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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u/Headpuncher Nov 26 '23

  1. already seen employers ban use of chatGPT / copilot because they are afraid their IP will be "stolen" by it. Legal are dealing with it as we write this.

  2. I've been using copilot anyway and it saves me a lot of boilerplate and typing, but it hasn't been error free, and I need to be quite specific in what i want from it. So, you need webdev knowledge to get anything out of it.

If employers had any brains, they would increase budgets to leverage faster development overall, Fire the soft skills waste-of-space roles who comprise 60% of a project's workforce and automate that.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

This is the perfect answer. It’s a tool. A very good tool. It can help productivity if used correctly, and in my case, is a great learning tool.

But you need to understand what you want it to do. Sure, it could spit out the very basics with very basic and low knowledge input. But to actually take it to something decent and presentable, you need web skills to cater what you want it to do. And you’ll need those skills to fix issues with some of the output ot gives.