AI Replacing Mid-Level Engineers - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

okay I think we're getting connected here I'm trying for the first time to also stream on substack which would be kind of interesting I didn't realize I actually offered this so kind of cool uh looks like Tik Tok is also back so streaming to Tik Tock um but yeah I know should be an interesting conversation so I'm happy to go through this today we're going to be talking about uh something that a lot of people are uh pretty nervous about there's a lot of conversation about it it's going to be AI replacing mid-level software Engineers um and this is all kind of stemming from a recent podcast episode I'm not sure if folks have watched it uh but Mark Zuckerberg was on The Joe Rogan podcast and started talking about this and since then uh everyone's been terrified and panicking and posting about it online so I wrote a newsletter artic about it I've done a couple of Vlogs about it and I wanted to do this live stream to kind of chat through it as well so hey folks on um on substack this is the first time I'm streaming on substack usually I do this on YouTube twitch uh Twitter LinkedIn everywhere else I just found this on substack so uh I'm going to be trying to watch the chat which is down here um if you're watching on the other feeds I have to have different cameras because I can't stream from my computer to substack would be a nice feature so I will try to watch the chat as well um but if you want a better experience I would highly recommend like uh YouTube probably and that way I can actually be talking to you but with that said um if you're on substack you probably know the newsletter issue I'm talking about if you're not I will post it in the chat um no um you don't have to uh let me pull my chat up sorry um you don't have to subscribe or anything like that if not into newsletters no worries um I realize that's not for everyone but if you want to know the topics that I go through on my live streams it's generally the newsletter article so even if you don't want it emailed to you if you're like hey this is a cool live stream I want to check it out by the way it's every Monday 700 p.m. Pacific if it's interesting to you then plan to come next time as well and if you want to know the topic it's most likely this newsletter weekly. deev leer.com um a friendly reminder if you're new to these live streams as well I try to spend as much time as I can answering and talking through questions that come up in the chat so by all means if you have questions like this is the time to be asking I will be watching as close as I can um and with that said too if you are in the chat do me a favor let me know what working by saying hi I appreciate it because I've definitely been on these streams and then found out later that like LinkedIn messages weren't coming through or something um so it' be good if you're if you're a regular say hi and if you're new here come say hi as well um and yeah I will be watching the chat for questions so um I pulled up or I guess I wrote some notes the other day because I made a follow-up video to a a vlog entry um and the first time that I was responding to some of the thoughts that came up from this uh this podcast interview I hadn't watched it yet but I was responding to what people were saying about it and a lot of the the fear that they were sharing right like hey like you know I don't know why I'm even going to school for software development like it's going to be a dead field like why am I doing this I don't know what path to take now like should have just done the trades by the way nothing wrong with going into the trades or anything but the point is that there was so much fear um and to me one of the challenges here is that there's a lot of folks that have not been in the industry yet and they're kind of taking things at face value so Graham Walker good to see you thanks it's working awesome um so I think what's happening is that a lot of people are like hey if if Markus Zuckerberg says it or um you know Nvidia CEO says it or any any other person that's like a sort of a figure in Tech they're like I don't have any other thing to believe except what these people are saying um but what I realized after doing my own homework because I hadn't watched it the first time I responded to it was just responding to the questions and the comments that people were making when I did my own homework and watched it I was like I don't disagree with what Mark Zuckerberg is saying because I don't hear the same thing that people are afraid about so I wanted to kind of chat through this um I have a couple time stamps I'm not going to play the podcast episode so uh by the way if you have not watched it yet um I'll I'll share the time stamps and you can check it out to make it easier but it's a recent episode on The Joe Rogan podcast if you don't like watching Joe Rogan like it's not I'm not telling you like oh go subscribe to Joe like it's not for everyone I get it um but I think it's an interesting conversation and if you haven't seen it I would encourage you to watch it and what I want you to be able to think about is a couple of different perspectives on this one is and you you might actually fall into this category already is like as someone that's like brand new to software development okay so you're brand new you're um an aspiring software developer or you're in college or university going through a boot camp and um and then you watch this like what is your take from that perspective and perhaps you are someone that has been in the industry for a while and you have opinions about like how you've seen software engineering teams operate and run and all this kind of stuff so when you hear what Mark Zuckerberg is saying like do you have a different perspective on that so I think it's really important um if you watch my one channel called code commute I realize some people might be uh visiting from that channel if you watch that channel you'll often see that I try to talk about things from different perspectives because I think it's really important that we do that um even when I disagree with things like if I know I have a bias and I have an opinion about something I always want to try and acknowledge the other side not dismiss it like it doesn't exist but try to look at it from the perspective of someone that sees it and see what types of truths or things that we can extract from it so I think it's a good exercise to do um especially as software Engineers um one of the things that we're always doing is analysis and that means that we have to navigate our biases and we have to be kind of open to exploring other things does not mean you have to agree with it and I want to be very transparent about that it does not mean you have to agree I'm just saying that it really helps us look at like a whole a whole picture when we look at things from different angles okay so um I'm going to kind of refer to my notes here so uh if you haven't seen the podcast episode like I said it's the Joe Rogan podcast that I don't know exactly when it went up within the last week or so um maybe two weeks now and if to save you some time at the 2 hour so you don't have to watch the first two hours 2 hour 8 minute and 7 1 second Mark 2817 this is where this topic starts to come up with uh with Mark Zuckerberg and Joe around Ai and software developers now the first video I made on this when I was talking about it I thought I heard someone saying that it was within 5 years so the first take I had on this was in five years um I thought what I was hearing was that Mark Zuckerberg said in 5 years AI will replace mid-level engineers and my stance was like I don't think that's possible in 5 years then I realized if you watch the podcast episode he says in 2025 but that's he doesn't say We'll replace mid-level software Engineers so we're going to talk through that he says probably in 2025 meta and other similar types of companies will have an AI that effectively can code as a mid-level sorry we'll have an AI effectively be a mid-level engineer that can code okay so first thing to note is he does not say the AI will replace Engineers like that doesn't he doesn't say that at this point okay so I think that's important to acknowledge and I know the first instinct that people have is going to be but but but he says that AI can do the job of a mid-level engineer he says it can write code like a mid-level engineer now I don't personally even with 2025 in that statement I don't really think so maybe and like we've seen llms advancing and I think this is all is all great stuff it's getting better cool but I I still don't see it sort of operating as a mid-level engineer is it going to be able to produce code that a mid-level engineer could produce perhaps but there's still a lot of room to go but maybe in 2025 will see that so let's keep going here so he says it'll be expensive but it will become more efficient over time but this is kind of like any technology right first versions of things they're expensive and then we start optimizing them we start making improvements to them so that the costs come down so again I think that makes sense I don't disagree with anything so far next up he says um a lot of the and I think this is where people start to connect the dots and really kind of start to panic but he says a lot of the code in our apps and the AI will be built by AI Engineers instead of people Engineers now this like I said I think is where people start to go oh my God like that means AI is just going to be doing our jobs it will replace us but that's not that's not quite the case um so if we I don't want to go through like too many complete different tangential examples here but um if we think about programs and code right really today at some level we have compilers that take the code we write and make it understandable for machines once upon a time there were things like punch cards and stuff right like we have tools that are replacing over time the different aspects of software development that we don't have to be responsible for now now if you're a net developer I realize maybe more of the people on my substack side are net developers maybe the people from YouTube are net developers but I realized my whole audience is not necessarily net developers I wanted to talk about uh something that we have in CP and.net that's called reflection and reflection just to kind of give you an example of of how I see kind of like tooling like this evolving um and in terms of creating code from a machine C and the net ecosystem we have strongly typed languages that we're working with but that means that the um the dev leader himself that means that we have type information that gets embedded into the assemblies that we're executing now what's really cool is that at run time we can actually investigate that type information so this is a process called reflection we can investigate that type information and then essentially dynamically call things if we wanted to so um the idea being that instead of saying like I have a method called like do work you could say hey on this type find me a method called do work and now invoke it so you don't have to refer to it exactly at compile time you could look it up now there have been advancements to reflection and some of the processes we do with reflection and we have things like Source generators now so what's really cool about Source generators is that they're filling the Gap that we had with reflection we were doing some of this stuff at runtime but now what we can do is create Source generators so at compile time we take things that otherwise we would have used reflection for in some cases and we can actually have the compiler generate code for us so that means that we start to have code that is in the code base that is generated by a computer if you've used um and again I realize I'm going to be dating myself and this is a niche part of my audience but if you've done winform development or WPF development I know like I I realize what I'm saying here um we have things like designers for those things and we can drag and drop um you know UI controls and stuff like that but even those things have code that gets generated by the computer so what Mark is saying here is that we will have ai like code in our code bases that might be more AI generated than Compu or than human generated to continue that final example with the source generators I just wanted to mention this really cool thing in net where and I'm going to I'm going to mention um yeah sorry uh I who's on LinkedIn I can't see the names coming through I'm not saying that Source generators are a reflection extension that's not the claim I'm making I'm using as an example um Philip yes um so I'm not saying that uh sorry if that's a misinterpretation of what I'm saying I'm trying to give an example of how computers are generating things um and that you can use uh Source generators to replace things that otherwise reflection could have done some things you still have to do dynamically with reflection um we have something for regular Expressions now that's another dirty word to bring up but inet we have uh the ability for compiled regular Expressions that aren't compile once at runtime they're actually Source generated and the source generators in net actually create the code that you can step through and you can literally debug the execution of a regular expression sounds terrible but it actually creates the code and it's commented and you can step through it and debug it so again just another example of like a computer generated that code that you're using so I think it's kind of interesting um yes I'm trolling only because I've been here longer than the CLR fair enough um and then just going to check the comments so a replace developers that don't use a and this is uh Philip I don't know why the LinkedIn usernames aren't coming through but I have LinkedIn pulled up as well so if other people are joining I can see who's who um but yeah Philip is saying uh a AI will replace developers that don't use AI with Developers that use them along with the rest of the tool set absolutely I fully agree with that the bottleneck is your ability to do any prompting and let's be honest Mo most managers don't know uh what the hell they want uh or explain what they want yeah that's I think that's true um Graham says I feel like the llm hype is following the same footstep is self-driving cars said many years ago and yet we still don't have level five autonomous driving yeah so this is it's like we're going to see I'm going to keep going through what uh what Mark talks about in his interview but it's a bit of a pattern right and the thing that I I'm trying to bring some attention to is like not I don't want to come across like I'm uh I'm like making fun of the people that are are fearful of this like it's a difference of opinion for sure because I'm not I'm not in the camp where I'm fearful of this stuff um but if you are fearful of it what I'm trying to do is give you a different perspective not to necessarily change your mind I'm not here to say like hey you're wrong if you think this or I have a crystal ball and I know exactly what's going to happen not my intention but especially for the people that don't really have anything else to grasp on to and all they're hearing is like you know programming in general is doomed and that's the only thing that they're like sort of seeing in the media or kind of in this Echo chamber that they happen to be in I'm just trying to interject different perspective to think about so I hope that that helps as we go through this um uh hammer 88 I'm still looking for examples where we can isolate different user chat and semantic kernel with history uh I haven't played enough around enough with semantic kernel um to be able to to comment on that um bra was saying I read a story I read it about Junior developers who started working for a startup where they generate all of their code and debug modify the generated code so their skill set seems to be refactor however the junior was complaining about how bad the AI generated code was maybe what this startup is maybe the startup's ahead of his time I just don't think AI is even at the point to rely on a main source of code so that's my um that's my perspective as well is that and I it's not that I don't think you can get there like I I think it would I feel like it would be a foolish claim of me to say I don't believe that AI could be that good I just don't I don't see it um Dev nir on Instagram says the question is even if AI can write the code can they trust it to fix bugs on multi-million dollar company's codebase yeah right like um here's the thing right when people are giving these examples this is one of the things I mentioned in a code commute Vlog entry where people are giving these examples of AI writing code and even in Mark's statements by the way I also want to make a side note here I'm not I'm not like super pro Mark Zuckerberg and I'm certainly not like super anti- Mark Zuckerberg I'm like like Mark doesn't employ me I don't have like meta is not paying me to like make this video or anything I'm just trying to look at what's being said and I know that there's other things going on where people are like upset with uh Mark Zuckerberg and well if you used Facebook or Instagram or Whatsapp ever I'm sure you have reasons where you're just upset with Mark Zuckerberg in general but like I know there's stuff going on with how they're doing um moderation and stuff like that I'm not I'm not talking about any of that I'm just talking about the statements made on the podcast okay so again I'm trying to remove bias where where possible so that we can talk about this um so one of the things that comes up even so far in Mark's statements that we've been talking about is that like mid-level engineer that like that can write code but that's not all that engine do in fact like at some point especially as you become more senior as an engineer writing code is not like the thing you spend the most time on there's a whole lot of other stuff that goes into software engineering and this is another reason why I think especially people that aren't yet in the industry it's so easy for them to see hey look llm generated code that code does work whether or not it's good or bad code code Works let's say and they go oh no what am I here for and it's cuz there's lots of other stuff that Engineers do so uh Devon is here on Instagram great Point um let's go back to the chat for a sec this reminds me of the days when people used to what they used to say about idees what will happen when programmers skills and their tools remember everything for them yeah oh no like it's it's a that I think that's a really good example uh raes Kumar a is not going to replace humans but humans with a will replace humans and geni can help or do Dev Tas 10 times faster if and only if that dev has sound knowledge of the domain your inputs yeah I think like I agree with that right um at least from what I've seen so far I would sorry I just read the next comment I'm eight steps removed from Nadella I'm actually I might be less than that watch out yeah um yeah but I think in this case right uh to ramesh's point everything that I've seen so far my experience like and I use AI for software development I don't code at Microsoft I don't write code there but in my own development right I've been writing code for years and years and years and I use AI for a bunch of things now I was I was uh making a a video and was saying I forgot the name of it but vz. deev for like UI development oh my goodness I'm a terrible front-end UI developer and just being ble to have that with like simple prompts like I can I can actually get stuff done so it does allow me to do task 10 times faster in that regard uh I talk about how I use AI for uh creating regular Expressions how I use AI for uh more complicated SQL queries there's times where like I'll design the table schemas and stuff that I want to use and then I have a scenario that's more complicated than I want to write a a query for myself and I say great here you go or sometimes I'll have it working and it's functional like oh man it's slow and I think I have my indices in the right places and then I do an explain query plan and I give it the output of that I give it the schemas and I say hey you tell me where to start looking I don't say or necessarily rely on it to fix everything but I'm like tell me where to start looking right like this really helps me be faster so what I don't know is that the AI tools we start to have do they become Advanced enough where they can start to link some of these thoughts together more cohesively and I'm not saying at that point it necessarily like replaces humans but like does that start to become more interesting in terms of the problems that we can sort of put in front of it and have it be successful with so just a thought for me like I said I'm not I'm not fearful of this stuff for me I'm looking at it like hey this is interesting and I think maybe the people that are like uh like I don't know like they don't want to touch Ai and I'm not saying it's because you know you might find it's inefficient for you right now that's totally fine but like what I'm saying is ignoring it I think that's probably a position that's maybe a little bit scary because I don't think it's going away it may not be moving at the pace that people say or they're predicting especially if you're running a trillion doll company or something like that but it's not going away and it will transform things because it already is um sorry there's a lot of chat messages coming in awesome thanks for chiming in folks uh my old boss at the previous job I was at just made a video about AI causing a memory leak and took quite some time to debug and resolve the issue feel like the problem is current over expectations of AI know I was disappointed today when trying to make myself a road map based on a syllabus for creating my own Big Data Financial trading app yeah I think like again we have these expectations and it can do things but if you're not if you don't have some of the background right you might take something go with it and then you're like it seems like it's working mostly working but when it doesn't work then what um on Instagram tell us the ultimate stack um there I don't there's no such thing the context is everything right uh I cannot tell you an ultimate stack without knowing and it would still be my opinion but without knowing what you're trying to accomplish and what constraints uh this is what engineering is requirements and constraints and then we get creative in there um I think design and architecting skills would become more important as the llms get better yes I agree um I use AI to speed up my work mostly agreed um I feel like there will be an emphasis on understanding both the low-level under the hood stuff as well as high level architecture stuff I feel like using AI for somewhere in between generation code for a developer has both high level lowle understanding so bra's the saying on this part um I agree with this and if we approach it from a couple different angles right just to walk through some of the um some of my own experiences that I was kind of sharing I know how to write SQL queries I don't love doing it I'm not like an expert at it I wouldn't like I would not at this point in my career say you know what I'm going to go take a job that's writing SQL queries because I love to do it and I'm so good at it that's not going to happen but if SQL came up in my job could I navigate it absolutely but I don't love it enough that like I get excited about getting into the details and stuff like that so I know enough about it at a high level where I'm like I can I can get by I can be effective enough but if I need to I can lean on AI to kind of go that next step and there's other things that I have a lot more intimate knowledge about that I might understand at a much lower level in way more detail and sometimes in those cases what's really helpful is if I'm using an AI tool cuz I'm trying to take a shortcut um you know I'm letting it do some mundane tasks for me that I know how to go look at the output and not be totally caught off guard and be like I don't know what's happening I can look and be like I understand this very well let me try to pick apart what's going on here so just some thoughts um I feel like I come here in word vomit so much no don't worry that's the whole point of this um I want people in the chat to be chatting that's the whole point of doing the live stream so don't hold back um philli on LinkedIn says for my own experience the actual missing part here is the llm exper in the llm experience is finding the right workflow I use llms to generate the code test in tdd style fashion that's only after spending a good 20 minutes explaining what the requirements are it gives me 10 times acceleration but only if I talk to it like the developers I used to manage yeah so it's kind of interesting right it's um the workflow has to change and I think that this is an interesting thing because we are going to go back to some of Mark's points um and I I but I think that this is like something I want folks to keep in mind this comment from philli if you can't see because of how the chats coming through in the video when it says LinkedIn user right now the only person that is LinkedIn user until someone else on LinkedIn chimes in is is Phillip just for heads up if you hear me saying Phillip um then Philip says you touch on something important about llms that most people Miss they see knowledge as flat they don't see the connections between different ideas which makes lots of people think they are copycat machines but speaking from my own experience there are some sci-fi level things that it will be able to do if it understood how everything is connected that's all I can say for now but I agree with that thought right if we're able to and I don't like I'm not sort of versed enough in AI terminology and different systems that we have access to to like to speak about this in a way sounds intelligent so I apologize but um we take things like even rag right where we're able to sort of feed a knowledge base to an llm and then it's able to do things with that like that's great but if you watch um I think it's in the Mark Zuckerberg Joe Rogan podcast the in that interview I think he talks about like he kind of gets a little bit philosophical and he starts to say like hey look like people often think about like intelligence and they think about Consciousness and like what's the other word he has like um it's not goals but like basically that you know it's it's driven for a goal it's like um we have like a purpose um he says that people often see these things kind of like as the same thing but he's like what's really interesting is that with an llm it's like it's just like intelligence it's not Consciousness it's not anything else but even to that point I think it's kind of interesting that in many cases it still seems to be missing some of the connections even if you give it sources of data sometimes it seems to be missing some of the reasoning and I don't know if reasoning is the right word in like in the sort of vocabulary here but that's maybe the word that comes to mind for me so interesting thank you for the discussion but yes I want people to keep this in mind what Philip was saying um where he he's talking about how he's approaching develop it accelerates his his ability to develop but he's he has to approach developing things in a different way he says it gives me 10 times acceleration but only if I talk to it like the developers I used to manage okay so speaking from a programmer perspective trying to get AI to do stuff I have to change my workflow to be able to get the effectiveness okay so very interesting let's keep going on some of the Mark Zuckerberg comments um so the last thing we talked about was that he said a lot of the code our Ops in the AI will be built by AI Engineers instead of people Engineers so we touched on that I tried to give some examples of like even before AI we're already seeing computers generate code now like he's saying he's not saying that no I think this is the last part I want to clear up on this he did not say in that statement will stop writing code you could literally make that statement and and and want to imply that humans will be writing more code than they do today it's just that AI will be writing even more code he doesn't say that so I'm not saying that he is implying it but with his statement you can't rule that out so when people automatically jump to but but but that means AI will eliminate the human it's not anywhere in his statement so just to be clear by making that jump you are inventing what he's saying I'm not trying to say one way or the other I'm just telling you that if you make that leap it's not in his statement let's keep going right after that he says but I don't know I think that will a I think that it will augment the people working on it this is I think the first time in that interview that he brings up more about augment ation of Engineers and not replacing because at this point in the interview he is not said obsoleting Engineers or replacing Engineers this is the first time that he goes on to say augment the people working on it so again for folks that were watching this and starting to panic like oh no that means we're done for what's the I think the cool kid term now is we're cooked is that am I doing it right we're cooked as software Engineers um I'm never going to be cool that's okay um literally mid-30s dude live streaming at software engineering it's okay um but I think the point that I'm trying to get across here is like I understand why people are panicking but I think we need to kind of look at what he's actually saying and not try to extrapolate without basing it on anything yet Chad yeah oh that's what we have to say right thanks bra chat are we cooked that's what that's what the streamers do chat are we cooked and then everyone floods the the chat with like different memes and emojis and stuff yeah I got to I got to work on this um okay after that statement Mark goes on to say people will be so much more creative and freed up to do crazy things so jumping back to what Philip said people will be so much more creative right in my opinion the way that he's saying that or like what he's implying is that people have to start looking at things from a different angle so what I take from what his statements are so far is nothing to do with obsoleting Engineers we will see more and more Ai and that AI will be augmenting people it also means the role of a software engineer will be changing and evolving I 100% think that because I 100% think that it is already changing um on Instagram Dev nir what if the dev Community starts learning prompt engineering to be efficient software Engineers that can work with AI efficiently yeah what if I think I think that's what we're saying here right like I think that's what will be happening I think and that's to I think what Mark is saying is that he believes that it will be augmenting the people that use it it's not that it's replacing people augmenting there is going to be tman 1992 that's why we're Karen says we're not cooked thank you Karen I don't think we're cooked either um to be honest um T 1992 thanks for being back here but if you weren't here at the beginning it is recorded So if you miss some of the beginning part of this conversation I hope so far for other folks that have been on this there's no reason to be terrified of it every like and especially if you're like terrified because you watch The Mark Zuckerberg interview so far we're we're got one more Tim stamp to jump to and that one is specifically about Job elimination from his perspective but so far he's not said anything about getting rid of software Engineers so it's all in the wording okay so um people will be freed people will be so much more creative and freed up to do crazy things now the next time stamp if you're interested in following Along on that Joe Rogan podcast if you want to watch it in your own time if you haven't seen it yet the 2 hour 9 minute and 20 second Mark so 20 Joe goes to say to Mark after some of these points he basically says I can't remember the exact question but it's along the lines of like but like hey isn't this going to be eliminating jobs like that's what people seem to be afraid of like what are your thoughts on this so Mark says too early to know exactly how it plays out another reason to panic if that's where you stopped watching I would say yeah maybe that's like that's kind of scary but he says more so he's still not claiming that he's like yep jobs are done so still not claiming that it hasn't hasn't come up in the podcast this is still too early to know exactly how it plays out which I think is a fair statement no one has a crystal ball that can know exactly how this works however he goes on to say that I think it will create more creative jobs create more creative jobs so it's kind of congruent with what we've been saying so far still not talking about obsoleting in fact in this case this is one of the first times that we're also hearing that he's suggesting create more jobs now what we're not doing and it again it doesn't come up in the in the podcast interview so we would be literally making this up in terms of Mark claiming this but he's not saying like oh it's going to reduce current jobs by 20% and then only create 10% more creative jobs therefore we have this like offset balance where we're net negative like that it just doesn't come up so if you're forming an opinion on that from the podcast I'm just trying to get you to acknowledge that that's not what Mark said and again Mark's not paying me I'm just trying to go through this podcast so we can talk about it more objectively he's it sounds like he's basically saying it could or it might end up creating more jobs like it's too early to say but at least more creative jobs will start to show up and I actually really do agree with this the next part that he gets into is a little bit of History a little bit of philosophy so I don't have all of the notes written out for this so I apologize if I get some of these points incorrect that's why I'm also recommending that you watch it try to form your own opinions about this stuff but um yeah so many clickbait YouTube regarding him uh to fire people which is a whole other thing people then start associating like the 5% stuff um with the AI and I'm not like I don't like layoffs uh I work at Microsoft and there were layoffs announced and then I had someone targeting me in comments saying like look like your company is doing stack ranked firing and I'm like actually that's not what's happening it's not that but again like people don't know and they're going to form opinions and obviously I can't convince them otherwise because like I only work there um anyway but this is the internet right um so one of the things that Mark goes on to say like I said I don't want to totally butcher this so I apologize but he he's trying to draw a parallel to other technological advancements that we've had over time so the point that he's going to be making over the next couple of uh blurbs I say here is that he's trying to show how as a society and I can't talk about like a society in terms of the entire planet so I apologize it's going to probably separate some parts of society but he's saying historically I think he says like 100 to 150 years ago if we look like many people are farmers and a lot of our time is spent farming like we need food so you end up working really long hours you Mo work most days of the week just to be able to have food just to be able to survive so he goes on to say then we in introduce industrial processes and again if there's history Buffs here I'm sure please don't freak out I'm just trying to articulate some of what I understood from what Mark's saying I know it's not quite that simple um but he's saying we introduce industrialization and then what ends up happening as time goes by is that if you look at Society he's saying something only like 2% of society is Farmers right so what's happened is that we have freed up Society from doing something that was like just to necessitate getting by so does that necessarily mean that like all of the possible farmers just like we we're fired no it's not what that implies at all but it's that society as a whole has less Reliance on people to go farm for the food that we need so farmers became incredibly effective compared to where they were at before if you extrapolate this concept and again he's trying to do it in his communication and I realize I've been like we can't just extrapolate everything and make and make it sound like he's claiming it but his point is to say in and I think I it's maybe not a direct quote in general people don't work as many hours compared to when they were farming and he believes that that Trend will continue and primarily allow people to this is the part that's really hard I think for a lot of people especially in like the Americas to to really get behind but to work fewer hours per week uh yeah like I don't know that's but I think his point is fewer hours a week to survive and there is more opportunity freed up for artistic and cultural Pursuits he doesn't have a timeline on that but he's kind of saying like it's a technological advancement that should allow Humanity to spend less time focused handson for things that are necessary for us to survive and then in theory free up more time for other types of things the final point before I go back to chat and see what people are saying is he says those that are super engaged will be able to accomplish way more than ever before due to unimaginable leverages from the technology those that are super engaged who do you think he's referring to when he says those that are super engaged right this has been about developers the whole time and I realize that he's done a bit of a tangent here to talk about farming and technological advancements but when I hear him saying this my interpretation of it again my interpretation you may have a different one is that he's saying the people that still want to be pursuing work right he's saying you freed up you could be doing these other things but if you're still engaged in getting the work done you want to be working you want to be contributing in this way those that are super engaged will be able to accomplish way more than ever before due to unimaginable leverages in technology again this is I have not yet heard except for that I don't know exactly what's going to happen he says that we haven't heard him saying it's going to obsolete software Engineers it just has not been brought up he does acknowledge that he does not know exactly how how it's going to pan out though okay back to the chat um Philip says this also implies it selection pressure for software Engineers is changing towards picking Engineers that can express exactly what they want in terms of prompts so the irony here is that all of the the freaking things in the world soft skills win again yeah um of all the freaking things sorry soft skills soft skills soft skills if you've watched some of my content before you know I like to talk about soft skills um I think even something that came to mind if uh if you were to scroll up in the chat from what Philip was saying and being able to articulate what he wants to AI when it's going to to build things for him you need to be able to communicate clearly like that's a soft skill it's important and it will continue to be important um prog programming that's awesome okay uh I'm I'm game for augmenting devs as long as it's like as long as it's like RoboCop okay yeah maybe um I don't know maybe not that extreme because I'm I it's been a little while since I've watched RoboCop but don't they just have like his kind of like brain and maybe a bit of like spine or something like that's maybe a little much but I don't know if I can write awesome code maybe it's not so bad right um Brax the saint layouts have definitely been rough but I felt like I've learned so much in the past year more the rest of the four years of my career I'm touching more code building more projects and even dove into lead code I know a lot of people are worried about how the market has been but I think as long as those of us who are unemployed continue to grow our skill sets the more prepared we'll be for these new jobs absolutely so Brax this is like like this is something that I would love to just like you know post up in places and like share more with people because I think that's the kind of mindset that I think is helpful and don't get me wrong I understand that if you're a situation where you're like I have been laid off the job market is tough like I'm not trying to dismiss that or minimize it it's reality and it's very unfortunate but the the challenge is that if you let that consume you and you don't try to focus on progression then then you're kind of just like waiting and hoping that things change but instead of doing that if you focus on what's in your control and this is kind of what bra is saying here in the chat right like in the past year touching more code building more projects and even dove into leite code these are things three things that are in your control and if I could make a recommendation it would be to continue focusing on those things um hammer 88 well I want a AI mosquito zapper and a laundry robot that's what programming says um yeah those would be awesome uh I know that I would like a laundry robot for sure I'd like a robot for doing the dishes as well I don't know why we don't have that do the dishes put them away I don't know like maybe it would be cool if my cupboard was just like a built-in dishwasher and I could just put the dishes like I think there's some opportunities there we don't need an AI or like an AI robot that can walk around I just want something that does my dishes and my laundry that would solve like 75% of My Life um okay let's read here bra says I could see it going the other way around where timelines become shortened and expectations grow as we produce more in shortened period of time yeah so this is something I wanted to touch on and thanks for reminding me Brax um one of the arguments and this is kind of like pivoting from the the Mark Zuckerberg conversation but um kind of in response to people that are are taking the St that programmers will absolutely be uh Obsolete and I want to be you know careful again as we talk about this my I'm not here to tell you I have the right answer I think that's like a false thing to do I think that's misleading I think it's incorrect because I obviously don't have a crystal ball these are just my perspectives and opinions um when I hear people saying that software Engineers will be replaced by AI my perspective is that this is like it's predicated on the fact that there is a limited amount of work and the reason I say that is because if I had a team of developers and you said to me well because there's only so much work to get done if we were to just replace the developers with AI and it was more cost effective then we would just do that we just get rid of them we'd chew through the backlog and we'd be done but the reality is the reality is I've never in my 12 plus years of managing software engineering teams I have never seen a backlog gets smaller ever ever there's always more work to do so if we could find ways to bring on AI to augment teams absolutely um I cannot imagine a world yet and this is me saying I don't have the crystal ball I can't imagine a world yet where we would reach a point where we're saying hey we don't need to hire developers because we can just integrate AI agents as effectively as a new team member and it's more efficient and the reason I say that is because I have yet to see anyone do that successfully you still need people driving the AI agents prompting them to do things reviewing what's going on one could argue that you can keep adding in more and more AI agents to do this stuff but like I just think we're a very long way off from that before that becomes feasible at which point why don't you have ai agents to replace the rest of the roles including all the way up to the CEO and then everything's just AI anyway so at that point I don't think that software Engineers need to be singled out as you need to be afraid I think that's probably at the point where no one really needs to have a job anymore is my opinion um yeah I've never seen yeah so agreed on the the backlog part maybe we should start off using a on I on a smaller sales at a few companies I've worked at we had huge amounts of technical debt during the winter months instead of building out new features went try to lower the technical debt I feel like this is something AI could really help with I agree I think that like in one of the code commute Vlog entries I did I talked about um and is sorry is your name pronounced Sean I hope so I apologize if it's not pronounced Sean are we building tools that are meant to replace us I think the answer is we're building tools that will replace the work we don't want to do um which kind of ties into brax's point so I think person there's a lot of opportunity for us to be building things and leveraging AI in ways that kind of like going back to the the podcast allows us to do more creative things do more highlevel thinking solve more interesting problems I would love to Outsource the work I don't want to do to AI I would love for AI to go refactor my code base I would love to be able to and I spent a lot of my career rapidly Proto typing things I would love to say hey look this works finally cool and it's just a prototype we can't use this code we have to toss it and we have to kind of start from scratch I would love to just be hey like AI like go make this not totally suck see you while I go work on the next thing and let let me know when you finish right um I have like I'm building a product called brand ghost which I use for all of my social media posting when we talk about software architecture I've had a couple people reach out to me and say hey like I want to use this type of architecture and this type of application tell me how to do it and my my gut is like take the things that you like about that architecture start building in that direction and you may very well find that like you don't need to have it like clearcut exactly like that um so I actually have a few different architectural patterns that I experiment with and try to see where I gravitate towards but that means that as I've been building brand ghost there's a few different parts where I'm like ooh you know what like we tried this not a fan like it works not a fan though I would like to kind of go to this other one that we tried and it is working better I would love to be able to tell AI in some sensible way hey AI you see this pattern over here you see how this is structured I want you to start migrating all of the other code to be doing this type of thing I would love that I don't want to have to think about that and do it I know it's important that's part of software engineering we have Tech debt we have to refactor code we'll have to rewrite things it's part of it but if I could get ahead of that kind of stuff and not have my team waste time on like more important things or what seems more important like building new features and fixing bugs um I I would much rather they're doing more highlevel creative thinking than just like going to refactor stuff now don't get me wrong there could be some really interesting things to come out of refactoring rearc things but if we already know what we want to do and it's just like okay like someone's got to slog away at it like I would love to be able to explain that very well to Ai and trust that it can do that personally that's what that's what feel good to me um I feel like we're just scratching the surface of this field and we'll end up using it in ways we never thought of at our jobs and I totally agree with that statement too I totally think so um you know I started using it as glorified Auto and then it was like hey wait I don't like writing complex SQL queries go do that I don't like writing regular Expressions go do that right I don't want to have to go convert some of this code to follow this different pattern like here's the input code you go rewrite it to this other pattern great um but there's this is like truly just basic stuff um one more thing from the Zuckerberg oh no I think we're kind of done uh just to close it off on technology changes when Zuckerberg's kind of confronted like does it obsolete people he says at every step in like history when we have these technological changes every single time because this came up in the chat earlier every single time people go oh no what's that going to mean Doom and Gloom we're about to be obsolete every single time it's come up people always thought this way so he says is AI is AI going to be the time that it's different it could be but he's like I don't see it being that way he sees it as other technological advancements because we've seen these types of patterns come up before so uh I think maybe this time it feels scarier because a lot of the times when we talk about these types of changes perhaps it's more physical right we're automating things we're automating physical tasks like labor and stuff like that and this time it's touching on things that are more creative more based around knowledge intellect thinking and like that feels like kind of scary but personally I'm I'm still not fearful of it I think the the thing to be afraid of is totally neglecting it and just kind of waiting to see what happens without being actively involved that's my my perspective on it though um wasn't there a time when people thought l no code platforms were the end of devs yeah there's still L there are people that still think that um I'll give you I'll give you an example of this that's very recent and hits home for me and it's going to be a good segue because I got to plug things like stuff I'm working on offers and stuff like that um so I'm going to bring up brand ghost again brand ghost is the platform that I'm building to allow content creators to cross post and schedule content across different social media platforms when I started taking my content creation seriously at the beginning of 2023 because 10 years before that I tried doing content creation and gave up when I started doing it again I said I need to systemize how I'm like sending out my content or else I'll give up I will never do this because I've already given up before I know why I failed I need to systemize it so what I started doing was saying look I don't have time to go build another solution for things let me like tack it together with some low code stuff um and Dev is here you're very welcome I'm I'm that's what I'm here for so I'm just happy to share Insight so I'm hope I'm hoping it's helping so you're welcome um I started to stitch basically the concept for brand goes together with low SL no code Solutions and basically got to a point where it was mostly working like I could see it coming together and then I realized um it just doesn't like it just hits a roadblock where I'm like I know how to write the software for this like by hand and it's no longer helping me it's only getting in my way and that's when I said screw it I'm just going to start building what is now brand ghost and build it from scratch so even though are these other no/ low code options that let me do a bunch of the things they became barriers so you know is it going to replace developers like this is a perfect example of me having a situation where I leaned into it it got me so far and then I was like nope thank God I know how to write software because I would not have gotten this far in my content creation otherwise so um will you keep this uh VA up I missed yeah yeah so this this will be uh recorded if you're on YouTube it's all all of my live streams are recorded um and that's the same so just a reminder for folks that are kind of coming into this later I do this live stream every Monday at 7 pm Pacific and it is recorded it's on YouTube it's on Twitch it's on LinkedIn it's on Facebook it's on Tik Tok until we figure out what's going on with that um Kick is a platform I guess it's on Instagram and now I'm doing it on substack as well and I really hope that substack enables it to be native on the computer so I don't have to have my phone running here and have a separate camera and separate chat like I don't know if anyone was posting messages in the chat on substack because it shows one line of chat at a time and I can just see people joining and leaving so it's like it's kind of useless but I do this every Monday at 7 p.m. Pacific architect good to see you uh AI is going to take over your code commute Chan drive your car rage on the road talk and upload video by itself yeah almost um but before it does that brand ghost is actually mostly doing a lot of that for me which is great so I just have to record the content and upload it and the rest is taken care of it so I think that's it folks um I'm going to kind of plug a bunch of stuff because this is what I have to do on the live stream at some point um let me jump over to this view you can still see me and hear me great um so for folks that joined late um I'm just going to put it in the chat again and I'll say it um the topics for my live streams are generally my newsletter article so this is at weekly. deev leader.com I actually see the chat there's I got lucky and looked at substack my YouTube um my YouTube is Dev leader and I will show you I guess you can't see on substack sorry I apologize I'm sharing my screen but you can't see it um Dev leader is my YouTube channel and I have a second YouTube channel called code commute which is very much like this format except it's not a live stream I'm I drive in my car and I talk about software engineering topics twitch is Dev leer CA I think but I think if you search Dev leader you'll probably see my branding come and that will be my channel I think someone else had Dev leader exactly I think so it might be Dev leader CA but if you're not interested in subscribing to the newsletter that's totally cool my point is that if you enjoy the live streams and you want to see what the Topic's going to be about this goes up every Saturday so you have Saturday Sunday and Monday you can go read at weekly. deev [Music] leader.com YouTube channel is Dev leader um this channel has edited videos so they're a little bit more professional so there's tutorials and uh software engineering topics like this one so this is where you can go check that stuff out it's a lot more succinct less rambling because I ramble a lot when I stream and then code commute is the other YouTube channel I have um in fact this topic was inspired by code commute if you can see my screen that I'm sharing right now depending on where you're watching this you can see um this video actually did very well um and it basically inspired the newsletter and live stream for today so it's titled Zuckerberg said no more software Engineers Panic time and this was me um responding to information that people sent me about that interview and I was responding to their comments I hadn't even seen the podcast episode yet so I was like if Mark says this like I don't agree with that I don't agree with that and when I actually watched the interview I was like I agree with a lot of the things he's saying on this stuff cuz he's not saying it's going to replace software Engineers I think that was a really big extrapolation by people so code commute um I think on this channel I get about 10 videos up per week I try to post them at times if you're in the Americas it's good for commuting to and from work so uh you get about one to two videos a day I've had people tell me that they watch watch them on their drive or their commute or if they're like cleaning their house and cooking and stuff which is cool um so you can put these on you can watch them at 2x speed if you want because I talk a lot but yeah that's my other channel um and then if you're interested I do have courses on D train I have to plug these as well I'll put the link in the chat um so basically it's between two categories I do a lot of c and net development so if you want to get started and learn about C I have two courses specifically around that and then I have refactoring and reflection we talked about reflection earlier um I have courses for that as well and then I have these other courses that are career Centric and I've partnered up with Ryan Murphy for those and we talk about different career topics so soft skills said it earlier on the live stream soft skills are really important important enough that I made a course with Ryan Murphy on it we have one for Behavioral interviews specifically and getting promoted um we're working on our fourth one together that should be up in about 2 weeks and then we have another one planned for after that so those are the courses and finally I will plug brand ghost a little bit as well I think we have a new site if I refresh there we go um I'll put this in the chat as well I like sharing this because number one this is what I'm working on I'm proud of it um depending on where you know me from and how you came across this live stream um I post on social media every day I post across platforms it's only possible because I built brand ghost to do it for me the content is my own but the only time that you'll see me directly post to a platform like 99% of the time it's through brand ghost otherwise um that like fraction of the time I'm actually going on to the native app so um brand ghost will handle all of my scheduling in fact I just create content now and drop it into brand ghost and it will go basically recycle content as needed um and just to give you a brief example I post memes Friday Saturday and Sunday I could not add more content to that and you wouldn't see content repeat for a year so I can retire from collecting memes but I won't because they're awesome so I use brand ghost for that and this is the platform that I'm creating on the side um it is 100% free if you just want to schedule post and cross poost them the other social media tools that allow you to create um and post and cross poost they generally have like a limit on the number of accounts and stuff or the number of posts you can make we want to make sure that it's commoditized that you can just post a social media for free our Advanced features do cost money but that's usually once you've reached a point in content creation where it starts to make sense that you might want to be paying for tools so that's what I'm building when I'm not working and not making content it's on brand ghost so that's what I got folks thanks so much for being here I hope that going through that conversation you feel a little bit less uh less fearful about some of the remarks that we saw in the Joe Rogan podcast um my personal take is not that it's a a terrifying obsoleting kind of experience it's going to be happening um and even from Mark my take is that it's uh very much an an augmenting of software developers um so yeah I think that's it and I appreciate everyone on the different platforms chiming into the chat it's great to see you all here so I hope to see you next week same time uh otherwise join me on the code commute love to see you there leave comments ask questions and I'll get them answered