Here are some mainstream opinions on the topic..
Is it/is it not to blame:
UC Berkley professor:
140K job cuts:
Harder for juniors:
Itās a holiday here so Iāll write a long reply 
What kind of impact do you think AI will have on programming/tech jobs?
I continue to think the long term impact will be incremental rather than transformative. If this were ditch digging, the current trajectory of āAIā is more like a better shovel than a replacement digger. Iāve used AI to write boilerplate and do some code translation tasks which it has done surprisingly well at (though pretty much never perfectly). But that is a far cry from being able to do all of my job which includes:
The idea that LLMs or even LLM-powered agents can replace junior SWEs simply makes no sense to me since writing code is only part of the job.
Itās telling that the video which makes the case for SWE replacement under the heading ā140k job cutsā was probably the worst one. Though I do thank you for including it since it is a genuine opinion held by many. The video starts by noting all the job losses in the sector, claims āAI is probably to blameā, but then proceeds to not argue for that position in any way. It includes some quick cuts of some people restating the thesis of the video. But we donāt know who those people are or why we should trust their opinion. The video then makes the eminently baseless claim that ānow thereās AI that can do the job of an entire team of software engineers and do it more efficiently.ā Utterly ridiculous. Show me literally any example of this. Then it proceeds to provide the only āevidenceā for the claim by saying that tech leaders are encouraging people to use AI in their work. But if workers are being replaced en masse, who is it exactly whoās supposed to be using AI?!
Pretty much every negative thing said about the job market can potentially be attributed to economic factors rather than AI directly replacing workers. So if youāre arguing that the negative factors are due to AI specifically, you need a good argument. Iām personally most aligned with the first video in this regard. At the very least, Iāve yet to encounter an argument which changes my mind.
If I had to choose what I think will be the most tangible, lasting impact to the field, itās that familiarity with LLM-powered workflows will become an area of expected competency. Akin to working with an editor/IDE.
Have you or anyone you know been impacted directly?
No. But Iād be very curious to hear of a first hand account of this happening.
Does it concern or worry you?
I am concerned. Not about AI taking jobs because it can actually do the entirety of those jobs, though. Iām concered about the hit to the economy after the AI bubble bursts. That will affect our employment.
I also want to throw a wrench into the discussion by questioning the ability of SWEs to meaningfully weigh in on the economic impact of AI. You might think that, as weāre in the trenches, weād have some special insight on the subject. We obviously have inside knowledge about exactly what AI is/isnāt capable of because weāre the ones using it. But I argue we donāt necessarily because the question is also about economics which isnāt our field.
Thereās an infamous comment on the /r/badeconomics forum about the CGP Greyās 2014 video āHumans need not applyā (renamed at some point) replying directly the the creator himself. The comment states near the end:
More generally we argue historically automation has not reduced employment. Automation has historically acted as a multiplier on productivity which drives demand for human labor. Pre-singularity its very hard to imagine this changing, we will undoubtedly encounter disruption effects (people will have the wrong skills, their earnings will reflect this matching issue rather then unemployment doing so) but from an economics perspective there is little difference between replacing a field worker with a tractor and an office worker with an algorithm. Certainly the office worker needs to find a new job, if they donāt have demanded skills that job may not offer earnings growth opportunities but it doesnāt imply unemployment anymore then the mechanization of agriculture did. The 2nd question in that IGM survey represents the SBTC split, while SBTC is reasonably well supported it lacks clear consensus; its not clear which of the two inequality scenarios will play out.
Basically, many economists arenāt sold on the idea that automation via pre-singularity AI will result in the level of economic disruption that is often claimed. And I think their reasoning needs to be contended with. (GCP Grey never replied, btw.)
I make this point because I think itās easy to jump from āAI has had or will have this or that effect on my day to dayā to āthis is what the job market will look like due to thatā without fully connecting the dots. Iām guilty of this myself!
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts Billy - I hope you enjoyed your day off 
I echoed similar in our recent How useful do you think AI tools are/will be? (Poll) but I am beginning to feel it might happen quicker than expected. In fact some people in our poll (12%) felt AI is so useful that they consider it a necessity. 22% think it will be a necessity within 5 years, and over 50% saying within 10 years.
If what has been said by Hinton and others, that a dev with AI will probably replace lots of devs within the same company to do the same work, then that will more than likely have an impact on the economy and society - because weāve seen similar in other sectors. Here in Wales mine closures had a lasting negative impact, including high unemployment, lower earnings, poorer health outcomes, and significant general social disruption in former mining communities that havenāt fully recovered. That was down to just 25,000 job losses.
I was actually talking to someone earlier and they mentioned that in the US there have been more job losses in the past month than there has for any month in the last two decades. I think this was the article they were referring to:
Nov 6 (Reuters) - U.S.-based employers cut more than 150,000 jobs in October, marking the biggest reduction for the month in more than 20 years, a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas said on Thursday as industries adopt AI-driven changes and intensify cost cuts.
The same person also said he knows people who have lost (dev) jobs recently. He said the latest he heard was a Go developer. Iād like to think more popular languages might be hit first, but weāve already seen it fairly close to home:
Iād go as far as to say that even economists donāt have any real idea how things are going to pan out tbh, not just because itās uncharted territory but because the implications of AI need a certain level of understanding of what these tools are actually capable of. Perhaps if they got together with Hinton that could make for an interesting report, but as of now, Iām personally just as interested in hearing the thoughts of people like you and the friend I was speaking to earlier - those who are working in the space itself and who may notice the impact before anyone else 
In short, I donāt know, and this is a really hard topic to answer without going on a long rant about āAI.ā
I donāt know anyone who has been impacted directly, and it somewhat concerns and worries me. Iām extremely lucky to work for a company that doesnāt force me to use āAIā, though they do enable and encourage anyone who wants to.
Iām a mostly a CRUD developer. Of course Iām a bit more than that, and I really enjoy the artistry around designing and writing (and reading!) code. Apparently a whole ton of people do not, though, and I get it. But as @billylanchantin pointed out, any extra time āAIā is currently buying you will not last long. Certainly enjoy it while you can but as soon as the non-developers become comfortable with the concept of āAI,ā weāre going to be in for a world of exponentially higher output expectations. Remember, āworking lessā was a promise of computers in general so many decades ago.
In short, my optimistic version of the future is technological revolt. There are already signs of itā¦ see: CD/cassette revival, EDC community, travel journal community, paper journal community in general, kids finding out that lunch time without phones is actually fun in a non-ironic/regressive way. I know Iām sounding pretty hippy-dippy here, but Iām getting old so I only need to last until my retirement 
Hopefully by then āAIā will actually be curing cancer as opposed to the utter nonsense itās currently being used for.
It will be bad for software engineering as a career and bad for technology generally and cause a regression. I do for sure agree with the above comment about the technological revolt.
In short, my optimistic version of the future is technological revolt.
I would much prefer to have cassettes and CDs again than keep dealing with streaming services, ads, and having to VPN to different countries to watch things.
But to the point of AI, CEOs and managers will gleefully think they can let engineers go and not replace them because āof course AI will make our other engineers so much more productiveā. And a lot of garbage will be pumped out because of that, and for a while. I predict it will mostly be a lot of proof-of-concept type projects that will then be put into production because managers and stakeholders are impatient. Those hastily produced applications will be nearly unmaintainable because of what LLMs pump out.
Systems wholesale will need to be replaced and bugs we arenāt even aware of that are currently baked into every LLM are being injected into project being produced because āwe need to be efficientā and get things done quickly.
Fiio makes decent portable walkman and discman. I own the walkman (and still have my dadās that I used as a kid) and considering the discman. I do have a CD player but itās a bit wonky at this point. Iām also on the lookout for a good mp3 player! Everything is so ugly, though, lol.
I realize it isnāt there right now, but it is coming. Not with llms as they are right now, but gradually in the future of algorithmic and hardware improvement that will come down the line.
I think software dev will be one of the first things to be hit. While there will always have to be technical people in the loop to direct, there wonāt be huge swaths of the population hunched over laptops all day making little bitty improvements for huge amounts of cash like there have been for the last few decades.
Iāve noticed my less technical coworkers sometimes can barely operate their browsers, but they are completely capable of prompting an llm, getting good images, video, even workable code that would have taken me ages just a few years ago. Iāve seen a firefighter with zero computer skills build and wire up, and code all by himself something to measure the altitude of his amateur rocketry launches.
And so yeah, it isnāt great yet, but it will never be any worse than it is today. So it is important that you all keep on top of it.
I still donāt really buy this. If itās going to be as good as everyone says it is, then why would I waste my time with it now while all the eager beavers are ironing out the kinks? Various āprompting skillsā keep becoming outdated. Of course I donāt know whatās coming and I could very well be wrong, so itās a gamble, but considering what the goal is it seems that those of us who will eventually be forced to use it wonāt have much of a learning curve (if any of us have jobs at all). Based on some current logic, it seems the smartest thing to do to stay in tech is to work in AI itself.
This article just hit DT:
MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce
Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.
The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The index simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI and corresponding policy.
I think AIās biggest impact on jobs will be when the bubble bursts and the effects are felt all through the economy.
Unfortunately @billylanchantin more or less nailed the topicās nuances and reasoning so I am left feeling almost useless trying to contribute. 
I am not an economist and I will not pretend that I am. But I donāt quite agree that us the programmers are naive or blind to it. Our systems thinking does help us analyze things on a decent level.
To that end, AI companies are actually painting targets on their backs; them taking away livelihoods makes them actively hated and gradually worked against by other, also quite big, players ā do you think big chains of grocery stores want to see 12% revenue reduction? They will start doing something.
I feel like, in the bigger picture, we are gradually entering a phase where mega-capitalists will start turning on each other. The market is not infinite and many of the AI companies are discovering this in a very painful way (most of them operate at a loss).
Sorry, that was a bit of a digression. But still related.
On to the topic itself, more directly: AI will not replace barely any programmer longer-term. The fact that the ruling class wants that to be true and that they are firing many people is just the effect of a collective delusion ā one that already is beginning to fade because many vibe-coded apps cannot be easily extended by AI, or when they are, they have loads of bugs.
The thing that most people miss about the influence of AI / LLMs is this:
It has nearly peaked and it cannot do much more than it already does.
The next play are sub-agents and complex agentic workflows. I like those because they play to the LLMās strengths: smaller-scope tasks. So the sub-agents workflows have a real chance of actually replacing a programmer.
But who gives them the detailed plans? The clueless project managers that are hand-waving requirements and are leaving you, the programmer, to define the projectās scope and priorities, i.e. doing their job for them? How will those people be able to prompt the multi-agent LLM systems?
I remain very skeptical on that point.
Now one can say that because I have a vested interest in our profession not disappearing and as such my takes cannot be trusted. While that would be somewhat fair to say, I believe it would be misguided because in my experience most people cannot see long-tail effects.
So let us try to hypothesize a few long-tail effects?
TL;DR we are near the end of a bubble. I am not sure how doom-and-gloom the scenario would be; maybe a few blips on the stock market or maybe a full-blown crash leading to many other effects ā no idea. But the current unsustainable pace cannot be kept for much longer.
And oh yeah, ChatGPT will include ads very soon. Surprising nobody in the IT area.
Even shorter TL;DR ā the amount of programmers will get reduced but not by as much as predicted by many doom-sayers, and technical expertise will be even more valuable in some mere 2 - 5 years from now. Just endure the storm.
Thatās the same Klarna that had to scramble to rehire support staff, correct? 
Why would anyone take what they think about AI seriously after that legendary fluke ā one that a well-educated 12-years old could have prevented ā is beyond me.
Ah yes, the labor simulation tool that is a perfect reflection of reality. Mmmm-hmmm.
These predictions are short-sighted. Again and as per above, that also means nearly $1.2 trillion less spending in the economy. I wish the companies relying on people buying stuff, a very good luck.
And, as if to prove me right, I find this article posted on HN today:
The market is not limitless. The AI players are starting to discover that obvious truth.
It was never, in my opinion, about punching holes in cards, or to type words into the screen.
The physical act of typing has never been the bottleneck, to clarify, while boilerplate coding hasnāt been the bottleneck, building the right thing correctly has always consumed the real time and skill.
What I see happening is this, standard web app scaffolding gets vibe coded by AI tools from Figma, Firebasestudio, Vercel, etc, eventually these interfaces (UIs) become more entrenched as commodity, and less and less as artisanal craft, yet another form filling process excercise but even more vibed, wrapped in more magic.
However, it is vibed in a fundamentally complicating way, this base vibe layer will amplify old problems.
The people doing product or requirements work frequently do not know what they want, or are not able to articulate it clearly, or are not asking the right questions to refine the vague idea into a real solution.
Vibe coding speeds up implementation far faster than it clarifies intent.
Eventually, the vibes end, and stewardship begins.
The translation from ambiguous requirements into something useful has been a lot more than āprogramming.ā Itās domain and constraint modelling, trade off management, expectation setting, being able to say ānoā, ānot yetā in the right way.
While this vibe commodity production peaks, other base input demand shifts, and will also accelerate these shifts.
AI driven generation becomes infrastructural, predictable, and ultimately boring, the way all utilities eventually become boring.
And with boring comes the real processes:
security
cost reduction
optimization
maintenance
feature iteration
market validation
governance
stewardship
finding out if anyone wanted the thing in the first place
Basically, all the stuff that successful software has always required, but that gets highlighted and amplified once the āeasyā scaffolding is automated even further.
Yes, a friend of mine, did not pivot and hasnāt been able to find frontend work for quite a while now.
Yes it does worry me a bit, especially when it comes to MCP tooling, might as well run random code from the internet with root.
From TigerStyle:
The hardest part, then, is how much thought goes into everything.
We spend this mental energy upfront, proactively rather than reactively, because we know that when the thinking is done, what is spent on the design will be dwarfed by the implementation and testing, and then again by the costs of operation and maintenance.
An hour or day of design is worth weeks or months in production
.. and when the Fed/Gov then intervenes (again) to bail out the ātoo big to f-AI-lā and it then transfers trillions if not tens of trillions borrowed from tax receipts (in a far-away future), while both the SWEās and non-SWEās are left holding the bag and footing the bill in yet another double digit inflation cycle.
Or in short, business as usual.
I donāt see this talked about, but I find a general mismatch in time-scale of AI-generated new products and sales cycle.
Consumer products that can be vibe-coded are never essential goods, and rarely high value. If they were essential and high-value, it would already have been built; many of the āhigh valueā AI-products strike me as monetized on the creatorās existing reputation (they could have sold random bits and someone would buy it. Seriously, remember NFTs? 
).
Business / institution products often have a long sales cycle, measured in 3-18 months. Important decisions need to percolate up in regular meetings that only happen so often. Due diligence (which usually include evaluation of longevity / stability of the project, esp if it inserts itself in critical places) and obtaining quotes all take time. Can any vibe-coder guarantee their ware wonāt be superceded by the time the contract ends? āconstantly adding new featuresā sounds likeā¦ ānot stableā. And then, for OpenAI/gemini wrappers, you canāt even guarantee a level of performance and any non-dumb decision makers know that.
Finally, what can be vibed by Peter can be vibed by Paul.
So it brings the utility largely to brownfield projects, extending whatever you had, that wasnāt valuable enough to be built at first place. The one extra feature in Word that 0.01% users cares about *but every other user else thought it just complicates things*, a feature that nonetheless needs to be managed indefinitely.
Within this category, the truly novel are those hooked onto live LLMs, but those are architecturally non-deterministic, and their āyieldsā and future costs are both unstable even on a 1-year time scale.
I donāt really know where is the general monetary value. āHarry Potterā sells a lot doesnāt mean writing is a viable vocation for most people, but I tend to see AI-products justified on some singular product (that often fades out within weeks. Like those LLM pins or whatever.)
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