Is AI-assisted Coding About Augmenting or Replacing Devs And Does the Distinction Even Matter?
There's rhetoric I've heard a lot recently where well-meaning people seek to clarify that AI-assisted development is about augmentation not replacement. This distinction doesn't reduce job risk.
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If you’d like to support the growth of this resource, consider upgrading to paid and take advantage of the other ways I can help you.There is a pattern of people distinguishing that AI is less about replacement and more about augmenting existing workers to enhance their effectiveness. A key driver for people raising this consideration is to alleviate concerns about AI code generation's potential disruption of software jobs.
This distinction may help us consider how we can utilise AI to benefit in the short term, but it doesn’t alter the equation regarding job losses. Over the longer term, the distinction becomes less critical due to the potential for entire business capabilities to be outsourced to companies that utilise AI effectively.
A second-order effect of more effective workers is job displacement—companies will be able to achieve more with fewer people. While there may be job creation elsewhere, the jobs gap leads to social disorder for the majority who couldn’t make the shift.
This post has another angle on the same question:
Another factor is the cost of using AI to assist coding. The price has yet to stabilise—while costs are coming down, capability is increasing, and the investment required to achieve the highest scale of return is significant. Multiple sources have reported that spending up to $500 daily on AI assistance for a single developer is not uncommon when pushing the limits of improved value throughput.
That may require businesses today committed to realising AI's full potential to budget over $100k in addition to each developer's salary. That leaves significantly less space for engineering talent in the budget, as this talent has shifted, in the big picture, outside the company to tooling and commodity AI vendors.
The gap in what must be learnt to leverage AI in different contexts to use it effectively is growing. For various reasons, many are not engaging with learning the new skills being developed as part of this shift in the industry. This is creating an interesting disconnect between business leaders and their technical teams.
A future with developers augmented with AI leads to a jobs gap.
Efficiency gains from considerable changes in industrial automation over the last few centuries also suggest the potential for a significant jobs gap. Developers must undergo substantial learning and personal development to realise the efficiency gains individually and in a team context.
A jobs gap occurs when the number of people taking on new jobs is less than the number of people who have lost their jobs, OR if the people who take on the new jobs are not the same as those who have lost their jobs. The size of the gap is influenced by the degree of difference in skills and the amount of investment in reskilling and retraining.
For people to transition to entirely new types of jobs with different skill expectations, they need the opportunity to acquire these new skills. When new kinds of jobs involve even more technical roles, the likelihood that people can make the switch decreases substantially.
Consider the heavy social consequences of the shift away from heavy industry at the turn of the century, which led to depressed towns and the ensuing social issues. Sure, it may have eventually led to feel-good films such as ‘The Full Monty’, ‘Brassed Off’, ‘Billy Elliot’, and others, but the reality of living in those places was much harsher for a very long time.
More recently, we saw the effects of technology advancements in the auto industry, which led to a reduction in overall jobs, with the most significant reduction being in lower-skilled roles:
I share all of this to make the case that rapid change driven by automation can lead to job losses or, at very least, job displacement and the creation of a jobs gap. Either way, that’s a significant amount of hardship for those affected and the scale of the change underway, which could impact many of us. There’s not just the organisation's performance at stake, but the careers of the people you are responsible for.
What does this mean for leaders?
Recognising that there are opportunities to augment your developers and help them become even more productive may aid in planning how to support them. However, don’t let that make you complacent, assuming this won’t lead to a smaller workforce.
As I covered in my earlier post, a strategic CTO will need to be considering the implications over the longer term, and that includes the obligation to your people to ensure they are ready and employable not just with your organisation but also the expectations of their future workplaces as well:
What do you think the focus on AI-assisted development should be? What are the different implications of AI-development tools replacing developers versus helping developers achieve more? Does the distinction matter? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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