluation of the craft to be completely independent from the professional occupation of software.
Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling. People that I do not consider smart enough or to have put enough work in to output the things that they have nor do they really understand it themselves.
It is of course the new reality and now we all have to go find new markers/things to judge peoples output by. Thats the devaluation of the craft itself.
For what its worth, this devaluation has happened many times in this field. ASM, Compilers, managed gc languages, the cloud, abstractions have continually opened up the field to people the old timers consider unworthy.
> Programming has been devalued because more people can do it at a basic level with LLM tooling
But just because more people can do something doesn't mean it's devalued, or am I misunderstanding the word? The value of programs remains the same, regardless of who composes them. The availability of computers, the internet and the web seems to have had the opposite effect so far, making entire industries much more valued than they were in the decades before.
Neither do I see ASM, compilers, and all your other examples of devalualing, it seems like it's "nichifying" the industry if anything, which requires more experts, not fewer. The more abstractions we have in reality, the more experts are needed for being able to handle those things.
You sound exactly like that turkey from Nassim Taleb's books that came to the conclusion that the purpose of human beings is to make turkeys very happy with lots of food and breeding opportunities. And the turkey's thesis gets validated perfectly every day he wakes up to a delicious fatty meal.
Your comment is hyperbolic fear mongering dressed up in a cutesie story.
Our industry is being disrupted by AI. What industry in history has not been disrupted by technological progression? It's called life. And those that can adapt to life changing will continue to thrive. And those who can't will get left behind. There is no wholesale turkey slaughter.
If you read the grand parent, they seem to be denying a disruption is taking place industry wide. The adage was used to illustrate how complacency is blinded by the very conditions that enable it, and while this is unfalsifiable and not very conducive to discussion, "fear mongering" is a bit rich to levy.
Further:
> Our industry is being disrupted by AI... No wholesale turkey slaughter.
Is an entirely different position than the GP who is essentially betting on AI producing more jobs for hackers, which surely won't be so simple.
Sorry to confuse the thread. I meant to point to the original comment (embedding-shape), but blindly labeled them GP.
We share understanding of their analogy, but differ in the inferred application. I took it as the well fed turkeys are "developers who deny AI will disrupt their industry", not "developers" as a whole.
Likewise with experienced devs who find themselves out of work due to the neverending mass layoffs.
There's a huge difference between the perspective of someone currently employed versus that of someone in the market for a role, regardless of experience level. The job market of today is nothing like the job market of 3 years ago. More and more people are finding that out every day.
Based on conversations with peers for the last ~3 years or so, some of retrained to become programmers, this doesn't seem to as absolute as you paint it out to be.
But as mentioned earlier, the situation in the US seems much more dire than elsewhere. People I know who entered the programming profession in South America, Europe and Asia for these last years don't seem to have more troubles than I had when I got started. Yes, it requires work, just like it did before.
Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find.
If you don't trust me, give a non-programming job a try for 1 year and then come back and tell me how much more comfy $JOB was :)
> Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find.
This is a ridiculous statement. I know plenty of people (that are not developers) that make around the same as I do and enjoy their work as much as I do. Yes, software development is a great field to be in, but there's plenty of others that are just as good.
Huh? I'm not saying there isn't careers out there that are also good, I'm not sure what in my comment made it seem so? Of course there are many great fields out there, wasn't my intention to somehow seem to say software development is the only one.
>>Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find.
A lot of non-programmer jobs have a kind of union protection, pension plans and other perks even with health care. That makes a crappy salary and work environment bearable.
There was this VP of HR, in a Indian outsourcing firm, and she something to the effect that Software jobs appear like would pay to the moon, have an employee generate tremendous value for the company and general appeal that only smart people work these jobs. None of this happens with the majority of the people. So after 10-15 years you actually kind of begin to see why some one might want to work a manufacturing job.
Life is long, job guarantee, pensions etc matter far more than 'move fast and break thing' glory as you age.
I was a lot happier in previous non-programming jobs, they just were much worse at paying the bills. If i could make my programming salary doing either of my previous jobs, i would go back in a heartbeat. Hell if i could make even 60% of my programming salary doing those jobs I'd go back.
I enjoy the practice of programming well enough but i do not at all love it as a career. I don't hate it by any means either but it's far from my first choice in terms of career.
Because tech corps overhired[0] when the interest rate was low.
Even after the layoffs, most big tech corps still have more employees today than they did in 2020.
The situation is bad, but the lesson to learn here is that a country should handle a pandemic better than "lowering interest rate to near-zero and increasing government spending." It's just kicking and snowballing the problem to the next four years.
I think it was more sandbagging than snowballing. The pain was spread out, and mostly delayed, which kept the economy moving despite everything.
Remember that most of the economy is actually hidden from the stock market, its most visible metric. Over half the business is privately-owned small businesses, and at the local level forcibly shutting down all but essential-service shops was devastating. Without government spending, it's hard to imagine how most of those business owners and their employees would have survived, let alone their shops.
Yet we had no bread lines, no (increase in) migratory families chasing cash labor markets, and demands on charity organizations were heavy, but not overwhelming.
But you claim "a country should handle a pandemic better..." - what should we have done instead? Criticism is easy.
It seems like most companies are just using AI as a convenient cover for layoffs. If you say: “We enormously over-hired and have to do layoffs.”, your stock tanks. If you instead say that you are laying off the same 20k employees ‘because AI’, your stock pumps for no reason. It’s just framing.
I've always heard this sentiment, but I've also never met one of these newly skilled job applicants who could do anything resembling the job.
I've done a lot of interviews, and inevitably, most of the devs I interview can't pass a trivial interview (like implement fizzbuzz). The ones who can do a decent job are usually folks we have to compete for.
> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?
Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge.
But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love.
Compare this to the jobs I did before, where the physical toll makes it impossible to do anything after work as you're exhausted, and even if I got paid more than my first programming job, that your body is literally unable to move once you get home, makes the pay matter less and feel less.
But for a programmer, you can literally sit still all day, have some meetings in a warm office, talk with some people, type some things into a document, sit and think for a while, and in the end of the month you get a paycheck.
If you never worked in another profession, I think you ("The Programmer") don't realize how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world.
It's a good perspective to keep. I've also worked a lot of crappy jobs. Overnights in a grocery store (IIRC, they paid an extra .50/hour to work overnights), fine dining waiter (this one was actually fun, but the partying was too much), on a landscaping crew, etc... I make more money than I ever thought possible growing up. My dad still can't believe I have job 'playing on the computer' all day, though I mostly manage now.
I too have worked in shit jobs. I too appreciate that I am currently in a 70F room of my house, wearing a T-shirt and comfy pants, and able to pet my doggos at will.
I work remote and i hate it, sitting all day is killing me, my 5 minute daily stand-up is nowhere near enough social interaction for a whole day's work. I've been looking for a role better suited to me for over a year, but the market is miserable.
I miss having jobs where at least a lot of the time i was moving around or working directly with other people. More than anything else i miss casual conversation with coworkers (which still happened with excruciating rarity even when i was doing most of my programming in an office).
I'm glad you love programming and find the career ideal. I don't mean to harp or whine, just pointing out your ideals aren't universal even amount programmers.
No, definitely some environments are less ideal, I agree. Personally, I also cannot stand working remote, if I'm working in a high-intensity project I have to work with the team in person, otherwise things just fall apart.
I understand exactly what you mean and agree, seems our ideals agree after all :)
Get a standing desk and a walking treadmill! It’s genuinely changed my life. I can focus easier, I get my steps in, and it feels like I did something that day.
Negativity spreads so much more quickly than positivity online, and I feel as though too many people live in self reinforcing negative comment sections and blog posts than in the real world, which gives them a distorted view.
My opinion is that LLMs are doing nothing but accelerating what's possible with the craft, not eliminating it. If anything, this makes a single developer MORE valuable, because they can now do more with less.
Exactly. The problem is instead of getting a raise because "you can do more now" your colleagues will be laid off. Why pay for 3 devs when the work can be done by 1 now? And we all better hope that actually pans out in whatever legacy codebase we're dealing with.
Now the job market is flooded due to layoffs, further justifying lack of comp adjustment - add inflation, and you have "de-valuing" in direct form.
The only way to create senior programmers is for someone to hire juniors and let them grow.
I'm not worried for my job, I can work _with_ AI very well. I'm not precious about my processes or ways of working.
What I AM worried about is that if companies stop hiring juniors because they (try to) replace them with AI, we'll no longer have new seniors and the craft itself will deteriorate.
The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).
Over the course of my career, probably 2/3rds of the roles I have had (as in my day to day work, not necessarily the title) just no longer exist, because people like me eliminated them. I personally was the last person that had a few of those jobs because I mostly automated them and got promoted and they didn't hire a replacement. It's not that they hired less people though, they just hired more people, paid them more money, and they focused on more valuable work.
Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing.
Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setup sensors and what not, but generally, programmers have one of the most comfortable jobs on the planet today. If you're a programmer, I think it should come relatively easy to acknowledge this.
Software engineering just comes really easily to my brain, somehow. Most of these days is spent designing, architecturing and managing various things, it takes time, but in the end of the day I don't feel like "Ugh I just wanna sleep and die" probably ever. Maybe when we've spent 10+ hours trying to bring back a platform after production downtime, but a regular day? My brain is as fine as ever when I come back home.
Contrast that with working as a out-call nurse, which isn't just physically taxing as you need to actually use your body multiple times per day for various things, but people (especially when you visit them in their homes, seemingly) can be really mean, weird and just draining on you. Not to mention when people get seriously hurt, and you need to be strong when they're screaming of pain, and finally when people die, even strangers, just is really taxing no matter what methods you use for trying to come back from that.
It's just really hard for me to complain about software development and how taxing it can be, when my life experience put me through so much before I even got to be a professional developer.
I've never done anything like road/construction work. But I've done restaurant work, being on my feet for 8+ hours per day... and mentally, it just doesn't compare to software development.
- After a long day of physical labor, I come home and don't want to move.
- After a long day of software development, I come home and don't want to think.
Comfortable and easy, but satisfying? I don't think so. I've had jobs that were objectively worse that I enjoyed more and that were better for my mental health.
Sure, it's mostly comfy and well-paid. But like with physical labor, there are jobs/projects that are easy and not as taxing, and jobs that are harder and more taxing (in this case mentally).
Yes, you'll end up in situations where peers/bosses/clients aren't the most pleasant, but compare that to any customer facing job, you'll quickly be able to shed those moments as countless people face those seldom situations on a daily basis. You can give it a try, work in a call center for a month, and you'll acquire more stress during that month than even the worst managed software project.
When I was younger, I worked doing sales and customer service at a mall. Mostly approaching people and trying to pitch a product. Didn't pay well, was very easy to get into and do, but I don't enjoy that kind of work (and many people don't enjoy programming and would actually hate it) and it was temporary anyway. I still feel like that was much easier, but more boring.
That sounds ideal! I used to be a field roboticist where we would program and deploy robots to Greenland and Antarctica. IMO the fieldwork helped balance the desk work pretty well and was incredibly enjoyable.
My experience and the ones I personally known, been in Western Europe, South America and Asia, and programmers I know have an easier time to find new jobs compared to other professions.
Don't get me wrong, it's a lot harder for new developers to enter the industry compared to a decade ago, even in Western Europe, but it's still way easier compared to the length people I know who aren't programmers or even in tech.
I came here to quote the same quote but with the opposite sentiment. If you look at the history of work, at least in the states, it’s a history of almost continual devaluation and automation. I’ve been assuming that my generation, entering the profession in the 2010s, will be the last where it’s a pathway to an upper middle class life. Just like the factory workers before us automation will come for those who do mostly repetitive tasks. Sure there will be well paid professional software devs in the future just as there are some well paid factory workers who mostly maintain machines. But the scale of the opportunity will be much smaller.
But in the end, we didn't end up with less factories that do more, we ended up with more factories that does more.
Why wouldn't the same happen here? Instead of these programmers jamming out boilerplate 24/7, why are they unable to improve their skill further and move with the rest of the industry, if that's needed? Just like other professions adopt to how society is shaped, why should programming be an exception to that?
And how is the quality of life for those factory workers? It's almost like the craft of making physical things has been devalued even if we're making more physical things than ever.
If you live in a country where worker's health and lives are valued, pretty good. 98% of them are in a union, so they can't get fired from nowhere, they have reliable salary each month, free healthcare (as everyone else in the country) and they can turn off when they come home. Most of them work on rotation, so usually you'd do one week of one station, then one week of another station, and so on, so it doesn't get too repetitive. Lots of quality of life improvements are still happening, even for these workers.
Of course, I won't claim it's glamorous or anything, but the idea that factory workers somehow will disappear tomorrow feels far out there, and I'm generally optimistic about the future.
Software to date has been a [Jevons good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). Demand for software has been constrained by the cost efficiency and risk of software projects. Productivity improvements in software engineering have resulted in higher demand for software, not less, because each improvement in productivity unblocks more of the backlog of projects that weren't cost effective before.
There's no law of nature that says this has to continue forever, but it's a trend that's been with us since the birth of the industry. You don't need to look at AI tools or methodoligies or whatever. We have code reuse! Productivity has obviously improved, it's just that there's also an arms race between software products in UI complexity, features, etc.
If you don't keep improving how efficiently you can ship value, your work will indeed be devalued. It could be that the economics shift such that pretty much all programming work gets paid less, it could be that if you're good and diligent you do even better than before. I don't know.
What I do know is that whichever way the economics shake out, it's morally neutral. It sounds like the author of this post leans into a labor theory of value, and if you buy into that, well...You end up with some pretty confused and contradictory ideas. They position software as a "craft" that's valuable in itself. It's nonsense. People have shit to do and things they want. It's up to us to make ourselves useful. This isn't performance art.
It is a part of gaining experience and knowledge though. If you aren't a senior right now, eventually you will be, and one of the expectations will be that you can read and review more novice programmers code and help them improve it, and lend a helping hand when you can. Eventually, all you do will be to review the work others have done after you instructing them to do the thing. Not to mention reading through really great written programs is personally a great joy for me, and almost always learn something new.
But, probably remaining a developer who runs through tickets in JIRA without much care for collaboration could be feasible in some type of companies too.
Then use better software engineering paradigms in how your AI builds projects.
I find the more I specify about all the stuff I thought was hilariously pedantic hyper-analysis when I was in school, the less I have to interpret.
If you use test-driven, well-encapsulated object oriented programming in an idiomatic form for your language/framework, all you really end up needing to review is "are these tests really testing everything they should."
The amount of negativity your positive comment has received looks almost overwhelming. I remember HN being a much happier place a few years ago. Perhaps I should take a break from it.
People working in one of the coolest industries on Earth really do not appreciate their lives nowadays.
I think comments like yours should include what salary range, industry, and company size your job entails. The last few years have been absolutely miserable for me at Series A YC startups
Salary range: 400 > 8000 EUR (monthly) over the years (starting job 10 years ago > last full-time salary)
Industry I guess would be "startups" or just "tech", it ranges across holiday related, infrastructure, distributed networks, application development frameworks and some others.
Smallest company I worked at was 4 including the CEO, largest been 300 people. Most of them I joined when it was 5-10 people, and left once they got to around 100.
Western Europe is fine, for seniors as well as newcomers, based on my own experience and friends & acquaintances. Then based on more acquaintances South America and Asia seems OK too. But again, ensure you actually understand the context here.
What does "heinous" actually mean here? I've repeated it before, but I guess one more time can't hurt: I'm not saying it isn't difficult to find a job as a developer today compared to a decade ago, but what I am saying is that it's a thing across all sectors and developers aren't hit by it worse than any other sector. Hiring freezes has been happening in not just technology companies, but across the board.
I've been helping people with programming, from students struggling with classes, thru people trying to get 1st job, to people working in industry.
They were passing their classes, getting jobs and completing their tasks.
So I've witnessed how maaaany things people need to learn, what things are not easy to them and so on.
I'm not saying other jobs are easy/easier, but none of my friends, who work in "traditional" industries like homebuilding, road maintenance, manufacturing, etc, etc. needed to push THIS MANY hours into it in order to get 1st job, be decent on it, improve, get promoted, etc.
Almost none of them is learning during their free time in order to get better, etc.
>If you want a challenge, try almost any other job than development, and you'll realize how easy all this stuff actually is.
I mean, difficult != hard.
software eng. is difficult cuz requires a lot of time to put into in order to be proficient.
Again, sucks to be in the US as a programmer today maybe, but this isn't true elsewhere in the world, and especially not if you already have at least some experience.
> Definitely true in western Europe, and finding a job is extremely hard for the vast majority of non expert devs.
I don't know what else to say except that hasn't been my experience personally, nor the experience of my acquaintances who've re-skilled to become programmers these last few years, in Western Europe.
It’s ok to admit that you were wrong. Your experience is good, but the industry is doing very poorly right now. I showed you data to back that up. Someone else posted data about Europe.
Don’t close your eyes and plug your ears and pretend you didn’t hear anything.
I couldn’t agree more, I think AI is more about taking power away from tech workers who have historically had a lot of power compared to other non unionized workers.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.
Well, speaking just for central Europe, it is pretty average. Sure, entry-level positions are different story, but anyone with at least few years for work experience can find reasonably payed job fairly quickly.
I don't know what "position of luck" you're talking about, it's been dedicated effort to practice programming and suffer through a lot of shit until I got my first comfy programming job.
And even if I'm experienced now, I still have peers and acquaintances who are getting into the industry, I'm not sitting in my office with my eyes closed exactly.
That’s probably because the definition of ‘average techie’ has been on a rapid downward trajectory for years? You can justify the waste when money is free. Not when you need them to do something.
> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy
Eh?
I'm happy for you (and envious), because that is not my experience. The job is hard. Agile's constant fortnightly deadlines, a complete lack of respect by the rest of the stakeholders for the work developers do (even more so now because "ai can do that"), changing requirements but an expectation to welcome changing requirements because that is agile, incredibly egotistical assholes that seem to gravitate to engineering manager roles, and a job market that's been dead for a few years now.
No doubt some will comment and say that if I think my job is hard I should compare it to a coal miner in the 1940's. True, but as Neil Young sang: "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."
I guess ultimately our perspectives shape how we see current situations.
When I write that, I write that with the history and experience of doing other things. Deadlines, lack of respect from stakeholders, egoists and changing requirements just don't sound so bad when you compare to "Ah yeah resident 41 broke their leg completely and we need to clean up their entire apartment from the pools of blood and pus + work with the ambulance crew to get them to the hospital".
I guess it's kind of a PTSD of sorts or something, as soldiers describe the same thing coming home to a "normal life" after spending time in a battle-zone. Everything just seems so trivial compared to the situations you've faced before.
What is devalued is traditional labor-based ideology. The blog references Marx's theory of alienation. The Marxist labor theory of value, that the value of anything is determined by the labor that creates it, gives the working class moral authority over the owner class. When labor is reduced, the basis of socialist revolution is devalued, as the working class no longer can claim superior contributions to value creation.
If one doesn't subscribe to traditional Marxist ideology, this argument won't land the same way, but elements of these ideas have made their way into popular ideas of value.
Marx addressed exactly this sort of improvement in productivity from automation. He was writing with full hindsight on the industrial revolution after all. I hope coding LLMs give professional computer touchers a wakeup call to develop some sorely lacking class consciousness.
>the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus-labour a greater portion of the working day, than the other capitalists in the same trade […] The law of the determination of value by labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production, by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value, this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?
I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.
But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.
> I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI.
I enjoy making things work better. I'm lucky in that, because there's always been more brownfield work than greenfield work. I think of it as being an editor, not an author.
Hacking into vibe code with a machete is kinda fun.
I do see a shortage of entry-level positions (number of them, not salaries).
Going through the author's bio ... it seems like he's just not able to provide value in any of the high-paying positions that exist right now; not that he should be, he's just not aligned with it and that's ok.
The part where writing performant, readable, resilient, extensible, and pleasing code used to actually be a valued part of the craft? I feel like I'm being gaslit after decades of being lectured on how to be a better software developer, only to be told that my craft is pointless, the only thing of value is the output, and that I should be happy spending my day babysitting agents and reviewing AI code slop.
Considering we surely have wildly different experiences and contexts, you could almost say we live on the same planet, but it looks very different to each and one of us :)
> What exactly is being de-valuated
We are being second guessed by any sub organism with little brain, but opposable thumbs, at a rate much greater than before, because now the sub organism can simply ask the LLM to type their arguments for them.
How many times have you received screenshots of an LLM output yesanding whatever bizarre request you already tried to explain and dismiss as not possible/feasible/unnecessary? the sub organism has delegated their thoughts to the LLM and i always find that extremely infuriating, because all i want to do is to shake that organism and cry "why don't you get it? think! THINK! THINK FOR YOURSELF FOR JUST A SECOND"
Also, i enjoy programming. Even typing boring shit as boilerplate because i keep my brain engaged. As much as i type i keep thinking, is this really necessary? and maybe figure out something leaner. LLMs want to deprive me of enjoyment of my work (research, learn) and of my brain. No thanks, no LLM for me. And i don't care whatever garbage it outputs, i'd much prefere if the garbage was your output, or you are useless.
The only use i have for LLMs and diffusion models is to entertain myself with stupid bullshit i come up with that i would find funny. I massively enjoy projects such as https://dumbassideas.com/
Note: Not taking into account the "classic" ML uses, my rant only going to LLMs and the LLM craze. A tool made by grifters, for grifters.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?