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?
1
Upvotes
1
u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23
Try to not be affected so much by the news and the cherry picked examples posted on Twitter. I am not saying that ChatGPT and Copilot are not major advancements but they are not even close at stealing your job. They can boost your productivity and if you know how to use them you can increase your salary directly, by promoting the productivity boost on your current project, or indirectly by onboarding more projects as a freelancer.
For developers to start losing their jobs, AI needs to grow to a point where it can go from product specs to end result without needing a single adjustment. And here lies the problem with the cherry-picked examples I mentioned before. They can't integrate with any non-trivial existing codebase. Yes, you can give ChatGPT a mockup and it can produce HTML. Will it work on all devices? Is it ARIA compatible? Most likely it will be plain HTML, how will you integrate it with your custom theme built on top of Bootstrap/Material/Tailwind? What about logic? How can it be broken down into components for use in any modern framework.
Recently, I tried to use ChatGPT to generate a series of MikroORM entities for a brand new NestJS project and some services to make use of them. I thought that because of the boilerplate level of code I could just trust it, but it made at least one terrible mistake on each line of code. In one case it used MongoDB semantics even though I had instructed it that the project uses SQL databases. Even after I asked for correction, its reply was "You are write this decorator is not to be used for SQL, here is another one that is also wrong". And that's normal, it's a predictive model that gives you the illusion of intelligence.
Use it to learn, don't trust its output and for any production use carefully inspect each line and avoid generating more than 10 lines of code at once with it.