I've been expecting to be replaced by a much, much cheaper developer in another country since I graduated college ... three decades ago. I'm still not 100% certain why that hasn't happened.
I suspect it has to do with the equivalent of prompt engineering: it's too difficult to cross the cultural and linguistic barriers, as well as the barrier of space that could have mitigated the other two. By the time you've directed somebody to do the work with sufficient precision, you could have just done it yourself.
And it's part of the reason we keep looking for that 10x superdeveloper. Not just that they produce more code per dollar spent, but that there is less communication overhead. The number of meetings scale with the square of the number of people involved, so getting 5 people for the same price as me doesn't actually save you time or money.
I have no idea what that means for AI coding. Thus far it looks a lot like that overseas developer who really knows their stuff and speaks perfect English, but doesn't actually know the domain and can't learn it quickly. (Not because they aren't smart, but because of the various human factors I mentioned.)
I'd be thrilled to be completely wrong about that -- in part because I've been mentally prepared for it for so long. I hope that younger developers get a chance to spin that into a whole new career, hopefully of a kind I can't even imagine.
By the time you've directed somebody to do the work with sufficient precision, you could have just done it yourself.
And it’s much slower because “do it” includes trial-error-decision cycle, which is fast when you’re alone and weeks if you are directing and [mis]communicating. Also wondering where it goes and how big of a bubble it is/will be.
