I’m curious about the ramifications of Devin or similar AI products putting all junior/entry level Devs out of Jobs and then there being no (Or very few) new developers and there being a huge shortage down the road. And/or developers not knowing technology very well because they never actually have to learn technology thoroughly with AI as a crutch. As someone trying to get into the field IDK whether to give up, or cling to hope…

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Devin or similar AI products may eliminate junior/entry level Dev jobs, potentially leading to a shortage of developers in the future. There is concern that developers may not learn technology thoroughly if they rely too heavily on AI.

Devin: The end of Developers... for 5 years or so?

Here is a piece of advice I’ve learned recently, never ever trust any application demo, these demos and the numbers you’ve seen in their tweet are carefully picked for fund raising purposes. In other words, most of what you have seen is perfectly picked-up to show off.
I saw an application generated by Devin to make simple ‘to do app’ … let me tell you something, I have built something way better than that back when I started my software learning journey. And I believe any junior developer would be able to do much better than that (of course it would take us more time to build).
Second, focus on LEARNING THE FOUNDATIONS … Data Structures, Algorithms, Programming Concepts, some Mathematics, some Networking knowledge and try to understand how things work under the hood … these skills will stay valuable on whatever tool or AI assistant you’re going to use.
Even in the work place you would notice whoever has strong foundation around certain topic (and you would love working with them) and who is not.
Third, have you ever heard about code generators and low-code/no-code applications?
These applications/tools have been around for a decade (or even more), and they always market them as the ‘end of software engineering.’ did they replace us or increased the demand for software engineers? (go look for the market demand in the past 10 years of software developers and the market projection for this job in the next 10 years)
Fourth, there is a big difference between a coder and software engineer. coding is only 5-10% of software engineering careers. Software engineers SOLVE PROBLEMS you’re going to spend most of your time thinking, understanding requirements, analyzing and evaluating different approaches to solve the problem and communicating with other team members in this job not writing code.
Fifth, let me ask you a question, if we said hypothetically that AI will actually replace software engineers, who is better at dealing and interacting with these AI tools, someone with technical background and experience or someone without? who is going to switch into AI more efficiently? Think about it, you will never lose anything learning how to program.
AI will make us 10x more efficient, plus it will allow non-programmers to do some applications, but this will come with 10x more demand on software and applications, more complex applications and problems to solve through software, more software to maintain …
Keep up on learning and do not give up, you’re going to thank yourself later.
Hope this helps a little,

I am by far no expert myself, but I doubt that something like Devin would be able to replace junior developers. Sure, it could make it so that fewer junior developers are needed to do the job, but it would never replace them.
As I see it, junior devs are not just an asset to the company, but also an integral part of the hierarchy, which is vital for any corporate application, since otherwise, it would just be some senior devs having to do all the work, but with the help of ai, and no-one can convince me that a senior dev would want that, or that it’s a good way to scale… well… anything.
On the other hand, AI would certainly create new jobs. Not only because people are needed to develop the AI, but also to, for example, embed it into existing applications. And what do you know, we need someone that understands JavaScript to do that! Which, still, is practically impossible to scale or even create using only senior developers and AI.
So on that note, keep learning and never give up!

There is still hope for software engineers/developers,
we humans are still 84.13% more capable than AI…
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--hGMoJPwX--/f_auto/v1710610226/ugc/content_83da600b-d84a-475a-adaf-5d5bd5235be0" alt="image">

As a junior dev myself, I think I speak for all of us when I say we are a tad bit intimidated by ai tools progressing so rapidly. Any experts on the matter would love to hear more about what you think would be the best route for us moving forward :D

Futurism is always something difficult to predict. Devin until now is only a compliation of presentation and claims from its develores, It doesn’t show their upsies and hallucinations that llms often have.
Developer jobs has changed a lot since I’ve started on the industry , back in 2008. To develop a website and put it into production it needed a lot of tooling, nowadays is a cli call away.
Devin probably will make a developer job different, maybe will make you be a monitoring engineer , or you’ll loose your job at all, who knows?