It’s a holiday here so I’ll 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 “AI” is more like a better shovel than a replacement digger. I’ve 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:

• getting full descriptions of tasks and, crucially, asking for clarification when something is under or incorrectly specified
• sometimes advocating to not to solve a problem because the maintenance won’t be worth the investment
• actually deploying the code and monitoring for problems
• soliciting feedback
• having ownership of systems and culpability for when those systems stop doing they’re supposed to

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.

It’s telling that the video which makes the case for SWE replacement under the heading “140k job cuts” 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 “AI is probably to blame”, 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 don’t know who those people are or why we should trust their opinion. The video then makes the eminently baseless claim that “now there’s AI that can do the job of an entire team of software engineers and do it more efficiently.” Utterly ridiculous. Show me literally any example of this. Then it proceeds to provide the only “evidence” 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 who’s 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 you’re arguing that the negative factors are due to AI specifically, you need a good argument. I’m personally most aligned with the first video in this regard. At the very least, I’ve 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, it’s 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 I’d 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. I’m 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 we’re in the trenches, we’d have some special insight on the subject. We obviously have inside knowledge about exactly what AI is/isn’t capable of because we’re the ones using it. But I argue we don’t necessarily because the question is also about economics which isn’t our field.

There’s an infamous comment on the /r/badeconomics forum about the CGP Grey’s 2014 video “Humans need not apply” (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 don’t have demanded skills that job may not offer earnings growth opportunities but it doesn’t 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 aren’t 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 it’s easy to jump from “AI has had or will have this or that effect on my day to day” to “this is what the job market will look like due to that” without fully connecting the dots. I’m 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 we’ve 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 haven’t 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. I’d like to think more popular languages might be hit first, but we’ve already seen it fairly close to home:

I’d go as far as to say that even economists don’t have any real idea how things are going to pan out tbh, not just because it’s 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, I’m 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 don’t know, and this is a really hard topic to answer without going on a long rant about “AI.”

I don’t know anyone who has been impacted directly, and it somewhat concerns and worries me. I’m extremely lucky to work for a company that doesn’t force me to use “AI”, though they do enable and encourage anyone who wants to.

I’m a mostly a CRUD developer. Of course I’m 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 “AI” 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 “AI,” we’re going to be in for a world of exponentially higher output expectations. Remember, “working less” 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 it… 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 I’m sounding pretty hippy-dippy here, but I’m getting old so I only need to last until my retirement Hopefully by then “AI” will actually be curing cancer as opposed to the utter nonsense it’s 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 “of course AI will make our other engineers so much more productive”. 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 aren’t even aware of that are currently baked into every LLM are being injected into project being produced because “we need to be efficient” and get things done quickly.

Fiio makes decent portable walkman and discman. I own the walkman (and still have my dad’s that I used as a kid) and considering the discman. I do have a CD player but it’s a bit wonky at this point. I’m also on the lookout for a good mp3 player! Everything is so ugly, though, lol.

I realize it isn’t 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 won’t 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.

I’ve 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. I’ve 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 isn’t 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 don’t really buy this. If it’s 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 “prompting skills” keep becoming outdated. Of course I don’t know what’s coming and I could very well be wrong, so it’s a gamble, but considering what the goal is it seems that those of us who will eventually be forced to use it won’t 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:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/mit-study-finds-ai-can-already-replace-11point7percent-of-us-workforce.html

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 AI’s biggest impact on jobs will be when the bubble bursts and the effects are felt all through the economy.