Would have to be quite a few years - last time price bump was in 2022 by 10% due to increase in energy costs because of the war in Ukraine. Naturally prices didn't go down.
I'm very curious to see how this will affect the job market. All the recent CS grads, all the coding bootcamp graduates - where would they end up in? And then there's medium/senior engineers that would have to switch how they work to oversee the hordes of AI agents that all the hype evangelists are pushing on the industry.
This is the thing I don't really get. I enjoy tinkering with AI and seeing what it comes up with to solve problems. But when I need to write working code that does anything beyond simple CRUD, it's faster for me to write the code than it is to (1) describe the problem in English with sufficient detail and working theory, then (2) check the AI's work, understand what it's written, de-duplicate and dry it out.
I guess if I skipped step 2, it might save time, but it would be completely irresponsible to put it into production, so that's not an option in any world where I maintain code quality and the trust of my clients.
Plus, having AI code mixed into my projects also leaves me with an uneasy sense of being less able to diagnose future bugs. Yes, I still know where everything is, but I don't know it as well as if I'd written it myself. So I find myself going back and re-reviewing AI-written code, re-familiarizing myself with it, in order to be sure I still have a full handle on everything.
To the extent that it may save me time as an engineer, I don't mind using it. But the degree to which the evangelists can peddle it to the management of a company as a replacement for human coders seems highly correlated with whether that company's management understood the value of safe code in the first place. If they didn't, then their infrastructure may have already been garbage, but it will now become increasingly unusable garbage. At some point, I think there will be a backlash when the results in reality can no longer be denied, and engineers who can come in and clean up the mess will be in high demand. But maybe that's just wishful thinking.
I'm in the same boat. Too often for me it feels easier to write code that I want to see by myself instead of opening some AI tool where I would have to describe what I need in plain English. After which I'd still have to review the code to make sure it does do what was requested.
Perhaps you have to be certain type of person or work in a peculiar company where second step (review) can be ignored as long as AI says that it does. Hardcore YOLO life.
the top % of talent is still extremely hard to get, perhaps moreso
saw an article recently where every sector is seeing a reduction in IT/devs except for tech and ai companies
if your company is in a sector where eng is a cost-center and the product is not directly tied to your engineers / your company is pushing for efficiency it's an employer's market
I don't think it makes sense to consider top % of the talent - relative to the total amount of engineers I imagine it would be minuscule.
It's the rest who will have to deal with shrinking number of positions, higher competition and possibly decrease in compensation due to said competition.
It isn't impossible that it's AI, but assuming writing and publishing happen at the same time would also lead you to conclude that Anne Frank wrote from the afterlife.
I agree with you. I had done a bit of vibe coding over the weekend. Not once did it feel good. Most of the time it produced things which are close to what I needed, but not quite hitting the mark. Partially probably because I'm not explaining myself in sufficient detail to AI, but the way I work is not working very well with super detailed spec ahead of development. I used to always develop understanding of the project while working on it.
I feel more lost and unsure instead of good - because I didn't write the code, so I don't have its internal structure in my head and since I didn't write it there's nothing to be proud of.
Yep, I agree 100%. People have described AI coding as "delegating". But there's a reason I'm an IC and not a manager. It's because I don't want to delegate to someone else who does the work, I want to do the work. There's no joy to be had in having someone else do the work at my behest.
If the future of the technology industry truly is having AI write software for you, then I will do what I have to do. At the end of the day I have to put food on the table. But I will hate every second of my job at that point, and it sucks ass.
Depends on who these humans you're comparing AI code to. I've seen and reviewed enough AI code in the last few months to have formed a solid impression that it's "ok" at best and relies heavily on who guides it - how well spec defined, what kind of rules are set, coding styles, architecture patterns.
The prompt user is basically selecting patterns from latent space. So you kind of need to know what you're looking for. When you don't know what you're looking for that's when the fun begins, but that's a problem for the next quarter.
I'm not sure comparing artisanal software to woodworking or organic farming is possible.
With woodworking and farming you get as a result some physical goods. Some John Smith that buys furniture can touch nice cherry paneling, appreciate the joinery and grain. With farming you he can taste delicious organic tomatoes and cucumbers, make food with it.
Would this John Smith care at all about how some software is written as long as it does what he wants and it works reliably? I'm not sure.
Because such people are not sincere either to themselves about who they are or to others. It's really hard for me to take seriously phrases like "I joined this industry to make things, not to write code".
Do painters paint because they just like to see the final picture? Or do they like the process? Yes, painting is an artistic process, not exactly crafting one. But the point stand.
Woodworkers making nice custom furniture generally enjoy the process.
I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.
Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years.
In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.
Yeah, seems like too many went into this field for money or status not because they like the process. Which is not an issue by itself, but now these people talk about how their AI assistant of choice made them some custom tool in two hours that would have taken them three weeks. And it's getting exhausting.
That is an insane assumption to make based on the grandparents' post. What part of them talking about how much they care about the systems thinking and software architecture and usefulness and meaningfulness to other people of software over the day-to-day drudgery of APIs and bugs and typing in syntax indicates to you that they only care about money and status? They just care about a different part of the process.
I went into this field because I love programming. I didn't even know how well these jobs paid until my junior year of college when I got an internship at AWS. I constantly programmed and read programming texts in my spare time growing up, in college, and after work.
I love AI tools. I can have AI do the boring parts. I can even have to write polished, usable apps in languages that I don't know.
I miss being able to think so much about architecture, best practices, frameworks/languages, how to improve, etc.
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