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Ask HN: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs?

10 points _pdp_ | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 14:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.242s | source

Longer title: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs and instead start thinking how we are going to hire more developers?

Hi folks,

I can't be the only one noticing that AI coding agents are making us work more, not less.

Here's the math that's been bugging me. If a developer used to write 100 lines of code per day (illustrative) but now AI writes 90% of the code, so you'd think that the load will go down to 10 lines, right? What I find is that the scope has exploded. Developers are now able to crank 1000 lines per day total and while you may say that AI writes 90% of them we are still writing 100 lines of the hard stuff.

Every feature that seemed too expensive before is suddenly doable. Every prototype becomes production system. The bottleneck shifted from typing to thinking, but the thinking load just got 10x bigger. We have also single-handedly increased the demand of that 10% chunk which is not as easy to scale as machines. Am I the only one noticing this?

1. scarface_74 ◴[30 Aug 25 13:50 UTC] No.45074683[source]▶
I can tell you anecdotally as someone who only does green field implementations which are proof of concepts/MVPs to train clients and to hopefully get a larger implementation down the road where we will need to bring in a team, before LLMs got “good enough”, I would have had to staff 1-3 junior engineers to do the grunt work while I did a lot of the higher customer facing, architecture, team lead type work, now I can do it all myself in the same amount of time.

The code that even ChatGPT generates is usually just as well structured using good software practices as I would have done - and I’ve been in the field professionally since 1996.

The only work I do manually is moving functions out into their own libraries and telling it to use my libraries to reduce duplicate code.

It’s going to hurt junior devs the most. I still have to do the higher level design work and tease out requirements.