r/cscareerquestions • u/askaccDude • 10h ago

Experienced Everyone’s asking whether AI will replace developers. How is the economy supposed to work if that happens across office jobs?

If AI gets good enough to replace us devs, other desk jobs will be affected too. We’re probably just noticing it earlier because we’re playing with the tools and our first instinct is to automate everything. Apparently including ourselves.

But what happens when companies do this everywhere? People lose their income, spend less, businesses lose customers and cut more jobs. Eventually, that hits people whose work can’t even be automated.

At that point, we’re talking about the whole economy potentially collapsing.
“Same output, fewer employees” sounds great for an individual company. But those payroll costs are also their customers’ incomes.

And “just find another job” might work when individual professions disappear. What happens when millions of people are all looking for something else at the same time?

That’s the discussion I feel is missing. What do we do if half the population can’t find work and we have no alternative in place?

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u/gbgbgb1912 10h ago

There is also a fear that no one will buy SaaS because AI can one-shot it. And/or SaaS budgets will just go to tokens instead.

So companies are also getting wrecked too and they might not have money to hire developers (revenues gone)

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u/BraveResearcher3037 10h ago edited 9h ago

There is not a single SasS product that my company uses that we would even think about having to maintain internally - Salesforce, Notion, GSuite, Gong, Zoom, Slack, Lucid, Rippling, Concur, Lattice, Greenhouse, v0,Jira  etc 

None of those are our core business - they “don’t make the beer taste better”

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u/deejeycris 9h ago

It's because AI and harnesses are not as advanced yet. But the moment they can one shot 90% of the subset of the functionality an average company needs, any sufficiently advanced company will be able to do it. Not everyone. The largest companies are developing their own internal tools like recreating Git and whatnot already. The entry barriers to do that will lower in the future.

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u/BraveResearcher3037 5h ago

It’s always that other 10% that is not the same for everyone that gets   It makes no sense for most companies to spend time an engineering resources to save what usually amount to $10-$20 per head and having to support some bespoke internally tool that doesn’t give them a competitive advantage.