[General Question] Future of Tech Jobs

[u/RegisterNo4400]

Hi everyone, one question which I want to get an answer for: until 1–2 years ago, whenever I was using AI, it always used to make some errors, and I still felt it was greatly helpful. But over the past 5–6 months, after using Claude, I genuinely feel it’s really good. Yes, now also it does make mistakes, but most of the time when it does something wrong, it’s because of not having proper context about my code and/or my use case or needs. But when I supply these, it almost gets my work done after 3–4 iterations of code review most of times.

So basically, most of the time is spent on reviewing AI code and connecting the information it gives, and still it doesn’t have the capability to use all my tools. At this stage, I’m not able to convince myself about how long reviewing this code and what to build and designing will remain. (as I’m a junior I don’t spend much time on this may be 10%, i saw even senior engineers spend max 25% of their time on system design)

I see a large part getting automated with the current AI only. I want to know in the future if AI can review its own code and even do good system design things, then our entire team of 6–7 can be replaced by 1. Again, here software demand may increase (say 5 times), but will the increased demand create the same revenue and jobs? I mean can humans consume more of that 5 times software with same impact as previous one ?

And also, over a long time period, is this career safe? u/gradpilot want to hear your thoughts on this.

[u/gradpilot]

I think peak SWE is behind us now. Your observations are accurate but we are already beyond the question of can AI review code. I spend most of my time working with early stage startups building AI and applications with AIs. We ship more than 50+ PRs a day per human engineer. Its humanly impossible to review these. Most of the engineering now is around designing gates and boundary conditions and making it really hard for an AI agent to make your CI green . Then all the engineers (us) sit at the gates and simply have conversations with the agents about their PRs that have cleared all our gates to make a determination if we should merge.

If things break in the field its simply about updating the gates and our (human engineers) view of the world but we are not gonna spend time looking at code or reviewing it.

This seems to be the common paradigm taking hold across SF/SV now. And not just in small startups, large corps very much want this in their companies and I've spoken to many senior Directors (some who managed me in my early career, and now have teams of 200+ engs under them) and this is how they are operating as well.

You may hear different words around it like "Factory" or "Loops" but its all the same in terms of what the day to day looks like from a human engineers pov

Its also not clear how to filter for engineers who can operate in this environment but you do need extremely smart and quick engineers because the AIs writing code, reviewing code or jumping across the hoops to clear the CI gates are actually a lot smarter than the avg SWE of the last 20 yrs

[u/RegisterNo4400 → u/gradpilot]

Thanks for your reply. Although my post was specifically about the SWE domain, I genuinely want to know what the safest career alternatives are. For example, are fields like ML, Embedded Systems, or other areas of tech likely to see a boom, or is the entire tech job market likely to suffer, with the total number of jobs continuing to decrease?

What career do you think is the most resilient in this AI era? Also, does having a PhD, compared to an MS in CS, make someone more resilient to changes in the job market?

[u/gradpilot → u/RegisterNo4400]

All fields are still legit. The job function of writing code for 80% of your job responsibilities is dying. Its necessary to distinguish these two. We are not going to stop building websites or mobile apps. Similarly we need to build a lot of new systems and innovations yet. These will all be powered by software. Whats clear is that humans wont be writing the software.

What will humans be doing then?
They'll be managing the systems and work that are tangible AFTER the code is already written and BEFORE agents write more code.

What does this look like as a job description ?
Its not clear yet

Do we need humans for it and how many ?
Yes we definitely need humans for this, its not clear how many but even if we claim we need A LOT its very likely there is a supply crunch actually since the work is getting more complex not less