The Industrialization of IT

Also, calculators did millions of operations, but the were 99.999999% right all the time. That's what set the apart from human people: eternal reliability 24/7. AI is about right 1% of the time, a human is needed to recognise when the machine is wrong, and it keeps repeating the same mistakes when identified and corrected. People WISH it was like a calculator, but you know, magic thinking doesn't make things happen.

&gt; In 2025, the engineer probably beats Gemini. Sure, great. But in 2030, who wins this hypothetical?<p>I don&#x27;t think we need to wait for 2030. Today, using aider&#x2F;cursor and Gemini-pro-2.5, I&#x27;m pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs. Being a small, close-knit team has a lot of advantages. And LLMs can help close the productivity gap.

I tried vibe-coding some non-trivial code. It failed successfully.<p>The resulting code had a memory leak (from good old Promise.race) that would have caused the app to continuously grow the RAM usage.<p>I decided to let the AI code, and then asked it to fix the problems, describing the issue (steadily growing RAM usage). It was not able to find the issue.<p>That&#x27;s what I&#x27;m afraid of. We&#x27;ll get megabytes of code that just fails sometimes, for unfathomable reasons.

I wish people would stop making predictions about LLMs so confidently. Some people confidently predict that LLMs will never be able to replace capable engineers, and other people equally confidently predict that we&#x27;ll all be out of a job in five years.<p>The reality is that <i>we don&#x27;t know.</i><p>We don&#x27;t know what the ceiling is for LLM programming ability. We don&#x27;t know how much better they can get without scaling up the hardware. We don&#x27;t know how well we&#x27;ll be able to scale up the hardware. We don&#x27;t know how many more billions we&#x27;ll allow companies to spend building better and better models until the market loses confidence in them.<p>We can make educated guesses, but that&#x27;s all they are. We just <i>don&#x27;t know.</i>

Clear and concise thinking, its the first time I have read someone cut through the hype and argue logically for what the next incremental steps are in making progress down this path of LLMs creating technology.<p>The first steam engines were too expensive and underpowered, the first cars were deatch traps when they actually ran. Dont lul yourself into the dream of a static world.<p>We see the wave coming, I will look for a way to surf it. Don&#x27;t be the stunned sceptic waiting to feel the crush.

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable.<p>In a well off European country, you&#x27;d pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but &gt;4x? Not sure how to back that up.

I find the outlined scenario well argued and plausible.<p>What&#x27;s more interesting to me though is the complete lack of mention of labor unions as a potential defense mechanism for engineers (either in the OP or in the conversation here, at least so far).<p>For a while now I&#x27;ve felt it&#x27;s quite arrogant and completely naive of us to not accept that we&#x27;re just keyboard workers, and not rare special flowers that will forever be economically privileged.

There was a job once consisting of painting with color black and white photography.<p>Color photographic film ended that job, but not photography nor painting.<p>What ended was just the small intersection between the two that was, for a moment, very popular and valuable but suddenly became not a job.<p>So diversification within the same or adjacent skillset is probably a good idea. Better than panic or putting all chips on one thing.<p>We don&#x27;t know the future after all. So much can change so fast.

You get something right, something awfully wrong. It&#x27;s true that machines dont sleep, but less true that every software engineer costs 230000$ an year. Maybe (!) that&#x27;s true in Silicon Valley. In Italy, it costs 35000E. And we don&#x27;t see many software companies in Italy. Why? Because I&#x27;m sad to have that explained, code is 10% of development. Whatsapp was sold for 17 billion dollars and it was 55 employees, and it&#x27;s an IRC chat made mobile. At the time, it didn&#x27;t have video. I can keep going on, but this discussion sounds so out-in-space that only USA people could not see. Sorry if you&#x27;re from somewhere else.

The difficult question to answer is not if we will lose our jobs to AI, but when. Are we talking 100 years from now? Are we talking 5 years, 1 year? But yeah, given enough time it is clear to see computers will one day program themselves.

How much are people paying per month per user for coding AI services?

I guess that your takes on parallel, compartimentalized, self healing, game-theory based micro AI agents could be spawned and organized code their own way. But... wake me up when it happens, ok? ;)