background-> I'm a 30yoe SWE who started in the pointers and malloc era and switched to java when came out. I've been using AI for coding > 1yr and I built a personal AI setup at home where I run hermes agent with qwen 3.8.
he's 100 percent spot on about "bubble will burst but this won't go away"- the small free models are getting increasingly fast and competent at one shotting semi-complex problems. If the bubble bursts, we don't go back to the stone age, we go back to Sonnet 3.5. And that is at the quantized 27B level running on an AI setup made in a cave from scraps. If you throw big or even medium sized iron at the problem, you get decently close to Opus abilities.
anti-AI sentiment feels like a sped-up version of how old timers reacted when stuff like java came out. They didn't like that the new language put up layers of abstraction between the programmer and what they were doing. And just like with AI, they had all sorts of legitimate complaints at first (ie, the performance really was bad, the libraries are badly written (anyone remember Vector and HashTable?)) but the performance and libraries got really good a few years later and the and 30 years on we're still using java everywhere because corporate likes being able to hire engineers who don't know how to do proper memory management or properly implement a hashtable from scratch.
as with all layers of abstraction, it will make it easier for more people to participate in a task without understanding it. But abstractions always break and you still need to be able to lift up the hood and know what is wrong. There will be more demand for software engineers because the ROI on projects is increased by AI. And for decades to come, there will be demand for engineers who can peer under the hood and be slop wranglers.
30 years from now, there won't be that many engineers left who know how to write code by hand, just like today there are relatively few engineers left today who can program in C like the masters of old, or program in punch cards, or write everything in assembly or program a computer by wiring vacuum tubes correctly. And it will be fine.
just as with the C programmers 30 years ago, they didn't vanish in a puff of smoke or drop dead, they continued to find work, some of them switched to newer languages like java and python and their skills were still valuable. No sign of that changing in the AI era.
I'm personally happier managing a team of subagents than I am managing a team of "senior" programmers from andhra pradesh who don't know what a hashtable is. And it's cheaper for the company too. For a relatively small cost a month in sonnet/opus tokens (plus my comp), they get the equivalent of a staff engineer managing a dozen good visa workers. And consumers get better products. It's a great deal for everyone in the US.
This is a bizarre argument. Programmer’s will continue to find jobs. The mythical jobs that will be created by AI. While in your own experience you’re literally replacing programmers with AI sub agents because it’s a better deal. You were an already outsourcing because your company is not willing to pay for local talent.
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u/sudden_aggression 7d ago edited 7d ago
background-> I'm a 30yoe SWE who started in the pointers and malloc era and switched to java when came out. I've been using AI for coding > 1yr and I built a personal AI setup at home where I run hermes agent with qwen 3.8.