An alternative optimistic but realistic vision for Developers and AI
A common theme is "AI will steal your job and it is already happening!". I'm tired of hearing it.
CEOs
I think it is important to look at the people that preach this message, they are often CEOs of AI companies. A negative vision is beneficial to them, then people will say:
"Well I have to be a stakeholder/early adopter if I want any future prospects, or at least I can't let others (China/ Competing Company) get there first!".
Fearmongering has been successful for persuading governments to invest and even provide bailout guarantees.
It is a CEOs legal responsibility to push targets, investment and stock price - not to be realistic.
If you are still not convinced, you should know OpenAI's original vision to profitability:
"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built this sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you."
But now they are pivoting to considering in-chat ads.
Job market
None of these companies are close to being profitable and their progress seems to be plateuing. Anthropic who are famous for saying software engineers will go extinct, just bought Bun. Because they wanted to repurpose the team that runs it to develop the software they need.
I think the recent job losses can also be explained by the state of the economy, post COVID-overhiring, investor caution (unless it is a .ai company), and how engineers are more efficient and you need less of them to do more.
Practical Impact
For me AI isn't close to replacing me or what I do - I would like to say "just accelerates" but not always. It can take thinking out and slow me down in future errors, spaghetti architecture or just breaking discipline to deep dive into errors. Soon I find myself looking like this guy creating slop at an industrial scale:
An alternative vision
It seems like a market correction is inevitable, considering how unprofitable AI is at the moment, but I do see it rebounding with a more sensible approach, since there are undeniable benefits.
This vision is based around the idea of companies being able to do more with less. Engineers can move faster, have wider stack coverage and Juniors are more independent and less burdensome on Seniors.
It could lead to:
- Risk-taking: Companies can spin up more experimental projects or set more ambitious goals.
- Leaner but more numerous Startups: those that previously would have been unviable/ unprofitable can exist since now they can get away with just one resourceful or a handful of engineers compared to 20 years ago.
- Increased Junior Hiring: AI can provide a reasonable amount of hand-holding that Seniors previously had to do.
If there is a bad ending to the AI story, in my opinion, it is more likely to be a AI slop code induced nuclear meltdown that kills us all rather than a Skynet takeover.
Take a deep breath and don't take AI CEO preaching too seriously ¯\_(ツ)_/¯