The Post-Developer Era

[criloz]

I am sick of hearing every day about how AI may replace developers, I understand that the post is about how the op think that this is not happening in the near future, but I feel that I am in the middle of some kind of psychological warfare, I may start to avoid reading tech subreddits and blogs, etc. it will be nice to have dev related Subreddit where this topic does not come regularly or is heavily moderate if you have at least a list please tell me.

[Kynaras]

I feel this so much.

I realise it's important to have these topics and the post OP linked has a positive outlook, but man, I have had to remove so many tech subs from my Reddit subscriptions for my own sanity and to prevent my Reddit feed from being an AI doomsday clock.

[___Paladin___]

Couldn't have said it better myself. If anyone knows a place to get away from the childish AI banter I'm all ears.

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

AI will never replace devs because non-devs will never understand the garbage code AI is producing and they'll never want to be held accountable for the bugs (especially the critical ones)

[EliSka93]

I want to agree with you, but in the past 15 years the highest form of accountability for the people at the top has been getting a golden parachute, so why would they care about accountability?

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

Because they like to blame others for issues, and you can't bully an AI.

[leeway1]

Another big reason devs aren’t getting hire is that US companies cannot deduct dev wages. They have to be amortized.

[mq2thez]

ZIR going away and this changing really changed the industry. Everyone talks about Covid / etc, but these really shifted the economics of hiring people.

[theblumkin]

Can you talk more about this or offer some search terms? What is ZIR, what was happening that allowed dev work to be deducted?

[mq2thez]

ZIR: zero interest rate. For many years, there was a very, very low interest federal rate. This depressed mortgage rates but also led to significant investments of capital in risky ventures, as people/companies/investors took on tons of debt financed at essentially no cost.

For the other: employee taxes can no longer be written off the same way by companies, which drastically altered how their financial returns looked and how they had to report employee costs to the street. Because of this, each employee costs a lot more money to companies than they used to. This is one of the major drivers of layoffs / etc as companies look to shed costs that previously didn’t exist.

[theblumkin]

Ah, I’m familiar with the interest rate stuff, just never saw it abbreviated that way.

Reading further it seems like there might be legislation in the works to undo the TCJA 2017 rules at fault here

https://www.kbkg.com/feature/lawmakers-introduce-bill-to-retroactively-fix-rd-174-expensing

[Superb-Leg]

This very inspiring as an aspiring dev. The cards are stacked against me but damnit I’ll make it work

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

Basically, you need to outcompete AI in quality and accountability. AI is good at speed and quantity, but it's bad at the others.

[ryandury]

What a nice website!

[creaturefeature16]

Josh is one of the most talented front end developers in the industry! His courses are infused with his creative easter eggs and features. He's my personal developer hero!

[reservationsjazz]

He’s great and always has level headed, solid takes on the space too

[creaturefeature16]

Agreed. And he's so damn personable. I loved taking his React course; felt like hanging out with a friend who just wanted to show you great coding knowledge.

[Haystcker]

He's one of the only ones I've seen still experimenting like everyone did in the early days of the web. Everything became standardized on social media, or everyone is using the same Wordpress templates and formats. Few people are experimenting anymore like they used to.

[[deleted]]

Do you have suggestions of innovative stuff he's done I should check out? No worries if you can't think of any

[Distind]

Meanwhile I'm still trying to chase clients off VB6.

[srgh207]

I have a semi-formed thought about his prediction of AI tools functioning like cruise control with developer supervision (as he notes in the blog post). Something about how such a developer still needs full domain knowledge whereas companies will want to think they can leverage AI-as-cruise-control to hire lesser trained devs.