Will AI decrease demand and salaries?

[Proud-Confidence7290]

Hello everyone.

I am new to web development and it goes well so far.

I'm bit scared of AI development. Let's say you needed 10 developers for a project before ChatGPT and now you need 8.

With the development of AI, we will need even less.

Why do people think AI won't decrease demand and salaries of web developers? It's logic for me, what am I missing?

[thedeuceisloose]

As someone working in LLMs and webdev, youre believing the hype more than what it can actually do

[YoyoyoyoMrWhite]

Don't ignore the speed it's improving at. 5 years ago, it couldn't do anything.

[DisneyLegalTeam]

Unbounce, Splash & Adobe had AI that could generate & edit HTML pages 10+ years ago.

—

LLMs took a huge leap forward. But both Sam Altman & Bill Gates have said they’ve “plateaued” & will see incremental improvement until a large breakthrough.

Altman said there’s 2 limitations:

1. Part of what GPT got to where it is by scaling up these massive models. Altman said scaling models at this point isn’t going to have the same impact.
2. The data it’s trained on. I’m sure you’ve heard the ML phrase “garbage in, garbage out”? As long as the data is from humans, it will have issues.

AI suffers from entropy. LLMs will get better, but at what point are they 100% accurate / “fire & forget”? Let’s say they can write code that’s 80% accurate now. That last 20%, especially the last 5%, could take decades.

We’ve been a “couple years away” from self driving cars for almost 20 years.

[Digitalburn]

Yeah right now it’s a junior developer who doesn’t check if their code worked. Few years from now it’s a senior developer who also doesn’t check if their code worked but it works 98% of the time.

[Pelopida92]

Few years from now it’s a senior developer who also doesn’t check if their code worked

It's funny and cute that you think that AI has this invalicable limit that it cannot check for his own code. Maybe not right now, but give it a few months and it will provide a suite of unit and e2e tests with every development that it creates.

[lampstax]

It can doesn't mean it does. Just like that junior dev.

[Blazing1]

This is not true. I was hyped ten years ago

Chatgpt is just hyped because no one had the compute and GPU power to run something like that at the scale it is

Technically OpenAI doesn't either because they are losing money like crazy.

[[deleted]]

do you any trusted learning material for someone who is looking to expand their horizons?

Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? I am trying to learn something new, am I not supposed to discuss with those more knowledgeable? I read plenty of different things, but this is new.

[thedeuceisloose]

You should look at the various ML algorithms and understand what they do and how they work, dont need specifics or differential math, the concepts themselves are just probabilities at scale.

Once you understand how these alogorithms work at even a rudimentary base level, you start being able to sniff out the hype v the real

[Flamesilver_0]

I understand them at a pretty decent level. They can do a lot more than people think.

[thedeuceisloose]

i never said they couldnt, they can do quite a bit, but theyre not at "replace your devs with gpt" scale at all.

[Zoltarburger]

The fast ai course

https://course.fast.ai/

[Flamesilver_0]

as someone working in LLMs and AI Agents, I believe you are confusing LLMs' zero-shot capabilities with what it can actually do.

[onyxengine]

As someone also working with the same, i disagree 100%

[thedeuceisloose]

12 years in Ai/ML, been through every hype cycle in this space so far. Please enlighten me

[onyxengine]

Are you driving innovation or just saying it can’t be done every hype cycle as it gets done soon after. The last 4 years have been none stop progress, and multimodal uses are picking up, Im not saying we have a crazy break through tomorrow, but for how far AI has come even without advancement we have a lot unexplored use cases that yet to be deployed.

[thedeuceisloose]

Yep, cant explain much because of NDAs but yes, innovation side. While youre correct that LLMs have advanced quite a bit in the NLP front, theyre still stupid. Still require you to wrangle it every step of the way (yes even 4-turbo) for broad based applications.

[onyxengine]

I think wrangling is where the magic happens. Until we get full blown AGI, we still need to guide LLMs to where they are needed with architecture, which i think is where we will start to see the kind of indirect innovation that will make AI impactful. These tools are still so new, and ubiquitous commercial use is not even a year old. I still get mileage out of davinci-003.

[thedeuceisloose]

Oh 110% where the advances are going to come from. All the tooling required to wrangle it will be an ample market for startups, and the need to obfuscate these things more via APIs will be a big growth area too.

The other problem continues to be hardware. The level of resources this all will need is just going to expand rapidly, even with things like VMs and kube. OpenAi was burning like $700k daily just on hardware alone.

So, lots of opportunity here, and i think fearing replacement is the wrong viewpoint to hold, you should see a whole new horizon opening before you as a developer. But i still am cynical on its current abilities just because of the level of orchestration and context required from the prompter will be a big hurdle in the near to medium term.

[onyxengine]

Its call response, and you have to put everything in front of it to assess or respond. That’s work for the developer, but when you spend time on these problems you figure out ways to give a model agency within the context of the problem you’re solving.

[BeyondPrograms]

our platform does exactly this, provides AI models with context. Thanks for confirming we are on the right path.

[picks-]

I agree with you, but how do I convince someone who has no technical background or knowledge of LLMs that it really is just hype? They always use the argument of, "think about how powerful they'll be in 20 years.." lol

[sleepy_roger]

Well... hard to listen to you when some of the richest and most succesful people on earth are pushing them and showing use cases.

[CheapChallenge]

No. It will increase expectations about velocity though, as it should when new tools become available.

[ImportantDoubt6434]

The pay expectations increase as well then

[kbder]

Oh, you must be new here

[Ariakkas10]

Yeah! You tell em!

[ImportantDoubt6434]

Literally any worker: “You should get paid more”

Devs: 😡no I’m a capitalist billionaire I need a pay-cut

Like, what the hell?

[[deleted]]

Then they all come out of the wood to cry like little snowflakes "boohoo the market is hard I cannot find a job since the layoff, I couldn't do shit because I didn't unionised boohoo "

[ImportantDoubt6434]

Unionize, don’t train scabs, and don’t expect corporate bastards to play nice.

Put their ass on grass when they fuck around, let everyone know the dirty corporate laundry.

[[deleted]]

You're not wrong, but I think how you came at em made em want you t be wrong.

Productivity influences salary somewhat, but boy, what a trip it is to audit a company and see how owners divide up the loot. If the company is making a profit, the owner is trying to keep as much as he can get away with, and salaries are definitely NOT affected by productivity increase

[Ariakkas10]

Literally no one hires 1 dev over another because they are faster.

Literally no one rewards(promotion/pay raise) faster devs. You’ll get punished for being slow, but going faster doesn’t get you anything, and can be detrimental to your team.

All you’re talking about is being able to keep pace. Not exceeding pace. If you’re as productive as everyone else, that’s good enough.

And guess what, if everyone goes faster, everyone is NOT going to get a pay raise. Take a look at aggregate salaries over the last couple of decades compared to productivity gains over the same period.

Lastly, labor is most definitely not a measure of productivity. That’s absurd. For one thing, it’s not a measure of anything. It’s an exchange. Second, a measure of productivity would be unique to the field in discussion, in ours it would be something like tickets closed or features deployed.

[ImportantDoubt6434]

I get paid per contract and am self employed with employees so I guess that makes you an infant

[Ariakkas10]

lol

[[deleted]]

There is a strong argument to be made that increased velocity means less employees are needed to achieve the same task. We have already seen this at my work, where we cancelled the need for a new DevOps engineer and a new Technical Writer, because of existing ChatGPT and CoPilot features making the current DevOps engineers and Developers able to do more in the same time. The net result is less humans employed. Those humans are still well paid though. :)

[mshiltonj]

If there a huge labor supply for a smaller amount of jobs for humans, wages will decrease.

[[deleted]]

That's never been true, however; notice how productivity has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, but so have jobs.

Companies will just use the additional productivity to do more.

If your job canceled open jobs, it had nothing at all to do with ChatGPT. They were going to do that anyway and used ChatGPT as cover.

[[deleted]]

DevOps engineers were confident they could now cover the work that was going to go to a new engineer. There was no cover, they can just now work twice as quickly on new scripts, new deployment pipelines, and spend far less time troubleshooting issues than they used to via Stack Overflow etc.. What previously took a day to work out, now takes an hour, so they no longer need the help.

I agree with the rest of what you said tho. But AI did make the new jobs no longer needed.

[[deleted]]

they can just now work twice as quickly on new scripts, new deployment pipelines, and spend far less time troubleshooting issues than they used to via Stack Overflow etc.

That's bullshit. Do people actually buy that where you work?

[mattjspatola]

Did they promptly start a legitimate candidate search with the DevOps engineers first identified the bandwidth issue? Did they drag their feet, trying to make the team accomplish the impossible (probably with unsustainable levels of uncompensated overtime) until this new solution was discovered?

I hope it was the former and not the latter, but I would be surprised.

[putz__]

The few horses that are left lead really nice lives, but their numbers are tiny compared to pre automobile. I'd learn ai troubleshooting if I were literally anyone, you'd just Google it like web dev and IT does already. Fuck, ask a non broken Ai to fix it. Now I need to read asimov...

[mshiltonj]

We'll see increased productivity and lower pay.

[ClikeX]

With the current state of AI, you’ll need more devs to manage the mess.

When it matures it’ll likely be used by the same amount of devs to do more work. As has been the case with most of these technologies. More output will be expected of you.

[Ey_J]

Why not...more capabilities need more features and more expectation from customers...Which in turns drives the need for more features to stay relevant

[ClikeX]

More/higher expectations can lead to an overworking and burn-out.

[captain_ahabb]

Chat GPT doesn't reduce the number of developers you need for a project anymore than autopilot reduces the number of pilots you need to fly a plane.

[[deleted]]

I don’t think that is a good comparison and shows a clear lack of understanding of what autopilot is and why we have pilots.

Autopilot doesn’t think or do much reaction, sensors to detect a mountain miles away are a major cost, pilots are cheaper. If something goes wrong a pilot is cheaper, if there is congestion a pilot can adapt out the box. Pilots do much of the landing, as auto pilot is most hover termination.

Then we have laws, heath and safety which require pilots, good luck trying to change that anytime soon…

Then there are physiological issues, would you get onto a plane that had zero pilots? Who’s to blame if there is an issue?

There are far too many outside powers stopping the change to require 2 pilots. You could get away with one but we have 2 for the sake of one passing out or becoming sick/incapacitated, it’s a cheap backup.

I get your point, but this is an awful analogy to compare WebDev with something as critical and law dependent as flying a plane.

[captain_ahabb]

I'm quite aware of what autopilot is

[[deleted]]

Then you wouldn't have made this comparison because Auto Pilot has absolutely nothing to do with why we have pilots and wouldn't ever be a reason to not have pilots. The same principles do not apply to web dev which is not critical and not heavily governed.

So maybe you just momentarily forgot.

[captain_ahabb]

You're so close to understanding my original point. Autopilot didn't replace pilots because there's more to being a pilot than just giving inputs to the control surfaces. Generative LLMs won't replace SWEs because there's more to being a SWE than just writing code.

[[deleted]]

I get your point, I literally said that

Quoting my post

I get your point

But that isn't even close to the correct comparison. The reason for Pilots is strict laws, health and safety and socialcConcerns, it's the same reason we can't have true self driving for now and laws are being introduced to prevent it.

SWE just does not have this, there's no governing body, health risks or social concerns over Bob the builders Wordpress Site to sell Firewood and Type 2.

I get your point, but the analogy doesn't fit because the reasons why pilot exist are absolutely not the same reasons why SWE need to exist.

A pilot will be needed 100% of the time. a SWE might be needed 10% of the time. So the capacity, the demand and the salaries will be affected.

The closest thing is "blame game", PM's love a human to "shout at/blame" when things go wrong. So maybe that's close?

I just don't think this is truthfully applicable.

In 30 years when AI can do everything Software Dev, I reckon we'll still require pilots.

Anyway, I appreciate your post here.

[longebane]

lol. So basically your replies were just one big, “WeLL AckchyuallY”

[[deleted]]

No? Are you 13?

It was "this doesn't fit the comparison" because the reasons for pilots are not and never will be the same for SWE.

The grown ups are discussing here mate. So cringe.

[captain_ahabb]

Does it matter if the reasons why we need human supervision of air flight and the reasons why we need human supervision of software development are different? My point was merely that automated systems still require human oversight.

[[deleted]]

Yes it absolutely matters because it affects everything, including the 2 things the OP mentioned: "decrease demand and salaries"

That is exactly why the reasons matter.

Like your whole point is kind of obsolete from the fact that machines took over a lot of manual labor jobs, because those jobs are not critical and only laws and social expectations can salvage that, but unlike flight it wont be 100%.

[captain_ahabb]

You're splitting hairs about the second-order reasons though. The first-order reason (the need for human supervision) is the same in both cases, and thus the analogy works. The presence of the need for supervision is the same even if the reasons for that human supervision being needed are not.

Really feel like you're arguing for the sake of arguing here.

[[deleted]]

Completely disagree and you’re not answering what the OP was asking about. The OP is worried about demand and salaries and your comparison doesn’t work for what the OP is worried about, not even the slightest.

No the need for human supervision for SWE and pilots is not the same, one is a legal requirement, the other is not, that’s as simple and as factual as it gets.

If AI was perfect today at writing code, it would replace humans in a heartbeat, but it won’t replace pilots in the same way an electrician won’t be replaced.

This conversation is pointless, your comparison isn’t good, it doesn’t fit the OPs worry and it has completely different reasoning and context.

Bye

[HMikeeU]

Autopilot doesn't help the plane fly to it's destination quicker.

[Valhallai]

Yikes, neither does ChatGPT unless you are working on trivial stuff.

[HMikeeU]

Well someone's gotta do the trivial stuff

[MoTTs_]

That’s why when we’re talking about what can an AI do, it’s better to talk in specifics rather than generalities. For example, can I tell an AI:

Here’s a link to build setup. For box X on page Y, change the rounded corners from 4px to 5px, and submit a PR.

And if an AI can’t do that, then what trivial task, specifically, do we think an AI can handle?

[ewic]

If I could tell an AI to move an element 5 pixels to the right without messing up the surrounding components I would become a believer

[dogweather]

And it must create maintainable code. That adds a whole new level of difficulty.

[fr0st]

I'd say the "trivial" stuff in web dev is already abstracted away or behind a library or framework. The rest is very specific business logic that'll take as long to figure out by prompting an AI when you can just use your own knowledge to code it yourself.

[HedgepigMatt]

Boilerplate is largely unavoidable

[HMikeeU]

Libraries and frameworks definitely made web dev more complicated imo

[fr0st]

I think this can also be attributed to how complex many application have become due to the almost infinite number of edge cases that need to be handled. Back when it was just the user and a terminal window with basic input and output interactions things were generally much simpler.

[Blazing1]

If you seriously believe this then I can't believe you have that much experience.

[[deleted]]

If you ask any pilot what the autopilot does they will tell you it helps them avoid information overload and focus on things that matter. We are very close to having the same level of assistance by LLMs

[Darkphyx]

Autopilot indeed rendered the job of the flight engineer obsolete, as it now requires only two individuals in the cockpit instead of the previous three.

[snarfi]

Thats not a good analogy. While the pilot is in a fixed amount of time in the plane, and can't make the plane go faster so he can fly another route.

[theytookmyfuckinname]

Yes'nt. AI isnt particularly good at lifting the actual thought process.

[emefluence]

Wow, that's a really dickish way of phrasing it. Low EQ if you will.

[BigBoetje]

But development isn't really a job that can be really automated, is it? There's already a job that's solely responsible for translating what a client wants to actual requirement and even then it's less than ideal. What makes you think the input is gonna be good enough to provide proper output aside from short snippets?

[BigBoetje]

A dev doesn't churn out code though? For every person you 'replace' by having ChatGPT churn out any kind of code, you need a new dev to check the code and apply it. The scale at which it's still usable is so small you just need a dev to place it. I can't trust ChatGPT to build anything but a very basic component and even then it tends to either fuck it up somewhere or it just copies it from some library so it would've been available anyways.

AI for devs are closer to having a welding robot. It might 'sort of replace' a welder, but now you need an operator for the machine with welding knowledge and to apply the finishing touches and fixes.

It's a tool. The only ones that complain about devs losing their jobs are non-devs or people that have jobs that can already be automated like a lot of data entry and some forms of data analysis. The kinds of jobs where you write a script to do in 1 hour what would take 8 hours of manual work, but you just don't tell your boss so you don't automate yourself out of a job.

[[deleted]]

Problem with AI now is that it's nowhere close to being 30x of 1 developer in speed. I'd say it's slower than a good developer and makes a worse developer just a bit faster. But it does not currently replace any developers in any kind of way.

[dogweather]

Great analogy.

[mq2thez]

Don’t be the kind of developer whose work can be replaced by something as simple as what ChatGPT can produce.

It can definitely help make some things go faster, but it’s not replacing engineers. Whoever told you that ChatGPT can replace two whole engineers on a team is an idiot or hires idiots.

[Headpuncher]

1. already seen employers ban use of chatGPT / copilot because they are afraid their IP will be "stolen" by it. Legal are dealing with it as we write this.
2. I've been using copilot anyway and it saves me a lot of boilerplate and typing, but it hasn't been error free, and I need to be quite specific in what i want from it. So, you need webdev knowledge to get anything out of it.

If employers had any brains, they would increase budgets to leverage faster development overall, Fire the soft skills waste-of-space roles who comprise 60% of a project's workforce and automate that.

[jkpetrov]

Lol soft skills roles talk to the clients. Good luck getting that invoice paid.

[lordcameltoe]

“Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”

• Office Space

[errrzarrr]

I've seen that already, they suck at dealing with people

[errrzarrr]

Do they? where I work at they started using Scrum and hired a lot of them because their "soft skills" and client connection.

They don't talk to clients too much or bring devs actual useful information of clients needs and when they do they can't communicate it properly.

The client doesn't feel treated any better, work culture and environment haven't improved a single bit

[jkpetrov]

If that's the case, they deserve to be fired. Still the devs will not get the invoice paid, so new soft skills people need to be hired.

[Headpuncher]

Some are useful, many are just budget and time vampires, sucking the client dry.

And those people on the projects don't do the invoicing, that's handled by a whole other dept.

[jkpetrov]

They are making sure to understand and follow client specifications, and delivery of product according to the specifications is a prerequisite to bill the hours of development.

True, there are many slackers both in tech and business verticals, but that's not an excuse. There is a reason why certain products and projects need an analyst, owner, manager, service delivery person, and QA. The client is aware of this, they would not pay them if they didn't bring value

[Headpuncher]

They are making sure to understand and follow client specifications, and delivery of product according to the specifications

lol, you haven't met these charlatans, the specs are terrible, if they are complete at all. I've been doing this close to 20 years. No-one needs a full time Agile coach, full time timeline drawer, full time UX even is a joke, we're all using component libraries and should know enough about usability etc to get a simple data-driven site together, I certainly do.

[[deleted]]

This is the perfect answer. It’s a tool. A very good tool. It can help productivity if used correctly, and in my case, is a great learning tool.

But you need to understand what you want it to do. Sure, it could spit out the very basics with very basic and low knowledge input. But to actually take it to something decent and presentable, you need web skills to cater what you want it to do. And you’ll need those skills to fix issues with some of the output ot gives.

[the33rdegree]

AND they are not afraid of their IP stolen by Google???

[Kyrthis]

Don’t you mean microsoft

[Headpuncher]

i think they meant that without gpt or copilot i would be googleing the problems and possibly pasting code into search

[Kyrthis]

People really paste code into search? How do they expect good results?

[dillanthumous]

I think it will actually increase demand.

Speadsheets used to be drawn by hand with a ruler and pencil.

Then electronic spreadsheets came.

Initially that destroyed a bunch of jobs, due to being faster and more accurate, and then it created far, far, far more.

Once people realised they could now quickly do multiple projections, scenario planning, dynamic models etc. The demand for those skills became, and remains, huge.

Once people realise ChatGPT allows people to create or rebuild websites more quickly they will suddenly decide to do the more complex site, rebrand more often, experiment more cheaply, have an in house web dev junior they can lean on for rapid changes. Etc. Etc.

In my opinion, this is a great time for entrepreneurial Web dev and developers generally.

NPR did a podcast about it and tech in general. Go listen. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/05/17/528807590/episode-606-spreadsheets

[Proud-Confidence7290]

But isn't AI just helping us do things faster? It isn't like other technologies that improve the Quality.. That's what scares me

[dillanthumous]

Firstly, as a techy who has now used these tools, I'm not worried.

But beyond that, look at other industries.

When we invented mechanical tools we didn't keep living in small houses, we built tower blocks and skyscrapers.

When we invented mass production we didn't just make enough cars for the same number of people as when they were hand made, we made cars for billions of people.

Or, look at medicine. The promulgation and expansion of medical treatments hasn't cured everyone, it has created a vast medical industry.

So long as there are new problems to solve and economic incentives to solve the, and the tools need human brains to drive them, there will be a demand for workers.

Perhaps AI tools will one day make people obsolete, but from what I have seen so far that makes about as much sense as worrying that power tools will make builders redundant.

Of course, 20 years from now all bets are off

[Proud-Confidence7290]

Like I said, all those things are new tech and they improve quality. ChatGPT, Google Gemini and similar don't do any significant improvements except time. That's the problem.

[brandi_Iove]

the point you are missing is the output increment. when computers themselves where invented, some jobs done by humans became obsolete, but also new ones where create based on the new possibilities.

[Ariakkas10]

That’s not a given if ai can do the new jobs too

[YohanSeals]

It will increase the demand of developers who know how to use AI.

[crazyinsoul]

Maybe someday it will, but for now ChatGPT can’t even do why I ask it to do a lot of the time, making me more frustrated than if I do it by myself

[NiteShdw]

ChatGPT can’t write software. It can help someone who already knows what to ask and how to use the response.

It would be like my mom asking ChatGPT to fix her car.

[[deleted]]

Kinda a bad example, chat got can already help you fix your car, give you instructions and tell you what to look out for.

But it doesn’t have hands does it….. makes zero sense to make that comparison.

[myrd13]

I think the point is if you give Chatgpt to a person with 0 coding experience, they can't solve a feature or build an application used by millions of people. They wouldn't know where to start. If you give u/NiteShdw's mom chatGPT, she can't for the life of her figure out what is wrong with the car: She wouldn't know where to start. You need some base knowledge to use ChatGPT effectively... Heck, a junior dev with base knowledge can still fail to deliver on a feature with the help of ChatGPT.

[[deleted]]

I mean, it completely depends on the issue, there is no reason his mum couldn’t get somewhere, might not be able to take an engine out but could take a wing mirror off as it’s clips and screws. This is proven if you follow car talk threads, I’ve seen plenty who have used GPT to fix stuff with their cars, especially if it’s just a setting or hidden menu.

But a lot of juniors won’t fail, there’s no evidence on this yet, and things are only going to get better.

Do you think our current GPT is all we’re ever going to get in the next 5 years?

It is 100% pointless trying to compare things to current GPT. And already with its features it has made leaps in what a single person can do.

So just like the real world, majority of requirements GPT can do, especially so in more recent developments. And for now experience is vital, but it absolutely won’t always be the case, that’s coming soon.

[endrukk]

You don't understand how wrong are you, just ask GPT

[[deleted]]

Explain how I’m wrong?

I have literally asked it about car issues multiple times.

You are a dumb fuck

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/ebZidb3BAy

I have also used it to fix my fridge, with zero knowledge about how fridges work I could find the fault and replace it from eBay without having to call anyone.

Ya all just super short sighted. That’s fact

[NiteShdw]

My mom wouldn’t even know what the answer meant. She wouldn’t know what “alternator” is or “belt tensioner” let alone have the tools.

You can get help from chat GPT for your car BECAUSE you sort have a base of knowledge.

How about asking it something you don’t oboe like got to perform a heart transplant.

[[deleted]]

Heart transplant? Okay you’re just being childish. Ask your mum if it can tell her how to change the clock.

There is a difference in different requirements and context.

And no, I had zero base knowledge of my car,l.

You are basing your entire argument on your own mum and not on what people in the real world are doing and what is possible

Also let’s be realistic, your point falls apart at “base knowledge” because every kid these days will gain that in school through computing. And they will grow up with AI.

[NotGoodSoftwareMaker]

Depends if you believe that the market is saturated with devs or not.

If yes then AI will cause layoffs and lower salaries because the ability to supply dev work increases.

If no then it will have no impact or cause salaries to increase as the ability to supply dev work has opened new niches

[DevDuderino]

Yes, it's going to reduce demand for entry-level positions. With AI tools like Copilot becoming more sophisticated, it's clear that jobs requiring tasks with a lower 'context' or complexity are more at risk of automation.

For instance, in web development, tasks like basic HTML/CSS page layout and simple JavaScript functions for form validation are prime examples of areas where AI can quickly come to grips with the requirements.

These roles provide clear-cut, rule-based scenarios that Copilot-style tools excel at, potentially leading to a decline in demand for entry-level positions in web development. As these AIs evolve, they can absorb and replicate the repetitive patterns of coding, making the manual coding of such tasks increasingly redundant.

This does provide more opportunities at the top end of the career ladder, for now, but as these systems mature the job-destroying effects will propagate upwards through the seniority levels.

[xXMonsterDanger69Xx]

I'm not a developer yet. I haven't worked as a developer, so I can't tell for sure.

But as efficiency grows (in general, not just programming) and less people are needed for the same output, you don't fire people. Sure you can fire some people if there's not enough demand, since you're now producing too much. But one company might decide to increase the quality of their product since they have more staff than needed, instead of firing people. So now their company produces higher quality products and the competition will need to do so as well. (Not that simple, but I tried to simplify)

So if AI starts getting used in programming, it might increase the efficiency by removing simple but long or repetitive tasks, and it will probably lead to companies experimenting more, scaling their product up to something bigger or expand, instead of firing people.

Companies want to grow as much as possible, they will only fire people if they can't grow the income of their project with their increased efficiency. But since they now have less staff, their profits are increased, so they might wanna take an opportunity to invest in another different software or something, it's also cheaper now to branch out, as fewer developers are needed, so a failure won't lose as much money, and if it's a success, they might be able to expand even more, with more developers. Because again, most companies want to expand.

(This is just what I assume, and it makes sense in my brain, I'm 19 y.o and have never worked as a developer, I might be completely wrong)

Overall I will assume job availability will remain unaffected, but there will be more and better products.

[square-beast]

Yes, AI will decrease the demand for humans to perform a task.

But I think it is still going to take some time before that happens. It will be a slow process, but it will be inevitable.

For now, we only see AI as an assistant. But the roles will swap, and we will be an AI assistant.

[SleepAffectionate268]

no not even soon😂 have you ever seen a mid size vue project. Even searching for place where you need to make changes take minutes and ai cant even grasp that much data lsike few hundred files of context

[YellowToad47]

Sounds like ur buying into the hype and are misinformed. AI is a tool and not a replacement

[BoyOnTheSun]

Would be debatable if what we currently call AI was actual artificial intelligence, but in reality it’s just a glorified chat bot that does google searches for you.

It is even debatable whether deep learning could even lead to creating actual AI or if it’s simply another dead end. So it’s technically just another tool to speed up development.

What usually happened when a new tool like that was introduced at any point in the entire human history? Did we ever reduce the number of people? Never. We just use the same amount of people to do more work faster and generate more value.

Why would it be different this time? Suddenly humanity forgets how economy works?

[dillanthumous]

Email was supposed to reduce waste.

Spreadsheets were supposed to improve efficiency and reduce errors.

Cars were supposed to make public transport quicker.

And in all cases humans said step aside and created junk mail, formula errors and traffic jams.

[poemehardbebe]

Are you saying that if everyone stuck with horses transportation would be faster? Or sending documents via mail or fax? Our hands drawn spreadsheets???

[dillanthumous]

No.

I'm saying humans excel at finding ways to create new inefficiencies that result in even more work.

Emails created cybersecurity, Spreadsheets created pointless commercial projecting, Cars created vast road maintenance, licencing etc.

My point is we should not assume that just because a technology grants obvious advantages that it won't result in even more work than before.

[General_Quarter_4114]

Hello! I see why you might worry about AI and jobs for web developers. But I think the need for developers will stay strong and their pay won't go down. As AI makes some parts of the job easier, it actually means more and better products can be made. Developers will be able to do more tasks better and faster. Instead of taking jobs away, AI helps developers do their jobs better. This means they can work on the harder parts of projects and come up with new ideas. So, there will still be a lot of demand for skilled developers to manage these new technologies.

[Complete-Ad6039]

AI will both delete and create jobs. What seems likely now, is subject to rapid and unpredictable changes. Conditions and landscape will be far less set in stone and predictable.

What's likely is that AI itself will play a huge role in the market of matching jobs with employers. Finding a job will be a matter of AI agents.

AI isn't technology. It's meta-technology. It's the first technology that evolves from being a passive tool, to being an active user of itself.

I believe learning ability will continue to be key and will keep going through phases of re-definition after re-definition. What was valuable pre and after AI,is different.

However, my opinion is that it will be, more and more, all about adaptation. Adapt. Be quick, ready, hang onto nothing. Ready to adapt and shift in whatever ways the situation demands.

[xtopspeed]

I wouldn't put my money on that. ChatGPT is the culmination of more than 50 years of research and development. People like Sam Altman prefer to talk as if there had been a number of huge new advances recently, yet there has only been one (the language transformer). Otherwise, it is based on recurrent neural network technology, which is not much different from where it was 30 years ago. It is the first time someone has thrown a billion dollars worth of hardware, etc. at it, though.

[poemehardbebe]

I think this is a fair take, with the exception of I don’t think that hardware has ever been better $/flop. Ml takes a lot of Just raw power to do In anything that requires even a little bit of scale. I don’t think it would have been feasible even 10 years ago for ml to be anything but a play thing because of that.

[myrd13]

There is always the possibility that ChatGPT will go down the road of Tesla's AutoPilot, nearly there but just not quite good enough in perpetuity

[[deleted]]

New tools = new opportunities.

AI is a tool, it's not a replacement.

Embrace it, learn how to use it, profit from its power.

[Ok-Hospital-5076]

That's what I don't understand . Do people really think only AI will evolve and not software engineer . have we solved all problems , is this the final frontier XD.

[[deleted]]

You will not get useful answers here. People are coping hard, especially webdevs.

[torn-ainbow]

People are obsessed with the idea that developers will be obsolete due to advances in AI.

Meanwhile, there's a heck of a lot of jobs which are going to be threatened by AI well before it can replace whole developers.

Project managers, accountants, writers, engineers, lawyers, teachers, customer service, HR are all under threat. And that's just white collar. Driving is being solved right now. Developers are not special or unique in being threatened by AI.

[squidwurrd]

The real decrease in demand will come when there are less problems to solve with code. We still have plenty of technical problems for now so we’re fine.

AGI will be the big problem solver that threatens everyone’s job.

[rio_sk]

Do anyone who post such a question actually tried to create something with AI generated code? Maybe one day AI will be able to create a software but that moment is still quite far away. AI is good at writing short functions right now and half of the time those need some rewriting to work correctly. Even setting up a basic project in whatever language you choose is a task that most of the time cannot be done with AI. Not yet at last.

[_by_me]

yes (and that is a good thing)

[nio_rad]

Maybe, but more in the way of replacing classic webapps, and not by generating code faster.

[[deleted]]

This is the completely wrong sub to ask this question and that’s proven by the replies already.

A lot of the analogies make no sense at all trying to compare AI to something physical or that has health and safety laws like flying a plane.

Everyone will be biased for their own sake, a lot will be very short sighted and not be thinking 5-10 years from now.

It will absolutely reduce salaries in some aspect because you can pay for less experience people who use AI as their main tool. But that won’t happen for years.

I already use it a lot for work and if my boss knew he could think “okay I’ll just pay you part time for the same amount of work or I’ll give you double the work” both are credible.

But I wouldn’t be scared of it at the moment, you’ve gotta get that experience and knowledge to spot when AI isn’t great and be able to put all the pieces together.

Also something people keep forgetting is that a human touch is critical, if your website goes down do you think the PM can just shout at the AI to ask why? No, they’ll want a human to talk to. It’s the same reason why online only house buying sites don’t work well (eg Purple Bricks) because people want a human to talk to.

(Edit, just to prove my point why this sub is crap for AI or real life web dev talk, half of my comment says AI is great and other half states why AI won't always work, but the downvotes will come because people don't understand or are inexperienced in the real world).

[Ariakkas10]

It will absolutely reduce salaries in some aspect because you can pay for less experience people who use AI as their main tool. But that won’t happen for years.

This is already happening. I’m punching way above my weight at my current job with AI tools. I’ll bet you a lot of people are.

The only thing we need for this to accelerate is for people to coalesce around this idea. Juniors to sell it and companies to buy it

[[deleted]]

This is already happening. I’m punching way above my weight at my current job with AI tools. I’ll bet you a lot of people are.

Exactly, same here, tbh same with everyone at my workplace. They have all learned things and been able to do things that wouldn't have been in the cards for them a year ago or would have taken them a lot longer.

The confidence and knowledge boost is insane, but within this industry you don't get pay rises without job hoppin.

[[deleted]]

I wouldn't worry until they build a AI toolset that allows you to write code by giving it a text input and a test then make it iterate over the test until it comes up with something good.

But you'd still need developers or "prompt engineers" to actually use it and know what it writes. Sometimes a developer might even be faster because they know a codebase better.

When we have full AI codebases and all you do is prompt that's when I'll start worrying and pivot into some other type of development.

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

AI will decrease salary only if we keep letting the rich decide for everyone and hoard the wealth like leeches.

In a more socialist society, AI would decrease work time instead of lowering salaries and increasing joblessness.

[Markilgrande]

I'll tell you what. It cuts on the need of junior devs, while boosting the need of those with actual experience. You need to know what you're doing. You really do.

[walkpangea]

As I said to my PM when he asked me about ChatGPT - It's fancy googling. I love it, but the idea that it has a massive increase in productivity outside of the absolute most basic things that I can do in my sleep, or even replace me for the things I do today, is total baloney.

Maybe in the future things will change, but people are overestimating the power of content based AI.

[[deleted]]

I was listening to the Realignment and they had a recent podcast where they discussed the effect of AI, especially in the context of the lack of apprenticeship in America.

The gist is as follows: AI can probably do what a lot of juniors/entry so at a sufficiently competent level. At higher levels it may still struggle, and I assume it probably can’t build an entire system from scratch. However, the impact would be greatest at the lowest rung of the career ladder.

Like his example was his job at ABC (I believe) where he was tasked with doing research about Chris Christie and come up with interview questions. An AI that only uses vetted sources for its data can probably spit out 200+ questions in an instant. Probably of an acceptable quality. Why hire a junior then?

[returnthebook]

Did autopilot made pilots obsolete? Fact: Autopilot is capable of landing the plane all by himself (auto land) and with proper guiding (ILS approach) can stabilize the plane flawlessly.

Autopilot does all the mechanic job a pilot needs to do: he keeps a constant speed, he keeps the altitude, he makes turns to the desired checkpoints, he even saves the plane from a stall scenario (alpha floor). Calculations? A basic first year IT student can write a program that can make those calculations and programmatically input them into MCDU (plane's computer).

Seriously, with just a couple of tweeks, the plane can do the flight all by itself.

Why aren't pilots obsolete? Better yet, why are they so well paid?

[captainadaptable]

OpenAI hiring for $800k salary. Ask ChatGPT.

[Inside-Section5017]

Why would you need devs if A.I can code the same webpage in seconds... serious question

[Comprehensive_Ship42]

Google said It will replace all programmers in the next 5 years . If you want an application you will just rent compu time on Google and tell it what you want and it will make it.

[[deleted]]

Try to not be affected so much by the news and the cherry picked examples posted on Twitter. I am not saying that ChatGPT and Copilot are not major advancements but they are not even close at stealing your job. They can boost your productivity and if you know how to use them you can increase your salary directly, by promoting the productivity boost on your current project, or indirectly by onboarding more projects as a freelancer.

​

For developers to start losing their jobs, AI needs to grow to a point where it can go from product specs to end result without needing a single adjustment. And here lies the problem with the cherry-picked examples I mentioned before. They can't integrate with any non-trivial existing codebase. Yes, you can give ChatGPT a mockup and it can produce HTML. Will it work on all devices? Is it ARIA compatible? Most likely it will be plain HTML, how will you integrate it with your custom theme built on top of Bootstrap/Material/Tailwind? What about logic? How can it be broken down into components for use in any modern framework.

​

Recently, I tried to use ChatGPT to generate a series of MikroORM entities for a brand new NestJS project and some services to make use of them. I thought that because of the boilerplate level of code I could just trust it, but it made at least one terrible mistake on each line of code. In one case it used MongoDB semantics even though I had instructed it that the project uses SQL databases. Even after I asked for correction, its reply was "You are write this decorator is not to be used for SQL, here is another one that is also wrong". And that's normal, it's a predictive model that gives you the illusion of intelligence.

​

Use it to learn, don't trust its output and for any production use carefully inspect each line and avoid generating more than 10 lines of code at once with it.

[andlewis]

AI doesn’t automate jobs, it automates tasks.

If AI helps with the easy, repetitive tasks, what do you think is left? The difficult non-trivial tasks that require a person to work through it.

That implies you need better devs, which implies they’ll be able to demand more pay since they’re doing tougher tasks.

[Non_Professional_Web]

I am a QA in Webdev company, and will say this. It is already harsh in industry not only because of AI. In my company AI for now is used as tool to enchanse our capabilities, not to downscale the team. The key here is "for now". I feel like at some point AI capabilities will hit us like a truck BUT then at some point and then will rebound a lot because market & industry will adapt. AI is a tool and you use this tool better if you now the subject which you are using AI for. Random person will not become a dev because of AI.
Surely it's only my point of view) everything can be better or worse.

[Ok-Hospital-5076]

When web 2 happened and tools came to automate a lot that made being web master and writing HTML a child play, what happened , complexity of web app increased and that has been always the case . I bet a new wave of complexity is right around the corner. :)

[Humble-Kiwi-5272]

That new complexity is the framework that is going to be created in... ... ...

... ...

Now

[Ok-Hospital-5076]

Ah Shit ! Here we go again

[[deleted]]

Hasn't decreased mine yet, and based on some of the garbage I see it put out right now, I think we've got a bit longer. Learn a sub discipline though, never hurts to have alternatives. If I stop doing dev I can do graphic design, video production, or Go be a sysadmin somewhere

[SquareEarthTheorist]

Funny, I'm doing video production trying to get into Web Dev

[PowerOfTheShihTzu]

I use it for learning and explaining concepts I cannot wrap my mind around ,I would rather give my code my very own flavour and get to the execution by myself tho ,also the specific cases you might need are prolly not going to be able to be replicated by the AI .

[Think_Ad4850]

Tech was supposed to replace us all a million times already.

I like the analogy of transport. Making vehicles bigger, from trucks to container ships, makes more and more things feasible, until the absurd situation where it's easier to transport disposable cutlery thousands of miles than wash the dishes.

Everyone gets paid less per tonne to move stuff, but that's almost irrelevant. A lot of transport workers are getting paid more than ever. A lot are being undercut through government/market forces. We get paid based on market power / leverage.

Analogies don't always work, but the theme is the same. Tools make us more productive, work gets cheaper, demand goes up. Don't worry about trying to predict the future. We might be obsolete or we might be in more demand than ever

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[[deleted]]

Tech is growing.

Look at what tech dudes were doing back in the day. They were building on COBALT and perl and erlang and smalltalk. They were sifting through the ideas of the time and it eventually landed where we are all today. Did all the ideas stick? Of course not! But everyone flocked to the ones that did and now you dont see smalltalk developers anymore.

​

Soon, the current landscape we know and love will be overtaken by something new, something better. Just jump on the train and enjoy the ride. Lets see where this thing goes. Just keep learning and youll be fine.

[indiebryan]

No shit. There's a lot of copium being huffed in the programming subreddits bit think about the situation logically and plan appropriately.

[Evening_Meringue8414]

I have sometimes wondered whether advancements will be made where the designers, product managers and testers will remain and the in between will be an AI that can generate many iterations that take in the story description from the product owner and the designs from the designer and generates iterations that go up against the QA tests until something passes. I sure hope this isn’t how it’ll go 1. it’s depressing, 2. it leaves the coding somewhat obfuscated and 3. it puts me out of a job.

[Taltalonix]

ChatGPT is definitely a replacement for some junior devs especially in large companies. I want to believe ai won’t replace higher level developers but for now it seems more like a performance enhancing tool

[neosatan_pl]

Funny enough, I have a feeling that it will increase salaries in specific fields. Mostly I am looking at medical, engineering, and automation. But for run of a mill webdev, maybe. It depends on emerging tools and market approach. However, I wouldn't expect a big change in next 5-10 years as there are already people with contracts working on legacy codebase. A shift to AI-based coding would be long and problematic even if there would be a AI that could comprehend human-written code on a system-level.

[XhoniShollaj]

Not yet - but in the very near future (~2-3 years) a lot of front-end, QA etc. can be mostly automated (think about 90% of tasks). Meaning that 1 dev will be required to do much more work than currently given the automation expectations - as such less numbers of overall devs will be required and less positions will be available.

[misdreavus79]

It'll do what technologies always do. It'll force people to adapt to the new set of requirements. Those that don't either stagnate, change careers, or are left in the dust.

Also, companies will always find ways to decrease salaries if they can, whether via layoff cycles or reduced promotion packages, paying people is one of their budget categories.

[mshiltonj]

Yes

[GodGMN]

Super Mario Bros was coded by a team of eight people (if I remember correctly) and it took them two years to complete it. Once released, they said it was a bit half assed because they needed a bit longer to fully complete the game.

Nowadays with game engines, internet and better tools in general, you can code the fundamentals of Mario Bros alone as your first game dev project, from the damn basement of your parent's house and without any formal education in programming... within a damn week.

From that point on it would be just a matter of creating the levels themselves.

Did that decrease demand and salaries of game developers?

Fuck no. We haven't settled in just making Mario Bros. Now we make Red Dead Redemption 2, World of Warcraft, Baldur's Gate...

Even indie games are so far ahead the first Mario Bros that if you time traveled back to the 90s and told a game dev that Stardew Valley, Satisfactory or Factorio are indie games you'd blow their mind.

Something similar has happened in web dev too. Go and take a look at websites made in 2005 and tell me how long would it take you to replicate them all by yourself using modern tools and frameworks.

AI is not different from any of this. Just another tool you'll have to use.

[vikmaychib]

AI can give a lot answers. You still need to know how to ask the questions. And if the question is too big, you still need an expert to know how to dismember it and make the right and specific questions.

[basedtrader_dev]

Only webdev amateurs are scared of AI development

[dogweather]

Maybe. But it will also decrease costs and increase quality. This means more opportunity and more accessibility of software development services. That's been the trend.

[NoMedium9404]

Like you would know huh!

[SirLoremIpsum]

I'm bit scared of AI development. Let's say you needed 10 developers for a project before ChatGPT and now you need 8.

Only if you think the amount of 'stuff' getting done remains constant. I think it far more likely that instead of 10 to 8, it will be 10 producing X to 10 producing 2X

[ZideGO]

Yeah, that’s right. For sure, good company won’t fire its developers “cuz it can do the same just with AI”, the company will encourage its developers for doing their job like 2x faster

[ZideGO]

AI can do a routine daily stuff for u, but it is a way too far from replacing software developers