will AI wipe out IT jobs

[Ramanujan]

i am about to enter IT jobs. will AI wipe out programming jobs . are we fucked

[Leo Gura]

If it does, no job is safe, so don't worry about that too much.

Don't worry about things you don't control.

[Joshe]

TBD. I think we're good for another 2-3 years. Hopefully. Time to sharpen the sword. 

[LordFall]

40 minutes ago, Ramanujan said:

i am about to enter IT jobs. will AI wipe out programming jobs . are we fucked

How much do you use AI? If you are on the cutting edge then probably you can get a higher salary than those too lazy to learn AI skills. If you are part of the lazy ones not keeping up with AI upskilling then good luck 🫡

[Joseph Maynor]

No.  There still has to be someone to make sense of AI.  It will wipe out a lot of stuff that computers can do much faster than we do -- which is just another aspect of the computer revolution.  

[bazera]

Currently the most latest models do great job of doing mostly anything that I need, but still require code review. In a serious project, you still need people but those people need to be highly experienced and have skill of understanding AI output. 

But it's true that if there was 10 developers in a team, today 5 or less developers with AI will do the same or better work.

I'm not sure about the begginers, it's really hard to get into the market. But if you somehow manage to, contentrate on skills that are more structural, like architectural skills more then manual coding skills because that's clearly being automated.

But who the hell knows what will the state of the industry be in 5 years. Nobody knows.

Edited 7 hours ago by bazera

[Jirh]

I think AI has a specific functionality that is extremely valuable, in which it takes away a lot of the work required by humans. Like when calculators were invented. Or when factories were built.

And that is creating a temporary gap in the market where developers are not as needed as before.

But markets don't just absorb external effects idly. They have entropy that governs them, as in each effect creates a reaction.

The effect of AI making things easier and production faster will create the reaction that is cheaper products. Competition will force IT companies to start selling products for cheaper prices, because cheaper goods expand demand. This in turn will encourage production, and the market then will demand more workers. Then we will back to some more balanced state.

This is because the job market is a fluid equilibrium and a living entity, not just dumb clockwork. It's a self-correcting system, not a static machine.

Probably the effect will be larger than the reaction, but it won't prevent it.

And in the meantime, more abstract jobs will emerge, like AI driver specialists lol.

So no, you're not fucked. Go for the job.

Edited 6 hours ago by Jirh

[something_else]

56 minutes ago, bazera said:

Currently the most latest models do great job of doing mostly anything that I need, but still require code review. In a serious project, you still need people but those people need to be highly experienced and have skill of understanding AI output. 

But it's true that if there was 10 developers in a team, today 5 or less developers with AI will do the same or better work.

I'm not sure about the begginers, it's really hard to get into the market. But if you somehow manage to, contentrate on skills that are more structural, like architectural skills more then manual coding skills because that's clearly being automated.

But who the hell knows what will the state of the industry be in 5 years. Nobody knows.

Agree entirely, this matches my experience.

I think if you're already in the field and competent, AI boosts your productivity 2-3x. It's getting much harder to break into the field though.

 

[bazera]

43 minutes ago, something_else said:

Agree entirely, this matches my experience.

Did you try Fable or Astra?

I was using Fable last month till I had some discount or extended limit they had, after that it gets limits so fast. 

They released Opus 5.5 this week and it's pretty good. But still doing code-reviews with Fable.

[something_else]

21 minutes ago, bazera said:

Did you try Fable or Astra?

I was using Fable last month till I had some discount or extended limit they had, after that it gets limits so fast. 

They released Opus 5.5 this week and it's pretty good. But still doing code-reviews with Fable.

Our team used Claude (Fable and Opus) until around 2 months ago, then we switched to ChatGPT / Codex. Oh my god, they're so much better to work with. I thought I was going insane using Claude because it talks in such weird, long prose that makes very little sense. It's INFURIATING.

I hear they've fixed it in the newer models, but frankly Astra/Sol are faster and arguably better for coding. And I still think their way of writing is more human.

[bazera]

59 minutes ago, something_else said:

Our team used Claude (Fable and Opus) until around 2 months ago, then we switched to ChatGPT / Codex. Oh my god, they're so much better to work with. I thought I was going insane using Claude because it talks in such weird, long prose that makes very little sense. It's INFURIATING.

I hear they've fixed it in the newer models, but frankly Astra/Sol are faster and arguably better for coding. And I still think their way of writing is more human.

Don't you have like an existential fear around your current software engineer role? My day-to-day job became code-reviewer basically. And I don't even know what to learn to stay relevant in the field, since latest models are so capable. So far this reviewer role is valuable, but not sure how long will this last.

Edited 4 hours ago by bazera

[something_else]

12 minutes ago, bazera said:

Don't you have like an existential fear around your current software engineer role? My day-to-day job became code-reviewer basically. And I don't even know what to learn to stay relevant in the field, since latest models are so capable. So far this reviewer role is valuable, but not sure how long will this last.

I'm actually loving my job more than I ever have. Though I did have that feeling ffor a period of time, as did my coworkers. I'm lucky though the company I work for is small and listened to the dev team when we were complaining that the current system wasn't working. We've now restructured very fast to get the most out of AI tools. This restructure has actually made me enjoy my job a LOT more.

Here is a brief summary of the restructure.

Before

Team of 8 devs, 2 product managers, 1 designer

Split into two squads of 4 devs

Each time works on a big project which takes 1 to 3 months to complete

Architecture of the solution is planned by the tech lead

Tickets are written by the tech lead for each dev

Devs pick up the tickets and implement

Design and product team work very separately from everyone else, almost exclusively with the tech lead

 

After

Team of 8 devs, 2 product managers, 1 designer

Each dev works on a their own 1 to 3 month project, assigned to them based on preference and skill

They form a 'Pod' with our designer, one of the product managers and a tech lead (designers, product and tech lead are distributed across multiple pods)

The dev plans the architecture themselves

They write their own tickets

The dev ultimately has complete ownership of that project end-to-end

 

Summary

This works incredibly well with AI coding agents. The previous setup is more traditional agile, and with AI coding agents it was a nightmare. Everybody in a squad is producing a lot of code for the same projects, so everybody is stepping on each other's toes. At the same time, you end up feeling like a meat interface for the AI agent because you are just told what tickets to pick up, then you put them into Claude, review the results, then iterate on it to a solution. There is little architectural thought involved as the tech lead tended to handle that part early on.

In the new setup I get to pick my own projects, plan out complex architectural solutions to them myself, break it down into a plan, break that down into tickets, implement each ticket, and work closely with product and designers the whole way along. In the end I have a single project which I feel completely responsible for and I love it.

[bazera]

58 minutes ago, something_else said:

At the same time, you end up feeling like a meat interface for the AI agent because you are just told what tickets to pick up, then you put them into Claude, review the results, then iterate on it to a solution. There is little architectural thought involved as the tech lead tended to handle that part early on.

Yes, that's my experience cause we're working on a single big project that's been in development for multiple years. 

59 minutes ago, something_else said:

In the new setup I get to pick my own projects, plan out complex architectural solutions to them myself, break it down into a plan, break that down into tickets, implement each ticket, and work closely with product and designers the whole way along. In the end I have a single project which I feel completely responsible for and I love it.

I do this with my own side-project, which is much more fun than a company one because I get to play around a lot.

[OBEler]

12 hours ago, Ramanujan said:

i am about to enter IT jobs. will AI wipe out programming jobs . are we fucked

I am a software developer. Yes we are fucked. Whoever starts now in IT should look for something else. AI really takes all of your work. 

There may be still a small part like quantum programming or something where Ai cannot be applied so far. 

Edited 1 hour ago by OBEler

[LordFall]

3 hours ago, bazera said:

Don't you have like an existential fear around your current software engineer role? My day-to-day job became code-reviewer basically. And I don't even know what to learn to stay relevant in the field, since latest models are so capable. So far this reviewer role is valuable, but not sure how long will this last.

Learn business models and capital stack. As a software engineer, you are only a cog in the machine and should be worried when AI tools can learn how to do your task. Build your own machines and this problem will start to work in your favor rather than against. Alex Hormozi is a good resource in terms of making business easily understandable. 

[something_else]

33 minutes ago, OBEler said:

I am a software developer. Yes we are fucked. Whoever starts now in IT should look for something else. AI really takes all of your work. 

There may be still a small part like quantum programming or something where Ai cannot be applied so far. 

I'm less convinced of this. Our team has been using AI agents for around 6-8 months now and they are amazing, but still a long way away from being able to do the entire job without human input. And it's not like what we are working on is cutting edge, it's full stack web development.

Most likely there will be less jobs in software engineering because 1 developer can now do the work of 2-3. However that doesn't mean software engineering is going away. It's just changing.

[bazera]

9 minutes ago, LordFall said:

should be worried when AI tools can learn how to do your task.

They already do actually. Still needs my input and reviewing output though, that's where I come.

9 minutes ago, LordFall said:

Alex Hormozi is a good resource in terms of making business easily understandable. 

Thanks, will check it.

My problem is that I have skills to build whatever I want, but I don't know what to build. I don't want to lunch another AI slop app.

My idea was to spend more time on places like reddit, scanning what problems people have and try to figure out technical solutions. Haven't got it to it yet though.

Edited 45 minutes ago by bazera

[bazera]

1 minute ago, something_else said:

However that doesn't mean software engineering is going away. It's just changing.

Yes we're moving to a higher abstraction. But it doesn't mean that knowing lower abstractions isn't necessary anymore. It still is important to make sense of the output or else we'll get sloppy apps. But not sure for how long will it be like that. It's like how we transitioned from lower abstraction languages (assembly, etc) to higher abstraction ones (python for example). 

But maybe this time it's different, I don't know. But surely industry is changing.