I can see it turning the job into a quasi-product/engineering manager role and for some, they may not have chosen the new social version of the career.
For some of my smaller projects, AI makes them vastly more efficient to do, but it is far from the hacker-style type of work they started as. For many of them, the human communication, typing the change request into ChatGPT, and pasting the new code into the file are all that remain of the work.
Memory and storage used to be precious resources in the computing world, but now nobody blinks at shipping webpages that are 5MB, APIs that take 3 seconds because there is now a spinner to distract people, or entire browser instances for a calculator.
I know a few software devs that didn't take that transition well as they loved knowing the little details and then the paradigm changed to "nobody cares."
Dev used to be an option for a quiet solitary job. I can see that type of role disappearing.
Oh definitely, no doubt that the world is changing, and of course not everyone is going to like the change. I wasn't exactly slap-happy that everyone decided to start writing their desktop apps in a rebranded version of Chrome, but it makes sense when memory is infinite and CPUs are fast.
I just don't think it's quite as doom-and-gloom as everyone is paranoid about. I feel like most of the jobs that could be easily replaced by AI also could have already fairly easily been outsourced to India. If you already have a job in a rich country like the US, it's likely that your employer thinks that it's necessary.
For some of my smaller projects, AI makes them vastly more efficient to do, but it is far from the hacker-style type of work they started as. For many of them, the human communication, typing the change request into ChatGPT, and pasting the new code into the file are all that remain of the work.
Memory and storage used to be precious resources in the computing world, but now nobody blinks at shipping webpages that are 5MB, APIs that take 3 seconds because there is now a spinner to distract people, or entire browser instances for a calculator.
I know a few software devs that didn't take that transition well as they loved knowing the little details and then the paradigm changed to "nobody cares."
Dev used to be an option for a quiet solitary job. I can see that type of role disappearing.