Yeah, I think it is definitely great. Having said that, I am still debating in my mind whether the volume of software engineers needed in the AI era is going to increase or decrease because of all of these advancements.
On the one hand, because it is easy to build products, more and more people will build. And more and more products and features will be built. However, a lot of people who are non-technical will also try to build, but they get stuck, and then they will need engineers. The sheer volume of product built by both experienced technical companies and non-technical novice startups and founders and wannabe founders is going to be massive. That is the bull case for having more software engineers needed in the near future.
On the other hand, in a year or so, people will build all these products, and most of them won't be able to market them, sell them and make money. Eventually, there won't really be a need for that many software engineers.
I think overall the bull case is probably going to win net net.
I see some similarities to 3D printing here. It’s great that everyone can make their own toothbrush holder (or whatever) but I’m probably not going to pay for someone’s weekend project.
I’m “seeing” more devs stepping into the SendCutSend stage where they’re cleaning up/fixing/productizing vibe coded projects so maybe there will be some new demand in that space?
3D printing is a good comparison - it allows almost anyone to make things, but in the end very few do.
Another example is when the WWW first became available, and suddenly everyone COULD be a publisher (browsers even included built-in HTML editors), and for a while MySpace pages proliferated until the excitement died down and people went back to being media consumers.
I expect we'll see the same thing with consumer use of generative AI. Suddendly everyone is generating 3-D worlds/games with Fable because they can, but I expect that just as with the web the novelty will wear off and they'll leave it up to the pros.
Professional use of GenAI, and coding in particular, is certainly here to stay, but it seems we're still in the early experimental/hype phase. At least tokenmaxxing has passed, and it seems most companies are now paying attention to, and limiting, how much they are spending, but it doesn't seem we've yet progressed to the stage where companies are paying attention to what they are actually getting out of it - is the money spent showing up on the bottom line in the form of increased revenues.
A comparison I find useful here is Excel (and spreadsheets in general). Those enabled huge numbers of non-programmers to build software-like things, while the demand for expert developers grew enormously at the same time.
I'm hoping vibe-coding plays out the same way.
It’s terrible and depressing work to take vibe coded garbage and make it a real product. There will be demand, but good engineers won’t want to touch it. And people paying will think they did the hard work so why pay a good rate?
I think LLMs/coding agents in particular are going to play out like automation always does.
1. You have a task and it requires an expert to perform it (software engineering, where we were) 2. You automate the task, it still requires the expert to babysit it (where we are now) 3. Management works out that the expert is just monitoring what the automation is doing and has actually lost expertise because they are just watching, not doing. Pay collapses. (where we are going)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
At least in China a lot of software developers are now struggling.
I think for a lot of type of software we have now reached peak employment.
Someone payed a few k just for a normal website.
> At least in China a lot of software developers are now struggling.
Do you think that Chinese software industry is that relevant to the kind of software market talked about on HN? I.e. lots of enterprise b2b and infra companies.
Chinese companies have always had a very low willingness to pay for software which kinda breaks the flywheel of B2B SaaS companies and companies to service those companies all the way down.
Its a signal. They were earning well and AI crashed the market in China.
China is in a very different economic state to the West (broadly construed).
They have had real issues with deflation rather than the inflation most Western countries have seen over the past five years.
> Chinese companies have always had a very low willingness to pay for software
Are we still left with this mindset? Maybe once upon a time but it has definitely been changing.
There's plenty of B2B and enterprise SaaS companies in China serving the Chinese market. Maybe not as many, but no longer the very low of the past.
I also would not say enterprise were not willing to pay, even many years ago. It's the SME that refused to pay. Large CRM, ERPs etc have always existed.
I would say I'm still in this mindset. Numbers are hard to come by but analysts optimistically put Chinese SaaS market at ~10% of the size of the US. Also I see that the gross margin for public Chinese SaaS is around 50% vs 80% for the US reflecting that SaaS in China is much more services and implementation heavy. So it feels like the direct to business SaaS's like Salesforce aren't really there and then then the selling to SaaS titans like Datadog have a much smaller flywheel to work in.
Happy to be wrong though if I'm missing something.
> I would say I'm still in this mindset. Numbers are hard to come by but analysts optimistically put Chinese SaaS market at ~10% of the size of the US.
Exactly it's mindset. I used pulled up 1st result when I used Google [0][1] and it is ~20%. It also forecasts huge growth potential.
[0]: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/software-a...
[1]: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/software-a...
> reflecting that SaaS in China is much more services and implementation heavy
I wouldn't read into it too much. There's creative accounting and other things involved. Also what is services and not e.g. "premium support"?
> So it feels like the direct to business SaaS's like Salesforce aren't really there and then then the selling to SaaS titans like Datadog have a much smaller flywheel to work in.
US companies struggle for many other reasons that I rather not go into but definitely not a SaaS nor China issue. I mean yes it is a China issue as in businesses need to adapt to different cultures rather than 1 size fit all but that applies everywhere.
> On the one hand, because it is easy to build products, more and more people will build.
And those people won't need to be software engineers.
> but they get stuck, and then they will need engineers
You've implicitly assumed here that the AI systems will always be worse than the average engineer. That is IMO myopic. I'm not sure that it's even true now let alone in the nebulous future.
> And those people won't need to be software engineers....You've implicitly assumed here that the AI systems will always be worse than the average engineer.
Most of what we do as engineers is precisely describe or analyze the behavior we want or the behavior we don't want. All other engineering skills that are useful are ultimately downstream from understanding the behavior of software enough to know which parts to keep, improve, or jettison. Chatbots can take care, somewhat, of analysis or expansion of instructions.... but they can't read minds. I don't see that changing any time soon.
> but they can't read minds
I don't know who needs to hear this, but neither can humans.
You've implicitly assumed here that AI systems will always be worse at contextualizing and framing questions than the average engineer. I'm not sure that it's even true now let alone in the nebulous future.
You haven't narrowed the fundamental myopia of the assumption here, just dressed it in slightly different clothing.
> You've implicitly assumed here that AI systems will always be worse at contextualizing and framing questions than the average engineer.
How would they know what to ask or contextualize if they don't know what the user wants?
Are you suggesting that psychic mindreading powers are real?
> How would they know
How would you? The answer is the same.
I don't understand what you mean. I can't build software I can't describe.
If you're implying chatbots can ask their "client" what to build, good luck with that—contractors are at least liable for what they produce and have extreme incentives to ensure that their clients are happy. To the extent of refusing to build anything if they don't know what they want....
> I don't understand what you mean.
If you had psychic mindreading powers you would understand what I mean.
By asking the user to explain what they want whenever there's ambiguity.
Plus all the other things that software engineers generally have not learned to a professional level even if they picked up the basics on the job by osmosis, because figuring out the customer's needs (and what they'll pay you for which may be different) is the job of a business analyst, a PM, or a UX researcher, and those are different skills and two of them may come with a Business Informatics degree rather than a CompSci one.
LLMs can be "eh, better than nothing" at many things, not just code.
And when an LLM runs up costs for a small company by getting them to lease a bunch of infrastructure they don't need, who can they sue? A contractor or advisor you can't hold liable is just a liability.
> And when an LLM runs up costs for a small company by getting them to lease a bunch of infrastructure they don't need, who can they sue?
This question is completely disconnected from reality. If you try to sue a human for proposing something more complex than what you need you will waste a lot of money and then lose the lawsuit.
Also the annual cost of too much small company infrastructure is less than the cost of even a single good human engineer.
Same person they'd sue if they used any other power tool themselves and it didn't work out right.
Plus, this is software "Engineering" we're talking about, which famously gets scare quotes in comparison to all the other forms of engineering because unlike them we don't have as standard things like professional liability insurance to cover serious professional errors of judgment the way someone who signs off on a bridge that collapses would have.
The big thing to me is why are we even running these models on top of an operating system?
What I really want is Claude as a deep part of the operating system.
If that happens then a whole lot of the abstraction of software vanishes along with what we think of today as software jobs. I think many new forms of knowledge work would emerge from this though.
I would think that needs massive local compute but I can't imagine that is not the future down the line.
It’s also not the future SV is incentivized to build. They want everything for rent, nothing can be owned.
Luckily, China is on the verge of a true breakout, I’m not sure what exactly it will be - but I’d make a very large wager the “next iPhone” is Chinese, and will constitute a full blown “Sputnik moment” for the US and SV.
If Americans weren’t forbidden to own Chinese EVs they’d know this. But tariffs mean the breakthrough will be even more unexpected.
Since Chinese actually “sell stuff” I’m guessing their unbeatable lead in AI efficiency, manufacturing, and distribution will produce a step change breakthrough within a decade.