> Will AI replace developers? The Stanford data shows a tilt toward seniority rather than mass displacement: entry for 22 to 25 year olds is suffering, older workers are growing. WEF expects a net gain of 78 million jobs by 2030.
As a 42 years old web developper, this situation gives me headaches. I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. I feel we will need much less developpers and yet I can imagine some years where a developper will be able to handle much larger projects.
I'm pretty convinced that manual coding will be done by late 2027 for at least webdev. At that point the optimal workflow will be coders controlling agents.
Not too far after it will be coders controlling agents who control agents who do the work.
> I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened.
In some ways, having a superpower is not all that great because then you are forced by the prisoner's dilemma to use it. And if you think about it, it comes at a cost: a higher mental strain over a long period of time.
To use a physical analogy: a workout machine at the gym is very likely to assist you in targeting specific muscles compared to just lifting stuff you need to lift, but it also allows you to push that specific muscle group harder and thus increase the chances of injury to that muscle group precisely because it's so targeted. I think AI is like that with the brain.
(I'll add that it's perfectly possible to work out safely at the gym with lots of equipment. But I've spent years at the gym and I've seen a ton of injuries because the temptation to push a specific muscle group hard is there. And, AI is much worse because with AI, there is an economic incentive to push harder, whereas at the gym it's in your best interest to dial back...only sometimes people like to show off to their gym buddies.)
Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? I don't know where to get started, would you just look like a junior or entry level candidate by doing that?
We hire “AI engineers,” and honestly the expectation most of the time is that they can demonstrate an actual interest and real work in or with AI. Mind you, we are not a frontier lab, but AI gaming company, and someone with senior dev knowledge is hugely valuable to the team if they actually have rolled up their sleeves and built with AI and push to improve our operations with AI. There isn’t an academic signal that would tell us you are really AI forward, and so much of the engineering job is super charged by having a real dev background for us.
I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
You can use it at different levels of granularity to fit your needs. I find a lot of the fun in designing the way the code interacts and class/module boundaries and responsibilities. So AI takes away the typing (code) part and makes it more fun at times. It give me more time to focus my thoughts.
most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
It’s for sure not too late, why would it be? The industry is young and evolving. It’s not even clear what an AI job is exactly, the definition and job titles have been changing a lot
Absolutely; I'd check out AI Engineering by Chip Huyen to get a fundamental understanding of the space and do a couple of side projects in the area to get familiar and be able to speak to the nuances of working with LLMs, and that will be enough to start working to transition and apply for relevant roles.
Maybe - as with most ultra competitive industries you either know someone or have some extremely niche yet hyper productive knowledge others don’t have.
I have multiple Senior AI Engineer roles posted (really, senior / staff SWE who has reps and sets using AI for development, perhaps working with AI infra) right now. Right now it's a lot of getting Claude working well, model routing working well, and getting us off of commercial LLMs. Trying desperately to hire, but get a lot of "AI-pilled" non-developers in the same way I would open SWE roles ten years ago and get constant "Software Bootcamp" grads. These roles exist, in my anecdotal experience of having multiple of these roles open on my team lol. Perhaps this is just 1/100 ads, or 1/1000.
Mostly title inflation. Using GPT API does not make you an "AI engineer". I don't even know if anyone would seriously call themselves this. Usually they are either software developers that actually work at an AI company or a researcher. The others are fake jobs.
I'm pretty sure people suddenly had BS like "Blockchain engineer" in their linkedin headline in 2022.
I interview a lot of larping 'AI engineers' that either vibe coded a side project or were involved in low stakes pilots
Irl theres a short list of companies that actually build / apply ai at scale. for people trying to break in its usually not expected to have experience with it, just don't lie about it
I would like to have a resource, or maybe a coalition of companies that sign up and offer jobs that are guaranteed not to use AI. Although it might be true that there are some new jobs that didn't exist before, it would be great for people to band together to create a system that promotes the human element over using AI.
At this point that’s like asking to work at an artisanal hand made goods factory. Not common and I’m not even sure there’s particular demand on the consumer side for artisanal hand crafted code despite the negativity towards AI.
It's worse even than that. Although I personally wouldn't pay for a bespoke hand designed piece of furniture I can at least see that it is an artisan piece and understand the rationale.
Software is all shit anyway, it just helps me get a job done. How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. Leave the visual appearance aside. I mean the functionality.
Well for one, a lot of people now solo dev a project with AI and then often seem to abandon the project. There's not much sense of owndership in some of it. I try and use software that has as little AI influence as possible.
> In AI Engineer postings the skill "prompt engineering" appears 8.9% of the time, RAG 13.6%. *The skill stayed, the job dissolved into other roles*.
That is Claude vibe. I thought it was an ok article when I was about half way through it, then hit this. And overall it seems like it could have been more focused, it listed various AI roles a bit carelessly.
As a 42 years old web developper, this situation gives me headaches. I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. I feel we will need much less developpers and yet I can imagine some years where a developper will be able to handle much larger projects.
Not too far after it will be coders controlling agents who control agents who do the work.
We're in for a very tumultuous few years
In some ways, having a superpower is not all that great because then you are forced by the prisoner's dilemma to use it. And if you think about it, it comes at a cost: a higher mental strain over a long period of time.
To use a physical analogy: a workout machine at the gym is very likely to assist you in targeting specific muscles compared to just lifting stuff you need to lift, but it also allows you to push that specific muscle group harder and thus increase the chances of injury to that muscle group precisely because it's so targeted. I think AI is like that with the brain.
(I'll add that it's perfectly possible to work out safely at the gym with lots of equipment. But I've spent years at the gym and I've seen a ton of injuries because the temptation to push a specific muscle group hard is there. And, AI is much worse because with AI, there is an economic incentive to push harder, whereas at the gym it's in your best interest to dial back...only sometimes people like to show off to their gym buddies.)
I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
You're just starting at a screen pushing pixels all day. Whether I do that with Claude or without doesn't matter to me.
most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
This stuff has only existed for 3 years. Everyone is faking it and no one really knows what's right or wrong yet. You're more than qualified.
I'm pretty sure people suddenly had BS like "Blockchain engineer" in their linkedin headline in 2022.
Irl theres a short list of companies that actually build / apply ai at scale. for people trying to break in its usually not expected to have experience with it, just don't lie about it
The numbers are stuck at 2018 levels. Accumulated inflation since then is over 20%. This bubble is not glamorous at all.
Software is all shit anyway, it just helps me get a job done. How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. Leave the visual appearance aside. I mean the functionality.
artisanal software is software that has a bound on the complexity. A human has to reason about it.
That is Claude vibe. I thought it was an ok article when I was about half way through it, then hit this. And overall it seems like it could have been more focused, it listed various AI roles a bit carelessly.
> Here is the short version, with numbers and links.
> The one-paragraph summary: