The hardest part of software development is not writing code, full stop. It never has been and it never will be. The hard part is designing, understanding, verifying, and repairing complex systems. LLMs do not do this, even a little bit.
I guess my worst fear is not "no more jobs because AI can code" but "no more junior jobs because AI can code under the supervision of a senior". SWE jobs will exist, but only seniors will have them and juniors are never hired. Maybe the occasional "apprentice" will be brought on, but in nowhere near the same amount.
Where my blind hope lies more specifically is in networking into one of those "apprentice" roles, or maybe a third tech Cambrian explosion enabled by AI allows me to find work in a new startup. I don't want to give up just yet.
If you're a junior looking for a job, it's always a tough time. Getting your first gig is insanely brutal (college career fairs help a lot). That said, I wouldn't give up and blame AI for "taking our jerbs". I would say the current macroeconomic conditions with higher interest rates have reduced the amount of developer headcount companies can support. AKA companies are risk averse right now, and juniors are a risk (albeit a relatively low cost).
If I were in your shoes, I would just stop consuming the doom and gloom AI content, and go heads down and learn to build things that others will find useful. Most importantly, you should be having fun. If you do that you'll learn how to learn, have fun, build a portfolio, and generally just be setting yourself up to succeed.
> I guess my worst fear is not "no more jobs because AI can code" but "no more junior jobs because AI can code under the supervision of a senior
You're posting under a thread where many seniors are discussing how they don't want this because it doesn't work.
You cannot make a model understand anything. You can help a person understand something. You can accomplish that with a simple conversation with a junior engineer.
I will never make GPT-4 or whatever understand what I want. It will always respond with a simulacrum that looks and sounds like it gets what I'm saying, but it fundamentally doesn't, and when you're trying to get work done, that can range from being annoying to being a liability.
On that note, for anyone who hasn't run into the "looks like it understands, but doesn't" issue, here's a simple test case to try it out: Ask ChatGPT to tell you the heights of two celebrities, and ask it which would be taller if they were side-by-side. Regenerate the response a few times and you'll get responses where it clearly "knows" the heights, but also obviously doesn't understand how a taller-shorter comparison works.
>You're posting under a thread where many seniors are discussing how they don't want this because it doesn't work.
Many artists and illustrators thought AI art would never threaten their livelihood because it did not understand form, it completely messed up perspective, it could never draw hands, etc. Look at the state of their industry now. It still doesn't "understand" hands but it can sure as hell draw them. We're even getting video generation that understands object permanence, something that didn't seem possible just over a year ago when the best we got were terrible low quality noisy GIFs with wild inconsistencies.
Many translators thought AI would never replace them, and then Duolingo fired their entire translation team.
I'm sure that GP isn't worried about being replaced by GPT-4. They're worried about having to compete with a potentially much better GPT-5 or 6 by the time they graduate.
IMHO juniors who rely on AI to write code will never learn. You need to make mistakes to learn, and AI never makes mistakes even when it’s wrong.
As a senior, I write code 25% of the time, and it’s always to understand the intent of what I should fix or develop. This is something that AI will not be able to do for a long time since it cannot speak and understand what customers want.
The last 75% of my time are spent refactoring this "intent" or making sure that the business is running, and I’m accountable for it. AI will never be accountable for anything, again for a long time.
I’m scared for juniors that don’t want to learn, but I work with juniors who outsmart me with their knowledge and curiosity.
Unless there's some major breakthrough and AIs are able to gain judgement and reasoning capabilities, I don't think they'll be taking junior jobs any time soon.
Seniors don’t grow on trees, and they all were juniors at some point. And juniors won’t become seniors by only typing AI chat prompts. I wouldn’t fear.
Interacting with a computers (and therefor creating software) will probably soon detach itself from the idea of single chars and the traditional QWERTY keyboard.
Computing is entering a fascinating phase, I'd stick around for it.
A tough pill to swallow that I think a lot of students and very junior engineers fail to realize is that bringing on a new grad and/or someone very junior is quite often a drain on productivity for a good while. Maybe ~6 months for the "average" new grad.
Maybe AI exacerbates that timeline somewhat, but engineering teams have always hired new grads with the implicit notion that they're hiring to have a productive team member 6 months to a year down the line, not day one.
The C++ standard library has a number of generic algorithms that are very efficient, like decades of careful revision from the C++ community efficient. With the help of ChatGPT Andrei makes major improvements to a few of them. At least right now these machines have a truly impressive ability to summarize large amounts of data but not creativity or judgement. He digs into how he did it, and what he thinks will happen.
He isn't fearmongering he is just one coder producing results. He does lay out some concerns, but at least for the moment the industry needs junior devs.
How many students / people early in career would benefit from having something to help them explore ideas?
How many don't have the advantages I had, of a four-year university, with professors and TAs and peers to help me stumble through something tricky?
How many have questions they feel embarrassed to ask their peers and mentors because they might make them look stupid?
Don't give up. This is a generational opportunity to lift up new developers. It's not perfect (nothing is). But if we sweat hard enough to make it good, then it is our chance to make a dent in the "why are there not more ______ people in tech" problem.
I dropped out of school and went into startups with my first full-time gig in March, 2000. Managed to make that one last a few years, but whoooo boy that was a tough time to be a junior-to-mid developer looking for a job. I even went back to school with plans to go to medical school (yet I'm still a developer 20 years later.)
Being a junior is rough, landing those first few gigs, no doubt about it. It didn't get any better with the advent of code schools, which pretty much saturated the entry level market. But, if you stick it out long enough and keep working on learning, you'll acquire enough skills or network to land that first gig and build from there.
I wouldn't freak out about AIs—they're not going to take all the jobs. They're a tool (and a good one, sometimes.) Learn to use it that way. Learning a good tool can easily accelerate your personal development. Use it to understand by asking it to summarize unfamiliar code, to point you in the right direction when you're writing your own code, but don't have it write code you don't understand (and probably can't, because it doesn't work as written.)
Give it a few years, things will generally work out. Make a plan to be resilient in the meantime and keep learning and you'll be fine.
LLMs remove the most annoying bits, making it possible for 1 person to do 3 people's work. LLMs are also good at fixing minor bugs. So version upgrades, minor maintenence and finding the right API handshakes will soon be doable for big LLMs without user supervision. Lastly, LLMs are accelerating existing tailwinds towards software commodotization. If an LLM can create a good-enough website on a low code platform, how likely are you to hire a front end engineer for the last 10% of excellence ?
Think about how many jobs are 'build a website', 'build an app' or 'manage this integration' style roles. They are all at risk of being replaced.
> hardest part of software development is not writing code
I agree, but you have to write a lot of code before you become good enough to think that clearly. If juniors don't get the opportunity to work their way up to a senior, then they might just never pick up the right skills. What's more like is is that CS education will undergo drastic changes, and masters/specialization might become a more degree requirement. But, those already on the market are in for a big shock.
I like the Primeagen's examples for the simple stuff. On stream he fires up an editor and copilot then writes the function signature for quick sort. Then copilot gets it wrong. It creates a sort function, but one worse than quick sort but not as bad as bubble sort.
These LLMs will get better. But today they are just summarizing. They screw up fairly simple tasks in fairly obvious ways right now. We don't know if they will do better tomorrow or in 20 years. I would wager it will be just a few years, but we have code that needs to be written today.
LLMs are great for students because they are often motivated and lacking broad experience, and a summarizer will such person very far.
can't wait until they're good enough to screw up complex tasks in subtle ways after undercutting the pay of junior developers such that no one is studying how to program computers anymore
In the future there won't be a Spacer Guild but a Greybeard Guild that mutates greybeard developers until they're immortal and forces them to sit at a terminal manipulating ancient Cobol, Javascript, and Go for all eternity, maintaining the software underpinnings of our civilization.
Absolutely. Copilot Workspace might not seem like it, but it's very much our first step towards tools to aid in comprehension and navigation of a codebase. I think a lot of folks have conflated "generative AI" with "writes code" when reading and understanding is a much larger part of the job
Yes? But it's commonly understood that reading code is harder than writing code. So why force yourself into a reading-mostly position when you don't have to? You're more likely to get it wrong.
It's not harder unless you write hard to read code.
> “Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.”
- Robert C. Martin in Clean Code
LLMs make exceptionally clean code in my opinion. They don't try to be fancy or "elegant", they just spit out basic statements that sometimes (or most of the time) do what you need.
Then you _read_ what it suggests, with a skilled eye you can pretty much glance and see if it looks good and test it.
>it's commonly understood that reading code is harder than writing code
I don't know about that. Maybe for kernel code or a codec. But I think most people could read (and understand) a 100 line class for a CRUD backend faster than they could write one.
There are code generators. Even with dealing with other languages library, I mostly copy-paste previous implementations and editing with Vim motions makes it faster.
I was looking for something like this. The only that might change is some of your toolset but LLMs won't change the nature of the job (which is what people seem to be thinking about)
