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Tech Layoffs Declining Even After AI Scare, And The AI Developer Boom

CodeLetter - The 3 Minute Coding Newsletter

In this CodeLetter we are going to discuss the current state of layoffs in the job market, the AI tooling arms race, and the surge of the AI developer role. Let’s get into it!

Tech Layoffs Down 72.6% From Q1 2023 to Q2 2023

Developers were hit with one of the largest job scares in recent history with over 167,398 developers laid off in Q1 2023.

With a downwards trend of layoffs, we are currently expecting a healthier job market moving forward. It is important to realize that the recent impact on jobs in the developer’s industry has successfully recovered; meaning that, with hope, such jobs will continue to become ever more promising in the future.

With tools like ChatGPT being out since November 30, 2022, we can see that the job market has recuperated, and that AI isn’t a significant threat to developers… yet.

Developer Tooling For Chatbots Is Only Getting Better

Tooling for software engineers to build LLM (Large language model) based chatbots is constantly getting better. With the collaboration between Vercel (Creators of Next.js) and OpenAI (Creators of ChatGPT), the two have brought about the Vercel AI SDK.

The Vercel AI SDK allows developers to easily communicate with OpenAI APIs from Next.js frontends with easy-to-use React components and implementations for streaming ChatGPT responses.

This type of developer tooling is only the start, and once the dust settles, we are predicting that there will be AI developer tools that allow even amateur software engineers to quickly understand LLM based systems.

AI Specialized Software Engineers, And The Positive Impact On Enterprise SAAS

Recent tooling (like the aforementioned) for software engineers has completely changed the game for those interested in getting into building chatbots and AI systems, as well as working with embeddings storage and understanding further LLM concepts. These types of concepts are new, but quite beneficial to organizations; we are even starting to see massive positive results from PagerDuty’s enterprise use of AI—for instance. Many other businesses should also see upcoming success, at this rate.

PagerDuty, an incident response SAAS, uses LLMs to help make decisions on who to page for a certain event. For example, paging the CTO if the internal code determines that the event is significant enough to do so.

Examples like this show the impact of using AI at enterprise scale, and the PagerDuty AIOps (AI Operations) teams report that internal AI systems help reduce time to resolve issues by 25% and reduce unnecessary interruptions (Getting paged for no reason, e. g.) by 90% (Source).

While LLMs are only one part of the Artificial Intelligence operations over at PagerDuty, this type of AI emergence at such a massive scale is something we are going to be paying close attention to. Cases like this suggest an influx of developers needed to fill roles tied to enterprise AI systems.

An AI Revolution, Or Simply Just Hype? Venture Capitalists Weigh In

The new AI realm for software engineers can be confusing, so it is important to look at the trends of top industry investors to further understand the AI market.

Y Combinator, the startup incubator behind Coinbase, Twitch, and Dropbox, has a portfolio of nearly 35% AI focused companies in their most recent Summer 2023 batch of companies they have invested in.

This 35% metric allows us to see that there are still large amounts of businesses where customer problems are getting solved without eyes on AI systems alone—but the importance of AI is only increasing.

In a recent blog post by a16z, a prominent venture capital firm with investments in names such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Slack, has discussed the impact of AI on the personal finance industry. a16z is expecting that “the best (AI) products will have incredibly fast and smooth onboarding and a ‘set it and forget it’ motion”.

This “set it and forget it” approach to building AI systems is important for developers as it increases the relevancy of AI when building out companies. The team at CodeLetter sees a future where AI systems become the center of attention for many companies. These companies will need developers to handle data, refine LLM outputs, manage AI spend, and develop streaming infrastructure. Our prediction is that these types of developers will become indispensable in the AI revolution.

Thanks for reading this weeks CodeLetter, same time next week ☮️ . If you enjoy reading CodeLetter, refer a friend by sending them over to thecodeletter.com!

- The Team at CodeLetter

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