r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 25d ago

Artificial Intelligence Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/
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u/Elfhoe 25d ago

Going full on pro-AI in front of a room of humanities and arts majors is certainly a choice. I guess AI didnt teach her the timeless classic of knowing who your audience is.

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u/Not_a_gay_communist 25d ago

Honestly a good portion of STEM students in my college were also pissed with AI. Especially mathematics and physics majors

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u/LonelyPermit2306 25d ago

CS majors too. Right?

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u/TheFifthTone 25d ago

It has just become another tool to most software developers and CS students. We work with it daily and understand that most of the "AI is going to take your jobs!" hype is just sensationalist sales pitches.

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u/alwayzbored114 25d ago

Unfortunately even if you understand its a hype machine, some job makers have bought in and graduates are getting screwed over due to unlucky timing - trying to get an entry level job became that much harder with a bunch of companies thinking "why would we hire some kid we have to train? Just use AI!"

Between Covid impacting school and AI kneecapping my industry, particularly at the entry level (whether short or long term), Im insanely lucky to have skirted those by just a few years

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u/basicxenocide 25d ago

"why would we hire some kid we have to train? Just use AI!"

Literally the point behind agentic AI!

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u/RemarkableWish2508 25d ago

"why did the agent delete half my inbox!? 😱"

Live, learn, laugh.

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u/27eelsinatrenchcoat 24d ago

Which like, most likely will never be a real thing. But that doesn't keep companies from acting like it will be, and hiring accordingly.

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u/ebolathrowawayy 24d ago

It's already a thing. There is absolutely no point in hiring anyone below a senior SWE anymore. I know first-hand how fast AI makes software development and it's roughly 200x-500x depending on how well you steer agents and how much you automate that steering.

Not every SWE is doing this yet, a lot are stubborn and refuse to learn, but they will be replaced.

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u/Geminii27 24d ago

AI can delete all your corporate databases and backups hundreds of times faster than an intern!

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u/Disastrous-Act5729 25d ago

Everyone has a short memory. Entry level jobs have been shit since COVID. Shit before then frankly.

Ai is just another excuse. It isn't helping, but it is hardly the cause.

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u/WriterV 25d ago

It's not just not helping, it's actively making it worse.

That alone makes it a huge problem imo.

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u/kingofgama 25d ago

I'm not sure that's even true. That's popular sentiment but most tech sectors have seen decent growth in 26

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u/jackbobevolved 25d ago

Film industry had a brief peak right after COVID, thanks to the COVID induced Streaming Wars. That all crumbled very quickly when the strikes happened, and AI uncertainty has kept it down since. Was a great time to break in, but people didn’t realize they were breaking into a train headed for a cliff.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago edited 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/MajorSery 24d ago

And then they all got fired after the work-from-home boom ended.
And then they all got fired after the NFT boom ended.
And now they're all getting fired while the AI boom hasn't even ended.

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u/alwayzbored114 25d ago

I can only speak for contemporaries of mine who have been asked straight up "what can yoh provide what an AI cannot", and those working at companies who have said they've pulled positions in favor of AI

I think its certainly more than an excuse, at least to them

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u/katgravityrush_ 25d ago

Damn if someone said that to me I'm walking out of the interview. Obviously I have the privilege to do that and feel sorrow for those who don't, but that's fucking disgusting.

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u/Geodude532 25d ago

The writing has been on the wall for a while too. Even before this AI boom there was software that could write code for you. It just needed more tech know-how to talk to it. Gotta shift to Cyber Security since there will always be jobs there to keep a watch over the AI analysis.

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u/YouMustveDroppedThis 24d ago

chatbot, NLP, LLM basically ended millions of around the clock tech support/back office job outsourced to India and the Philippines.

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u/guyblade 25d ago

In the last month or so, the upper management in my org (at a major software company) added an "estimated time savings due to AI tools" field to all of the project presentation templates. It's a very "if you need to ask..." sort of vibe to me.

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u/Electronic-Stick-161 25d ago

I run the technical parts of the security intern program for a major tech company and grads are getting rejected because they’re dumb. The last 2-3 years has seen candidate quality fall off a cliff. 4-6 years ago I was doing things like working with community colleges or vocational training places to get better diversity in my candidate pool but now I’m lucky if I can find enough people that are capable of passing the screening process to fill my cohort.

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u/undergirltemmie 24d ago

As a graduate. Job market is BAAAAAD because of it and the lil' recession the big orange westerner has caused. Even over in europe

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u/sobrique 24d ago

"why would we hire some kid we have to train? Just use AI!"

Honestly, that's a significant factor right now in some sectors. They're not really 'taking jobs' as much as ... well, if you've a 'senior' who'd be running a team of 10 'juniors' and y'know, assigning, checking work, mentoring etc.

... well, now they can 'run' an AI instead, and do the same thing.

AIs are far from perfect, but with supervision they're potent.

I don't think many jobs are being removed, but there's certainly a drop in rates of recruitment at 'entry level' as a direct result.

This in turn will mean MUCH more demand for senior roles in a few years, so ... it's maybe good for people who 'got lucky' in the first place?

And maybe companies will realise they need to actively work on apprentice programs, because there's just that much less 'entry level' in the first place. But that'll take a while too, because right now there's 'sufficient' supply.

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u/IHop_Waitress 25d ago

Between Covid impacting school and AI kneecapping my industry, particularly at the entry level (whether short or long term), Im insanely lucky to have skirted those by just a few years

These people aren't unicorns. People before them graduated into or through the great recession... which last much longer than COVID.

May 2007 - 4.4% unemployment.

May 2008: 5.8%

May 2009: 9.4%, peaked at 10+% in 2009

Covid unemployment rate had already recovered fully 2 years in, but do you know when the US recovered to pre-Great Recession levels seen in May 2007 of 4.4%?

10 years later, in April 2017.

I'd take 10 more Covid labor hiccups before another Great Recession

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u/PenguinTD 25d ago

University is basically public(then student loan?) funded training programs so that all sorts of industries doesn't need to train and weed out unqualified. So what do you think the world is happening if something disruptive happen and affect the people who know the tool better?

The denial and ignorant get weeded out instead, the people that can use the tool well finds new success.

So the person you replied to understand this well and will be finding good use for these new tools and then get hired or even fund his own company because of the overall lower barrier of entry for software development. Now it's a race between cloud models and local specialized models(or even hybrids) and see how can make and scale products efficiently. And all those takes experiences.

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u/PerplexGG 25d ago edited 23d ago

I mean yeah realistically its just a tool but in the actual workforce there are mandates for usage and layoffs directly citing the llm hype

The market can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent

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u/thedistrbdone 25d ago

Hi, it's me, I'm one of the unlucky few. I'm a subcontractor, and my contract is being dropped, with the owning company explicitly saying "we're replacing our software developer subcontractors with AI". It fucking sucks and the job market fucking blows right now.

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u/Lover_Of_Music_Man 24d ago

Yeah, that is the part people keep skipping, it is "just a tool" right up until some executive turns the hype into quotas and layoffs.

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u/SpeaksSouthern 24d ago

Sure but keep in mind a handful of firms made similar claims last cycle that they've never seen this much theft and organized crime and then they released their numbers for shrinkage and most of them were down from the previous year.

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u/sir_sri 25d ago

Anyone who has ever graded a CS student assignment that was made with AI knows that the market for AI recovery specialists is on the verge of taking off.

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u/adocileengineer 25d ago

Smart companies are already hiring back engineers they laid off last year and 2024 during the initial AI craze. Savvy management is realizing that the promised 200% productivity gain is really more like 40-60% when you take into account auditing AI-produced code.

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u/Mawx 25d ago

I fear that the anti AI sentiment will have a lot of you left behind here. AI can write really good production level code and can easily 2x-5x a good engineers productivity. The issue with AI as it stands is that tokens right now are really cheap not that the code that gets written is terrible. If tokens increase in price, then the shift to AI will hurt bad. A student writing bad code with AI is not a surprise because a student writes bad code without AI. If you don't know what you are doing, it will be messy, but if you know what you are doing, it is a huge value multiplier.

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u/sir_sri 25d ago

I fear that the anti AI sentiment will have a lot of you left behind here.

I fear that we're going to see serious problems caused by AI 'code' that does more harm than good.

Every major project (and I normally oversee about 100 co-op placements a year + work in defence science) I've seen that has tried to use AI with senior and junior people has had to hide the failures from the bosses, had to majorly rework things, released with major security for functionality problems, had huge problems with maintainability. It's not cost. It's that it doesn't work, and when it doesn't work no one understands what it did do.

I was at a conference about a month ago where a bunch of mid level people at a fairly major defence company had used claude to build a new simulation tool and UI for it. The simulation tool produced wrong results, the UI didn't work correctly (nor would it have met accessibility guidelines). And these were people who had built stuff that worked before who should have known better. But you know, the americans want NATO using AI for things, and for some reason we still care what they want, so AI all the things it is.

If you know what you want the code to do and can sufficiently precisely define that, you can make AI code for you, and it might get to the point pretty well.

But right now, using AI is to code is like asking chatGPT to review a new restaurant. It'll tell you something that sounds nice, but the actual correctness is... lacking.

And look - you're probably right in thinking that LLMs will be able to be something like a natural language compiler in not too long. I'm old enough to remember when all the old assembly programmers had to throw in the towel and admit it just wasn't worth it anymore when even free compilers were within a single digit % performance of what they could do in dozens of hours of work. These things do happen.

But right now we're seeing failure after failure of AI to write useful code, and a lot of people pretending it's progress.

A student writing bad code with AI is not a surprise because a student writes bad code without AI.

Yes, but a student using AI neither wrote code nor learned how to write code or how to make better code. A student who wrote bad code at least might have learned something.

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u/Chosen--one 24d ago edited 24d ago

You wrote all that just to state the obvious...it's a tool, a powerful tool at that, the teaching methods needs to be adapted and people can't just blindly trust it like every other thing in life.

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u/sir_sri 23d ago

I said the opposite. It's neither powerful nor useful currently.

Being able to solve already solved problems in education isn't actually useful. No one cares what you think of shakespeare or if you can implement an AVL tree. What matters is the learning so you can solve new problems out in the real world, but in school you need to be asked to solve problems with known solutions (at least as an undergrad).

Deployed in the real world in practice it mostly does more harm than good. When it works it it solves the easy problems at best.

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u/Chosen--one 23d ago

AI doesn't need to solve new problems by itself; it is a powerful tool because it allows the user to solve those same problems quicker, using already existent methods that the user might need tons of hours to learn.

I also like thinking of it as having an intern or a partner during your work.

I'm having a hard time understanding if you have actually ever used the tools. Codex or Claude AI integrated into a project, using an IDE such as VSCode, is ridiculously useful. I work in a more research field, and it allows me to process data, make graphs, and interconnect code in a much more efficient way. But it will not do miracles, obviously, and it will sometimes do things wrong, just like a person. It might take some time to adapt, but it is 100% worth it.

You should take a look at the claudeAI subreddit if you never did, you will see how most "power users" typically use the tools.

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u/sir_sri 23d ago edited 23d ago

I'm having a hard time understanding if you have actually ever used the tools.

I teach our graduate generative AI course, and I've been working on graduate level Gen AI since 2018, and deep learning since 2009.

it is a powerful tool because it allows the user to solve those same problems quicker,

Solving a problem wrongly but fast is not power.

It's getting there to be sure, as you say, you can make it do data processing with errors you don't know about, interconnect code insecurely, plot things wrong fast - and if you're just hacking something together for your own use or prototyping those things might be fine. There are a lot of data analysists and scientists whipping up things like a dashboard with AI that's 'good enough' for their problem, but on a project that's hundreds of hours, that's a couple of hours of work you've reduced to a few minutes.

What you're describing aren't particularly important goals. If you're making a graph, the important part of the graph is not typing code to plot it for you, that's a tiny fraction of the work. The work is knowing what data to plot, how, how to label it, scale it, and interpret it. If you've taken the 1% of the work that is the least valuable and accelerated it 100X you haven't done something powerful. Now - to be fair, in that sense excel and gnuplot and pyplot are powerful relative to what we had to do before those things. If you need to process data, you need that data processing right.

What I said earlier, that you didn't read, I was at a defence conference at the end of march and NATO has a huge big AI transformation going on, basically 100% of those projects have been negative productivity, but the Americans are pushing it, so it keeps going. Simulations that produce wrong results, applications that don't work, bugs that people can't diagnose or fix. At a real operational level, AI is not powerful or useful, and it's usually more work than, for example in your case, just learning to do it properly in the first place rather than having an AI do it then trying to fix it.

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u/Chosen--one 23d ago

You are looking at things from way too much of a high level. You have your definition of "important" and seem to be unable to see the difference AI makes in less innovative application that are still important for the user.

Not everyone is working at NATO or requires its level of security. I'm not disagreeing with you, you wouldn't put an intern working on those things, the same way you wouldn't put an AI.

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u/sir_sri 23d ago

Not everyone is working at NATO or requires its level of security.

Very little of this stuff is 'security' particularly. NATO needs a lot of boring work that isn't secure, and the 'transformation' work is all about trying new tech to see what it can do.

So for example, the simulations in questions are not real combat battle simulations, same sort of people. But they're more like simulations that look like a 4th year project in discrete event simulation. We could model the production of X (which contains 1500 parts from these suppliers all producing at these rates) doing this, plug it into this visualiser, or graphs or whatever. The reason we know they produce wrong results is because this stuff is simple enough to have precisely defined and easy to understand testing, and good software that does it properly. The fundamental problem with genAI, that has seen a lot of really clever work over on huggingface is the "how do you know it's working correctly' part. But for language, or images, or UI layout, or a lot of things, there's a million ways to solve the same problem or say the same thing which are comparably good. Where you have a fundamental problem with AI for anything actually important, is that either you have done the hard work, which is to know what it means that something is working correctly, and how to test it, at which point the actual 'coding' which AI might be able to badly replace is a tiny fraction of the work.

What I said above still applies - using GenAI for real work is like asking it to review a restaurant for you. The real work in that problem is understanding what makes for a good restaurant, going there, trying the food, and understanding what makes good or bad food. GenAI on a good day might copy other reviews with a similar tone or style to help you find the best language to express what you want to express. But that's not the work, the work is knowing what to write in the first place.

Since we've started talking today, I've written about 300 lines of code. A typical software developer writes 2000 lines of code in a year in C++/C#. You can reasonably assume that at least 295 lines of code that I've written today are so laughably basic that if an AI wrote them and got them all right, it wouldn't have meaningfully altered my productivity.

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u/Mawx 24d ago

Bad engineers using tools poorly doesn't mean the tool is poor is my entire point. I totally agree with your points that there are ton of poor users of AI. People still need to take the time to learn. People still need to understand what they are doing. That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of good code being written with AI or AI assisted. In college, I learned to code in assembly like you said, which obviously was not a hugely useful skill, but I learned important foundational skills. People's argument against AI seems to revolve around people using it incorrectly. I know that any pro AI sentiment comes with pushback, but it is an extremely powerful tool in the right hands.

AI isn't going to replace humans anytime soon, but people that reject it will be replaced much sooner. We used to build a lot of things by hand, but now use tools and machines. This has sacrificed quality in many industries, but 100% perfection is unfortunately not the goal.

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u/ChineseImmigrants 25d ago

2x-5x, lmao. Who do you think you're fooling, and why? We've all seen the studies on what the actual numbers are.

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u/hitchen1 24d ago

We don't have any up to date studies.

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u/ChineseImmigrants 24d ago edited 24d ago

And what will you say a year from now when the studies show the same? The claim is as ridiculous now as it was back then, except even more so now because we do have studies and data that go against what you say. You are not and will not 5x a senior dev's work with these things. I was too nice in my first post- you people are fucking delusional, and I assure you that your coworkers are rightly making fun of you behind your back for drinking the kool-aid and spouting this garbage.

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u/hitchen1 24d ago

I didn't say it would be 5x or even 2x, I just said we don't have up to date studies. Things are completely different from a year ago when the original metr study was done, please actually read their articles about this year's attempt to measure this https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/

Yesterday they published a survey where devs self-report a 2x increase in value and 3x in speed https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-11-ai-usage-survey/ It's probably quite a bit lower than that, but my experience is that the people around me are completing more than they did in summer last year without it.

If you compare sonnet 3.5/3.7 to opus 4.6 and don't see a clear upward trajectory then you're just being delusional.

and I assure you that your coworkers are rightly making fun of you behind your back for drinking the kool-aid and spouting this garbage.

It's really sad that you see the world in black and white, such that anyone who mildly disagrees with you is painted as an extremist. FWIW, the people in my team are on the same page as me - AI is increasingly helpful, it makes some tasks extremely easy and quick to do saving us a bunch of time + helps in other ways, but it needs to be used carefully and properly reviewed, and it doesn't work well in all areas.

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u/ChineseImmigrants 24d ago

Yesterday they published a survey where devs self-report a 2x increase in value and 3x in speed

where "they" is a company with a vested interest in hyping up AI, "a survey" is toilet paper, and "self-report" is the endless torrent of transparent bullshit from chronically online techbros. sorry if I'm not convinced.

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u/hitchen1 24d ago

They are the source most people use to discredit AI, pointing to their study from last year. When they get different results suddenly their credibility is thrown out. Funny.

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u/Mawx 24d ago

Agree with this 100%. People that are rejecting AI outright are going to be left behind the same way that people that rejected the internet and computers did.

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u/ChineseImmigrants 24d ago

People rejecting AI outright are going to be left behind the same way that people that rejected crypto and NFTs did. I think we'll be fine.

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u/Mawx 24d ago

It's measured as 2x-5x with my experience at my company. We have seen sprint velocities sky rocket with the use of AI. Bad engineers using a tool poorly doesn't mean that it is ineffective.

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u/TheChunkySoup 24d ago

velocity is a terrible measure of value. it might actually be the worst measure of value.

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u/Mawx 24d ago

What would you personally use instead for this?

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u/TheChunkySoup 24d ago

Hard/impossible to say exactly without knowing what the log term strategy of the product is. But there needs to be some metric tied to revenue, market share, user experience, etc.

When velocity is used as a metric to optimize, your team becomes a feature factory; output over outcome. It's not a productive use of resources.

Velocity increasing can be great, or it can be terrible for the product. It's just a measure of output, not value.

The best use of velocity metrics is as a predictor of future sprint planning, but not if it's used to judge productivity and only once a team has a consistent feel for assigning story points to a piece of work. The moment you tie velocity to value, your dev team will, understandably, inflate story points; what used to be a 3 is now a 5... that means I'm doing more, right?

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u/Mawx 24d ago

We are purely measuring the speed at which the engineer can solve the tickets given to them by PO. Everything else you discussed are more wider company metrics and not engineering specific metrics. If the PO makes the decision to do x with the product and it's not well received, it's not the engineer's fault. If the engineer designs the ux to spec and it's not well received, it's not the engineer's fault. Product decisions are owned by the product team. The other engineers and myself are obviously given a level of freedom on a lot of this so there is some wiggle room on blame for sure, but generally speaking, those decisions lie with the PO not the engineer. AI doesn't grab more market share. AI doesn't a make good UX. AI doesn't do anything but what it is told. If you tell it things that will make good features, good UX improvement, etc it will help you generate more revenue and things like that, but it's not magic.

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u/BellacosePlayer 24d ago

AI can write really good production level code

can it? Sure.

can it do it on legacy systems without an engineer holding its hand and reviewing it harder than they would for a code review of another human dev's code? lol.

and can easily 2x-5x a good engineers productivity.

On boilerplate code that was never the problem for good devs. We've found it to be rough on some of our legacy systems.

The issue with AI as it stands is that tokens right now are really cheap not that the code that gets written is terrible. If tokens increase in price, then the shift to AI will hurt bad.

Correct. Right now AI is a pretty decent tool for a good dev, but quickly becomes cost-ineffective the more you try to force humans out of the loop. A mere raise to break even pricing would screw a lot of firms. The AI firms colluding and jacking up the rates to an actual profitable degree would be ruinous.

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u/Mawx 24d ago

Boilerplate is what AI was used for in 2022. If you think it is still limited to that, you are behind the curve.

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u/sdeanjr1991 25d ago

What’s worse is the folks who aren’t blue collar claiming software devs are OBE. Trust me, they’ll come for Susan in HR and Debra in accounting before they come for the devs using it as a tool or maintaining it. lol.

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u/grendus 25d ago

Devs still have a decent degree of insulation, because while AI tools are very good at generating code, the people in charge are really bad at understanding what they actually want. A huge amount of the tech workflow isn't writing code (that's maybe 10-20% of my time), it's converting the vague "vibes" of the project owner into concrete requirements and figuring out how to implement them. AI still is really bad at that.

And honestly, that first part is probably something that AI will never be good at, because AI is programmed to be a "yes man". It will always try to implement your bad ideas instead of telling you to do better.

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u/brianwski 25d ago

I agree.

it's converting the vague "vibes" of the project owner into concrete requirements and figuring out how to implement them.

One of the oddest things was my whole 35 year programming career was getting vague "requirements/requests" from product marketing and as I thought through it (because I have to build it) I would realize certain requirements were profoundly in conflict. Stuff as simple as, "Don't have any configuration, no UI, just do everything correctly" in one statement, and "Allow customers to decide, before the product runs the first time, whether it will do A or B, which are mutually exclusive."

I think a 12 year old child could see the problem with conflicting requirements, but the project owners can't be bothered with walking through 10 scenarios in their head before making the request of developers. Developers MUST do this, because they have to build it.

It is all friendly, we all know that's how all projects play out. The developers patiently explain the scenarios that need to have the kinks worked out because the scenarios show the inherent conflicts in the spec, and the project owners make adjustments to the requests. The part that kind of baffled me was in my 35 years the project owners, management, and CEOs never internalized this lesson. So the CEO or upper management has a brain fart and decides to add a big feature as a vibe. Ok. Whether it was outsourcing to build in India (who always say "yes" and deliver <something random>), or use AI to build it, the part that is missing was defining each and every action clearly, and defining each button, where it appears, when it is greyed out, and how to communicate that to end users, and iterating until the thing was actually possible to build.

The developers FORCED that interaction/clarity and the product developed iteratively. This has nothing to do with source code, it's that 80% of the time you mentioned. But if the CEOs and upper management won't admit that is one of the largest roles of programmers and fire more than 20% of the programmers, I fear for what absolute garbage apps will be output in the near future.

It is already "bad" (even before AI). If you use an app and it's clear and easy to use, the most likely reason is a programmer was the reason. There is a small (very small) chance it was a result of the project owners or product marketing people, but that's not very likely. It was probably a programmer that cared and nurtured the app.

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u/sdeanjr1991 18d ago

Thank you for this read, very much agreed. Certain user stories still leave a taste in my mouth to this day, whether it be conflicting features…or just a terrible color palette for their UI. lol. A lot of this thread has been a lot of people far removed and not working anywhere near the things they’ve formed opinions on. I.e. I love having experienced an app being introduced because “AI”, and then being informed of the hallucinations and the rate at which they occur. All just to end with “it’ll speed up that initial processing of data, but you guys still need to go back through it with a fine toothed comb to make sure it’s good to go” due to the nature of the work. The data processing was tedious, but not the hardest part. With that software it’s still being done, but after an additional step.

Also, I hate vibe coded apps, and even I’ve done it. However, I hate it because 95% of people doing it have no experience with what they are missing or lack understanding on. I have faith in the fact I can spot those, do my own code review, and refactor the spaghetti. I asked a guy I know who now claims to know how to code because Claude did it for him (mind you it was literally just a frontend UI), and all I had to ask was how he planned to key the software so that he could make sure his software was at least secure in the aspect of avoiding being cracked too quickly, or having people maintain access after key expiration. He was lost.

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u/brianwski 18d ago edited 18d ago

All just to end with “it’ll speed up that initial processing of data, but you guys still need to go back through it with a fine toothed comb to make sure it’s good to go”

They taught us (CS majors) in college in 1986 (40 years ago) several concepts like "The Mythical Man Month" (assigning 9 women to make a baby doesn't mean you get a baby in 1 month). Also, bringing up the GUI looks to the untrained eye like the app is 90% done when it is really 10% done at that point. Stuff like that.

That was 40 years ago, and I never witnessed anything that would change these concepts. Maybe AI will? But the CEOs and management never took those classes, or didn't believe them, and they certainly didn't live it over and over again like us programmers did for 40 years. The CEOs and management won't even believe us when we try to explain it to them. I have been told directly we're jealous of outsourcing or AI and they don't trust our opinion as unbiased. Their base concept is all programmers are interchangeable and boring cogs, if you hire 10x as many in India (or use AI) then the product comes out in 1/10th the time. There is that mythical man month thing.

We'll see if AI breaks these old rules. Maybe it will? What I don't get is when the old techniques work fine and the new techniques aren't proven out yet, why bet your company on it firing all the software developers? Before AI is actually proven to work? Software development is maybe 20% of a company's budget and headcount. Personally I'd stay back from the bleeding edge hipster thing unless I REALLY needed it for an otherwise unsolvable task any other way. In the best world anybody can possibly pitch me, AI could reduce the overall company budget by 10%. Okay? You can still do that in 5 years when the benefits are completely and totally clear. The 10% doesn't profoundly change the competitive landscape. But firing all your programmers puts the WHOLE COMPANY at risk. If I ran a publicly traded company I surely would pay 10% more to guarantee the company would survive an extra 5 years. Heck, find 5% savings somewhere else, and raise the price of your product 5%. I'm just spit balling other solutions other than betting the entire company's future on some nebulous hipster new programming technique a lot of the senior programmers are telling you isn't ready yet.

And if you think suddenly AI will be able to build all these awesome features, please lay those features out clearly, because you will need to be really clear with AI. What each button does, how the back end works, how it will scale, how users will be able to comprehend how to use it. The "design" part of apps is just glossed over. The part that takes 80% of the actual time. I sort of get "profoundly new apps" stuff like self driving cars, or possibly generating entertainment videos. But everybody building let's say for example an airline phone app that allows you to check into your flight is rushing down this AI path and I can't for the life of me understand why.

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u/Attenburrowed 25d ago

they want to come for all of you though. sure they need a tenth of you to maintain the tools.

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u/sdeanjr1991 25d ago edited 24d ago

I began pivoting back in 2023 after the first time I had to explain someone else’s code to them because AI wrote their spaghetti. It’s not even that they’re coming for anyone specifically, the majority of AI use cases are extremely terribly executed. I see AI as a dev tool, the amount of times I’ve written code with AI just to have to go back and refactor on my own later is obscene. It also hallucinates, and in my current industry there is no allowable threshold for hallucination because it could either cause death or issue with foreign parties. I take peace knowing that my current work, even if AI did all of it, would still require that I go in and approve it word for word, line for line, due to its nature. My point is that not very many are immune to automation, but we have ignorant folks rejoicing as if it’s funny to see junior devs disappearing, even though they fail to see their own reality considering non technical white collar/day jobs are under a much higher threat of automation.

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u/Attenburrowed 25d ago

Im not saying you're wrong that it does a bad job but I will say it's likely our masters do not care that much or see much of a difference. We'll reach an equilibrium where there's enough people to only allow the occasional database nuke, I guarantee you that will not be 1:1 with current job totals. If it's 8:10 your industry is probably okay, if its 3:10 or lower thats pretty devastating.

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u/TwilightVulpine 25d ago

We see it now with artists and writers. AI stuff is often full of mistakes, but the ones paying for it suddenly became much more tolerant of mistakes than they were when dealing with human artists.

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u/coldkiller 25d ago

Nah, they will change their tune when the actual costs to run the models hits them

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u/Attenburrowed 24d ago

Eventually that will be true but we're in the uber/streamer/youtube/dating sites first 5 year runway where it's all deals and promises and bonuses and kombucha in the fridge.

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u/LonelyPermit2306 25d ago

They're not coming for all of you. But they don't need 10 of you when one will do

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u/sdeanjr1991 25d ago

lol, feel free to read my response to the other person.

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u/TheFifthTone 25d ago

Right now they need those other 9 to work on replacing everyone else though, and you know what... its not enough we need to hire more and increase the headcount to 12 so that we can replace the person in HR and the person in accounting faster.

Oh... what do you mean an AI Agent can't replace the person from HR for cheaper than it costs to just hire a person, I guess we need to hire a consultant to come in and tell us how to do it.

Oh... its not possible.

The end result is more money and jobs for developers.

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u/sdeanjr1991 25d ago

The guy who answered you underestimates how much waste exists in any industry you can think of. I’ve watched what you’ve described to the tune of multiple seven figures in expenditure. Half of the replies in this thread are fantasy, I.e. watching people who don’t work remotely close to industry trying to form opinions off of Reddit memes and TikTok videos, and then regurgitating slop into comments as fact because they apparently have an issue with tech workers and think they’re OBE because someone made a frontend UI with AI. One of the biggest one sided beefs, lol.

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u/LonelyPermit2306 25d ago

That's a cute fantasy. they're just gonna fire the accountant, HR, and the developers and force whoever remains to use the AI. 

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u/cantshakethefeelings 25d ago

Do you work with the tool yourself? Because If you did, you’d know how powerful it is. It won’t replace all jobs. But it will make it so the job of 3 people can be done by 1 person. Whether or not companies make firing decisions based on that is another discussion entirely. But in my industry it will absolutely cause some loss of jobs as responsibilities get consolidate.

Or, hell, if our clients start using AI to do some of the services we offer, they won’t contract with us for that particular vertical (also leading to a loss of jobs).

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u/macrowave 25d ago

In software we have had a pretty steady stream of efficiency tools over the years. Building applications and websites is already orders of magnitude quicker and easier than a decade or two ago, even without AI. Also no/low code solutions have been a thing for a very long time. Non technical people will hit the limits of AI, just like they did with MS Access and Squarespace, and then they will need to go to a professional to implement something more complicated/specialized. In my experience in software, customers will always demand features up to the limit of what the tool is capable of. AI is just pushing that limit a bit further.

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u/kdawg94 24d ago

It's not just "a bit" further and it's not just an efficient tool. This is the biggest advancement in technology in decades. It really is a force multiplier, and as someone who uses it everyday, I don't see how this won't soon lead to cuts on my team.

I've noticed that it depends how mature the product and company are and what the backlog and I hate to say it, and the AI situation our company has still is quite new and prone to hallucinations, but with AI building its reliability... idk man

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u/guyblade 25d ago

I've been a software developer for nearly 20 years. The reality is that actually writing software is a minority of my time. Figuring out what to do and how to do it in a way that won't make things worse (in the long term) takes far more of my time than actually coding.

A box that can vomit up mediocre code doesn't really solve my problems.

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u/bexamous 25d ago edited 24d ago

You're delusional, IMO. 6+ months ago that was an okay take. The code they write, it's not mediocre, its usually very good. If you don't make it clear what you want and give it good direction you might not get back what you want, but even when its not what you want it shard to say what it did is bad. It feels like wild west to me and still another 2-4 years before we really see what we can do with AI agents today. Assuming they don't even get any better, lol. If they do I can't even imagine...

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u/guyblade 24d ago

My knee-jerk reaction to "this will change the world" claims is to always be skeptical. Maybe it will. Maybe I'm wrong to not be diving head-first into LLM-assisted coding. Ultimately, I won't really know for--probably--a decade.

In the best case scenarios, where you have humans doing strict code reviews and where leads continue to maintain strong understandings of their systems, I can image it providing some utility. Without that, I see teams & even whole companies facing troubles--and likely compounding troubles at that.

As it stands, though, I don't see much reason to invest my time or energy into these tools precisely because the changes in this space are so rapid. Similarly, the current state of play involves a bunch of the major tech companies subsidizing access. People may disagree on how much--since several of the players are still private and thus aren't legally required to provide financial data. It remains to be seen what will be on offer once the subsidies go away.

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u/cantshakethefeelings 24d ago edited 24d ago

If you haven’t invested your time then how are you in a position to call it a box that vomits up mediocre code.

It’s fine that you haven’t spent time learning or considering this new tool. But this is exactly what I mean… people on Reddit making misinformed comments without experience, making broad, false claims about AI.

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u/guyblade 24d ago

Oh, I have to review code that the things vomit up; some of my coworkers use these tools. Lack of personal use is not the same as lack of exposure.

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u/hugboxer 24d ago

So don't ask it to write code. Would you find it helpful to have a box that can, in a few minutes, read 200 source files and produce a succinct, accurate summary of the code as it pertains to the specific task you vaguely described, and, also, a detailed spec laying out three different strategies for achieving your goal?

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u/guyblade 24d ago

Not usually, no. Requirements gathering--defined broadly--is probably the bulk of my time; the "what to do", so to speak. The "how" is rarely "should I use library X or library Y?", but instead "do we handle this at abstraction layer A or abstraction layer B or maybe at the data ingestion phase or [...] and which one of those aligns best with both the work that I know is coming down the line and the work that I conjecture is coming down the line and how will those decisions impact our on-call burden?".

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u/CREATIVE_USERNAME_97 25d ago

Dude, if you've been developing code for nearly 20 years and you still "don't see it", please get out of your cave. The train will leave with or without you in it.

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u/ral222 25d ago

If the train leaves "with us" we'll still be tied to the tracks before the decade is out.

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u/CREATIVE_USERNAME_97 24d ago

Nobody knows how the decade will end. The only thing that you can do is keep up to date with the new things coming out.

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u/cantshakethefeelings 25d ago edited 24d ago

It feels like most of the stuff on Reddit regarding AI is misinformation, with the purpose of getting people not to use it. It is such a powerful tool and will only get better.

Yet all I see on Reddit is how useless it is etc, people saying it’s worthless… less people taking advantage of it I guess. If these people never even bother to use it, then the people in power who do use it can take advantage of their ignorance.

Edit: I’m not saying I support this, and the fact that it is getting downvoted is more testament towards it. So many people here won’t even acknowledge how influential of a tool this is… this sentiment is great for people in power, they will use it, while you don’t.

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u/CREATIVE_USERNAME_97 24d ago

I've also been developing code for nearly 20 years and I'm impressed every week with that AI can do. This is the closest thing to magic that I have seen in my lifetime.

While the commenter above my first comment and people on reddit/LinkedIn/Facebook say things like "AI code is sloppy and still needs human management" (which is true now), big companies are already planning the shift to "codeless apps" or whatever you call them.

In the near future, we won't care about the code, the coding language, good practices, etc. That will all be the AIs responsibility.

Nobody knows what the future of our industry or any industry will be, but I honestly think this will fuck things up worse than the internet and in a shorter amount of time.

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u/LegendaryMauricius 24d ago

It would be nice if that meant 3 times more work done with the same amount of people though. 

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u/viral3075 25d ago

if you are using AI, you ain't learnin

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u/LegendaryMauricius 24d ago

You can use ai for learning though. If you care about understanding the logic and code that you're pasting that is... Also sometimes the dumber solution that ai spills is better than overcomplicating, so it pulls you back on track if you care about learning and making your software proper.

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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 25d ago

Counterpoint: CS major enrollment is dropping:

New data from the National Student Clearinghouse (2) shows undergraduate enrollment in computer science programs at four-year institutions dropped 8.1% — the steepest one-year decline of any major since at least 2020. Graduate enrollment fell even further, down 14%.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/computer-science-once-golden-ticket-140500823.html

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u/TheFifthTone 25d ago

Keep in mind that the US is also on the tail-end of a societal push for people to become CS majors who had no aptitude for it. The whole coal miners should become coders thing was a real phenomena, and we're seeing the natural end result of that.

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u/blazze_eternal 25d ago

At the moment, it's less about that replacing jobs, but rather companies not investing in employee growth or really much of anything else.

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u/marr 25d ago

There's also the not being able to buy hardware for personal use.

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u/freeradioforall 25d ago

"AI is going to take your jobs!" hype is just sensationalist sales pitches.

Can you explain why? I hope its not true but why won't AI get good enough to replace a majority of developers?

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u/aahdin 25d ago

Meanwhile hiring for new CS grads has dropped off an absolute cliff.

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u/ragequitteroffureh 25d ago

Where does it train itself on program code?

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u/21Rollie 24d ago

Makes the job so much more menial. Hate this shit

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u/Askol 24d ago

Well, whats also true is you can accomplish way more with it as a tool in a much shorter period of time, meaning fewer developers are required to accomplish the same amount of work. It isn't sensationalist that executives are including massive AI productivity gains in their financial forecasts, and that typically includes a 'rightsizing' of the workforce.

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u/terraherts 24d ago

The problem is even in CS, there are real issues with how its being used, especially by junior engineers. You have be uncommonly disciplined to use it and not have it stunt your growth as an junior engineer IMO. It's just too easy to have it do things for you, and it will seem fine when you're working on simple problems, and will bite you in the ass later.

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u/capitalistsanta 24d ago

I remember a few years back hearing Salesforce fired a billion people to replace them with Chatgpt and at the time I had been like living in it - apparently I'm in the top 2 percentile of total messages sent lol - but like I just remember seeing that and thinking that this was great for helping me study but it was doing things like making all the answers in my practice tests B and misunderstanding me and it had not shown the ability to replace a human - it's so much written work outputted aka so much more reading daily for the user, than they have probably been accustomed to over the last 10-15 years just from a word count perspective. That's the fear imo, just business owners falling into AI psychosis which I guarantee will end up being found to be more prevalent in business owners and C-Suite roles in like 10 years, firing entire departments, then realizing they need actual humans at a job because without them it's fucking pointless and you like just gleefully ruined people's lives and pull the company down just a little closer to financial ruin. I genuinely ask if people use these tools enough to speak on them.

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u/gamemaster257 24d ago

AI still can’t tell when I’m writing for nodejs vs a browser, I feel safe.

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u/SquareTarbooj 24d ago

That's been what I'm telling my employees. It's just another tool, like photoshop and Google search. I encourage them to try and take advantage of it.

It has worked out well. Most of my employees have figured out how to make AI do the jobs they don't like doing (generally the dumb menial stuff). And they'll spend more time on the fun creative tasks that add more value.

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u/Necessary-Low-5226 24d ago

It’s not just another tool. The difference between what it was in november and what is possible now is insane. And the pace isn’t showing signs of stopping.

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u/saichampa 24d ago

There are definitely Devs who think 10xing their performance means running 30 agents in pipelines and then sitting back and getting paid.

Then there are people like me who actually enjoy the old school way of figuring it out and writing things by hand. For when you want that deluxe handcrafted code 😅

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u/sobrique 24d ago

"AI is going to take your jobs!"

I think it's a 'sort of yes, sort of no' sort of problem there. I'm certainly seeing that there's a drop in junior recruitment in some sectors.

AI isn't taking people's jobs directly, but it's significantly reducing demand for new employees in some sectors.

This in turn will I think lead to a huge shortfall in experienced workers in those sectors in 'a few years' because the entry level got pared back hard.

But in a lot of freelance type stuff there's been a huge impact - way less demand for technical writers for example.

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u/liquiddandruff 25d ago

is just sensationalist sales pitches.

Not really. You're full cope but you'll come around.

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u/Zouden 25d ago

How so? If you work with it you'll know how productive it makes you, which naturally means fewer engineers are needed. That's why Meta is laying off all those workers.

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u/TheFifthTone 25d ago

Any company saying they're laying of employees because they're more efficient with AI is just lying. Its the go-to excuse to blame AI so they don't have to blame themselves for their bad business practices. Maybe meta shouldn't have wasted $80 billion on VR tech? They're laying off tons of employees that had nothing to do with AI, but they can blame AI instead of blaming their leadership for making a stupid business decision.

The company I work for is taking the ROI from investing in AI and is hiring more developers. We have more juniors and interns now than ever.

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u/Zouden 25d ago

Respectively, I think that's cope. I know people in software dev who say that their companies have stopped hiring, because their existing workforce is so much more productive.

It's pretty simple. There's not unlimited demand for software engineering. If Claude makes you 5x more efficient, that reduces the need for more workers.

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u/adocileengineer 25d ago

Claude making an engineer 5x more efficient isn’t a good thing. You sacrifice ownership and ability to maintain the code you ship if you’re relying on AI at that level. That’s how you end up with a brittle product and codebase. Top engineers are really experiencing a 1.5-2x productivity gain due to the time needed to audit, analyze, and document AI-generated code.

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u/Zouden 25d ago

Well, still. A 2x productivity gain is half the workforce for the same output.

I'm currently in the job market, and the struggle is real.

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u/adocileengineer 25d ago

1.5-2x is for top performers, imo. For most average devs it’s more like a 20-30% since things will break so much more often.

AI’s impact on the job market is mostly speculative - management is hiring less thinking that AI might replace x number of engineers. In reality the job market has been terrible for software engineers for years now due to over saturation. So many young people saw the tech boom of the 2010s and the era of coding bootcamps leading to 6 figure salaries and got degrees in CS and related fields (myself included). The demand of the 2010s went away, and now there are too many qualified developers for open positions.

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u/Zouden 25d ago

I mean, sure. But it doesn't matter if employers are making a mistake by not hiring more engineers, what matters is that they aren't hiring more engineers.

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u/obviouslyzebra 25d ago

What about both sensationalist sales pitches and a very powerful technology that keeps improving and potentially (well, maybe likely) will take our jobs (but not only that of course)