Do you think the product is not the code?

From a user perspective, yes. The product is what it does, not how it does it.

But for the person building the product it very much is how it does it.

I think we (developers) need to get over that. Code was always the means to an end, which is providing a product to solve a problem, not the end itself.

The code is still the means to the end. AIs still write code, that is compiled and deployed and operated in some manner.

It isn't, no one is buying code on it's own - but it's a component of the product. I dislike the phrasing above since it assumes the two are distinct things.

Honestly, it never was. Personal projects not withstanding, if there is a product that should always be the focus. Code is only a means to that.

Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything

As always, the limit is human bandwidth. But that's basically what AI-forward companies are doing now. I would be curious which tasks OP commenter has that couldn't be done by an agent (assuming they're a SWE)

This sounds bogus to me: if AI really could close 100% of your backlog with just a couple more humans in the loop, you’d hire a bunch of temps/contractors to do that, then declare the product done and lay off everybody. How come that isn’t happening?

Because there's an unlimited amount of work to do. This is the same reason you are not fired once completing a feature :-) The point of hiring a FTE is to continue to create work that provides business value. For your analogy, FTEs often do that by hiring temp, and you can think of the agent as the new temp in this case - the human drives an infinite amount of them

Why hasn’t any of the software I use started shipping features at a breakneck speed then? The only thing any of them have added is barely working AI features.

Why aren’t there 10x the number of games on steam? Why aren’t people releasing new integrated programming language/OS/dev environments?

Why does our backlog look exactly the same as when I left for posterity leave 4 months ago?

Questions posed in bad faith can only be answered by the author.

Someone asked why the backlog doesn’t get finished. You answered that it does but the backlog just refills. So I asked where is the backlog evidence that the original backlog was completed.

I’m still waiting for the evidence. I still haven’t seen externally verifiable evidence that AI is a net productivity boost for the ability to ship software.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t. It does mean that it isn’t big enough to be obvious.

I’m very closet watching every external metric I can find. Nothing yet. Just saw the steam metrics for January. Fewer titles than January last year.

Sounds more like busy work rather than something that makes money

Alternatively: this is an America problem. I'm outside of America and I've been fielding more interviews than ever in the past 3 months. YMMV but the leading indicator of slowed down hiring can come from so many things. Including companies just waiting to see how much LLMs affect SWE positions.

Alternatively, it's a loud minority.

As an American I found a new job last year (Staff SW), and it was falling off a log easy, for a 26% pay bump.

It's from AI either directly or indirectly, either the top SWE's using AI are replacing 10 mid/juniors or your job is outsourced to someone doing it at half your Salary with a AI subscription. Only the top/lucky/connected SWE's will survive a year or two, if you have used any SOTA agent recently or looked at the job market you would have seen this coming and had a plan B/C in place, i.e. Enough capital to generate passive income to replace your salary, or another career that is AI safe for next 5-10 years. Alternatively stick your head in the sand.

I guess I just don’t see that happening right now. I’m at a big public startup and our hiring hasn’t changed much and we still have a ton of work and Claude code with SOTA models can shortcut some tasks but I’m still having a hard time saying it’s giving us much of a multiplier. Even with plenty of .MDs describing what we want. It can ad-lib some of the stuff but it’s not AGI yet. In 5-10 years I have no idea

What is the hard evidence?

Edit: What I mean by this is there may be some circumstantial evidence (less hiring for juniors, more AI companies getting VC funding). We currently have no _hard_ evidence that programming has had a substantial speed increase/deskilling from LLMs yet. Any actual __science__ on this has yet to show this. But please, if you have _hard_ evidence on this topic I would love to see it.

Closest I guess is hiring of juniors is down, but it's possibly just due to a post COVID pullback being credited to AI.

I definitely think a lot of junior tasks are being replaced with AI, and companies are deciding it's not worth filling junior roles at least temporarily as a result.

I don’t think this is unique to software. Across the US over the past decades there’s been a massive contraction in companies being willing to “train-up” employees. It’s greedy, and it works for their bottom lines. But it’s a tragedy of the commons and a race to the bottom. It also explains the dearth of opportunities for getting into the trades, despite sky-high demand.

If anything, the expectations for an individual developer have never been higher, and now you’re not getting any 22-26 year olds with enough software experience to be anything but a drain on resources when the demand for profitability is yesterday.

Maybe we need to go back to ZIRP if only to get some juniors back on to the training schedule, across all industries.

For other insanely toxic and maladaptive training situations, also see: medicine in the US.

> I definitely think a lot of junior tasks are being replaced with AI

I think team expansion is being reduced as well. If you took a dev team of 5, armed them all with Claude Code + training on where to use it and where not to I think you could get the same productivity as hiring 2 additional FTE software devs. I'm assuming your existing 5 devs fully adopt the tool and not reject it like a bad organ transplant. Maybe an analogy could be the invention of email reducing the need for corporate typing pools and therefore fewer jr. secretaries ( typists) are hired.

/i'm just guessing that being a secretary is in the career progression path of someone in the typing pool but you get the idea.

edit: one thing i missed in my email analogy is that when email was invented it was free and available to anyone that could set up sendmail/*.MTA

> I definitely think a lot of junior tasks are being replaced with AI

one last thing to point out then my lunch is over. I think AI coding agents are going to hit services/marketplaces like Fiverr especially hard. I think the AI agents are the new gig-economy with respect to code, I spent about $50 on Claude Code pay-as-you-go over the past 3 days to put together a website i've had in the back of my mind for months. Claude Code got it to a point where I can easily pick up and run with to finish it out over a few more nights/weekends. UI/UX is especially tedious for me and Claude Code was able to take my vague descriptions and make the interface nicely organized and contemporary. The architecture is perfectly reasonable for what i want to do ( Auth0 + react + python(flask) + postgres + an OAuth2 integration to a third party ). It got all of that about 95% right on the first try.. for $50!. Services/marketplaces like Fiverr have to be thinking really hard right now.

With the Iran example, it's an interesting world we live in where the design of an emoji by some of the largest companies in the world can support or detract recognition of new states. Especially with some of these tech companies bending the knee to the current US administration I could imagine a world where there are executive orders to say, remove the Greenland flag, or change the design of the Venezuela flag.

Well the Taiwan flag doesn't appear on mainland china phones, I think the phone does fall back to the TW letters.

Apple originally had a bug in that censorship code. It would crash your phone if you received a text with the Taiwan flag.

https://objective-see.org/blog/blog_0x34.html

Well you could say that every educated country is far better informed about the US than vice versa.

You could even say that many foreigners are better informed about the US than US citizens are about the US, but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of the current administration so that's already over one in three who don't understand the basic functioning of government or the economy.

I think foreigners tend to be better informed than the locals wherever you go.

As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people.

In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town.

edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.

Yeah, it took me a moment to clue in, but I think maybe "expat" is the more common term there.

In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.

I think you've never read real investigative journalism before

We live in an era where people lack the ability to read and digest written content and rely on someone speaking to them about it instead.

It's a step beyond that. Where people who only consume the easily digestible content don't believe there is a source to any of it

But it has electrolytes!

Imagine claiming that video has not historically been a medium of investigative journalism.

If your takeaway from my comment was "this guy thinks investigative journalism must be written" I would suggest reading the comment again.

What do you mean "backed by"

Alternatively, think about asking the women in your life what they want

Of course. I think that communication is the key to a successful relationship.

However Henry Ford has a well known quote about what people think they want vs what they really want. For that matter, think about how you would answer a question about what you want, vs what you really value to experience in a relationship.

While this is generally good advice, it only works if you have women you're close with, at that level, already. If the only women you know are work colleagues, you can't go around asking them for advice on dating (depends on your relationship with them of course, but usually, not work appropriate).

Perhaps that is part of the problem. Talking to women outside of romantic interest might be a good first step

Yes, but that's not useful advice to someone who currently has none.

My point being, maybe other things are foundational to building a romantic life upon. Not saying it is a must but building friendships with all sorts of people will generally help with many aspects of life

What's protecting smaller online spaces from AI?

Nothing is bulletproof, but more hands-on moderation tends to be better at making pragmatic judgement calls when someone is being disruptive without breaking the letter of the law, or breaks the rules in ways that take non-trivial effort to prove. That approach can only scale so far though.

Essentially, gatekeeping. Places that are hard to access without the knowledge or special software, places that are invite-only, places that need special hardware...

Or places with a terminally uncool reputation. I'm still on Tumblr, and it's actually quite nice these days, mostly because "everyone knows" that Tumblr is passé, so all the clout-chasers, spammers and angry political discoursers abandoned it. It's nice living, under the radar.

Another important factor is whether the place is monetizable. Places where you can't make money are less likely to be infested with AI.

Or a place that can influence a captive audience. Bots have been known to play a part in convincing people of one thing over another via the comments section. No direct money to be made there but shifting opinions can lead to sales, eventually. Or prevent sales for your competitors.

Not enough financial upside for it to be worth the trouble.

The fact it's text only means we only get AI text and not images, I suppose. lmao.

Economics. Slop will only live where there's enough eyeballs and ad revenue to earn a profit from it