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r2k-in-the-vortex t1_j6cmbjr wrote

AI will not replace devs or reduce numbers, but simply boost productivity. Coding is not farming, there is finite demand for food, only so much people can eat. Software development though, that is a boundless task that never ends, you never sit down and say that you are done, there is nothing more left to do. Every time you get any task done it opens up several new tasks that you should be doing, but simply will never have time for.

Automating our own work as software developers is what we have been doing ever since first computers were built. Do a task once in a way that nobody ever has to do it again is the core ethos of software development. And yet, there is infinite amount of labor yet to be done.

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Doyouevengeek t1_j6e4rn2 wrote

You're assuming that businesses don't have a cap on other activities related outside of coding, such as product, planning, marketing, sales etc. The pace will be defined by the business and the need for the amount of developers to maintain the AI based delivery pipeline. So pure dev code monkeys that exist today will be reduced significantly. Others like SMEs will still be in demand.

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r2k-in-the-vortex t1_j6e8jje wrote

Software plays a very big role in all those other activities too. Even a company with no in house software development uses software and pays for it's development, the coding simply happens somewhere else.

As long as value added by software development pays for the devs wages, companies will keep paying for developers to work.

The upper bound of it is only that everything is automated by software. But that is an utopia where it makes no more sense to talk about jobs anyway. Not in the same sense as what jobs are today at least.

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