The hidden consequences of AI software development.

💬 Topics:
- Unsustainable AI economics;
- The future of AI coding agents;
- Loosing know how and the ability to think;
- Important skills in software development;
- The future of software.

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Awesome

AI coding assistants are eroding fundamental developer skills like reading documentation, searching effectively, and critical thinking. Developers increasingly rely on LLMs for instant answers rather than learning to break down problems and evaluate solutions. This shift has real business consequences: Tailwind CSS laid off 75% of engineers because developers no longer visit documentation sites to discover paid products, and Stack Overflow traffic has collapsed. The economic sustainability of AI tools is questionable, with costs far exceeding current pricing. The real risk isn't job loss but the degradation of problem-solving abilities across the industry.

Don't forget to Google it...

It’s true. These are underestimated consequences of the AI revolution for the SW Engineers. But the guy forgot to mention that we also loosing the joy of coding and finding the elegant solutions by ourselves, and the frustration of the endless prompting with no result. In my opinion the AI assistants should be used balanced, mainly for the routine coding jobs, pair debugging and as generators for ideas.

People aren’t learning from past mistakes - well, that’s new! 🙃 We’ve already seen this with the cloud: massive hype, rapid and almost blind adoption, then costs quietly spiraled out of control. Only later did some realize the trade-offs. Like Elon and his pivot toward on-prem infrastructure in 2023.
Also, like Awesome pointed out, there’s the issue of public knowledge being effectively plundered by tech bros. Models were/are trained on vast amounts of openly available human work, then monetized at scale, concentrating value in a few hands. The pattern feels familiar.

I tried learning Dotnet and C# from ChatGPT, maybe because many devs have historically written their code using Domain-Driven Design it would default to this model of writing code and it was like bashing my head against the wall trying to learn everything at once.
Only when I stopped and thought about everything step by step and attempted to get the most minimal solution which was essentially using app.MapGet and some static files I noticed all the similarities between it and express and could create a basic back end.

It’s been years since programming became just a way to build products, not to solve problems, so jobs market is driven by those who build it faster, not smarter. If there are developers who deliver, your boss will keep the one who delivers faster - he doesn’t care about elegant solutions, neither customers do.