Generative AI is reaching greater and greater heights. Google has proven that they can migrate software at rate of up to 80-90% faster by using AI assisted coding tools. More and more companies are finding AI assisted software development can dramatically help certain tasks and predict AI assisted development will soon be sweeping the industry.
Now Salesforce, Microsoft, Replit, Meta and other CEO’s are all saying they might not be hiring a lot more software engineers very soon.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has gone so far as saying Salesforce is looking at essentially freezing hiring for software engineers in 2025 owing to agentic AI:
I think in engineering this year at Salesforce, we’re seriously debating maybe weren’t gonna’ hire anybody this year because we’ve seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side-by-side with our engineers, making them more productive. And we can all agree, software engineering has become a lot more productive in the last two years with these basically new models.
Mark Zuckerberg also piped with similar sentiments
In 2025, AI systems at Meta and other companies will be capable of writing code like mid-level engineers. at first, it’s costly, but the systems will become more efficient as time passes. eventually, AI engineers will build most of the code and AI in apps, replacing human engineers.
Microsoft Copilot Studio can now create new agents through Copilot Studio and integrate them into Copilot. Microsoft’s CEO said:
The way to conceptualize the world going forward is everyone of us doing knowledge work will use Copilot to do our work and we will create a swarm of agents to help us with our work and drive the productivity of our organizations.
Replit’s CEO Amjad Masad went even further by saying that ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’. They have grown their revenue five-fold in the last 6 months thanks to artificial-intelligence capabilities that enabled their new product called “Agent,” a tool that can write a working software application with nothing but a natural language prompt. “It was a huge hit,” Masad said.
So what’s a soon to be out of work software engineer to do?
A recent report by The World Economic Forum (WEF) and AI expert Tak Lo both estimate about 92 million workers are about to be displaced by AI, but claim there will be the creation of 170 million new jobs.
I always approach these reports skeptically. Just because you claim it will create new jobs doesn’t mean those that lost their jobs have the skills or capability to take one of those new jobs. Jobs that often require very different skills or appeal to very different people. In fact, they predict 39% of current skill sets will become outdated by 2030.
The report indicates that manual labor jobs will be the safest: construction, farmers, laborers, medical/nursing, truck drivers, etc. They claim that knowledge workers should be largely safe, but that’s definitely not what technology leaders are clearly saying – implying this rosy report is probably not right.
Cognitive decline?
Additionally, a study by Uplevel found that the productivity of developers hasn’t improved because of AI coding assistants, and their code has become more buggy.
Research is also starting to show that AI may be contributing to a decline of critical thinking skills:
The effects of AI on cognitive development are already being identified in schools across the United States. In a report titled, “Generative AI Can Harm Learning”, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that students who relied on AI for practice problems performed worse on tests compared to students who completed assignments without AI assistance. This suggests that the use of AI in academic settings is not just an issue of convenience, but may be contributing to a decline in critical thinking skills.
Greg Isenberg had an interesting interaction with a young Stanford grad who claimed he was forgetting words now due to his near constant use of chatGPT to finish his thoughts. https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1869202002783207622
The new skills
There’s also a great article by Dev that outlines the mindset and skills developers will need to develop to stay relevant.
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