About whether AI will reduce how many software developers are needed.
Has this happened?
Yes 41 (31%)Not sure 28 (21%)No 64 (48%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI will reduce how many software developers are needed.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
If you had an AI capable of writing the code you mean to without errors, the demand for software developers would be even larger than what it is today.
Deciding what problem to solve and how to solve it is hard enough to sustain more than the current population of developers. (But if you had an AI capable of deciding those, then yeah, that would be problem.)
Anyway, the current crop of highly hyped AIs are obviously structurally unable to do either. And it's not clear at all how far any AI is from solving any those (what usually means we are many decades away).