Will AI Replace Developers? The Answer Is More Complicated

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we're trying to get unstuck. We're trying to get some forward momentum and we're trying to help you do the same. This is the Building Better Developers Podcast, also known as Develop-a-Nur. I am Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nur, also the founder of RV Consulting, where we help you get yourself unstuck technology wise. There's a lot of stuff that's ahead of us, a lot of changes, a lot of big projects, and we help you make sure that you're doing the right thing, that you measure twice before you start to cut once, especially when it's a million dollar cut. Good thing and bad thing. Good thing is technology. I love the fact that I'm able to do remote work and things like that. It is amazing and I've talked to other people that are road warriors and digital nomads and things like that. It is really interesting having the conversations about the days of desktops and 18 screens and all these different things we needed and being down to just a little laptop and maybe like a phone or something like that. It's awesome. A great time. Downside, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, is that when you are remote, when you throw down the walls and you don't have the boundaries of an office, sometimes you end up never leaving your office because now the world is not only your oyster, the world is also your office. And so downside very often is that when we end up in a situation where we just don't have the, we don't stop work. We're always working. We're always checking email. We're always doing that stuff. And I know I'm speaking to the singing to the choir as it were right here. But instead of continuing on and just us commiserating, let Michael give us a little sunshine and his good thing, bad thing, as well as his introduction. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Melash. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as DeveloperNR. I'm also the founder of Invigin QA, where we fix broken systems and replace the guesswork with tested, dependable solutions. These are built around your business to hopefully streamline your processes and help your business start to grow. Good thing, bad thing, good thing. It's almost spring, almost weather's getting better and getting out. Finally, starting to exercise some more again, getting away from my desk as Rob pointed out. The bad side is for three months now, I've been literally stuck in my office, avoiding the elements, working too much because the bad thing, like you said, with all this one wonderful technology we have, it is hard to turn it off. It is hard to disconnect yourself from the business and not work. So hopefully you can put a pin in that and get ready for a wonderful conversation here. Rob, I'll let you continue. Yes. And I'm not going to stay in the way of Adam. We are going to step in and continue our conversation with Adam right where we left off last episode. And here we go. So, I'm going to listen to Gears a little bit. From a personal, productive developer point of view, how do you see I, and particularly I'm thinking there's all of this almost panic that developers will never exist anymore or that everybody's going to be a developer. As always, like you said, there's a lot of extra stuff that is poured on top of this that may not be real. How do you see it, realistically, how do you see it impacting your work today and moving forward? So, let's split this into parts. How I see it, I'm to certain extent thrilled about what to come for us as a developer, as an engineer, because I would bet that Eldorado is coming and it's already visible in some reports because saying that AI or LLMs can replace developers just proves that people who claim that don't understand what this discipline is about. So let's be clear. Everybody or most of the people in the Western world can read and write more or less coherent sentences, but this doesn't create them the next king or the next president. Everybody has a camera in their pockets, in the smartphone, that is infinitely better than cameras, codex 30 years ago, but it doesn't make them photographs. So there is a huge set of skills. Like I said, AI can speed up code generation, but saying that the software engineering is about writing code is a little bit like saying that writing a book or like, I don't know, Game of Thrones is about writing words. And the part of architecture, part of identifying, I don't know, compromises, offset, balancing requirements, identifying risks, those are skills that come with time and intuition that I would say can be implemented. And in that, I even recently did an interesting dig, it's a bit on my blog, sorry for kind of promoting myself right now, about history of copyright and art. And I realized, for instance, in visual arts, that Andy Warhol was literally prompt and engineer. He called his studio the factory, he wasn't touching the paintbrush, he was highlighting and hiring interns to do, he was just telling them what to do. And he was the artist just by curation and changing the context. Maybe this is something similar happening right now on a different scale. Maybe I didn't finish my associate, so I still need to think about it. But similarly for software engineering. Yeah, we will spend less time on building software or on writing the code. We will have more time on actually designing the architecture of this software. So from my perspective, from the perspective of someone who is a designer, that's good. The risk I'm seeing is for the industry itself, because a lot of companies stopped hiring juniors, which means we do not have the inflow of the people who could learn the discipline. But if you think about this, it's even worse, because that means that current mid-level engineers also don't have the possibility to grow. Because one of the skills that makes the difference between mid-level and senior is the ability to mentor, to lead the group, to lead the project. But now if we don't have juniors, who learn the medium, mid-level engineer? But at the same time, if we don't have juniors, who the mid-level engineer could mentor to become senior? And that's why I'm saying that from senior perspective, in 10-15 years, that will be from my perspective good, from some of my colleagues probably also, from the industry as a whole. That's another term from economics, the tragedy of common. It's funny, I really followed what you were saying there, because that is the risk, right? So we're going to lose basically the next generation of developers. We're not fostering them, we're not encouraging them, because companies are looking at AI as the replacement. We can automate those jobs in their minds. I'm already seeing that, in fact I've read a couple articles that lawyers are already running into this with contract writing. So contract writing is being automated, so we're losing the legal assistants that are there to write these documents. We're seeing this in gaming. NVIDIA just put out this wonderful AI model. It's like, hey, you turn this on, look at Resident Evil 9. It goes from this dark game to something that's almost movie quality, just by pushing a button. We're seeing the technology grow, we're seeing companies adapt it, but we're not seeing, like you said, we're not seeing their consideration of what's going to be lost if we go this direction without forethought of keeping the next generation. How are we going to sustain this long term? It kind of even goes back to automation and farming. We have all these technologies, booms, we went to automation to build cars, we have automation to farm farms, but the next generation of farmers are already leaving. Children aren't taking the mantle on to become the next farmer, so we're losing farms left and right. Do you see that potentially happening with businesses with this AI boom? You just laid out, if we're not encouraging, if we're not hiring those junior developers, those mid-level developers aren't becoming senior developers, do you see a gap coming or do you see a potential downshift in technology or with businesses because they focus on AI that you can see the companies actually start to falter because they're not quite thinking about the repercussions that are going to come to just go with AI? Let me think about this whole answer because I have two strains of thoughts competing right now. So yes, I see the risk, that's the tragedy of commons I mentioned, that we do not feel the, I will use the analogy from Polish because in Polish translation it wouldn't be, it's a tragedy of commons, it would be a common pasture problem, which is much more illustrative. So we have a common pasture, every farmer sends a cow to the pasture to eat some grass and everybody is happy. As long as everybody is trained and sends how much grass their cow or sheep can eat, everything is great. But the moment when the pasture is shared between everybody, there is a temptation to take a little bit more to, I don't know, speed up the growth of your cow or something and it doesn't sound like much because come on, it's not your result that you're depleting. But if everybody does it, suddenly the entire group of farmers is consuming the grass faster than it could grow again. And we have a problem. This is visible in English, it's called tragedy of commons and you can see it in, I don't know, in fishing and policies, in farming, like I said, in shared currency, I don't know, Greek euro crisis in 2008, Greece and stuff, that was exactly that. When one country was just increasing its own debt, assuming that others would pay for it and so on and so on. So this is happening now because every company optimizes their own intake, their own benefits for the price of refueling the intake of growth of the new engineers, new skills that are required. That's one way to look at it. It's a problem. How to solve it? Honestly, I'm not smart enough to figure it out. But on the other hand, the opposite path, which is a little bit more optimistic, is you mentioned automation farming. That kind of reminded me about something I also recently read and wrote about. It is Jevons paradox, which basically says that each, when the cost of certain service or goods drops, you would expect that the global consumption of this good would drop. And it is totally opposite. Jevons paradox says that the moment the cost of certain service, goods or whatever resource you have, the global consumption skyrockets because it's easier to use. For instance, with electricity, there was an assumption that when the electricity cost would drop, then the requirement for power plants would drop because, come on, how many light bulbs we can have. Except when the electricity got cheaper, we found out that electricity is great to fuel not only to light our cities, but also to run our air conditioning, to build. We started building electronics, now cars and so on and so on. With automation, when we invented cars, there was an assumption that the need for transportation services would drop because it's cheap. Yet, the entire industry, entire professions disappeared, but in their place and global connectivity exploded, tourism was created and so on. Another example, I don't know, the computation cost. Most people don't realize that the computer itself, the name, was the name of profession. Before World War II, there was a profession called human computer. Those were people who were literally sitting in the offices and calculating, I don't know, logarithmic tables, ballistic paths and so on. Before, during World War II, there was between 200 and 1 million people worldwide working as a computer. And so we have quite stark example of profession that was eliminated by automation, but in its place, it created a huge industry called IT. So, will this AI automation eliminate professions? Surely, does it mean that there will be less work? I somehow doubt it. The different question is if we will be able to replace some skills if we want new certain skills that are needed on the port of profit. That's a great question because one of the things I'm hoping to see from AI, and it's funny because Musk makes a comment that in 10, 20 years no one will be working that doesn't want to work. This kind of goes back to something even Tim Ferriss said in his 4-hour work week. It's like you need an income. You need some way of making money to live. The question is, are you doing it for your passion or are you just doing it for the buck? Are you doing it just because you need a job to have income to put food on your table? It's almost as if, and my hope here is that AI is going to allow that shift to where people that have passions have ideas that we're going to hopefully see a boom in innovation or at least in like a cultural innovation but through AI. We're going to see more cultural apps. We're going to see more kind of like you said with the painter where you have all these interns and you have your curator. So I see people becoming more of a curator and AI being more of the implementer. That's definitely, that's something I strongly believe in. It's just democratizing the tools. I don't know, just like, I don't know, music creation became accessible, movie creation became more accessible through technology. AI will just help some people to materialize their vision. That's great. Of course, that also means that since everybody can do it, just because everybody can do it doesn't mean that everybody will do it properly or good. So yes, we already have explosion of advantage to put it polite. So that's one thing. But at the same time, I wouldn't be too optimistic with assumption that AI will be able to do it, give us more time. This Jevons paradox is totally opposite and we already see it. I don't know, in Keynes, one of the economists, American economist, I think it is around 1930s but don't quote Nildar, predicted that in 2030 the work, thanks to automation, work week would be reduced to 16 hours. Well, unless something really shifts in next three to four years, I wouldn't say materialized and I doubt even work week shortened from 40 hours that he was talking. The nature of work just changed. And I don't know, with email there was similar assumption, another example, that the moment when the communication would become cheaper and easier, everything would go fast. The effect was we started using Communicate more and suddenly every decision requires email plus 10 people in CC just in case. There is even an entire term, CIA, cover your sitting place, just in case send an email. So the amount of communication exploded and you need assistance just to get through the communication. With AI we already see, the scientists already coined the term AI brain fry because suddenly the best performers are doing much more. They need to context switch a lot more. They need to verify much more work. It's not that they have less work as I thought. The work got easier, cheaper, but the overall workload actually increased. Let's be clear, tasks or feature ideas that, I don't know, five years ago would be at best postponed, probably said not worth it even investigating. Now, because they are much cheaper to do, they are realized and then they drop. I wouldn't be too optimistic about reducing the amount of work so that we can sit and be artistic, everybody would just do their own thing. I think this really touches back on the, it's interesting because it has to do with raising prices and things of that as well, things of that nature. I think what we see is there are thresholds essentially that we will cross and then there's problems that are not worth solving or we just don't have the resources to solve. But then as the cost of those resources or the number of those resources change, now we suddenly have something that makes much more sense. So if you think of it as electricity when it was very rare, then there's only certain things you can do. You're not going to be able to power a car with it because you weren't going to be able to plug a cord in it long enough. But then once we start figuring out how to store it better and things like that, now you've grown to a point that now there's different problems that we can solve. And I think AI is the same way. I'm honestly seeing this a lot is that there are the things that we had to spend a lot of time on, for example, like email, spending a lot of time dealing with email. Suddenly if you can use automation and AI and some of the tools there to reduce that and that frees you up to do something else. So it's not agree 100 percent. It's not that we're suddenly going to not have work to do. I think we're going to change our focus. We're going to be solving. Honestly, we'll probably be solving bigger and more complex problems as we move forward. We are as so often happens, this time just flies right by. So we are just screaming along as always. And I want to respect your time. And thank you for hanging out with us. It's been a great conversation. I love having people that have been in the trenches that have seen this growth because then you get to talk about what happened the last time this cycle came through and it helps us to talk about it and learn so that we can do better in the next cycle. For those that are out there, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you if they would like to further this conversation or read your books or anything of that nature? Well, I would recommend just go on my website, AdamKorca.com. You'll find everything there, links to my... You can send me an email. I will be happy to answer. You can sign up for newsletter. You can read my blog. And of course, you can find information about my books where in all of those channels, I'm trying to dig this kind of thinking, sometimes coherent, sometimes not that I try to present here. And that's the best way to find me. And like I say, I'm reading everything and we'll be happy to answer any questions if somebody wants to ask. Excellent. And for those of you guys listening and gals listening, there will be links to the show notes for all of this so you guys can check that out as well. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for all of you that are listening, for hanging out. You can put your pencils down now and stop taking notes for a little bit and shake that off. I'm sure there's a lot of good stuff that came out of this. Thank you as always. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thanks for tuning in to the Develop the Newer Podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback, so drop a note to info at DevelopTheNewer.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.