> Code spitters are cooked, let's be honest here and accept the fate so everyone can move on.
I'm guessing "code spitters" here means people who consider their job to be manually writing code based on requirements produced by others.
Personally, I think the role of "developer" has already expanded way beyond that. If you're a technology expert who understands what is and is not possible to build, how it can be built, how to prompt that thing into existence, verify that the implementation is good, then get that implementation safely into production, you're not "cooked" at all.
There is absolutely no place for PM. I say this as someone who has been in PM leadership and built product orgs several times over the last 20 years.
If you rely on AI to make those decisions, at least with today's capabilities, you will quickly see how sub optimal the results are.
I'm not saying we're surely all doomed here, but there are going to be a lot of changes that none of us can imagine every aspect of, and they are going to happen at a surprising speed, and there are a vast number of cascading impacts that people aren't thinking much about.
eg. if you're in the trades, yes you're safer than a knowledge worker for now, but if all the knowledge workers get wiped out you're both going to have vastly decreased demand for your work (far less individuals will have the disposable income to hire you, companies will have less need for facilities to house employees, so you'll also see a retrenchment on the corporate side) and you'll start getting a labor supply glut as the knowledge workers all desperately attempt to retrain for the 'safe' jobs. And this is just the short term problem, without getting into the robotics threat.
If we don't get ahead of this problem politically (spoiler alert: we won't, at least in the US, it is unclear if we even have a functioning democracy), things are going to get very messy for virtually everyone who relies on labor income.
60k fired from Microsoft
Today Cisco announcing 1 engineer using AI to try to replace/improve 98% of Cisco's code
Goog just lost $475B in value
These are not random disparate events. This is the industry changing to business as usual with less humans.
Note that people laid off are not able to find jobs for more than 9 months. This is a very serious situation.
Not true
Gen AI has changed every single part of classic software development, and the impact hasn't even remotely been felt. And zero jobs are "safe" in that traditional way that we saw them.
It's actually staggering to think of how the teams I've led developed software five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago and twenty years ago. Easily 95% of that effort has been obliterated (I'm estimating on the low side, more like 99.5%). Classic wisdom like "the specification needs to be 100% up front because once we implement it stratifies" are relics of the past.
Everything has changed. I can't fully express how software development will work, but it certainly won't involve someone whose job is "human interaction".
Is this just domain dependent?
The "I just manage the Gantt chart" folks are screwed, I think.
The ones that are good at translating between teams can be a huge force multiplier.
Code quality improves month by month, and by now I rarely have complaints in PR reviews, even if I read through them manually, line by line. For the most part, it's how I would write it myself, only that I would have been slower, and not as motivated to test it so thoroughly.
The key is IMHO giving the agents a way to verify their results in a feedback loop as short as possible, along with few instructions for the important guardrails, and a way to organise efficiently (a ledger, a GitHub repository with issues, Linear, Jira, whatever.) With that, you can tend to 3-5 parallel sessions to avoid waiting, and actually get stuff done fast.
Many developers don't want to think about these at all (and I say this as a former-developer-current-PM).
I was hired as a TPdM. I unabashedly wrestled technology decisions away from them because these "senior" and "principal" engineers obviously showed they could not be trusted.
And you are 100%, this was thoughts wandering after a long late night discussion with friends who work for a CRM company.
Not backed by data, not a prediction, just subjective take at 1am.
And yes, thinking architecture, tradeoffs, scalability and safety isn't going anywhere.
Spending all day writing code as proof of work is out.
AI can now push new features at speed, but somebody still needs to steer those features into a desirable product. Customers will ask AI for a faster horse.
This is why AI companies aren't spinning out new companies left and right. They can obviously push huge volumes of code, but can they effectively manage the resulting products?
Huge volumes of buggy code. The ChatGPT web interface should be an absolute embarrassment. Tap the input box, scrolls to top. Submit input, scrolls to top. 1+ second delay from keypress to input. Scrolling locks up. It’s been an absolute buggy mess for ages, the specific bugs change day to day. I suppose this is what happens when people think the LLMs are good enough to let loose without supervision.
Someone will have to be the technical bodyguard that needs to thwart an attempted breach as quick as possible without causing an outage and that is the difference between a $45,000 breach vs a $450M breach. Enough to bankrupt a startup.
Using something like Cloudflare won't be enough this time.
Buddy, that skill is what PMs that are any good at their job spent a lifetime perfecting.
Rather, PMs aren’t safe as managers could just ask the agent to find the problem worth solving and then go solve it. But that takes us to a rather different world.
My hunch is that software is pretty much going to end the way we think of it today.
Hardware, too, but that will take longer. If you think big enough, the idea of waiting for a new TV or phone or gaming system when you can just have your agent take your description, spec and order the hardware and have it fabbed for you in days ... is kind of quaint.
The broad societal disruption will be pretty devastating. But looking at software as the microcosm really lets you dream (/nightmare) big.
To me the question is not will we be able to get anything we want how we want it, but more who will have money to buy this?
I certainly believe that decent engineers do already have a good degree of knowledge about product topics (it’s like a must nowadays). PM/POs don’t really know enough on the tech side, so they would be clueless even with claude.
Hopefully all these unpredictable side effects include bringing down the cost of living.
Hopefully, but I think it is going to be difficult for that to happen in a positive way because AI is likely to suppress wages for most (for the reasons you mentioned) but our entire current economic system is engineered to never be deflationary.
So it is hard to imagine a situation in which AI causes us to all earn less but still be equally or better off without some pretty fundamental changes to our economic system that will be hard to get consensus on in our current political environment.
Neither of these statements are true if your team is building anything remotely complex with real customers. You can’t quickly verify if your decisions will survive the test of time and past mistakes can’t always be easily fixed. LLMs trivialize the easy parts of software development and enable faster enshittification of the projects they’re used on, but that’s about it.
> On the other hand nobody is going to try building a building only to check if it's structurally sound because that would be absurd.
Structural engineering isn't some mystical science. It's a set of mathematical truths, calculations, SOPs, and so on. If a human can do it, of course a machine can do it, and I'm obviously not saying "run it through the stochastic parrot and out comes a corporate headquarter building", but it's a part of the process where we're rapidly going to get there. And of course, the disruption in that field is already underway. For instance Stru AI. Yes, an engineer is still involved, but the premise is that your single engineer now replaces 10 engineers, and so on.
Gen AI isn't going to be plunging toilets or changing bedpans...yet...but it disrupts almost every role in the "white collar" world. That doesn't mean it eliminates every job, but it completely upends the norms.
For security or applying business logic (and how it interfaces with programming or database logic), you get less and less assurance by just looking at it.
Citation needed. Many of my users don't even know what correct would be.
> nobody is going to try building a building only to check if it's structurally sound because that would be absurd.
Well, that otoh can be simulated quite easily.
What should we call these intermediate deterministic artifacts? Code!
Yeah we'll still need to know a sequence to flip bits in the right order, but it isn't code you'll recognize.
idk how common this is in the industry though, but since the introduction of AI my role has expanded so much beyond what is just writing code, i'm now a devops/product/dev person and expected to do all of that at once for the same pay as before
i actually enjoy it myself cause you feel less like a ticket pusher
As long as humans are making decisions, human interaction remains important. From this perspective, PMs are still in a better position than engineers
I think you can eventually set up an AI system that handles a lot of the interactions and conversations people have.
> I grew up with the distinction of "tech guy" needs a "product guy". I am not dismissing it, I am just saying that the world is entering into a phase where both roles are eventually melting into a single function.
The whole reason why Engineering exists in organizations is to take Product's ideas and turn them into reality. When Product can realize its own ideas (through AI) then Engineering is no longer necessary as a political sub-organization. Making it happen requires engineers to learn Product skills and adopt a "Product" job title. We will likely call people with both skillsets Product Engineers. People who can't adapt to learning both skillsets are at risk of losing their jobs.
For the rest of us, that's not a problem.
jbv9901•1h ago
gopher2000•57m ago