I think there is a very real possibility that widespread AI use increases the amount of “repair”-like tech jobs, even if it simultaneously eliminates some of the entry level “create” ones.
The analogous situation to me is the 80s and 90s, when computers really started to be used by businesses and regular people. There were so many issues with the process of digitization, moving from paper files to computer files (for businesses), etc. that entire industries grew up around it. This was relevant to me personally, as my parents made a living doing this for decades.
So if AI results in a ton of half-baked broken-but-profitable software, it might turn out the same way.
I looove cleaning up/refactoring old code, improving build systems, writing tests, etc. I've been contracting part-time at a place for a couple of years now, and that's basically all I do. I suspect there's going to be a greater need for people like me in the near future. I don't think that the code LLMs or agents produce is any better or worse than the code it was trained on. Not to sound too judgmental or condescending, but there's a lot of crap out there. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned, because I have made a nice bit of extra cash cleaning that crap up. I imagine the description of what I do is going to go from "I'm being paid to fix issues caused by years of accumulated technical debt" to the title of this post. Ironically, AI helps me with my job to some extent, but I usually end up rewriting most of the code it generates because it follows the same bad patterns I'm trying to address.
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I think there is a very real possibility that widespread AI use increases the amount of “repair”-like tech jobs, even if it simultaneously eliminates some of the entry level “create” ones.
The analogous situation to me is the 80s and 90s, when computers really started to be used by businesses and regular people. There were so many issues with the process of digitization, moving from paper files to computer files (for businesses), etc. that entire industries grew up around it. This was relevant to me personally, as my parents made a living doing this for decades.
So if AI results in a ton of half-baked broken-but-profitable software, it might turn out the same way.
I looove cleaning up/refactoring old code, improving build systems, writing tests, etc. I've been contracting part-time at a place for a couple of years now, and that's basically all I do. I suspect there's going to be a greater need for people like me in the near future. I don't think that the code LLMs or agents produce is any better or worse than the code it was trained on. Not to sound too judgmental or condescending, but there's a lot of crap out there. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned, because I have made a nice bit of extra cash cleaning that crap up. I imagine the description of what I do is going to go from "I'm being paid to fix issues caused by years of accumulated technical debt" to the title of this post. Ironically, AI helps me with my job to some extent, but I usually end up rewriting most of the code it generates because it follows the same bad patterns I'm trying to address.