> people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians has been a reality for 10 years at this point, and amusingly they keep failing and never learning their lesson.
Good good, so you're the software equivalent of a 1990's era German auto engineer who currently has no equal, and maybe your career can finish quietly without any impact whatsoever. There are a lot of people on HN who are not you, and could use some real world advice on what to do as the world changes around them.
If you've read "crossing the chasm", in at least that view of the world there are different phases to innovation, with different roles. Innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. Each has a different motivation and requirement for robustness. The laggards won't be caught dead using your new thing until IBM gives it to them running on an AS400. Your job might be equivalent to that, where your skills are rare enough that you'll be fine for a while. However, we're past the "innovators" phase at this point and a lot of startups are tearing business models apart right now, and they are moving along that innovation curve. They may not get to you, but everyone is not you.
The choices for a developer include: "I'm safe", "I'm going to get so good that I'll be safe", "I'm going to leverage AI and be better", and "I'm out". Their decisions should not be based on your unique perspective, but on the changing landscape and how likely it is to affect them.
Good sense-check on where things are in the startup universe: https://youtu.be/z0wt2pe_LZM
I can't find it now, but there's at least one company that is doing enterprise-scale refactoring with LLM's, AST's, rules etc. Obviously it won't handle all edge cases, but...that's not your grandad's Cursor.
Might be this one, but don't recognise the name: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/multi-repo-ai-assisted-refact...
Also I never said that I "have no equal". I am saying that the death of my career has been predicted for no less than 10 years now and it still has not happened, and I see no signs of it happening; LLMs produce terrible code very often.
This gives me the right to be skeptical from where I am standing. And a bit snarky about it, too.
I asked for a measurable proof, not for your annoyed accusations that I am arrogant.
You are not making an argument. You are doing an ad hominem attack that weakens any other argument you may be making. Still, let's see some of them.
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RE: choices, my choice has been made long time ago and it's this one: "I will become quite good so as to be mostly safe. If 'AI' displaces me then I'll be happy to work something else until my retirement". Nothing more, nothing less.
RE: "startup universe", that's a very skewed perspective. 99.99999% of all USA startups mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things out there, they are but a tiny bubble in one country in a big planet. Trends change, sometimes drastically and quickly so. What a bunch of guys in comfy positions think about their bubble bears zero relevance to what's actually going on.
> I can't find it now, but there's at least one company that is doing enterprise-scale refactoring with LLM's, AST's, rules etc.
If you find it, let me know. That I would view as an interesting proof and a worthy discussion to have on it after.
"Your analogy with the automakers seems puzzlingly irrelevant"
"Your take is rather romantic."
That's pretty charged language focused on the person not the argument, so if you're surprised why I'm annoyed, start there.
Meta has one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08806
Another, edited in above: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/multi-repo-ai-assisted-refact...
Another: https://codescene.com/product/ai-coding
However, I still don't recognise the names. The one I saw had no pricing but had worked with some big names.
Edit: WAIT found the one I was thinking of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve-akpov78Q - company is https://about.grit.io
In an enterprise setting, I'm the one hitting the brakes on using LLM's. There are huge risks to attaching them to e.g. customer-facing outputs. In a startup setting, full speed ahead. Match the opinion to the needs, keep two opposing thoughts in mind, etc.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/tra...
To be honest, I have no idea how well it works, but you can’t get much bigger than AWS in this regard.