>Instead it will mean that bosses can fire 75-90% of the (very expensive) engineers, with the ones who remain left to prompt the AI and clean up any mistakes/misunderstandings.
This is the same logic that has driven cheap off-shoring in non-technical companies.
For decades orgs have been able to buy "human-level" (i.e. humans) engineering for a tiny fraction of an engineer's salary, and there have been millions of eager salesmen for off-shore dev shops pushing them to do it too. After seeing the outcomes of this approach, I understand why well-paid engineers remain well paid. And why they'll remain well-paid after the LLM non-pocalypse.
If you think LLMs are so amazing, I would encourage you to see how much you can rely on them to replace human beings in real world scenarios. Not in contrived PR pieces and cherry picked examples but in situations where actual real people would otherwise be working together to deliver commercially valuable outcomes.
You believe you have domain specific insights that allow you to state, with confidence, that LLMs are able to replace a highly technical and well-compensated role at virtually no cost. If that's the case, you're sitting on a gold mine. If I believed that, I'd be starting a development agency tomorrow.
The "some work" phrase is doing a lot of work for you here. It can easily take them 100 years as well and they will get broke long before.
I see nothing in the original article that doesn't strike me as the techno-optimism of the 1960s where people made movies and books saying "It's the year 2003 and the humanity is exploring the vast depths of the Universe".
So again, it's a very plain old boring techno-optimism.
I am sure they can automate some work (like scaffold a certain CRUD part of the app) but there are always nuances and specifics and the current generation AI has so far proven inadequate in catching those and taking proper care of them.
If it was actually working for anyone, then they would be selling software engineering time at the same but slightly cheaper price as existing software engineering time costs today so they could capture those sweet margins.
This is a company spending investor money selling pickaxe hand grips during a gold rush.
For real evidence, look for companies selling engineering time much greater than the amount of their total engineer count who have good customer retention across projects.
It's hilarious. If Devin were any good, they wouldn't be selling access to it to random SWEs, they would be replacing Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc for that sweet sweet trillions of dollars!
Where's the app they built in an afternoon using Devin? Where's the software product that Devin actually built a month ago and was being used by thousands of people?
Their actual business seems to be closer to "Lets milk some of that sweet sweet high income from SWEs with FOMO about AI"
This is the same logic that has driven cheap off-shoring in non-technical companies.
For decades orgs have been able to buy "human-level" (i.e. humans) engineering for a tiny fraction of an engineer's salary, and there have been millions of eager salesmen for off-shore dev shops pushing them to do it too. After seeing the outcomes of this approach, I understand why well-paid engineers remain well paid. And why they'll remain well-paid after the LLM non-pocalypse.
If you think LLMs are so amazing, I would encourage you to see how much you can rely on them to replace human beings in real world scenarios. Not in contrived PR pieces and cherry picked examples but in situations where actual real people would otherwise be working together to deliver commercially valuable outcomes.
You believe you have domain specific insights that allow you to state, with confidence, that LLMs are able to replace a highly technical and well-compensated role at virtually no cost. If that's the case, you're sitting on a gold mine. If I believed that, I'd be starting a development agency tomorrow.