And you know what? We went from having actual no- or low-code tools (UI builders, forms in Access and FoxPro etc.) to zero no-code tools worth a damn [1]. There was a brief dream of Yahoo! Pipes in mid-to-late 2000s, but it's dead as well.
[1] Except some applications like Unreal Blueprints and similar node-based tools in audio and graphical software
Once you create a general purpose no-code option, it is so complicated and sprawling that the mental burden to understand it is just as great (if not greater) as just using plain old code again. Or conversely, it is so constraining (for the sake of "simplicity") that it can't do anything useful.
They've been promising those since the early 2000's, but I'm still employed.
Some stuff has been automated by Zapier, IFTTT and the like, but most of the systems I'm integrating with don't have public APIs.
Obviously it's a cheeky example, but this would not be the first time in history a previously well-established career was upended in a (relatively) short amount of time. I'm a FAANG dev, I've got skin in the game too and I'm trying to be optimistic, but I can't help but be at least a little worried. From Wikipedia -
"In 1890 there were 13,800 companies in the United States in the business of building carriages pulled by horses. By 1920, only 90 such companies remained."
I don't think we'll be out of the job entirely, but I can definitely imagine the bar being raised and the compensation stagnating as we now have to justify the time and cost of our work compared to the near-free, near-instantaneous output of an LLM.
All that being said, if you've been working since the 2000s, you've got nearly a 20 year head-start on me, so perhaps it makes sense for me to be a bit more worried.
Yea, that's mostly why I get hired. Experience gives people a certain intuition on what kind of solutions work for which cases.
And when you've been working long enough, you don't (hopefully) feel the need to do cool bleeding edge shit at work, you just want the work code to ... work. You pick the simplest and most boring solution possible so you can clock out at 1600 and not think about services crashing because the newfangled thingamageek coded with the latest language du jour failed because of an edge case nobody has seen before.
Wow. The hype around "AI"s has entered the crypto stages. Just like crypto was the new car, the new internet etc., so is AI now.
Well, at least AI is useful in certain applications.
It's same for me. I can learn how to tile my bathroom or repair my car, but i just don't feel like and am happy to pay someone else.
I think all of us here conflate simple with easy. It's simple in theory yes - you get some JSON from service X, maybe tweak service Y that talks to X and then feed it into some front end. In practice even very experienced engineers can take days writing or changing a simple end point or some front end because unclear requirements/bugs/micro service hell/unclear existing code/etc etc.
If it was that easy the pace and quality would have been much higher than what I'm seeing in tech companies.
