AI obsolescence is “coming for basically everyone in due time,” says one engineer who went from earning $150k to being locked out of the workforce for over a year.
Software engineer here - I make more than this guy did and I have roughly the same amount of experience in the industry that he does (perhaps a smidge more, going off of his linkedin profile).
For folks who are saying that there’s something off about this guy - that would not have mattered two or three years ago. At most he would have just been seen as a highly talented dev who was also slightly quirky.
For those who say it’s not about AI and more about the economy - well, maybe. We do have a couple of major ongoing wars right now and moves over the last couple of months by the recent administration of the US haven’t helped.
But I was around during the crash back in 2008, and this still feels different. Harder. Before, I had recruiters just banging on my door. Now, it’s tough to past the automated screenings unless I have a contact at the company who can refer me there.
Meanwhile, I’m hearing from my co-workers about how great AI is - how they ran their code through it and it came up with a bunch of unit tests for them and some boilerplate code. Vibe coding is already a thing. So is using AI to write your resume and cover letters and applying to jobs.
Likewise, I look upon tools like Devin.ai with increasing trepidation. Today, LLMs aren’t good enough to replace a single senior dev, despite a lot of investment happening to move things in exactly this direction. It probably won’t happen tomorrow, or even next year. But in 25?
Let’s just say that this article really hit home for me.
The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that’s a win for the people. We want to lower the barriers to entry here, to give this highly elite power to others. Actually, there shouldn’t be an elite at all - there should just be a democracy where everyone is equally empowered to create and build great things.
Working in tech will not remain this vaulted, lofty place for much longer. If we aren’t content creators, or controlling company owners, then ultimately tech workers like myself are in the same position as any other kind of worker - we work for someone else and serve only at their sufferance.
Hey, i’m not a dev but i thought i’d share my recent experience since you mention something related to it. I’m trying to set up a website for a small business i want to start. I got to the stage of creating the website so started contacting companies. I contacted about 15 companies, mostly small and also some sole-proprietorships (consultants). Only 3 of those i contacted responded. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s the industry standard - if the job’s not for you, don’t waste anyone’s time responding to emails about it. No problem. Still, i had to get more responses. So i got onto ChatGPT and asked the AI to help me improve my query email. It made the improvement, but at the end of its response the AI wrote something like: “You can do this project yourself. I’ll help you.” I scoffed, but after another week of no responses from human web devs, i dove into doing it myself. I have a year of computer science from college, and built some hobby sites back when CSS was new, so there was a little learning curve, but nothing AI couldn’t help me over with ease. Now the site’s almost ready to go live after only six weeks of part time work by myself, and it’s exactly what i want. The AI saved me between 4k and 10k usd. It’s crazy/scary/exciting/empowering/scary/crazy what you can do with the tech.
I’m very happy I started hedging early in my career by saving a very large fraction of my income. Working in tech has been excellent for me, but there’s never been any guarantee that this will last forever. At that point, I will probably be ready to live off my savings, should that become necessary. Then it doesn’t really matter what any market looks like - I will be able to do whatever I feel like during the days.
It’s really not ai, but the general economy. My company has been tightening down for longer than we have ai - only hiring in India. We’re in one of those phases again.
People want it to be ai but it just isn’t. Actually I’m a bit worried about my job because I don’t drink the coolaid. Ai is a nice additional tool to help me be more efficient and I use it when it can help. However I will not participate in these overblown claims within my company that we’re saving like 40% of our time because of ai. We all know you’re just making numbers up to ingratiate with the new boss
“The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that’s a win for the people”
Lets not have any illusions here. Currently this tool is available to the public with reasonable access cost only because it is not at that stage and needs a lot of testing and training. The moment it becomes capable of such feats, if it ever does, tech giants will monopolize the shit out of it.
I’m a senior mobile dev, and I needed a website for the app which I’ve never done before. AI was able to help me make one. Is it a well programmed website? Nope! Does it work? Yep!
With my knowledge I was able to troubleshoot problems the AI created, and fix things that came up, but it would have taken me so much longer to do that on my own, or I may have hired someone to make it for me.
I might need to do it better in the future, but for now it works and gets me off the ground.
Software engineer here - I make more than this guy did and I have roughly the same amount of experience in the industry that he does (perhaps a smidge more, going off of his linkedin profile).
For folks who are saying that there’s something off about this guy - that would not have mattered two or three years ago. At most he would have just been seen as a highly talented dev who was also slightly quirky.
For those who say it’s not about AI and more about the economy - well, maybe. We do have a couple of major ongoing wars right now and moves over the last couple of months by the recent administration of the US haven’t helped.
But I was around during the crash back in 2008, and this still feels different. Harder. Before, I had recruiters just banging on my door. Now, it’s tough to past the automated screenings unless I have a contact at the company who can refer me there.
Meanwhile, I’m hearing from my co-workers about how great AI is - how they ran their code through it and it came up with a bunch of unit tests for them and some boilerplate code. Vibe coding is already a thing. So is using AI to write your resume and cover letters and applying to jobs.
Likewise, I look upon tools like Devin.ai with increasing trepidation. Today, LLMs aren’t good enough to replace a single senior dev, despite a lot of investment happening to move things in exactly this direction. It probably won’t happen tomorrow, or even next year. But in 25?
Let’s just say that this article really hit home for me.
The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that’s a win for the people. We want to lower the barriers to entry here, to give this highly elite power to others. Actually, there shouldn’t be an elite at all - there should just be a democracy where everyone is equally empowered to create and build great things.
Working in tech will not remain this vaulted, lofty place for much longer. If we aren’t content creators, or controlling company owners, then ultimately tech workers like myself are in the same position as any other kind of worker - we work for someone else and serve only at their sufferance.
Hey, i’m not a dev but i thought i’d share my recent experience since you mention something related to it. I’m trying to set up a website for a small business i want to start. I got to the stage of creating the website so started contacting companies. I contacted about 15 companies, mostly small and also some sole-proprietorships (consultants). Only 3 of those i contacted responded. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s the industry standard - if the job’s not for you, don’t waste anyone’s time responding to emails about it. No problem. Still, i had to get more responses. So i got onto ChatGPT and asked the AI to help me improve my query email. It made the improvement, but at the end of its response the AI wrote something like: “You can do this project yourself. I’ll help you.” I scoffed, but after another week of no responses from human web devs, i dove into doing it myself. I have a year of computer science from college, and built some hobby sites back when CSS was new, so there was a little learning curve, but nothing AI couldn’t help me over with ease. Now the site’s almost ready to go live after only six weeks of part time work by myself, and it’s exactly what i want. The AI saved me between 4k and 10k usd. It’s crazy/scary/exciting/empowering/scary/crazy what you can do with the tech.
I’m very happy I started hedging early in my career by saving a very large fraction of my income. Working in tech has been excellent for me, but there’s never been any guarantee that this will last forever. At that point, I will probably be ready to live off my savings, should that become necessary. Then it doesn’t really matter what any market looks like - I will be able to do whatever I feel like during the days.
It’s really not ai, but the general economy. My company has been tightening down for longer than we have ai - only hiring in India. We’re in one of those phases again.
People want it to be ai but it just isn’t. Actually I’m a bit worried about my job because I don’t drink the coolaid. Ai is a nice additional tool to help me be more efficient and I use it when it can help. However I will not participate in these overblown claims within my company that we’re saving like 40% of our time because of ai. We all know you’re just making numbers up to ingratiate with the new boss
“The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that’s a win for the people”
Lets not have any illusions here. Currently this tool is available to the public with reasonable access cost only because it is not at that stage and needs a lot of testing and training. The moment it becomes capable of such feats, if it ever does, tech giants will monopolize the shit out of it.
I’m a senior mobile dev, and I needed a website for the app which I’ve never done before. AI was able to help me make one. Is it a well programmed website? Nope! Does it work? Yep!
With my knowledge I was able to troubleshoot problems the AI created, and fix things that came up, but it would have taken me so much longer to do that on my own, or I may have hired someone to make it for me.
I might need to do it better in the future, but for now it works and gets me off the ground.