austin-cheney 18 hours ago

All AI will do is further divide the capable from the imposters.

Engineers measure things. It doesn’t matter whether you are producing software, a bridge, a new material, whatever. Engineers measure things. Most software developers cannot measure things. AI cannot measure software either.

So, if you are a software developer that does measure things your skills are not available for outsource to AI. There is nothing to atrophy.

That said, if I were a business owner I would hire super smart QAs at a plus 20-50% market rate instead of hiring developers. I would still hire developers, but just far fewer of them. Selection of developers would become super simple: writing skills in natural language (essay), performance evaluation, basic code literacy. If a developer can do those they are probably smart enough to figure out what you need. For everything else there is AI and your staff of QAs.

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sigotirandolas 17 hours ago

My foresight is that when you compensate bad developers with process, measurements and QA, the software breaks when exposed to the real world, which has a habit of doing things you didn't think about.

Maybe an user can open two tabs and manage to submit two incompatible forms. Or a little gap in an API validations' allows a clever hacker to take over other users' accounts. Or a race condition corrupts data and causes a crash loop.

Maybe some are OK with that level of brokenness, but I don't see how software can be robust unless you go into the code and understand what is logically possible. My experience is that AI models aren't very good at this.

austin-cheney 14 hours ago

That is exactly why you need good QA and not developers doing their own QA. The role of a good developer is threefold: features, defects, and refactors. 80-90% of your product improvements should live in your refactors and not feature creep.