The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer.
COBOL was supposed to let managers write programs. VB let business users make apps. Squarespace killed the need for web developers. And now AI.
What actually happens: the tooling lowers the barrier to entry, way more people try to build things, and then those same people need actual developers when they hit the edges of what the tool can do. The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding.
The developers who get displaced are the ones doing purely mechanical work that was already well-specified. But the job of understanding what to build in the first place, or debugging why the automated thing isn't doing what you expected - that's still there. Usually there's more of it.
Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.
>every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer
you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.
Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc.
Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.
This suggests that the latent demand was a lot but it still doesnt prove it is unbounded.
At some point the low hanging automation fruit gets tapped out. What can be put online that isnt there already? Which business processes are obviously going to be made an order magnitude more efficient?
Moreover, we've never had more developers and we've exited an anomalous period of extraordinarily low interest rates.
I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity."
In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring strategies and networking patterns on top of CNI because they never learned the fundamentals these abstractions are built on. They're not learning faster: they're relearning the same operational lessons at orders of magnitude higher cost, now mediated through layers of YAML.
Each wave of "democratisation" doesn't eliminate specialists. It creates new specialists who must learn both the abstraction and what it's abstracting. We've made expertise more expensive to acquire, not unnecessary.
Excel proves the rule. It's objectively terrible: 30% of genomics papers contain gene name errors from autocorrect, JP Morgan lost $6bn from formula errors, Public Health England lost 16,000 COVID cases hitting row limits. Yet it succeeded at democratisation by accepting catastrophic failures no proper system would tolerate.
The pattern repeats because we want Excel's accessibility with engineering reliability. You can't have both. Either accept disasters for democratisation, or accept that expertise remains required.
It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems.
The first electronic computers were programmed by manually re-wiring their circuits. Going from that to being able to encode machine instructions on punchcards did not replace developers. Nor did going from raw machine instructions to assembly code. Nor did going from hand-written assembly to compiled low-level languages like C/FORTRAN. Nor did going from low-level languages to higher-level languages like Java, C++, or Python. Nor did relying on libraries/frameworks for implementing functionality that previously had to be written from scratch each time. Each of these steps freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level problems. Mel's intellect is freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common.
(The thing that distinguishes gen-AI from all the previous examples of increasing abstraction is that those examples are deterministic and often formally verifiable mappings from higher abstraction -> lower abstraction. Gen-AI is neither.)
> It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems.
People do and will talk about replacing developers though.
Were many of the aforementioned advancements marketed as "replacing developers"? Absolutely. Did that end up happening? Quite the opposite; each higher-level abstraction only caused the market for software and demand for developers to grow.
That's not to say developers haven't been displaced by abstraction; I suspect many of the people responsible for re-wiring the ENIAC were completely out of a job when punchcards hit the scene. But their absence was filled by a greater number of higher-level punchcard-wielding developers.
the infinite-fountain-of-software machine seems more likely to replace developers than previous innovations, and the people pushing the button will not be, in any current sense of the word, programming
I think the thing that’s so weird to me is this idea that we have to all somehow internalize the concept of transistor switching as the foundational unchangeable root of computing and therefore anything that is too far abstract from that is not somehow real computing or something mess like that
Again ignoring completely that when you would program vacuum tube computers it was an entirely different type of abstraction than you do with Mosfets for example
I’m finding myself in the position where I can safely ignore any conversation about engineering with anybody who thinks that there is a “right” way to do it or that there’s any kind of ceremony or thinking pattern that needs to stay stable
Those are all artifacts of humans desiring very little variance and things that they’ve even encoded because it takes real energy to have to reconfigure your own internal state model to a new paradigm
> Which brings us to the question: why does this pattern repeat?
The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. AI has been pushed as an omnipotent, all-powerful job-killer by these companies because shareholder value depends on enough people believing in it, not whether the tooling is actually capable. It's telling that folks like Jensen Huang talk about people's negativity towards AI being one of the biggest barriers to advancement, as if they should be immune from scrutiny.
They'd rather try to discredit the naysayers than actually work towards making these products function the way they're being marketed, and once the market wakes up to this reality, it's gonna get really ugly.
As I have heard from mid level managers and C suite types across a few dev jobs. Staff are the largest expense and the technology department is the largest cost center. I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product but that's a lost point.
This is why those same mid level managers and C suite people are salivating over AI and mentioning it in every press release.
The reality is that costs are being reduced by replacing US teams with offshore teams. And the layoffs are being spun as a result of AI adoption.
AI tools for software development are here to stay and accelerate in the coming months and years and there will be advances. But cost reductions are largely realized via onshore/offshore replacement.
The remaining onshore teams must absorb much more slack and fixes and in a way end up being more productive.
Can semi-technical people replace developers if those semi-technical people accept that the price of avoiding developers is a commitment to minimizing total system complexity?
Of course semi-technical people can troubleshoot, it's part of nearly every job. (Some are better at it than others.)
But how many semi-technical people can design a system that facilitates troubleshooting? Even among my engineering acquaintances, there are plenty who cannot.
My guess is no. I’ve seen people talk about understanding the output of their vibe coding sessions as “nerdy,” implying they’re above that. Refusing the vet AI output is the kiss of death to velocity.
The reverse is developer's recurring dream of replacing non-IT people, usually with a 100% online automated self promoting SaaS. AI is also the latest incarnation of that.
Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive.
If the deck is stacked against labor and in favor of the owner, become the owner. Start a business. Create things that are better. Enrich the world. Put food on the table for a few people in the process.
Be something instead of intentionally being nothing. Win.
> Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.
"Don't take it personal" does not feed the starving and does not house the unhoused. An economic system that over-indexes on profit at the expense of the vast majority of its people will eventually fail. If capitalism can't evolve to better provide opportunities for people to live while the capital-owning class continues to capture a disproportionate share of created economic value, the system will eventually break.
You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.
Some businesses want to reduce costs. Some want to tackle the challenge of using resources available in the most profitable manner, including making their employees grow to better contribute in tackling tomorrow's challenges.
A business leader board that only consider people as costs are looking at the world through sociopath lenses.
A few observations from the current tech + services market:
Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now. Lower costs, smaller teams, and a lot of “good enough” duct-tape solutions are shipping fast.
Fewer developers are needed to deliver the same output. Mature frameworks, cloud, and AI have quietly changed the baseline productivity.
And yet, these companies still struggle to hire and retain people. Not because talent doesn’t exist, but because they want people who are immediately useful, adaptable, and can operate in messy environments.
Retention is hard when work is rushed, ownership is limited, and growth paths are unclear. People leave as soon as they find slightly better clarity or stability.
On the economy: it doesn’t feel like a crash, more like a slow grind. Capital is cautious. Hiring is defensive. Every role needs justification.
In this environment, it’s a good time for “hackers” — not security hackers, but people who can glue systems together, work with constraints, ship fast, and move without perfect information.
Comfort-driven careers are struggling. Leverage-driven careers are compounding.
Curious to see how others are experiencing this shift.
Let’s not forget that we are just now recovering from the market corrections of the pandemic. Pandemic level tech industry hiring was insane and many of those companies who later held layoffs were just sending the growth line back to where it should be.
I think pressure to ship is always there. I don’t know if that’s intensifying or not. I can understand where managers and executives think AI = magical work faster juice, but I imagine those expectations will hit their correction point at some time.
> Understanding this doesn’t mean rejecting new tools. It means using them with clear expectations about what they can provide and what will always require human judgment.
Speaking of tools, that style of writing rings a bell.. Ben Affleck made a similar point about the evolving use of computers and AI in filmmaking, wielded with creativity by humans with lived experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s. Faster visual effects production enables more creative options.
Science is hated because its mastery requires too much hard work, and, by the same token, its practitioners, the scientists, are hated because of their power they derive from it. - Dijkstra '1989
The link redirects back to the blog index if your browser is configured in Spanish, because it forces to change the language to spanish and the article is not available in spanish.
I recently did a higher education contract for one semester in a highly coding focused course. I have a few years of teaching experience pre-LLMs so I could evaluate the impact internally, my conclusion is that academic education as we know it is basically broken forever.
If educators use AI to write/update the lectures and the assignments, students use AI to do the assignments, then AI evaluates the student's submissions, what is the point?
I'm worried about some major software engineering fields experiencing the same problem. If design and requirements are written by AI, code is mostly written by AI, and users are mostly AI agents. What is the point?
> We’re still in that same fundamental situation. We have better tools—vastly better tools—but the thinking remains essential.
But less thinking is essential, or at least that’s what it’s like using the tools.
I’ve been vibing code almost 100% of the time since Claude 4.5 Opus came out. I use it to review itself multiple times, and my team does the same, then we use AI to review each others’ code.
Previously, we whiteboarded and had discussions more than we do now. We definitely coded and reviewed more ourselves than we do now.
I don’t believe that AI is incapable of making mistakes, nor do I think that multiple AI reviews are enough to
understand and solve problems, yet. Some incredibly huge problems are probably on the horizon. But for now, the general “AI will not replace developers” is false; our roles have changed- we are managers now, and for how long?
Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.
If anything, there were a bunch of low barrier to entry software development options like HyperCard, MS Access, Visual Basic, Delphi, 4GLs etc. around in the 90s, that went away.
It feels like programming then got a lot harder with internet stuff that brought client-server challenges, web frontends, cross platform UI and build challenges, mobile apps, tablets, etc... all bringing in elaborate frameworks and build systems and dependency hell to manage and move complexity around.
With that context, it seems like the AI experience / productivity boost people are having is almost like a regression back to the mean and just cutting through some of the layers of complexity that had built up over the years.
And I would argue speadsheets still created more developers. Analytics teams need developers to put that data somewhere, to transform it for certain formats, to load that data from a source so they can create spreadsheets from it.
So now instead of one developer lost and one analyst created, you've actually just created an analyst and kept a developer.
Business quacks being forever bamboozled because turns out implementation is the only thing that matters and hacker culture outlived every single promise to eradicate hacker culture.
This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far.
On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening:
First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of incidental complexity. This is significantly an instance of Chesterton's Fence. Yes, there certainly is incidental complexity in software development, or at least complexity that is incidental at the level of abstraction that most corporate software lives at. But as a discipline, we're pretty good at eliminating it when we find it, though it sometimes takes a while — but the speed with which we iterate means we eliminate it a lot faster than most other disciplines. A lot of the complexity that remains is actually irreducible, or at least we don't yet know how to reduce it. A case in point: programming language syntax. To the outsider, the syntax of modern programming languages, where the commas go, whether whitespace means anything, how angle brackets are parsed, looks to the uninitiated like a jumble of arcane nonsense that must be memorized in order to start really solving problems, and indeed it's a real barrier to entry that non-developers, budding developers, and sometimes seasoned developers have to contend with. But it's also (a selection of competing frontiers of) the best language we have, after many generations of rationalistic and empirical refinement, for humans to unambiguously specify what they mean at the semantic level of software development as it stands! For a long time now we haven't been constrained in the domain of programming language syntax by the complexity or performance of parser implementations. Instead, modern programming languages tend toward simpler formal grammars because they make it easier for _humans_ to understand what's going on when reading the code. AI tools promise to (amongst other things; don't come at me AI enthusiasts!) replace programming language syntax with natural language. But actually natural language is a terrible syntax for clearly and unambiguously conveying intent! If you want a more venerable example, just look at mathematical syntax, a language that has never been constrained by computer implementation but was developed by humans for humans to read and write their meaning in subtle domains efficiently and effectively. Mathematicians started with natural language and, through a long process of iteration, came to modern-day mathematical syntax. There's no push to replace mathematical syntax with natural language because, even though that would definitely make some parts of the mathematical process easier, we've discovered through hard experience that it makes the process as a whole much harder.
Second, humans (as a gestalt, not necessarily as individuals) always operate at the maximum feasible level of complexity, because there are benefits to be extracted from the higher complexity levels and if we are operating below our maximum complexity budget we're leaving those benefits on the table. From time to time we really do manage to hop up the ladder of abstraction, at least as far as mainstream development goes. But the complexity budget we save by no longer needing to worry about the details we've abstracted over immediately gets reallocated to the upper abstraction levels, providing things like development velocity, correctness guarantees, or UX sophistication. This implies that the sum total of complexity involved in software development will always remain roughly constant. This is of course a win, as we can produce more/better software (assuming we really have abstracted over those low-level details and they're not waiting for the right time to leak through into our nice clean abstraction layer and bite us…), but as a process it will never reduce the total amount of ‘software development’ work to be done, whatever kinds of complexity that may come to comprise. In fact, anecdotally it seems to be subject to some kind of Braess' paradox: the more software we build, the more our society runs on software, the higher the demand for software becomes. If you think about it, this is actually quite a natural consequence of the ‘constant complexity budget’ idea. As we know, software is made of decisions (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1219758.html), and the more ‘manual’ labour we free up at the bottom of the stack the more we free up complexity budget to be spent on the high-level decisions at the top. But there's no cap on decision-making! If you ever find yourself with spare complexity budget left over after making all your decisions you can always use it to make decisions about how you make decisions, ad infinitum, and yesterday's high-level decisions become today's menial labour. The only way out of that cycle is to develop intelligences (software, hardware, wetware…) that can not only reason better at a particular level of abstraction than humans but also climb the ladder faster than humanity as a whole — singularity, to use a slightly out-of-vogue term. If we as a species fall off the bottom of the complexity window then there will no longer be a productivity-driven incentive to ideate, though I rather look forward to a luxury-goods market of all-organic artisanal ideas :)
Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well.
Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people.
So a programmer then...
I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, rather than being driven by dispassionate logic.
Outside of SV the thought of More Tech being the answer to ever greater things is met with great skepticism these days. It's not that people hate engineers, and most people are content to hold their nose while the mag7 make 401k go up, but people are sick of Big Tech. Like it or not, the Musks, Karps, Thiels, Bezos's have a lot to do with that.
Not imputing that to you, but it seems like they are people out there that believe money is all that matters. The map with the richest details won't save anyone in a territory that was turned into a wasteland unable to produce a single apple on the whole land.
No high paid manager wants to learn that their visionary thinking was just the last iteration of the underpants gnome meme.
Some things sound good at first but unfortunately are not that easy to actually do
Devs are where the project meets reality in general, and this is what I always try to explain to people. And it's the same with construction, by the way. Pictures and blueprints are nice but sooner or later you're going to need someone digging around in the dirt.
Some people just see it as a cost, one "tech" startup I worked at I got this lengthy pitch from a sales exec that they shouldn't have a software team at all, that we'd never be able to build anything useful without spending millions and that money would be better-spent on the sales team, although they'd have nothing to sell lmfao. And the real laugh was the dev team was heavily subsidized by R&D grants anyway.
The day you successfully implemented your solution with a prompt, you solution is valued at the cost of a prompt.
There is no value to anything easily achieved by generative tools anymore.
Now it is in either:
a. generative technology but requiring substantial amount of coordination, curation, compute power.
b. substantial amount of data.
c. scarce intelectual human work.
And scarce but non intellectually demanding human work was dropped from the list of valuable things.
The reason those things matter in a traditional project is because the previous developers fucked up, and the product is now crashing and leaking money and clients like a sinking Titanic.
Even that is the wrong question. The whole promise of the stock market, of AI is that you can "run companies" by just owning shares and knowing nothing at all. I think that is what "leaders" hope to achieve. It's a slightly more dressed get-rich-quick scheme.
Invest $1000 into AI, have a $1000000 company in a month. That's the dream they're selling, at least until they have enough investment.
It of course becomes "oh, sorry, we happen to have taken the only huge business for ourselves. Is your kidney now for sale?"
LLMs are a box where the input has to be generated by someone/something, but also the output has to be verified somehow (because, like humans, it isn't always correct). So you either need a human at "both ends", or some very clever AI filling those roles.
But I think the human doing those things probably needs slightly different skills and experience than the average legacy developer.
With all these AIs chaining and prompting eachother, we're approaching the point where some unlucky person is going to ask an AI something and it will consume all the energy in the universe trying to compute the answer.
The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer.
COBOL was supposed to let managers write programs. VB let business users make apps. Squarespace killed the need for web developers. And now AI.
What actually happens: the tooling lowers the barrier to entry, way more people try to build things, and then those same people need actual developers when they hit the edges of what the tool can do. The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding.
The developers who get displaced are the ones doing purely mechanical work that was already well-specified. But the job of understanding what to build in the first place, or debugging why the automated thing isn't doing what you expected - that's still there. Usually there's more of it.
Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.
>every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer
you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.
This doesn’t seem immediately false. Industrial society creates more complexity and specializations. There is more work to do all the time.
Actual AI seems like a possibility here.
Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc.
Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.
This suggests that the latent demand was a lot but it still doesnt prove it is unbounded.
At some point the low hanging automation fruit gets tapped out. What can be put online that isnt there already? Which business processes are obviously going to be made an order magnitude more efficient?
Moreover, we've never had more developers and we've exited an anomalous period of extraordinarily low interest rates.
The party might be over.
I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity."
In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring strategies and networking patterns on top of CNI because they never learned the fundamentals these abstractions are built on. They're not learning faster: they're relearning the same operational lessons at orders of magnitude higher cost, now mediated through layers of YAML.
Each wave of "democratisation" doesn't eliminate specialists. It creates new specialists who must learn both the abstraction and what it's abstracting. We've made expertise more expensive to acquire, not unnecessary.
Excel proves the rule. It's objectively terrible: 30% of genomics papers contain gene name errors from autocorrect, JP Morgan lost $6bn from formula errors, Public Health England lost 16,000 COVID cases hitting row limits. Yet it succeeded at democratisation by accepting catastrophic failures no proper system would tolerate.
The pattern repeats because we want Excel's accessibility with engineering reliability. You can't have both. Either accept disasters for democratisation, or accept that expertise remains required.
It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems.
The first electronic computers were programmed by manually re-wiring their circuits. Going from that to being able to encode machine instructions on punchcards did not replace developers. Nor did going from raw machine instructions to assembly code. Nor did going from hand-written assembly to compiled low-level languages like C/FORTRAN. Nor did going from low-level languages to higher-level languages like Java, C++, or Python. Nor did relying on libraries/frameworks for implementing functionality that previously had to be written from scratch each time. Each of these steps freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level problems. Mel's intellect is freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common.
(The thing that distinguishes gen-AI from all the previous examples of increasing abstraction is that those examples are deterministic and often formally verifiable mappings from higher abstraction -> lower abstraction. Gen-AI is neither.)
[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
> It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems.
People do and will talk about replacing developers though.
Were many of the aforementioned advancements marketed as "replacing developers"? Absolutely. Did that end up happening? Quite the opposite; each higher-level abstraction only caused the market for software and demand for developers to grow.
That's not to say developers haven't been displaced by abstraction; I suspect many of the people responsible for re-wiring the ENIAC were completely out of a job when punchcards hit the scene. But their absence was filled by a greater number of higher-level punchcard-wielding developers.
the infinite-fountain-of-software machine seems more likely to replace developers than previous innovations, and the people pushing the button will not be, in any current sense of the word, programming
I think the thing that’s so weird to me is this idea that we have to all somehow internalize the concept of transistor switching as the foundational unchangeable root of computing and therefore anything that is too far abstract from that is not somehow real computing or something mess like that
Again ignoring completely that when you would program vacuum tube computers it was an entirely different type of abstraction than you do with Mosfets for example
I’m finding myself in the position where I can safely ignore any conversation about engineering with anybody who thinks that there is a “right” way to do it or that there’s any kind of ceremony or thinking pattern that needs to stay stable
Those are all artifacts of humans desiring very little variance and things that they’ve even encoded because it takes real energy to have to reconfigure your own internal state model to a new paradigm
> Which brings us to the question: why does this pattern repeat?
The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it. AI has been pushed as an omnipotent, all-powerful job-killer by these companies because shareholder value depends on enough people believing in it, not whether the tooling is actually capable. It's telling that folks like Jensen Huang talk about people's negativity towards AI being one of the biggest barriers to advancement, as if they should be immune from scrutiny.
They'd rather try to discredit the naysayers than actually work towards making these products function the way they're being marketed, and once the market wakes up to this reality, it's gonna get really ugly.
>The pattern repeats because the market incentivizes it.
Market is not universal gravity, it's just a storefront for social policy.
No political order, no market, no market incentives.
As I have heard from mid level managers and C suite types across a few dev jobs. Staff are the largest expense and the technology department is the largest cost center. I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product but that's a lost point.
This is why those same mid level managers and C suite people are salivating over AI and mentioning it in every press release.
The reality is that costs are being reduced by replacing US teams with offshore teams. And the layoffs are being spun as a result of AI adoption.
AI tools for software development are here to stay and accelerate in the coming months and years and there will be advances. But cost reductions are largely realized via onshore/offshore replacement.
The remaining onshore teams must absorb much more slack and fixes and in a way end up being more productive.
> I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product
There are a lot of counterexamples throughout history.
Can semi-technical people replace developers if those semi-technical people accept that the price of avoiding developers is a commitment to minimizing total system complexity?
Of course semi-technical people can troubleshoot, it's part of nearly every job. (Some are better at it than others.)
But how many semi-technical people can design a system that facilitates troubleshooting? Even among my engineering acquaintances, there are plenty who cannot.
Remains to be seen for production settings.
My guess is no. I’ve seen people talk about understanding the output of their vibe coding sessions as “nerdy,” implying they’re above that. Refusing the vet AI output is the kiss of death to velocity.
The reverse is developer's recurring dream of replacing non-IT people, usually with a 100% online automated self promoting SaaS. AI is also the latest incarnation of that.
When do we get the Star Trek / Orville dream of every job is a good job?
Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.
Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing.
Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive.
Hey, it's just business.
And you do this honestly, by negotiating reduced hours for the same pay or by negotiating piecework rather than time-based pay. Right?
What a nihilistic perspective and empty life.
If the deck is stacked against labor and in favor of the owner, become the owner. Start a business. Create things that are better. Enrich the world. Put food on the table for a few people in the process.
Be something instead of intentionally being nothing. Win.
Let's say the average firm has 10 workers. 90% of people are nihilists and empty lifers?
Do I want to lead a business filled with losers?
The irony being that software, and developers, have often been the tool for reducing head count.
> Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.
"Don't take it personal" does not feed the starving and does not house the unhoused. An economic system that over-indexes on profit at the expense of the vast majority of its people will eventually fail. If capitalism can't evolve to better provide opportunities for people to live while the capital-owning class continues to capture a disproportionate share of created economic value, the system will eventually break.
While not an incorrect statement, trillions of dollars have been paid to software developers to build software that invariably reduced labor costs.
You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.
Some businesses want to reduce costs. Some want to tackle the challenge of using resources available in the most profitable manner, including making their employees grow to better contribute in tackling tomorrow's challenges.
A business leader board that only consider people as costs are looking at the world through sociopath lenses.
A few observations from the current tech + services market:
Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now. Lower costs, smaller teams, and a lot of “good enough” duct-tape solutions are shipping fast.
Fewer developers are needed to deliver the same output. Mature frameworks, cloud, and AI have quietly changed the baseline productivity.
And yet, these companies still struggle to hire and retain people. Not because talent doesn’t exist, but because they want people who are immediately useful, adaptable, and can operate in messy environments.
Retention is hard when work is rushed, ownership is limited, and growth paths are unclear. People leave as soon as they find slightly better clarity or stability.
On the economy: it doesn’t feel like a crash, more like a slow grind. Capital is cautious. Hiring is defensive. Every role needs justification.
In this environment, it’s a good time for “hackers” — not security hackers, but people who can glue systems together, work with constraints, ship fast, and move without perfect information.
Comfort-driven careers are struggling. Leverage-driven careers are compounding.
Curious to see how others are experiencing this shift.
Let’s not forget that we are just now recovering from the market corrections of the pandemic. Pandemic level tech industry hiring was insane and many of those companies who later held layoffs were just sending the growth line back to where it should be.
I think pressure to ship is always there. I don’t know if that’s intensifying or not. I can understand where managers and executives think AI = magical work faster juice, but I imagine those expectations will hit their correction point at some time.
Kind of off topic but this has got to be one of my least favorite CSS rules that I’ve seen in recent memory:
> Understanding this doesn’t mean rejecting new tools. It means using them with clear expectations about what they can provide and what will always require human judgment.
Speaking of tools, that style of writing rings a bell.. Ben Affleck made a similar point about the evolving use of computers and AI in filmmaking, wielded with creativity by humans with lived experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s. Faster visual effects production enables more creative options.
Science is hated because its mastery requires too much hard work, and, by the same token, its practitioners, the scientists, are hated because of their power they derive from it. - Dijkstra '1989
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD104...
The link redirects back to the blog index if your browser is configured in Spanish, because it forces to change the language to spanish and the article is not available in spanish.
Here's an archived link: https://archive.is/y9SyQ
I recently did a higher education contract for one semester in a highly coding focused course. I have a few years of teaching experience pre-LLMs so I could evaluate the impact internally, my conclusion is that academic education as we know it is basically broken forever.
If educators use AI to write/update the lectures and the assignments, students use AI to do the assignments, then AI evaluates the student's submissions, what is the point?
I'm worried about some major software engineering fields experiencing the same problem. If design and requirements are written by AI, code is mostly written by AI, and users are mostly AI agents. What is the point?
>> What is the point?
To replace humans permanently from the work force so they can focus on the things which matter like being good pets?
Or good techno-serfs...
> We’re still in that same fundamental situation. We have better tools—vastly better tools—but the thinking remains essential.
But less thinking is essential, or at least that’s what it’s like using the tools.
I’ve been vibing code almost 100% of the time since Claude 4.5 Opus came out. I use it to review itself multiple times, and my team does the same, then we use AI to review each others’ code.
Previously, we whiteboarded and had discussions more than we do now. We definitely coded and reviewed more ourselves than we do now.
I don’t believe that AI is incapable of making mistakes, nor do I think that multiple AI reviews are enough to understand and solve problems, yet. Some incredibly huge problems are probably on the horizon. But for now, the general “AI will not replace developers” is false; our roles have changed- we are managers now, and for how long?
Mythical Man Month -> Mythical AI Agent Swarm
Spreadsheets replaced developers for that kind of work, while simultaneously enabling multiple magnitudes more work of that type to be performed.
I do agree, that’s like my go to thought.
Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.
If anything, there were a bunch of low barrier to entry software development options like HyperCard, MS Access, Visual Basic, Delphi, 4GLs etc. around in the 90s, that went away.
It feels like programming then got a lot harder with internet stuff that brought client-server challenges, web frontends, cross platform UI and build challenges, mobile apps, tablets, etc... all bringing in elaborate frameworks and build systems and dependency hell to manage and move complexity around.
With that context, it seems like the AI experience / productivity boost people are having is almost like a regression back to the mean and just cutting through some of the layers of complexity that had built up over the years.
And I would argue speadsheets still created more developers. Analytics teams need developers to put that data somewhere, to transform it for certain formats, to load that data from a source so they can create spreadsheets from it.
So now instead of one developer lost and one analyst created, you've actually just created an analyst and kept a developer.
Business quacks being forever bamboozled because turns out implementation is the only thing that matters and hacker culture outlived every single promise to eradicate hacker culture.
This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far.
On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening:
First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of incidental complexity. This is significantly an instance of Chesterton's Fence. Yes, there certainly is incidental complexity in software development, or at least complexity that is incidental at the level of abstraction that most corporate software lives at. But as a discipline, we're pretty good at eliminating it when we find it, though it sometimes takes a while — but the speed with which we iterate means we eliminate it a lot faster than most other disciplines. A lot of the complexity that remains is actually irreducible, or at least we don't yet know how to reduce it. A case in point: programming language syntax. To the outsider, the syntax of modern programming languages, where the commas go, whether whitespace means anything, how angle brackets are parsed, looks to the uninitiated like a jumble of arcane nonsense that must be memorized in order to start really solving problems, and indeed it's a real barrier to entry that non-developers, budding developers, and sometimes seasoned developers have to contend with. But it's also (a selection of competing frontiers of) the best language we have, after many generations of rationalistic and empirical refinement, for humans to unambiguously specify what they mean at the semantic level of software development as it stands! For a long time now we haven't been constrained in the domain of programming language syntax by the complexity or performance of parser implementations. Instead, modern programming languages tend toward simpler formal grammars because they make it easier for _humans_ to understand what's going on when reading the code. AI tools promise to (amongst other things; don't come at me AI enthusiasts!) replace programming language syntax with natural language. But actually natural language is a terrible syntax for clearly and unambiguously conveying intent! If you want a more venerable example, just look at mathematical syntax, a language that has never been constrained by computer implementation but was developed by humans for humans to read and write their meaning in subtle domains efficiently and effectively. Mathematicians started with natural language and, through a long process of iteration, came to modern-day mathematical syntax. There's no push to replace mathematical syntax with natural language because, even though that would definitely make some parts of the mathematical process easier, we've discovered through hard experience that it makes the process as a whole much harder.
Second, humans (as a gestalt, not necessarily as individuals) always operate at the maximum feasible level of complexity, because there are benefits to be extracted from the higher complexity levels and if we are operating below our maximum complexity budget we're leaving those benefits on the table. From time to time we really do manage to hop up the ladder of abstraction, at least as far as mainstream development goes. But the complexity budget we save by no longer needing to worry about the details we've abstracted over immediately gets reallocated to the upper abstraction levels, providing things like development velocity, correctness guarantees, or UX sophistication. This implies that the sum total of complexity involved in software development will always remain roughly constant. This is of course a win, as we can produce more/better software (assuming we really have abstracted over those low-level details and they're not waiting for the right time to leak through into our nice clean abstraction layer and bite us…), but as a process it will never reduce the total amount of ‘software development’ work to be done, whatever kinds of complexity that may come to comprise. In fact, anecdotally it seems to be subject to some kind of Braess' paradox: the more software we build, the more our society runs on software, the higher the demand for software becomes. If you think about it, this is actually quite a natural consequence of the ‘constant complexity budget’ idea. As we know, software is made of decisions (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1219758.html), and the more ‘manual’ labour we free up at the bottom of the stack the more we free up complexity budget to be spent on the high-level decisions at the top. But there's no cap on decision-making! If you ever find yourself with spare complexity budget left over after making all your decisions you can always use it to make decisions about how you make decisions, ad infinitum, and yesterday's high-level decisions become today's menial labour. The only way out of that cycle is to develop intelligences (software, hardware, wetware…) that can not only reason better at a particular level of abstraction than humans but also climb the ladder faster than humanity as a whole — singularity, to use a slightly out-of-vogue term. If we as a species fall off the bottom of the complexity window then there will no longer be a productivity-driven incentive to ideate, though I rather look forward to a luxury-goods market of all-organic artisanal ideas :)
> don't come at me AI enthusiasts!
no need to worry; none of them know how to read well enough to make it this far into your comment
It's like developers are only now awakening to the reality that despite being paid well, they never were the capitalists.
The link doesn't works for me, just get thrown on the main page after a second.
Looks like the article was pulled down? I could not find it in the english archive either.
The dumb part of this is: so who prompts the AI?
Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well.
Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people.
So a programmer then...
I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, rather than being driven by dispassionate logic.
Maybe it's the ancient jocks vs nerds thing.
Outside of SV the thought of More Tech being the answer to ever greater things is met with great skepticism these days. It's not that people hate engineers, and most people are content to hold their nose while the mag7 make 401k go up, but people are sick of Big Tech. Like it or not, the Musks, Karps, Thiels, Bezos's have a lot to do with that.
Popularity gets you nowhere though. What matters is money and money. Those 401k holders are tied down to the oligarchy.
Not imputing that to you, but it seems like they are people out there that believe money is all that matters. The map with the richest details won't save anyone in a territory that was turned into a wasteland unable to produce a single apple on the whole land.
Devs are where projects meet the constraints of reality and people always want to kill the messenger.
No high paid manager wants to learn that their visionary thinking was just the last iteration of the underpants gnome meme. Some things sound good at first but unfortunately are not that easy to actually do
Devs are where the project meets reality in general, and this is what I always try to explain to people. And it's the same with construction, by the way. Pictures and blueprints are nice but sooner or later you're going to need someone digging around in the dirt.
Some people just see it as a cost, one "tech" startup I worked at I got this lengthy pitch from a sales exec that they shouldn't have a software team at all, that we'd never be able to build anything useful without spending millions and that money would be better-spent on the sales team, although they'd have nothing to sell lmfao. And the real laugh was the dev team was heavily subsidized by R&D grants anyway.
The day you successfully implemented your solution with a prompt, you solution is valued at the cost of a prompt. There is no value to anything easily achieved by generative tools anymore. Now it is in either:
a. generative technology but requiring substantial amount of coordination, curation, compute power. b. substantial amount of data. c. scarce intelectual human work.
And scarce but non intellectually demanding human work was dropped from the list of valuable things.
Who fixes the unmaintainable mess that the AI created in which the vibe coder prompted?
The Vibe Coder? The AI?
Take a guess who fixes it.
The real question is, do you even need to fix it? Does it matter?
The reason those things matter in a traditional project is because a person needs to be able to read and understand the code.
If you're vibe coding, that's no longer true. So maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the things we used to consider maintenance headaches are irrelevant.
The reason those things matter in a traditional project is because the previous developers fucked up, and the product is now crashing and leaking money and clients like a sinking Titanic.
For now, training these things on code and logic is the first step of building a technological singularity.
They don't need to put all developers out of work to have a financial impact on the career.
Even that is the wrong question. The whole promise of the stock market, of AI is that you can "run companies" by just owning shares and knowing nothing at all. I think that is what "leaders" hope to achieve. It's a slightly more dressed get-rich-quick scheme.
Invest $1000 into AI, have a $1000000 company in a month. That's the dream they're selling, at least until they have enough investment.
It of course becomes "oh, sorry, we happen to have taken the only huge business for ourselves. Is your kidney now for sale?"
> Invest $1000 into AI, have a $1000000 company in a month. That's the dream they're selling, at least until they have enough investment.
But you need to buy my AI engineer course for that first.
> who prompts the AI
LLMs are a box where the input has to be generated by someone/something, but also the output has to be verified somehow (because, like humans, it isn't always correct). So you either need a human at "both ends", or some very clever AI filling those roles.
But I think the human doing those things probably needs slightly different skills and experience than the average legacy developer.
Rules engines were designed for just such a thing. Validating input/output. You don’t need a human to prompt AI, you need a pipeline.
While a single LLM won’t replace you. A well designed system of flows for software engineering using LLMs will.
Well, who designs the system of flows?
If you ask the AI labs, the AI systems themselves will build these kinds of workflows for themselves.
That's the goal.
How about another AI? And who prompts that AI? You're right - another AI!
With all these AIs chaining and prompting eachother, we're approaching the point where some unlucky person is going to ask an AI something and it will consume all the energy in the universe trying to compute the answer.