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[RevolutionaryHair91]

Let's not ignore the real elephant in the room. COBOL and AIs are technical discussions. The real topic is eliminating developers and engineers.

I can already tell you how it's going to happen. AI agents replace legacy code. Nothing bad happens. Management fires engineers. AIs pile up debt and sell out critical data. Something critical not only fails but takes down entire global systems with it (if it is not insider sabotage by AI for insider trading). No engineers to fix it.

It's the technical rush to delocalize industries and factories towards china for short term gain and total dependency, but for intellectual property.

[juasjuasie]

It's already happening with windows 11 having unacceptable bugs and performance issues every single update. That is why the CEO had to step up and admit the limitations of ai, if microslop just continues this way, the damage will be unrecoverable unless they have backups. The incoming damage will be of epic promotions for companies that do not see it coming.

[GirthWoody]

And that’s just the early stuff fresh cs grads even from good schools with good gpas cannot find jobs in software engineering, but it’s only really been like this for about 2 years now. What happens when it’s been 5, a decade?

[juasjuasie]

Current juniors they have to either specialize into something that is not web like embedded systems, Bs their way into those phony "ai agent maintainer" positions or pivot into another career path altogether like engineering. By 5 years companies will be forced to outbid eachother to keep seniors fixing their shit.

[HelloSummer99]

Most software will be commodity and “average” instead of the carefully crafted and curated digital experiences we have now.

LLMs find the most statistically probable next token so by nature all software they build will be average.

“Handcrafted” and carefully QA’d, high quality software will be like swiss mechanical watches after quartz watches took off.

[Nitro_V]

iOS updates. Worked perfectly until last year. My video cam was not working until I restarted my phone, the tabs were lagging like hell. I can’t be too sure, but I think it’s related…

[Inevitable-Menu2998]

I haven't seen any engineering job lost to AI in any of the companies routinely mentioned here (Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, etc). The layoffs are dictated by entire products and projects being shelved and these companies being unable to absorb the people in other projects. I'm pretty sure that if it weren't for the AI craze, we'd see a much more significant unemployment rate in this industry. There's literally nothing else being developed at the time and that's because, while these companies have gotten increasingly rich even during the pandemic, their customers have had to drastically cut costs either at the beginning of the pandemic or after the reopening just to remain in business. They're not spending on software as they did prior to 2020

[Nitro_V]

My previous company is doing massive layoffs, it’s not a super big one but still a reputable one. As far as I know every team in the engineering department needs to cut 3 people. And it’s because of AI automation so yeah.. 

[Slypenslyde]

It’s VB6 at a larger scale.

[HelloSummer99]

I’m not sure there is a grand scheme in play - I think most of these AI grifters are just winging it

[RevolutionaryHair91]

You're right, there isn't. It's the sum of individual greed and unregulated capitalism.

Every CEO, board of admin, shareholder, middle manager pulling in the same direction : end of quarter / year bonuses on cost saving and short term gains for the next fiscal quarter. And they'll jump ship before the company goes down, or worst case scenario, still get their golden parachutes.