I’m always seeing this claim:
AI can code better than most humans.
Yet literally every formal study on this says exactly the opposite.
They can’t get a job because they do not possess any skills that are marketable… I hate to break it to you, but going to computer Science school doesn’t make you a coder, and doesn’t make you good at anything.
Tbh I feel like computer science was the most overrated major this past decade and way too many students picked it.
Exactly, as hard as it is to swallow for people, there was a time when coding was a cushy job that you could land after drinking through college. Those days are gone, and it’s back to what it was when I was a dev: you made your own way; You made something awesome and you force companies to look at you and say holy fuck let’s get this person they’ve got something going on.
“AI can code better than most humans.”
They actually mean: After burning millions of tokens and using up the energy of multiple households (for a year) it can code better than an intern.
State of the art AI can indeed code better than most programmers. I can get weeks of work done in a day with $100. I’ve been programming in multiple areas for 30 years.
I’m not saying that a noob can ask an AI to build Google and it will be done; But you’d better believe that an experienced programmer using AI will deliver weeks of high-quality work in a single day.
In this scenario, people with no experience are simply dead in the water. Things that took an experienced team months to build can now be done by a single guy in a few days, and there’s no way that won’t mess with employment.
If I was a young person I would be getting as far from software development as possible. Coding as a job is basically obsolete, people like you will just take time to accept it.
No, it won’t. Programming was and still is a professional job. If somehow corporations are able to throw resources at it to make this profession obsolete, this will be one of the last jobs which get replaced by machines. Hundreds of other jobs would be replaced before it. Corporations would have all the money with nothing to spend on.
If there isn’t a revolution to overthrow this “infinite growth” model now, there will be. It’s either the end of corporations, or humanity.
Even though we live in an utopia, burning all that energy to program isn’t sustainable on this earth. It’s a dead end for this so-called AI.
AI can code better than most humans? BS. Only takes a few features to end up with spaghetti.
I wonder if some bolognese would make it a little bit better… I’ll see myself out
In my experience it doesn’t even take a few features, a medium-size non-trivial script by Claude would not pass review by me without human cleanup.
It doesn’t have to be better, just cheaper.
Do you know why software gets expensive?
It won’t be cheaper for long. It creates a ton of bugs and outright removed features. Without real devs to fix it, companies who replace devs with AI will be left with products that simply don’t work in a matter of months.
Absolutely, but cheaper now is all that matters to the Dunning-Kruger c-suit that runs every business. Besides, they might have already moved on to a different company by the time it becomes a problem, so why should they care?
You tried adding stuff to a spaghetti code base or tried fixing bugs? Half the time you need to rewrite it. It’s not cheaper, you just pay more later.
If it’s cheaper this financial quarter then they don’t care if they have to pay for it the next financial quarter. That’s a future problem!
The same is true of most software built by humans, and AI is able to refactor, if you ask it to.
Not in my experience.
No it can’t.
I think the conclusion that a software engineer can’t find a job due to LLMs is a load of bullshit. I work as one, we are always hiring, just not rubbish candidates…
But the problem is that fresh out of college candidates are generally going to be rubbish, especially when competing against candidates in CA with skills and candidates in lower cost of living areas with a near equivalent education.
Why hire a junior programmer from Stanford at the lower half of their class when you can hire two junior programmers from the University of Warsaw?
This is what killed my love of learning programming. An llm is years beyond me since I’m a noob and it would take 5 years of learning for me to surpass it vs someone typing into it and telling it to code an entire game. Id have to look up every syntax.
Id like to get away from computers since ai has ruined it for the most part and it’d be a lot smarter to learn metal work or woodworking. But I just enjoy computing and its interesting.
Not fresh grads. My company is hiring but we demand experience.
There’s no jobs!
Lands “technical lead” in LA after four months
I’m not in California but I have a CS degree and am going on 15 months of unemployment.
