Will AI take web developer jobs?(alpower.com) |
Will AI take web developer jobs?(alpower.com) |
It's perfect for replacing web developers.
It can make mobile apps, too.
In fact, web developers are the first for AI to completely replace them as it is best trained on the javascript and typescript ecosystem(s) and that was all done by themselves due to it's high popularity and the lowest of all barriers in this industry.
It will take time for the other sectors, but web developers are the first to be completely displaced.
Also imagine the compression factor made possible by such a system. Instead of sending a few dozens of megabytes over the line the AI-server will tell the AI-renderer to:
X-PAGE-PROMPT = generate a page showing a number of cats engaged in play with a fluffy toy, make sure to have product placement for products $A, $B and $C, have a catalogue for the furniture used in the scene lie open op the table and make sure that the brand and vendor names are clearly visible
Personally, I would like all my personal interaction with people going like that. Life would be totally easier!
What kind of code are you writing, if I may ask; and how long have you been doing it?
I sometimes ask whatever AI open ended questions on subjects I know very little about, and sometimes I find some kind of starting point for less random research using better tools.
Beyond that, and whatever fancy autocomplete my IDE forces down my throat, nope.
If if was gone tomorrow I would barely notice.
The real question is will AI create a shortage of developers to fix the mess!
Maybe idea of using AI to develop anything is going to die and instead it is just setting up AI that everyone then has to use...
But an artist's boundaries are internal and subjective. They're set by: - Emotional satisfaction with the work - Achievement of their vision - Cultural/personal context - Intuitive sense of "rightness"
This is why AI can more readily determine when code is "done" - it matches against explicit criteria. But AI struggles with artistic completion because it requires an internal, subjective experience of satisfaction that AI can't access.
The artist knows to stop when the work resonates with their intended emotional impact. Code is done when it works as specified. One is bounded by feeling, the other by function.
I think it would be unexpected if within 2 years we don’t have AI systems that have excellent taste and judgement.
Sure, icon designers of 2005 would kick the little figma butts today, but we didn't get rid of designers, and we still need them.
If you have a 25k/year software dev, and you pair it up with AI, now you have two 25k/year software devs at best.
It's sort of capable of producing the same crap as the least experienced, least motivated developers.
Overall, I think building sophisticated apps/SaaS is safe because LLMs can't generate the overall quality experience that customers want.
But I agree with Al that AI allows people to generate apps for personal use and low-quality website templates.
LLM code assistants in the hands of a skilled developer are a productivity multiplier. In the hands of a novice, they bloom technical debt like cancer. Expect rapid cost cutting, followed in about a year or two my panicked recruiting of expensive contractors to fix the unmaintainable mess, making the whole endeavor a loss (which looked good enough on the books for enough time to earn raises and bonuses for managers).
But they are not the people companies want to get rid of, they never had any integrity to begin with.
The next big platform winner I think will be an AI phone... one that embraces the web over app stores. Its web browser will be where all the games and everything is built even if we no longer open our web browsers up as we do now.
Disclaimer, I did not use AI for this post.
So when some company outsources its development it is always good news - it can be pretty easily crushed with in-house dev team from a competitor.
But by the time it can replace (not merely assist) senior engineers, anyone who has a job in front of a computer, about 80% of workers, will have their job automated by AI and we'll need an alternative (or big changes to) to capitalism. Otherwise, this particular economic system will experience massive collapse.
You're not getting replaced by AI. You're getting replaced by a coworker using AI. It doesn't matter how poorly AI performs at any remotely complicated task, what matters is how many developer-hours it saves by not having to manually write as much boilerplate.
But for web developers? Most certainly Yes. They will be the first and especially for those who love redoing their web app with hundreds of web frameworks, releasing web app clones, javascript and debating about the sea of libraries to use that compete against themselves.
It is best trained on the entire javascript and typescript ecosystem and those specializing in web development which is the low hanging fruit, will be easily replaced.
Or someone would have been added to headcount to work on it
You would likely lose absolutely nothing by throwing away most of it, and gain a lot.
If you believe that making developers 10% more productive results in a need for ~10% less developers, why didn't open source software over the past ~20 years harm our profession?
Working with open source packages from npm and PyPI has given me WAY more than a 10% boost - so much stuff I don't have to write from scratch now!
Because I suspect that comes with learning a lot less in the process and lower quality output.
Very refreshing!
Maybe. Or maybe the industry will simply churn even more software due to increased possibilities and everything stays the same.
How long until people realise AI cannot take responsibility? Sure, that coworker can do 10% more coding. But can they handle 10% increase in mental workload to juggle all the hard problems? What about 20%? At what point do people start cracking?
Economies can grow and the output of economies can grow and thus the number of jobs can grow
- how these tools are being hyped for programming
- the kinds of things inexperienced or poor programmers are using the tools for
- the errors and failure modes typically resulting from naive usage or misuse
- mitigation strategies derived from well-known techniques of dealing with legacy systems, applied to the particulars of AI-generated code and systems.
When there's no budget for hiring a human professional, then any AI output seemingly resembling what is needed would be a solution. Because, how to properly verify it?
Every PM I’ve ever worked with had 10x more things they wanted to add than they had devs to add them.
I've published a ton of notes on this here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/ and https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/
You have to use them diligently, but it's definitely possible to avoid the obvious downsides of working in this way.
Because I have the same level of experience and to me, for my way of working, they're obviously mostly useless.
Sorry, about the interrogation, but I'm curious to understand this disconnect between us. To me, for my way of working, LLM's are obviously mostly useless, destructive to the process even.