Ask HN: What career will you switch to when AI replaces developers?

I won't have to switch careers since I'm a software engineer instead of a developer that does nothing but implement specifications with no creativity or design work. I will have to keep up with the changing technology landscape though like I have been for my entire career.

Software, but not for someone else - it's time to be the primary beneficiary of our own work. The jobs are evaporating because AI can amplify our individual efforts into something much greater, and it can do it for us by ourselves too.

AI will create more jobs as it replaces tedious ones. There will always be more innovation and work, so don't worry! This is the same fear as the Internet age back in the days replacing stores, TV, media, etc. We will always continue to improve, and nothing stays stagnant -- there's always something new to discover.

There will be an enormous market cleaning up the mess AI use will leave behind.

PCMag Australia has this headline<p>Bill Gates Says Humans Won&#x27;t Be Needed for &#x27;Most Things&#x27; in the AI Age.<p>Also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JCnAz_fYzW8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JCnAz_fYzW8</a><p>“Will we need humans” “Not for most things. We’ll decide..” rambling on<p>I’m not going to be negative just leave that there.

&gt; I&#x27;m thinking pastry chef or line cook.<p>Have you done these jobs before? Or is this more like a programmer’s dream of some fantasy camp version of manual labor?

I’ll be an expat taking advantage of lower income nations

The 10 lines of code I write daily will be written by AI and I&#x27;ll keep doing all the other work.

Shoe cleaning is like coding, you start by spotting surface dirt (easy bugs), then scrub out the tough stains (edge cases), and finish by polishing everything up (optimization). Both demand precision, patience, and a sharp eye for detail.

When AI replaces developers, it might affect around 5% to 10% of IT staff. Even if AI could develop robust code from scant and inconsistent requirements, it would likely only replace up to 50% of those developers. This would result in a 2.5% to 5% reduction in IT staff. That coincides with what CrowdStrike is laying off as discussed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43916858">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43916858</a>. I imagine we&#x27;re going to see a lot of announcements like these over the next couple of years.

Busker, cronic author, chef, racing car driver, language teacher, tourist guide, YouTube pseudo-celebrity, project manager, spiritual guide, advisor, dog walker, gigolo, clown.<p>So many options!

Parallel parking but clearly not even that is safe.

I&#x27;m going to buy a boat and become a pirate.

The last remaining job: captcha solver for AI.

I&#x27;ll help AI to replace developers (or lawyers or doctors or managers...) in better ways

AI won&#x27;t replace developers, it will make people think they can do things that seemed otherwise out of their reach (a.k.a. vibe coding) resulting in more work to people who actually know what they are doing.

Already veering back to EE, energy based models, mutations of electromagnetic geometry in the machine, that recreates software states through energy based regulation.<p>Gonna be a long time before infrastructure makes itself.

Bartender or waitstaff. Or wait, I guess they are supposed to be the ones coming to replace me with AI...?

Containment vessel welding.

I&#x27;ll make the same career switch that I made when &#x27;no-code&#x27;, 5GLs, and, er, that Sun drag and drop flowchart thing, can&#x27;t remember what it&#x27;s called, made developers obsolete.<p>&quot;This will make developers obsolete&quot; is fairly standard marketing and crops up a couple times a decade (this has been going on for a while; COBOL was marketed this way!) At a certain point, it&#x27;s an industry crying wolf, honestly.

AI code fixer.

Autocompleter can replace copyers.

I&#x27;ll probably get a job with the city cleaning up all the poop from the flying pigs.

Career? I would just own several AI products

Ugh. Please. Get <i>off</i> the hypetrain already.<p>Developers aren&#x27;t going to be replaced by AI. Have you seen how BAD this stuff is?<p>It might <i>assist</i> you in certain use cases, but it&#x27;s not going to replace you.<p>&quot;AI&quot; is neither artificial, nor intelligent.<p>It&#x27;s next token prediction, and it&#x27;s still laughable what things it comes up with.<p>It will *<i>NOT*</i> replace a human developer who knows what they&#x27;re doing and is <i>actually</i> capable of reason.