> * Programmers resistance to AI assisted programming has lowered considerably. Even if LLMs make mistakes, the ability of LLMs to deliver useful code and hints improved to the point most skeptics started to use LLMs anyway: now the return on the investment is acceptable for many more folks.
Could not agree more. I myself started 2025 being very skeptical, and finished it very convinced about the usefulness of LLMs for programming. I have also seen multiple colleagues and friends go through the same change of appreciation.
I noticed that for certain task, our productivity can be multiplied by 2 to 4. So hence comes my doubts: are we going to be too many developers / software engineers ? What will happen for the rests of us ?
I assume that other fields (other than software-related) should also benefits from the same productivity boosts. I wonder if our society is ready to accept that people should work less. I think the more likely continuation is that companies will either hire less, or fire more, instead of accepting to pay the same for less hours of human-work.
> Are we going to be too many developers / software engineers ? What will happen for the rests of us?
I propose that we should raise the bar for the quality of software now.
I don't think that will happen because it hasn't for other technological improvements. In the end people pay for "good enough" and that's that. If "good enough" is now cheaper to implement that's all they will do. I've seen it in other technologies. As an example due to more precise manufacturing many manufacturers have used it to cheapen things like cars, electronics, etc just to the point where it passes warranty mostly; in the old days they had to "overbuild" to get it to that point putting more quality into the product.
Quality is a risk mitigation strategy; if software is disposable just like cheap manufactured goods most people won't pay for it thinking they can just "build another one". What we don't realise is due to sheer cost of building software we've wanted quality because its too expensive to fix later; AI could change that.
Hoping we invest in quality, more software (which has a price inelastic curve mostly due to scale/high ROI) etc I'm starting to think is just false hope from people in the tech industry that want to be optimistic which generally is in our nature. Tech people understand very little about economics most of the time and how people outside tech (your customers) generally operate. My reflection is mostly I need to pivot out of software; it will be commoditized.
Yes, certainly agree. A few days ago here there was this blog claiming how formal verification would become widely more used with AI. The author claiming that AI will help us with the difficulty barrier to write formal proofs.
I'm not sure that it will scale to other fields other than coding and math. The approach with RLVR makes it more amenable to STEM fields in general and most jobs believe it or not aren't that. The level of open source software with good test suites effectively gave them all the training material they needed; most professions won't provide that knowing that they will be giving their moat away. LLM's to other fields from my understanding still exhibit the same hallucination rates if only mildly improved especially if there isn't public internet material in that field.
We have to accept in the end that coding/SWE is one of the most disrupted fields from this breed of AI. Disruption unfortunately probably means less jobs overall. The profession is on trend to disrupting and automating itself I think; plan accordingly. I've seen so many articles claiming its great we didn't learn to code now; that's what the AI's have done.
I like to think of it as adding new lanes to a highway. More will be delivered until it all jams up again.