> I've accepted that in 5-10 years, the vast majority of human devs. and engineers will not touch a single line of code.
Why would companies employ human engineers then? What is the value addition to justify high human salaries. If AI is going to get so good (and I am not saying it won’t happen, that’s a separate debate), why can’t AI figure out the prompts itself?
That is where a lot of people in tech believe things are headed, executives in particular. Fully autonomous AI-driven codebases. “Dark factories.” One agent generating a plan, one writing the code, one responsible for testing and validating, and one to orchestrate the rest.
The idea is software development will follow in the footsteps of physical manufacturing and eventually become fully automated. I think one huge flaw with this belief/comparison is that the automated assembly line is deterministic. LLMs and AI agents are not. Every Tacoma made on the Toyota assembly line is made from the same blueprint. There are no robots deciding on-the-fly whether to use a laser weld or an adhesive, what material to use for a specific component, etc. Now think about how LLMs build software. No matter how strict a harness or detailed spec you give it, it will always make decisions. That is what makes it “agentic” after all.
I've fully automated the software development part in my company. With production apps, no code has been written by hands, no requirement written by hand. Everything is fully automated except the testing part. And testing means the human testable parts are still performed by hands. The resule, with less people we produce more, actually way more. Our cost has gone down, quality has improved litrally. The code is being produced with AI is of higher quality, we employ multiple agents during planning phase and then different agents during execution phase. Sometimes some tasks has to be redone because some agents are better than others. Our release cycle is reduced from 2 weeks to 2 days.
We'll probably get there, once frontier labs RL the fuck out of AI agents sitting in meetings and interpreting incoherent ramblings of business majors into actionable requirements. That's the biggest value human devs currently provide.
Yes, AI for now has significant code quality issues, but that's mostly because it lacks agency to take care of code quality unless you explicitly tell it to. It is good at refactoring its own messes when you even vaguely ask for it. So while something like Astra still needs supervision to produce decent code, I expect that in a year or two it will be unnecessary.
Sorry for being pedantic but content like “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” is not doom scrolling. Is it low quality use of your time, sure, but it’s not doom scrolling
I've noticed a usage shift in the last few years. In 2020, "doomscrolling" originally meant to be stuck scrolling at all the doom-y posts we were bombarded with as the world fell apart around us. As things "stabilized" in the last few years, I've noticed that everyone and myself still tends to use "doomscrolling" even just for when we're stuck, locked in place, scrolling low quality content.
I figure in ten years when someone asks what "doomscrolling" means, we'll probably just shrug and say it means scrolling away to our doom.
I use the phrase "brain rot" for the low quality stuff that I scroll through. I do really hope that we retain the original meaning of "doom scrolling", as I think it's still as relevant today as the COVID days.
Why would companies employ human engineers then? What is the value addition to justify high human salaries. If AI is going to get so good (and I am not saying it won’t happen, that’s a separate debate), why can’t AI figure out the prompts itself?