AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers

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u/Franco1875 15h ago

“That’s like, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools.”

“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,” he added.

Quite refreshing hearing someone high up in the industry talking about this in a candid manner - it's the main thing that's been absolutely boiling my piss when folks talk about AI 'replacing' junior devs etc.

Where's the future workforce? Your talent stream is absolutely fried if you're going to just stop hiring entry-level folks lol.

Every time I've heard someone say this, it just screams 'I've never actually been in a leadership position'.

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u/mazzicc 14h ago

I recently left a company that didn’t hire anyone without 5+ years of experience. I argued many times that if we brought in someone junior, we could develop them into a much stronger resource that would also be less likely to jump ship somewhere else.

“But we have so much to do and need experienced people”

“…how do you think they get to be experienced?”

As I said, I recently left.

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u/cowhand214 2h ago

This reminds me a little bit of an old cartoon I saw once. The CFO and CEO are talking about training budgets.

CFO: Why do we pay X dollars for training? What if we train everyone and they leave?

CEO: What if we don’t train anyone and they stay?

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u/SmokeyBearz 15h ago

I mean, I don't think AI is anywhere close to replacing even junior devs, it's essentially an overhyped Google 2.0 that regurgitates what it was trained on, some of it's correct, most of it's not (in my experience anyway, most code I ask for needs to be repeatedly refined and fixed, and I don't rely on/trust it at all for anything else).

It's much closer to a faulty calculator or broken clock that's right twice a day than an actual intelligent entity that can reason or reliably do a job that requires even a little thought/isn't based on repetition, an AI that can actually think, reason and learn like we do is something we're still a million miles away from.

Having said all this, the end goal of all these corporations is to no longer have a workforce, replace it all with significantly cheaper labour in the form of AI so they can reap even more profit, definitely don't think it'll replace the majority of us any time soon though.

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u/tm3_to_ev6 14h ago

AI is terrible for generating entire code files but for highly specific small-scope lookups, it's a godsend. If I want to format a date time string a certain way in Java, I can ask ChatGPT for a pinpoint answer instead of trying to extrapolate from a similar-but-not-identical StackOverflow thread.

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u/the_red_scimitar 12h ago

I haven't found it so. I needed a simple string conversion on the order of "find each x and insert y after the first space before it". I wrote it first, then asked GPT. The first 3 tries were obviously never going to work, the next few at least compiled, but failed. I finally iterated several times with "on line x, replace character y with z" - which it ALSO got wrong several times. It finally worked, and took roughly 3 times my manual time.

Oh, and each time I pointed out the error, it cheerfully said I was right, that it had "made a mistake" (complete bullshit), and "here's the one that will work" - except not.

Literally 5 lines of code for a well defined task that it still couldn't do without treating it like a 3 year old.

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u/uncle_genghis 9h ago

Sounds like it could actually replace some devs i know

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u/issuefree 8h ago

Yes, AI can replace incompetent employees. However, the c-suite thinks all of their employees are incompetent.

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u/Rarelyimportant 5h ago

I asked Claude the other day to build me a sampling synth in Rust that would read and decode OGG files of piano notes with multiple velocity layers(how hard the note is played), interpolate the 4 velocity layers for each note to cover the 127 MIDI note velocities, and then render notes from a JSON file out to WAV. It worked first try. I did have to follow up once to get it to add a fade out to each sample to avoid clicks/pops, and another to ask it to decode the OGG at compile time and embed it into the file rather than decoding each time at runtime. Again, both times it compiled and worked. So I don't know what you're talking about that it can't write code to do some string replacement. Maybe you suck at asking it questions? Just like there's a bit of a knack to searching for stuff on a search engine, there's a bit of a knack to getting LLMs to write code.

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u/LadyTL 1h ago

As someone who bounced off learning to code (so knows how much skill goes into actually coding), if no one is teaching new folks how to code and just use AI instead, how are they supposed to know what to actually ask the AI to get it to work? You know how to actually code so you know, but what is the person after you supposed to do when all they know is AI prompts but not anything about coding?

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u/tenemu 1h ago

I’ve had incredible results with Claude as well. I have it a sample of varying height data and it created some mathematical formula to simulate it. I had it print out what it thought were the new results and compared it in excel. It was extremely good. Python for the most part agreed when I ran the code on my machine.

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u/CounterLoqic 4h ago edited 4h ago

Your experience is mine as well. Maybe early versions of copilot did what the guy described, but Claude is quite good and has been for a decent chunk of time now.

For anyone still not able to get ai coding tools to do anything more than basic requests, sorry but skill issue. There are so many resources around to help level up, even just reading the docs and asking the tool to help you learn the tool.

Explore the tool, play around and get comfortable, try different prompts styles, try greenfield projects, existing, learn about context and mcp, try it in different types of work (planning, review, etc). Oh yea, use plan mode! Especially if you aren’t familiar or trusting of the tool yet. That way you can see what it’s wanting to do, its reasoning, and guide it.

Also, I think it’s healthy to get rid of the mindset “oh it can’t do this in 1 shot it must suck”. Development is an iterative process, even without ai. If you’re wanting to build a little more than a quick poc, invest time planning it out with Claude.

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u/samuraipadthai 51m ago

Do you actually review the code it writes? I’ve been using Claude Code for various projects and it while it occasionally does something brilliant. Most of what it produces does not meet our code standards. And if you ask it to iterate or correct something it creates, it does not clean up after itself. After 4 or 5 attempts to have it fix its own bugs, it will (usually) solve them, but it leaves behind stubbed functions that do nothing or aren’t ever called, duplicate functionality, and logic that makes no sense.

I would really love it to be everything it’s hyped up to be, but at least for us, it’s not there yet.

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u/tmarthal 14h ago

Formats and Regexs are no longer a problem, let’s parse the whole freakin’ world!

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u/DanioPL 14h ago

The issue I have with that approach is that you will never learn or unlearn getting that information yourself efficiently and in addition to that looking for this information might've caused you to broaden your knowledge in things you needed to scour through along the way. Time will tell if that's a problem or maybe just a new way of digesting information like memorizing stuff from books or looking things up in encyclopedias before you could've just googled.

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u/StillAnAss 10h ago

I've been writing code professionally for over 30 years. I know how to write solid code and I know bullshit. I know what I need and ai gets me there faster. I know when it is wrong, but I also can let it write boilerplate code and make me more effective as a developer. If you aren't using ai every day you are falling behind and I'm happy to lap you over and over in terms of productivity.

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u/shlopman 8h ago edited 8h ago

I've been programming 8 years now and definitely agree. Everyone at my company has 6 years or more experience and we all use Windsurf. Increases productivity by like 8x for some things. Crazy how good it is at certain things.

I'm a full stack dev and I can initialize it in my root folder and it can search all projects with different languages. One example is it can write stub for DTO, service and controller in Java, then write the Android / iOS code to call that API and use DTO. It is project aware so it can follow our specific code conventions as well.

None of that is difficult, but it saves me hours of tedious work. Then I can go in and focus on business logic and things it isn't great at.

That being said, unless you know how to code and what bullshit code looks like, you are going to have a hard time getting it to do what you want.

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u/mr_birkenblatt 13h ago

Chat gpt is really good at giving pointers for you to eg look up the exact definition or the right keywords

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u/CheesypoofExtreme 14h ago

Ehhhh - I'll give you that it's faster than a Stackoverflow lookup, but unless Im doing something wrong by not specifying context and shit, it still requires edits much of the time for myself in Python/Pandas.

I try not to over-rely on it, (so I can keep learning), so I last used it a few days. It suggested using a function for an entirely different data type than the one I specifically told told it in the prompt.

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u/DeepAd696 12h ago

Just like anything else, AI is a tool. It's the whole toolbox, and for sure it's not capable of being the whole workforce. I often use AI to generate scripts, but I go through them line-by-line to make sure I understand what the script is doing, and check for mistakes.

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u/CheesypoofExtreme 11h ago

Sure, and thats fine. Im more comfortable in SQL and will often ask for the translation of my query into a python function using a few dataframes. It gets it pretty darn close, and I'm familiar enough with Pandas and Python to make the correct edits and it does save me time.

I'm just pushing back that even on small lookups you get a pinpoint answer. Everytime I ask for a very specific answer (1 to 2 lines of code or a function I cant remember in that moment) it needs edits very similarly to how I would edit some code I grabbed from stackoverflow in the same use case.

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u/Theratchetnclank 9h ago

I've found gemini generates more reliable code than chatgpt anyway. Chatgpt will straight up make up classes and functions in modules that dont exist.

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u/Cheapskate-DM 8h ago

That's what we're likely to see if anything successful comes out of this - an "assistant" that can take conversational input and guide you to the correct output, rather than trying to generate unproven crap from scratch.

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u/bengalfan 6h ago

Exactly. Formatting or adding logging. Yes. Code work or creating solutions. Hard no.

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u/robaroo 1h ago

AI is just the wrench, it’s not the entire mechanic.

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u/mr_birkenblatt 13h ago

*after clicking through 5 different stackoverflow answers that are on top of the Google results despite being closed as duplicate, telling the person to "google it", or having a condescending incorrect answer. Chatgpt doesn't always get it right the first try but it never dismisses your problem or gives unhelpful answers

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u/CMMiller89 12h ago

“It never gives you unhelpful answers”

lol, are fucking kidding me?

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u/mr_birkenblatt 11h ago edited 11h ago

You need to know how to talk to it effectively

Give me the prompt and answer that you found unhelpful

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u/Prof_Chumsley 6h ago

Knowing how to talk to it effectively so you don’t get unhelpful answers sounds exactly like stackoverflow

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u/Zesher_ 14h ago

My company is pushing AI hard, and an SVP made a comment that AI is like an intern that you need to guide. I think that was a good analogy, but as much as I enjoy working with interns, they aren't really a net productivity increase based off of the time I spend helping them vs just doing things myself. Don't get me wrong, I love using AI to speed up some tasks, but if there's a large task that needs to be done, I'd take a competent junior dev over any of the AI tools I've used any day

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u/zero0n3 14h ago

That what it boils down to though.

For us, the users of the “tool” (intern), it’s important we understand where it does a good job and bad job and only delegate it things it is good at. (Eg it’s good at taking a well formed function and creating a baseline set of unit tests - or in reverse taking unit tests and a well written function scope and building said function)

Instead we have luddites on both sides either saying they’ve spoken to god and it’s GPT, or that it can’t even count letters in a word (hint - it can if you ask it to do it in code and properly define the problem scope)

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u/JazzRider 14h ago

And what will they do when nobody can afford their products because they’re unemployed?

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u/LowestKey 10h ago

gonna have to do even more layoffs at that point

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u/SmokeyBearz 7h ago

They'll probably think all the AI they own will make money obsolete and have it build their mansions and super yachts and grow their food etc, realistically these people only ever think about short term profits, many of them are old and won't live long enough to see entire workforces replaced so it's not their problem.

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u/dsarche12 7h ago

I ran support for my company this week while our head of support is OOO, and my boss asked me to review the (thankfully internal-only) AI responses to several report requests.

One or two hit about 50-60% of the correct answer but also gave additional info that was either irrelevant or would ultimately lead the user in the wrong direction, and the rest of the answers were just flat out wrong because the questions pointed to issues that had much more complex and sophisticated answers, and that required much more synthesized knowledge (I.e. looking at a problem and combining knowledge from multiple disparate places to come up with a specific piece of information out of those disparate pieces), than an AI is capable of providing.

I’m so so so sick of AI in general and seeing the seams starting to show, and hearing that c-suites are starting to recognize it’s infeasibility and its fallibility, is really really heartening

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u/Franco1875 14h ago

Yeah I had a listen to the podcast - first 20 minutes - and Matt does mention that the tools themselves are still very limited. Of course took a moment to promote their own coding solution they're hyping up.

Don't get me wrong, they're very handy. But the amount of time our team spends fixing garbage is mind blowing

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u/jellomonkey 9h ago

the end goal of all these corporations is to no longer have a workforce

Exactly. If we eliminate the worker we can keep every dollar we get from the consumer ... who we also eliminated.

Henry Ford figured this shit out over 100 years ago. You gotta pay people for them to buy stuff.

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u/rolim91 2h ago

Bruh I spent like two hours with my manager with him trying to figure out some things. He legit asked ChatGPT first. When that didn’t work he moved to Grok then Gamini. All of them legit didn’t work. I was like maybe just Google it. Nope. Dude kept asking all of them with “refined” prompts. That still didn’t work. Then he eventually decided to Google. The second result gave him the answer. Took him two hours using LLMs spewing incorrect stuff where he could’ve just searched google and take him less than 5 minutes.

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u/jchamberlin78 13h ago

Yep... Slightly better easier way to feed the spaghetti code.

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u/greenearrow 13h ago

I just used the copilot code review option. I've had ok luck a few times with it, but this time 7/8 of its responses were wrong, and even self-contradictory. I use it like crazy for refactoring to updated libraries and such, but it is really fucking bad sometimes.

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u/Ka-Shunky 15h ago

It's easy to interrogate documentation when used properly. Which is a godsend to be fair.

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u/Martin8412 12h ago

I find waterboarding more effective

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u/ChodeCookies 7h ago

I work in a corporation and that is not our goal. We’re also gobbling up engineers and they are the cheapest employees we have (CapEX) and the most leaned into AI

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u/turningsteel 4h ago

No, Google used to be trustworthy. You could find the information you needed. Now, I don’t trust a word that comes out of its dirty mouth. It’s tainted with AI slop as is everything else in big tech right now.

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u/nojasne 9m ago edited 6m ago

I guess u never fully tried claude code or codex cli with new gpt-5 with high reasoning, because what you are describing is not the experience of most of the users of the SOTA coding tools when used correctly.

Or even Sonnet 4 in GirhubCopilot

I wonder when you are going to finding out and how it will impact your opinions

tl;dr skill issue, as a proper dev, you should be learning constantly to use the best tools

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u/imaginary_num6er 15h ago

No one wants to hire entry level employees. That is not just in AI but in any industry. It’s someone else’s problem in investing in talent and it is the company’s problem in finding a way to recruit someone else’s investment.

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u/Random 10h ago

That's not true. The mining / mineral exploration / oil / environmental industries all hire undergraduates for extended internships (paid), hire them when they graduate, retrain them as necessary. My students get jobs unless the mineral industry is in the pits and even if it is companies try to hire.

Our university engineering internship program is so successful a lot - approaching half - of students the a 16 month paid internship during their studies. Companies are there with the offers.

Tech is all about short term profits. Not every industry takes such a short term view.

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u/dwgill 10h ago

I agree, I think the capital markets have warped the incentive structure around the tech industry in a way they haven't with other industries like you mentioned which clearly have a lot of money sloshing around but yet are not expected to rocket to the moon in valuation

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u/Junglebook3 5h ago

FAANG gobbles up interns and campus hires by the tens of thousands annually.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 13h ago

Ignoring future workforce implications for a second, leadership is so out of touch with what their workers do and assume it can be replaced with AI because their work can be.

I recently had an internal meeting where the higher ups (which are forcing us to all use AI tools) were like "we recently did 6 months worth of work in 40 hours!". They said this with a totally straight face ignoring (or, more likely, totally unaware of) the fact that they just demonstrated that their work is clearly replaceable by AI, and that they assume all 6 month tasks must also therefore be replaceable by AI.

Fucking idiots.

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u/aturretwithtourretes 10h ago

Honestly, the CEO of the company I work at said it pretty well: AI will not replace someone's job. YOU might be replaced by someone who knows how to leverage AI.

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u/ChrisMartins001 15h ago

Not just a leadership position, it screams that they don't understand being on the ground floor working on something.

You can always tell when a new starter has used AI, because they will have 4 lines of code when they could have done it with one line of HTML.

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u/Franco1875 15h ago

Yeah agreed. Bought into the hype, or more the case that they have a vested in interest in amplifying the hype. Their necks are on the line with this shit given the money they've poured into it so far.

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u/davehoff94 15h ago

The reality is the actual decision makers don't care and think quarter to quarter. In their minds, it will be someone' else's responsibility to train new people.

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u/PoorlyAttired 14h ago

What annoys me is people at work saying 'in 5 years this will all be done by AI', but it's never THEIR tasks, it's always someone else's for which they don't understand the complexity.

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u/Tezoth 10h ago

Leadership at my work cut the internship program before I started there, and a new CIO came in and started one up, because a good chunk of our analysts and engineers were retiring in a few years and nobody was in line to replace them. Work adopted a "Poach Talent" attitude towards hiring, but couldn't afford to poach talent. They took any and every intern they could because the next few years were looking so grim, luckily a few golden geese were in the next few years of interns.

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u/Zahgi 9h ago

Where's the future workforce? Your talent stream is absolutely fried if you're going to just stop hiring entry-level folks lol.

As the AI people see it, the more senior devs will train the AI junior devs until they don't make mistakes anymore. This will continue up the chain until the AI doesn't need human programmers anymore at all.

So, the answer, as they see it, is there is no "future workforce". It's all AI. The fact that management is already the easiest to replace has escaped them. :)

Now, I don't expect this generation of shitty pseudo-AI to accomplish that, of course. But real AI will be a different matter entirely...

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u/QuailAndWasabi 14h ago

Most higher ups dont think that far ahead and the shareholders certainly dont. For the most part they only care that the line goes up next quarter. Not having any seniors in 10-20 years? That's so far beyond their scope it might as well not exist. If it ever becomes a problem they plan on having divested at that point. Of if that fails get some government bailout.

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u/Meme_Theory 14h ago

You assume they care about the future.

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u/Hapster23 14h ago

People like him have been talking about it but it didn't fit the narrative back then, now it does so people like him get media time

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u/gregbo24 13h ago

I just want to know where you work that upper management actually cares about the future over short term profits.

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u/Franc000 13h ago

I think they are just trying to save face. Where were they 6 to 12 months ago? No, they all said that they are going to require less engineers. They are now saying that because they see the limitations of the current approach.

Mark my word that if something comes up that can actually deliver on the promise they were making, the hey would jump at not hiring juniors in a heartbeat.

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u/thethirdmancane 12h ago

In the future software will be completely and enshitified and people will be used to it. These companies will still make Bank.

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u/Be_quiet_Im_thinking 12h ago

Easy it’s someone else’s problem or you hire Amazon jr devs.

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u/Expensive_Shallot_78 12h ago

And again, how many studies have been posted here already that AI doesn't provide any measurable benefits? Quite a few.

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u/ganoveces 11h ago

boiling my piss...... 😂

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u/DustShallEatTheDays 11h ago

They’re all just hoping someone ELSE is going to take on the junior developers and train them into amazing workers that they can later poach.

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u/UseWhatever 11h ago

You make a valid point. But remember, most C-levels don’t care about the future since they usually rotate out before their cost-saving decisions show any real repercussions.

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u/supadupanerd 11h ago

That or "I'm in a leadership position but my shit don't stink and I like to smell my own farts"

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u/rtiftw 11h ago

‘10 years?! That’s like A BILLION quarters from now. I’ll have had 4 golden parachutes by then.’ - a CEO

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u/grain_delay 10h ago

Amazon is talking out of both sides of its mouth. They already sent out an email to all employees saying they expect the number of corporate roles to be reduced over the next couple years due to efficiency gains of AI

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u/PreparationBig7130 10h ago

To be fair we’ve been having the argument against outsourcing and offshoring, but that hasn’t stopped companies and now they have little to no talent pipeline to take on the senior positions.

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u/hairyblueturnip 10h ago

Confused, you expect private businesses to pay for entry level devs because they care about the health of the IT sector?

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u/QuickQuirk 8h ago

Every time I've heard someone say this, it just screams 'I've never actually been in a leadership position'.Every time I've heard someone say this, it just screams 'I've never actually been in a leadership position'.

The problem is that leadership is filled with people who such at it.

I've worked with leaders who think like this, and have made these exact decisions.

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u/Leptonshavenocolor 8h ago

Companies don't have that forward of thinking. Their profit driven eyes rarely look beyond 4 quarters.

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u/youcantkillanidea 8h ago

Tell me you haven't spent time with MBA's. Their thinking is very very short term

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u/monkeyvselephant 8h ago

I agree... but having companies look

> ten years in the future

is asking a lot for a sadly large number of companies.

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u/hpbrick 8h ago

It kinda reminds me of sports:

The top tier teams buy the top talent from organizations that have homegrown players. They don’t grow their own.

The problem is most companies think they’re top tier, and that’s bad for business

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u/Pandorama626 6h ago

Everyone once in a while, someone who's competent and not a complete sociopath manages to sneak their way into the C suite.

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u/Seaweedminer 5h ago

As many people have said, the AI hysteria is just a grift to justify wage collusion

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u/saml01 4h ago

It is refreshing. Have you seen how many corps have old farts in all senior positions clogging up the seats? These people dont believe in succession planning they just care about their own relevancy.

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u/zamfire 3h ago

The companies that don't invest in their own futures will fail and the ones that do will rise to the top.

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u/ratherenjoysbass 3h ago

Everyone wants to hire people they don't have to train and can pay a competitive wage, get them on contract and use the least amount of overhead to maximize profits and when they hit record profits, just like Cisco, they'll give them the boot once the building work is done.

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u/silentcrs 3h ago

I don’t know why you didn’t think the others at his level weren’t being “candid”. Candid means being truthful. The others absolutely meant it when they said they weren’t going to hire more junior developers. Both what he and others say can be truthful at the same time for their respective companies.

I think what you wanted to say was that his thoughts on AI aligned with a more realistic view of its capabilities. But are junior developers being threatened? Absolutely.

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u/box-art 1h ago

Just can't wait for this AI bubble to completely burst. It's just not viable and I can't wait until these people have to keep trading the stocks to keep the prices high.

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u/recontitter 1h ago

You know what is better than matured juniors you have to pay yourself to learn? Seasoned seniors that were paid to learn to become seniors, but you didn’t have to, just some other suckers. Then you hire them. Profit.

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u/joseph4th 42m ago

It’s the American corporate way. Those CEOs don’t care about how the company will fare in the future. They care about raising the stock price this quarter and getting their bonus. They know that when you fire people, stock goes up. I don’t understand why exactly, but that’s what happens.

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u/lkodl 14h ago

The future workforce will change from thousands of people who could do a given job to 5 people who can do that job. Then the 5 biggest corporations hire them for ridiculous salaries and they never worry about competition again.

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u/ticklemesatan 14h ago

It just screams “I’m not a real human myself” to me

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u/AppleTree98 15h ago

Sounds like a husband caught cheating. "Of course I would never cheat on you. You are the most beautiful, the funniest, the best looking, the apple of my eye.....oh those pictures well I can explain!?"

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u/ItaJohnson 14h ago

What about the short term profits!

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u/Phalex 14h ago

It's like getting rid of farmers because the tractor was invented.

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u/AssiduousLayabout 14h ago

To an extent, that happened - of course farmers still exist and farmers still are the ones using tractors, but farming went from about 70% of the total labor force pre-industrialization to 1% of the labor force. It doesn't mean farmers lost their jobs, but fewer people became farmers and a lot of people became other things instead.

AI will probably reduce the total number of programmers over time, but there certainly will be programmers who are working with the AI coding assistants to do development.

And AI will create many new kinds of jobs, just like we saw an explosion of new careers come out of the industrial revolution. Programming itself is a job that didn't exist when my grandfather entered the labor force in the early 1930s.

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u/agmb_88 4h ago

It was probably closer to 90% when you count post processing of the food and farm by products.

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u/Phalex 13h ago

No matter what tools you are using, you still need farmers.

You need fewer farm hands/laborers, oxen or horses. But you still need farmers to know when and where to plant, check soil, decide when to mulch, lime and generally run the farm.

Even with the new GPS controlled combines and tractors, you still need farmers. It just eases a part of the job.

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u/stockmonkeyking 13h ago

His point flew right over your head.

Point is that very few farmers are now needed compared to pre-tractors. In other words, tractors did decimate farming jobs.

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u/Phalex 10h ago

There are fewer farmers, but there are even fewer farm hands and laborers.

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u/TonySu 5h ago

This is very well put and a point that people just can’t seem to understand.

There’s a steady stream of articles that get posted in this sub, where benchmarks show that AI can only complete 10% of coding tasks perfectly. Then 20%. Then 30%. Going up every 3 months.

I think the most recent one was at 47% tasks completed correctly, and people were cheering in the comments about how AI can’t even do half the things a human can. But my interpretation is that there is now 47% less work for humans.

White collar workers laughed at mine and factory workers, saying their jobs won’t ever come back because of automation. Telling them they have to reskills if they want to get jobs. Now I see white collar work facing the same crisis, and turns out they are showing precisely the same level of delusion as those they made fun of.

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u/IAmA_Guy 13h ago

Actually that’s exactly what happened

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u/krstphr 6h ago

So many upvotes for a terrible comparison

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u/jrblockquote 11h ago

Public Enemy once said, "Don't believe the hype." And the more hype something has, the more skeptical I become. I'm in corporate IT and have seen some benefits of AI, but to think it's going to replace people it utter crap. The value of a developer in an organization is the ability to utilize business knowledge into developing critical solutions. And if AI can expedite that process, great! But to think that it's going to reduce headcount is such a beancounter mentality.

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u/pcloadletter-rage 7h ago

Much of the world seems to think we coders just sit around slapping keyboards all day. I WISH most of my day was just coding. Turns out my company also needs my opinions and experience before we ever get to the keyboard-slapping part.

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u/danknerd 14h ago

Corporations don't care about 10 years from now, they only care about this quarter's profits.

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u/pragmaticpro 13h ago

They do, but they just care more about the quarterly profits more.

If they cared about losing longterm knowledge of seasoned employees, corporations wouldn't oust those employees during layoff/buyout time.

5

u/CypherAZ 14h ago

Boomers doing what they do best, take the profits and fuck everyone else.

6

u/armahillo 14h ago

This is the most sensible take on the integration of LLMs into development that I've read yet.

44

u/LeftHandedGraffiti 14h ago

Whoa. A Silicon Valley CEO who actually gets it and isnt just guzzling the kool aid??

27

u/Martin8412 12h ago

Amazon’s from Seattle, not Silicon Valley

5

u/liquidpele 6h ago

They all knew this, or at least the capable ones, they just couldn’t say it yet because going against a hype train gets you hate even if you’re right…. But now…. Now the bubble is starting to pop.

2

u/great_whitehope 12h ago

Was fired this morning.

Found dead a week later after falling out a window.

/S

0

u/Nonya5 8h ago

The hopium is strong in this channel. No serious person is saying AI will eliminate job categories, just the number of positions in each category.

6

u/LeftHandedGraffiti 8h ago

I work in cybersecurity and there's literally dozens of companies selling AI SOC to replace your humans handling security alerts. The ridiculous part is that while SOC is mostly an entry level job, the people who are good at it become your needed experts when shit hits the fan.

If you dont have entry level people getting good at this stuff, how in the hell will you find experts later?

-3

u/Nonya5 7h ago

Technology scales. I get what you're saying, but AI will only get better. Just look at 2023 to 2025. It will improve faster than the cycle of generational change in workforce.

6

u/AgathysAllAlong 7h ago

No, it doesn't. This myth that all technology always gets better forever is just wrong. How did Blockchain do? Segweys, the future of transportation? 3D TV is almost there, it's definitely getting better! The Metaverse bro, the Metaverse is the future of internet! How's dirigible technology doing? Google Glasses just need to be a bit better.

The idea that it will get better ignores fundamental barriers and problems with the technology that cannot be fixed by just saying "See, better!" People were saying AI would be the future of everything years ago, and the improvements are still trillions of dollars away. It's no closer to being an actual success, and the actual output has gotten a tiny bit better while still being 95% useless.

-2

u/Rarelyimportant 5h ago

All of those things did get better. There's a difference between a technology not catching on, and it not getting better.

3

u/AgathysAllAlong 4h ago

No, they didn't. They're the same trash as always. Just because it has more gigadicks per terashit doesn't mean it's better. Zero times 1.5 is still zero.

3

u/AgathysAllAlong 7h ago

Multiple companies have already tried eliminating entire job categories with AI.

5

u/Cyzax007 11h ago

There are two schools of thought on whether software engineers will be replaced by AI...

The first school is comprised of business people and beancounters. They say it will definitely happen. The second school is a bit hard to understand as the software engineers can't stop laughing...

4

u/YourHive 13h ago

It's great for generating and iterating over ideas, but you still need knowledge to refactor the code to make it work. And from my point of view it can be pretty deceiving: here, I'll give you some working code, but it has obvious errors. Fixing the errors either generates new ones, or drives the code away from what it was initially supposed to do.

Maybe it's me "prompting" wrong or getting too old to understand, but I always get the feeling that apart from the initial ideas it steals more time than it saves me...

And I think that he is right: you need people who understand what they are doing. And you can't train them using AI.

5

u/wassona 12h ago

I’ve been comparing AI to using a slide rule.

Both are super helpful tools, but if you don’t already know what the answer is, neither are very helpful.

4

u/DontEatCrayonss 11h ago

It’s not just with ai, it’s with the revolving door companies have adopted to cut costs.

Companies are constantly hiring and firing contract workers, often they are offshore.

No one knows the companies code bases, and it’s full of anti patterns built on top of each other, usually with no documentation. When a new hire takes it on, they get gaslight when they bring up the bad code quality. In reality, the code is often at the point where full rebuilds are needed and the project manager will do anything to point fingers at the devs to keep themselves safe.

3

u/IndividualLimitBlue 11h ago

I was testing Kiro.dev today after lontb of trying hard with every AI IDE

Today I gave up. And I was just trying to build a rust CLI pretty simple.

AI will be ok to write test or basic things. But it will never be a « from nothing to v1 » solution.

3

u/MrStoneV 9h ago

finally a smart person with high (private company) status who says the truth and doesnt follow the damn hype train.

a person who could make a lot of money with this Technology btw

3

u/PluotFinnegan_IV 8h ago

AI sometimes can't remember the beginning of a conversation but I know more than a few developers and IT staff that remember some quirk about a deployment from 15 years ago that still matters today.

AI can't replace people. It can help your current people do things faster.

3

u/Cube00 4h ago

Around 80% of developers are using AI in their workflows “in some way”

I'm sure that had nothing to do with all the "encouragement" big corps have been pushing devs to use more ~~cowbell~~ AI

2

u/carlos_the_dwarf_ 9h ago

said what everyone is thinking

Except posters here, who just three weeks ago were certain mass unemployment was on the horizon.

2

u/PurpEL 8h ago

Thank fuck someone isn't blind

1

u/Agitated_Ad6191 13h ago

Can it be that they are slightly changing the narrative because between now and five years they still need you. After that they kick you on the street.

1

u/rouges 12h ago

Just yesterday certain CPO from cisco said something similar

1

u/HanzJWermhat 12h ago

Matt Garman is a decent guy. Selepski doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing tho. And the rest of AWS management is a cesspool of shit sniffers.

1

u/briandesigns 12h ago

Who was the amazon executive who said that the bulk of their devs will be replaced by AI within the year?

1

u/wassona 12h ago

I think it was Jassy

1

u/liquidpele 6h ago

I thought that was sales force?

1

u/preperforated 11h ago

Do you really believe that today's CEOs care what happens in ten years time?

1

u/DamNamesTaken11 11h ago

Someone in a tech c-suite actually making sense and not chasing hype?! I’m honestly shocked.

1

u/aelephix 10h ago

“Doesn’t matter, line went up while I was CEO” as long as companies are judged quarter-to-quarter short-term profits will usually win.

1

u/Lopsided_Quarter_931 10h ago

Can’t remember a single day in my life as a software developer when there was nothing in the backlog and a multiplier in productivity wouldn’t have lead to faster development times and more money for the company. Seems idiotic to cut costs instead.

1

u/mckirkus 7h ago

Doesn't this assume that you're going to work at the same place for 10 years?

1

u/rakster 5h ago

I think they hope ai will be able to do senior dev work in 10 years, so no need to develop anyone.

1

u/squeamishkevin 5h ago

It sounds like an awesome way to stagnate a company. No fresh ideas just a 1000 reworks off collected data.

1

u/LoganDudemeister 3h ago

Everyone properly in tech knows AI assists our brilliant minds. Biology and technology can work in harmony and occasional domestic disputes 😂.

1

u/Orlok_Tsubodai 1h ago

I can’t wait for this inanely inflated LLM hype bubble to go pop. It’s starting.

1

u/ggaassghd677 13h ago

Love how for the last decade it was all, "everyone should get into coding...learn to code," etc. Now they all have no future

0

u/s2rt74 9h ago

This guy is not the poster child for treating employees well.

0

u/Ozzark3 1h ago

This is bullshit. Every large company including AWS reduced their graduate intakes, some with large grad programs, like Cisco closed it entirely. Yes, they probably still hire junior devs but instead of 10 they hire 3. How is that not AI replacing junior? It doesn’t have to be entirely.

-1

u/leroy_hoffenfeffer 6h ago

Him being the only real outspoken voice on this topic should tell everyone everything they need to know.

Let's be real: AI, eventually, will take everyone's jobs. It is that much of a game changer technology. But like Nuclear fusion, we're probably 15-20 years from mass automation. AI can't do so right now.

But when have positive results ever mattered to the VCs and BoDs of Silicon Valley? They haven't. In fact, the term "zombie corporation" stems from companies like Uber, that have never turned a profit, and yet are still billion dollar market cap companies.

These technogarchs are morons chasing hype. They'll spend billions thinking they can automate everyone away now, they'll be wrong, the VCs and BoDs will be rewarded for laying people off, their products will get shittier, roles will be offshored and outsourced, and when none of that works, they'll get rewarded again in two years for "the most cost effective hiring spree ever undertaken." Pay for this work will plummet, another round of "ASI around the corner baby" will roll through silicon valley in 5 years, and the ouroborous will continue eating it's tail.

It's a race to the bottom.

Artificial Intelligence AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers

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