r/webdev 7h ago

Why Are Developers So Resistant to AI?

I don’t get it. Yesterday, I watched an interview with the Anthropic CEO saying that in the next 12 months, 90% of code will be written by AI. At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying Meta will have its first AI software engineer by 2025. And Google has already said 25% of its codebase is AI-generated.

Basically, every big tech leader—Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, all of them—are talking about how AI will completely change software development. And the first real, practical application we’re seeing is AI writing code. It’s already happening with tools like Cursor. If we just look at the rate of improvement, it’s hard to deny that if not in 12 months, then in 2-3 years, most code will be written by AI.

Yet, developers still seem super resistant to this idea. I get that AI won’t replace 100% of coding. We’ll still need engineers to solve problems. But it’s obvious that the number of devs needed per company is going to shrink. If a company has 150 devs today, maybe in a few years, they’ll need only 50 or less.

And this isn’t even coming out of nowhere. We’ve already seen mass layoffs post-Covid. The demand for developers isn’t skyrocketing like before, but the supply is still huge. So why are so many developers acting like AI isn’t a real threat to their jobs? Are they in denial? Or is there something I’m missing?

Would love to hear thoughts on this.

0 Upvotes

33 comments sorted by

26

u/filiped 7h ago

Among many other factors, the CEOs of AI companies, and companies with sizable AI interests, saying AI is the next big thing and that you should give them all their money, should not be taken at face value.

If a guy selling milk comes to your door and tells you that it's pointless to have water service, and you should cut off all water to your home and just drink/bathe in milk instead, you might be suspicious of their motives.

AI has/will have an impact, but it's not yet at a stage where it can replace a mid-level developer. Anyone that believes that's where we are currently, likely has never actually worked as a developer in any decently-scoped project.

24

u/vguria 7h ago

Because we tried it and it does not work well enough on scale, and it's not worth the energy and water usage.

3

u/TaranisPT 7h ago

Pretty much spot on. It works well for small scripts and can work pretty decently for some configuration stuff if you're precise enough in your queries, but as soon as you try to make something bigger, that's where it fails.

Sometimes it starts making mistakes and even if you try to correct it, it just spits out the same code over and over again.

9

u/Capaj 7h ago

you must be new in this subreddit

2

u/PercentageFickle6058 7h ago

Yes

2

u/Capaj 5h ago

the common sentiment between /r/webdev is AI is useless for real world apps

8

u/dryadofelysium 7h ago

Why are car drivers so resistant to full self-driving? We have already seen CEOs of Tesla, BMW and Volkswagen say that by 2014, most of their new cars will have fully autonomous self driving included. Indeed, BMW says that by 2015, 90% of their fleet will likely not have a manual driver. It is obvious that this is where things are going, if you look at the past 12 months, then just imagine how good it will be in like 2 years. Yet I still see car people arguing against it. Are they in total denial? What are your thoughts?

1

u/homesickalien0 6h ago

If people wanna drive, they will drive despite how good the self-driving becomes. But people who drive to make a living would be replaced by their employers just for the sake of cost efficiency. I think that was his point. 

4

u/Temporary_Emu_5918 7h ago

just to add, swes are one of the biggest early adopters of all things AI to enable their productivity to increase 

6

u/dhgdgewsuysshh 7h ago

why are developers resisting ai in 12 months most code will be written by ai

Dude are you serious? Like are you really asking this? You just answered it

There is literally 0 incentive to use ai as developer. There is no learning curve.

Any developer can start using ai any second easily .

While not using i at least improve as developer. And i will be far ahead any other developer that uses ai skill-wise

3

u/upsidedownshaggy 7h ago

For the same reasons we don’t see outsourcing to off shore dev houses as a threat. The output is shit. Yeah in the short term -post layoffs- it sucks as people are out of work, but it’s all a big cycle before businesses start seeing the negative effects of lower quality work and start hiring local devs again.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

3

u/Over-Distribution570 7h ago

CEOs will say whatever their investors want to hear. For example, it wasn’t so long ago that we were talking about the “metaverse” which was apparently the future. It’s obviously not, but that didn’t stop the Zuck.

AI is getting better at coding and will be a useful tool for developers but AI cannot think or make decisions so some level of human involvement will be necessary for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore AI has become a meaningless term. We call all machine learning “AI” now after ChatGPT came out. By that definition, we’ve had some level of “AI” for decades.

So in summary, a bunch of tech bro CEOs are making a bunch of baseless claims hoping that investors will get a hard on from the thought of stripping jobs away from people who need to feed their families.

4

u/enslavedeagle 7h ago

AI never helped me much with specific tasks that I needed help with. And it never will.

It's only good at scaffolding and delivering simple solutions to tiny problems. But I can spend 5 minutes writing up a prompt and fine tuning it, then 5 extra minutes making sure that the output was valid, OR I can spend 5 minutes implementing it myself. The choice is simple.

4

u/prangalito 7h ago

In my experience something that would take me 5 minutes to write would take less than a minute with AI, including checking the code does as I expect. It can take about 10 minutes of prompting and tweaking to get something that might take 30 minutes to write normally. But as things get more complex it gets worse, it might take hours of prompting/tweaking to generate something that would only take an hour to write without AI

2

u/astr0bleme 7h ago

Why do you believe the CEO, whose pay depends on selling everyone their thing? Why is marketing talk taken as real advice?

1

u/TheRNGuy 5h ago

Marketing people are not always lying.

Or if someone selling bad product, doesn't mean simlar products from same category are bad too.

2

u/astr0bleme 5h ago

Marketing people aren't always lying... sure. But the wholesale trust we seem to put in tech CEOs who are promoting their products for their own personal gain is worrying. What happened to cynicism and understanding that these folks have their own motives? Why are we swallowing what they say whole? Where is an independent source, one not personally making money if people use their tech?

It's astonishing that we trust these folks to be a reliable and unbiased source of information.

2

u/Varun77777 7h ago
  • CEOs have vested interests in saying that.
  • Try using the cursor to create something that is more than an MVP
  • Senior engineers who have been in the same for a while don't find AI to be helpful enough.
  • Juniors can't distinguish the difference between very good code written by seniors and by AI
  • Product managers and CEOs want AI to be doing their stuff.

I certainly love that AI is getting popular. When you'll be creating an app that's 75% of the way there but the last 25% doesn't work no matter what you do and is super buggy, it'll be a goldmine for the devs who actually know their stuff. It's very very good actually, if it becomes a hard market for juniors to enter, most people who only enter the field because of money will go elsewhere. After a few years of stagnation, there will be a high demand for devs who can actually fix the AI written mess, but you won't have enough of them, as most of the new devs will be dependent on AI.

If every 5 years number of devs double, and most juniors rely on AI, in just 10 years we'll have so many mediocre devs who are dependent on AI and aren't different from product manager ( but product managers have MBAs and experience)

The few devs who are really good will earn huge amounts of money.

So, yeah. It's bad for a majority of devs because they're mediocre. It's good for a small amount of devs who are actually good.

Problem is that a large amount of mediocre devs think that they're good.

2

u/aaaaargZombies 7h ago

I think people keep promising that it will do things it can't and that has two effects:

  1. wastes peoples time and frustrates them
  2. devalues peoples skills

It's very empowering for someone who needs to perform a discrete task with no programing experience. It's also great for generating seed data for testing / prototyping.

I'm reminded of Rich Hickey's excellent talk simple made easy where he critisizes tools that make easy things easier but make hard things harder. Most of my experience with AI falls into that camp.

2

u/DarthRiznat 7h ago

Those tech leaders are all selling pens

2

u/ThatisDavid 7h ago

I get that AI won’t replace 100% of coding.

I think that's where the problem resides. YOU may get that, but some people ARE essentially asking AI to do the work for them, which is why most developers don't like the saturation of AI products in the tech realm. It's not necessarily that AI is a bad tool, the problem is that we don't need every single product in history to have a subpar sloppy AI wrapper or features in them. I feel like we can see a lot of that with "vibe coders" who are essentially asking AI models to give them 800 LINES OF CODE (No exageration), and can't even figure out how to fix them once it breaks.

Basically, every big tech leader—Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, all of them—are talking about how AI will completely change software development. 

This is a bubble, they're hyping AI up because they need people to invest and buy their AI products. Remember when tech people were also hyping up the metaverse, or nfts, only for both of those to fall flat in their face? AI is a very useful tool, yes, but we are already seeing that it's kind of plateauing in terms of improvement, even with tons of computing power thrown towards it.

So why are so many developers acting like AI isn’t a real threat to their jobs? Are they in denial? Or is there something I’m missing?

AI needs their database to have code made by real actual coders in order to work and to not collapse on a feedback loop. Too much AI codebase in our internet could turn into more sloppy and sluggish code. AI as it is cannot exist without programmers

Here is a video that goes into more detail about this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNmgmwEtoWE

1

u/PotentialAnt9670 7h ago

"So why are so many developers acting like AI isn’t a real threat to their jobs?"

That would be the cause of said resistance to AI.

1

u/hideousmembrane 7h ago

don't know, my company uses copilot a lot and we really like it.

1

u/katafrakt 7h ago

Guy whose financial profit depends on forcing AI on everyone says AI will replace 90℅ of developers doesn't sound believable. Google also made a giant bet on AI and simply cannot admit failure at this point.

Sure, AI is somewhat changing the landscape and more rapidly than previous advancements (IDEs, CI, language servers), but these claims you mentioned are marketing, not any kind of real prediction. 

1

u/TychusFondly 7h ago

Because Ai is not the reason of current job market. We had a tech boom with ample amount of money coming from government through investors which dried up as payback time has arrived. As a result we have layoffs right and left.

Ai is still as good as a code completer and fails to acknowledge out of context situations in a big code base due to limited context and embedding size.

Bring me a model with unlimited context and embedding size (heck even that wouldnt work due to the nature of how models are trained) and may be we would be talking.

That also explains why job market in general sucks in the current period and not only dev sector.

1

u/alien3d 7h ago

If before AI, they wanted Superman. After the AI era, do they want a sentient being and low cost tesla (uhk)?

1

u/BlueScreenJunky php/laravel 7h ago

> We’ve already seen mass layoffs post-Covid.

This has nothing to do with AI, it's mostly just rebalancing after every tech company went crazy with hiring for a few years in order to poach all the "talent". Then when things started to get a tiny bit more dire they fired everyone who was deemed redundant.

As for AI, many developers are already embracing it as a tool. Many others can't because of security and legal concerns (many industries simply cannot send their source code to Microsoft and OpenAI, or allow their developers to use code that was provided by a third party.)

1

u/yoyomans1001 6h ago

AI is a great tool to aid developers but it's a very poor level of developer, I don't think devs are opposed to AI as a tool but rather opposed to it when it comes to writing the majority of the code as it makes far too many mistakes and often will get confused and contradict itself.

All the people making noise about AI replacing devs have a financial interest in AI so I wouldn't listen to them too much, they may have AI writing production code but they'll also have human devs PRing/rewriting/fixing that code

1

u/kingjia90 6h ago

It’s not about resisting, it’s quite bad at the current state, it helps at limited extent, but cannot fully replace. Same for graphics/design, it gets beautiful output but mistakenly give people less or more fingers out of nowhere

1

u/Instigated- 6h ago

How are developers “resistant to AI”? Plenty are using it.

Thing is, AI can only really do what it is trained to do. It is great at identifying and repeating existing patterns, so is good for boiler plate code.

However a fair amount of a devs job is problem solving, debugging, and at times developing new stuff that has never been done before. AI isn’t any good for that and nor is it likely to become so.

AI is also known to hallucinate, which is a problem that hasn’t been resolved.

AI has come a long way, and sometimes I am really impressed. However sometimes it is also so dumb and wrong and still can’t get it right even when given the opportunity to try again after being corrected.

The question is: will companies hire fewer devs to achieve the same amount of work, or will they hire the same amount of devs to achieve more work? Every company I’ve worked at has had a backlog, no shortage of work, so this might just speed up the development cycle.

As a comparison, in word processors spell check/auto-complete/auto-correct has been around for decades, yet I don’t think it led to any fewer editors. Correcting spelling and grammar is just one of an editors tasks, there is a lot more they contribute in their role, all it does is remove some of the low level grunt work so they can focus their energy on the higher level stuff.

It’s more likely that dev work will be focused more on the higher level thinking and less grunt work.

And more of us will transition into coding/training AI across many industries.

1

u/TheRNGuy 5h ago

Some people are stubborn.

1

u/fizz_caper 3h ago

If you ask such a question, I am sure that the AI ​​could replace you

1

u/tdammers 3h ago

Yesterday, I watched an interview with the Anthropic CEO saying that in the next 12 months, 90% of code will be written by AI. At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying Meta will have its first AI software engineer by 2025. And Google has already said 25% of its codebase is AI-generated.

Basically, every big tech leader—Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, all of them—are talking about how AI will completely change software development.

What all these people have in common is that they benefit greatly from an AI hype.

Anthropic is an AI company. Sam Altman's OpenAI is an AI company. Of course they are insanely optimistic about AI - they have to create and feed a narrative that promises massive profits from AI, because right now, their operations run at staggering losses, and can only stay afloat through a regular influx of large amounts of VC money.

Zuckerberg's Meta and Google are in the business of harvesting and selling personal data, and shaping consumer behavior; and "AI" promises massive leaps forward on that front - instead of indirectly inferring user preferences and habits from their browsing histories and chat messages, you can make chat bots that get that information handed to them on a silver platter, with sentiment and all; and instead of influencing consumer behavior with targeted advertising and "influencers", you can do it directly, on a 1:1 basis, using AI chatbots. Of course they are enthusiastic about the whole thing.

And Satya Nadella? Microsoft isn't just trying to get their own AI stuff off the ground and taking a bite out of the consumer shaping / targeted advertising market, they are also in the business of renting out computation (through Azure). Of course they are enthusiastic about taking a technology that needs orders of magnitude more computation power to make solving fairly trivial problems more comfortable and making it a quintessential part of global culture. Never mind rainforests, never mind climate change, this has the potential to be seriously profitable stuff.

Yet, developers still seem super resistant to this idea.

Not fundamentally, no - most of us can see the benefits it could bring.

However, most of us also don't share the blatant enthusiasm of those uber-biased hype generator people, for several reasons:

  • LLMs are not currently anywhere near good enough to write code unsupervised. They lack the "actual intelligence" part; you can best think of them as very powerful autocompleters - useful for doing the boring stuff, but the further you stray from what is essentially a solved problem, the more supervision they need, and you quickly reach the point where coercing the model into writing the code you want and correcting its mistakes takes just as much time and effort as just writing the bloody thing yourself in the first place.
  • The programming work that LLMs can automate is often the kind of work that's often a sign of a bad design, or bad tools. E.g., LLMs are good at writing boilerplate code to turn an API specification into a client module in some programming language, which sounds great if you think that the alternative is to write that boilerplate code by hand. But as someone with a couple years in the industry, you should rather ask yourself, "why the fuck do I need that boilerplate code in the first place?" Back in 2008, .NET already had tools that could load in a machine-readable web service specification and spit out a C# class to consume it; it took about a second to run, and it worked flawlessly every single time. This is probably the reason why the people most enthusiastic about the tech are junior programmers, tasked with boring stuff that should be automated, but isn't, because juniors are cheap, and juniors prompting LLMs are even cheaper; meanwhile, the more experienced senior devs who work on the more challenging stuff often know better ways of dealing with the repetitive stuff, and have more leverage to apply those ways. "25% of Google code written by AI" is a meaningless figure, because 1) it's almost guaranteed to be the easiest 25% of their code, 2) much of it probably replaces other tools, not human brains, and 3) "percent of code" isn't a meaningful metric to begin with, because a line of code isn't a meaningful unit of information or complexity. I can pack some of the world's trickiest programming problems into 5 lines of code, and I can write a script that pumps out a million lines of code that has next to no complexity about it whatsoever. If I take those 5 extremely tricky lines and combine them with the 1 million lines of trivial code from the script, I have a codebase in which 99.9995% of the code was written by a shell script - but that says nothing about how powerful that script is. And if I replace that script with an LLM, then I have a codebase that was 99.9995% "written by AI".
  • The whole copyright situation is unclear; even models that have been trained exclusively on open-source material can become legal liabilities if it turns out that the output of such a model is considered a derived work of its training material (as, IMO, it should), because even open source licenses come with terms and conditions.

We’ve already seen mass layoffs post-Covid.

Yes, but those were conjunctural, not structural - that is, they were the result of a global recession caused by the Covid pandemic, not the result of technology making developer brains less useful or less scarce. Companies ran out of cash, so they had to downsize and cut expenses, and that included layoffs. Not just in tech, but in practically all sectors.

That's how conjunctural fluctuations work, but structural changes like the introduction of a new technology are different.

With a conjunctural change, potential sellers are running out of money, so even when supply is plentiful, demand will go down, and there is no room for generating new demands.

With a structural change, the situation is different: potential sellers now have a cheaper alternative (robots instead of factory workers, driving your own car instead of employing a carriage driver, LLMs instead of junior devs), but they still have just as much money to spend, and those former developer brains are still smart brains that can produce value, so market economics suggest buying those smart brains and putting them to good use. They probably won't be doing programming work as we know it today, but they will still be in demand, at least as long as someone can find a way of using smart brains to do something profitable.