r/webdev • u/Proud-Confidence7290 • Nov 26 '23

Question Will AI decrease demand and salaries?

Hello everyone.

I am new to web development and it goes well so far.

I'm bit scared of AI development. Let's say you needed 10 developers for a project before ChatGPT and now you need 8.

With the development of AI, we will need even less.

Why do people think AI won't decrease demand and salaries of web developers? It's logic for me, what am I missing?

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137

u/captain_ahabb Nov 26 '23

Chat GPT doesn't reduce the number of developers you need for a project anymore than autopilot reduces the number of pilots you need to fly a plane.

12

u/HMikeeU Nov 26 '23

Autopilot doesn't help the plane fly to it's destination quicker.

20

u/Valhallai Nov 26 '23

Yikes, neither does ChatGPT unless you are working on trivial stuff.

16

u/HMikeeU Nov 26 '23

Well someone's gotta do the trivial stuff

9

u/MoTTs_ Nov 26 '23

That’s why when we’re talking about what can an AI do, it’s better to talk in specifics rather than generalities. For example, can I tell an AI:

Here’s a link to build setup. For box X on page Y, change the rounded corners from 4px to 5px, and submit a PR.

And if an AI can’t do that, then what trivial task, specifically, do we think an AI can handle?

3

u/ewic Nov 26 '23

If I could tell an AI to move an element 5 pixels to the right without messing up the surrounding components I would become a believer

1

u/dogweather Nov 27 '23

And it must create maintainable code. That adds a whole new level of difficulty.

15

u/fr0st Nov 26 '23

I'd say the "trivial" stuff in web dev is already abstracted away or behind a library or framework. The rest is very specific business logic that'll take as long to figure out by prompting an AI when you can just use your own knowledge to code it yourself.

3

u/HedgepigMatt Nov 26 '23

Boilerplate is largely unavoidable

1

u/HMikeeU Nov 26 '23

Libraries and frameworks definitely made web dev more complicated imo

2

u/fr0st Nov 27 '23

I think this can also be attributed to how complex many application have become due to the almost infinite number of edge cases that need to be handled. Back when it was just the user and a terminal window with basic input and output interactions things were generally much simpler.

1

u/Blazing1 Nov 28 '23

If you seriously believe this then I can't believe you have that much experience.