Once upon a time there were engineers that used software. Just like any other tool, and usually in combination with electronic, electrical and mechanical equipment, all of them being very well aware of the laws governing it all.
But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more.
Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer).
And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.
As someone not old but young enough to not have experienced a world before software, Im not sure that engineering rooted in the physical is a necessary prerequisite.
I appreciate your comment but the entire world I happened to experience in my coming of age was at the dawn of the consumer internet. And so “web stuff” was how I cut my teeth. And its my profession. And i never went to school for it, im basically a dumb untrained web dev, borne from the script kiddie days.
There’s a stigma to it sure, but im well past it. All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction. Theyre just different things now.
I really love using AI to code but more and more I wonder ... Are things really that different? So I guess I'm the business as usual type.
I think on the frontend side we're going to see a lot more scope for teams.
On a backend infra side it seems as hard as ever. Still have to think really hard problems, think deeply about data structure and flow, and deal with second- and third-order effects. Or even harder because the models like to confidently lie.
The harder question is how we train people but that doesn't seem insurmountable either. Most of us cut our teeth as junior engineers somewhere, implementing tasks that Claude can now do without breaking a sweat but was that really the most efficient way to train and learn?
Yeah I mean, as far as I can tell the result of the agent mania is the same amount of software, but an acceleration in the decline of performance and quality. I'm also increasingly seeing early adopters going back to a more "traditional" approach to development. So idk, maybe the result will be more jobs fixing up all the vibe code while we transition to a more mature implementation of language models into our workflows.
Reversing to which direction? Because what I've always seen here is a pretty good mix of positive and negative sentiments. Usually we get a lot of AI related submissions, but with skeptics/opposers in the comments.
I’m not sure. I’ve been reading death-of-the-software engineer for years, but recently the -vibe- feels different. I don’t have anything anecdotal to back it up so take it with a grain of salt. I might be reading what I want to see
I'm assuming it's a turn to the negative and not more positivity you're seeing? Geohot's article and Hasimoto's tweet about AI psychosis kind of made me pay attention.
In my opinion, as AI was oversold for too long, it was was easy to dismiss it. Classical image processing was marketed as “AI”. Doomsday predictions about AI seemed laughable, just as SkyNet in the Terminator seemed unrealistic.
The early ChatGPT versions were also pretty silly and equally oversold.
At this point, the popular messaging of AI is still 90% fiction but the remaining real 10% is now a force to be reckoned with.
Companies laying off Indian call center employees to replace with AI is something I never would have dreamed of.
My experience of using AI as a search engine has surprised me. I never expected an overgrown pile of matrices to work that well.
My feelings right now can be described as follows:
If AI progress stalls now or grinds to a halt, we get to keep a lot of new jobs that are going to show up (it opens a lot of doors), while maintaining software devs as an interesting career.
Egoistically, I would love that.
If it keeps going and software devs get replaced, so many jobs are going to disappear.
Even though the synthetic benchmarks paint a picture of LLMs coming a long way since 2022, my practical experience has been that they aren’t tangibly better. No doubt someone reading this will chime in and say LLMs are way better at writing code or whatever, and maybe that’s true, but there’s no difference between ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 as far as my trusting the output. Opus 4.8 still messes up plenty. It’s particularly bad with identifying and fixing CI yaml, but it struggles in the usual areas too.
So I’m thinking we’ve just about reached apex with LLMs, and they have failed at replacing software engineers (companies can freeze hiring juniors at their own, future peril using any excuse they like).
Yep, that has been my experience as well. There hasn't been any meaningful improvement in LLMs since ChatGPT first launched. They still fall over, in the same ways, and with more or less the same high rates.
The difference for me has been that you can use llm as your main typing interface, you couldn't do that (without being annoying) before I think opus 4.5
What I like is it's still hard, but you can do things like "prove this using game theory" or "find the optimal value for this and a proof" without having to know game theory or deep math really
How do you ensure that the output isn't BS if you don't know those areas? What value does it add to have a mathematical proof of questionable validity?
In my experience I'd have to agree. I'm shipping more and I'm onboarding onto domains faster but the same bottlenecks exist, the same complexities creep up and the same talents that help individuals push through are still relevant.
I work on backend infra. I touch a lot of things and have multiple instances of claude code running at once. I do feel like I'm doing more simultaneously. but that's still more that I have to keep track of and make sense of in my head. claude is making me way more productive, for sure, but at the same time I feel way more overwhelmed than I've ever been.
idk how anyone else is doing it and managing all of this. supposedly there's people with large teams of agents that they can just trust to do everything end-to-end.
Right there with you - this has been my experience as well, to a tee
I can do more now…so I do - it’s really that simple
And it’s way more exhausting because there’s no room to breathe - fresh code to work with every few minutes with prepping for the next set of tasks in between
On the one hand the dopamine’s got me hooked on this like a video game
On the other…I’m as overwhelmed as ever line you said, even if it’s my own doing
I’ve been finding I can mitigate the sense of being overwhelmed by trying to keep my tasks within the same domain or part of the code base. I know it’s not always an option, though.
I guess the goal is to stack context rather than spread it.
I find it incredibly exhausting otherwise. It’s a skill I don’t have in spades. I’ll have to develop it, though.
I don’t think the people trusting agents end to end are getting the quality they think they are. I’m bullish on AI as a permanent and genuinely useful tool in our kit, but I’m not seeing signs that you can actually let them loose at all. Looping on a very well defined problem, sure. But open-ended tasks across large infrastructures and complex domains, no, it’s going to be duct tape and sprawl as far as the IDE can see. It’s going to sprawl faster than context limits can grow, and the mess will only get worse.
From what I can tell, the solution is an ever-expanding roster of agents to make piece work of these immense tasks. The token expense for this approach is insane, though. I used deep-research in Claude Code today and it dispatched 103 agents and consumed something like 3.5MM tokens in ten minutes. That can’t be the future, can it?
LLMs seem to be best at writing web apps intended to be internal tools. I don’t need to ever really read the code because the functionality is relatively simple- but still valuable. I had Claude Code build me a CLI tool for running common kubectl commands against our EKS cluster. With EKS (AWS) you generally use the AWS CLI to authenticate and then choose the correct EKS cluster and then you can run your kubectl commands. So this CLI tool remembers all the AWS accounts and EKS cluster names and namespaces and pods that I care about. It’s been a huge time saver, and I never would have had the time to build it as part of my day to day. And because it’s an internal tool, I don’t have to worry about things like security/authentication, and any bugs aren’t as big a deal as if they were customer-facing. I wouldn’t want to use it for generating an app that is going on the public internet and doing anything sensitive/important/valuable with my or other people’s data (I’m sure that doesn’t stop others from vibe coding commercial products).
I doubt we will ever need a large team to build software again. PMs will be fractional. Product owners and subject matter experts will become more valuable. And engineers that have deep experience with things like Domain-Driven Design will thrive and vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles.
Vibe coding is the chaos version of using GenAI. Seven agents in parallel and the dev refuses to believe this will just be a circle jerk of hallucinations.
Planned, architected problems led by experienced dev/arch’s will be where success is measured.
There are people who make handmade watches in Switzerland and people who push buttons and trigger automations on assembly lines for mass manufactured watch companies in Vietnam.
The guy in Switzerland enjoys his life more, their labor has more leverage and is generally more valued across the world.
You all have a choice. Handmade software isnt going anywhere.
In fact this is all a trick to decrease the bargaining power of your labor, turn you into a de-skilled button pusher and a slave to anyone willing to pay you a morsel. Dont fall for it.
Edit: The people arguing with this have low standards and yearn for slop.
The difference, and I think we as an industry will have to reconcile this depending on how advanced llms get, is that you don’t see the quality in handmade code like you do in a high end watch or a luxury automobile or appliance. The veneer might be identical. It’s going to be tough to convince people that handmade software has added value or quality over slop. I still believe it does right now, but that might not always be true. And this is an industry that has pumped out a lot of sloppy code for decades, even before it was actual slop.
well this is not exactly unique to software. It is not a given that the 'handmade' nature of a product (luxury or otherwise) manifests in anything tangible or self-evidently superior. Luxury products in general overwhelmingly treat the crafted nature of the product as almost solely an investment in narrative (read: marketing) and market positioning, not an actual material outcome.
I like this take a lot. Posting a counter-example not because I disagree but because I think it’s interesting.
Ghostty is a terminal emulator with a pretty good narrative. The author is very accessible on podcasts to go over the story. It is also actually very good though. I think the jump in performance and usability put it on the map before the narrative could help push it further. The product does have to actually be good before the crafted nature can be invested into.
What're you talking about? I can instantly detect if software was created with AI. It has a stench much like a cheap product who's materials off gassing, and Im certainly not using it over the handmade solution. There will always be two options, like in clothes or watches.
Maybe you should take a step back and realize that sofware developers themselves are not the primary purchasers of most software. The average joe or jane purchaser doesn't have some magical AI slop detector, especially if the UI is well done.
I didnt downvote you, I cant. But I have yet to see a vibe coded project have good UI/UX. You'd be surprised how much thought and intention goes into making a great UI. An LLM simply cant, guided or unguided.
I actually predict that frontend devs and designers will become more valuable in the coming years as people (stupidly) abandon these disciplines.
Fortunately the economics of infinitely copyable software aren't going anywhere. If there is actually a sizable market, it can be served with relatively little cost, compared to hand-producing physical goods. I am not fully convinced there will be such a market, though.
Its like telling animals dont get domesticated, dont get exploited, dont get eaten, think about the farmer, be more like him.
Its not going to happen. For the first time in history we have tools that talk back. Adults arent mentally prepped for that. They will cling to old models of reality they know, when reality has changed. The kids on the other hand can learn and adapt better, but learning takes time and happens through trial and error.
All anyone in a position of responsibility can do, just like parents, protect the kids as much as you can as they keep falling and trust with time they will learn to adapt to the new reality.
If it were quartz it would be needing to justify why it costs more than $10. The Swiss government doesn't do anything to get people to buy Swiss watches. They're good status symbols, so rich people buy them.
Platforms that are obviously vibe slop are almost entirely ignored by those that value quality.
If your product has that cheap stench of AI I'll never trust it, I'll instantly think the creators are chumps and I'll look for any alternative that doesn't have that stench.
I think there's a ton of examples where this is true for lower level stuff like open source where you see the internals.
For commerical products it certainly exists too, for example in those cases where you know the product is built by one person or a small group of people who you absolutely know take extraordinary care to get all the details right, and it shows through as a really nice intangible feeling when you're using the product.
That (kind of rare to be honest) 'oh this is just really well done' feeling.
This is not a choice and it's not about labour, as usual. It's about the product, as usual. Instead of buying any quartz watch that keeps basically perfect time, people pay thousands of times more for a watch that's worse at timekeeping as a status symbol, or because they appreciate watches as art or as constructions. You would have needed your analogy to say why these same reasons would apply to hand-made software.
The correct argument is, again, about product and not labour. Hand-made software still is a better product, and so it's worth paying for.
> There are people who make handmade watches in Switzerland
Very few of them, and if that’s what you want to be, you better start praying that you’ll be selected for one of the extremely limited apprenticeships available.
I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and having it produce plans that you then have to refactor multiple times. It's impressive that LLMs can do this, but it's not particularly enjoyable. I guess I was a "writing code was the fun part" guy.
Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.
My feelings about front-end code are that I have a stronger feeling of craftsmanship, in the sense that I can ship a much more polished product because all the small nagging annoyances are things that I can eliminate (second-hand), where I’d previously have just lived with a lot of them as fixing them took too long to be worthwhile. I hate shipping some of the resulting working slop.
For me, part of craftsmanship is the quality of the shipped product. (I’m also willing to use CNC tools while doing hobby woodworking; others think that takes away the craftsmanship; I think it changes how the craftsmanship is experienced and applied.)
I wonder that too. I've been on the receiving end of "it's 90% done, we just need someone to get it over the line for us" way too many times to know that there's going to be a lot of pain trying to maintain or re-write parts of anything that is vibe-coded.
On the other hand, I notice the AI-fundamentalists(I am not sure how to refer to people within that group) just say that you won't be doing any hand coding anymore and you'd "just" ask something like claude to maintain it or re-write.
I've been pulled into these 90% done vibe-coded projects several times now to "get them over the line" and all I have to say is I wouldn't wish it on my greatest enemy.
AI made working for (an AI-pilled) company unbearable to me. Time will tell if there will be new approaches that new companies take, and lessons learned.
But immediately, I hate AI work in a company setting. Mandates intentionally want humans managing more “features”. When you get stuck owning someone else’s AI “feature”, it’s game over.
The new hope is that as a founder, the stimulating and creative parts of working with AI are persevered. Fingers crossed so far so good.
> I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days.
Well, yeah. There's nothing to be proud of. When an LLM is doing the work, human expertise is relevant. My employer has been trying to tell us that our skills still matter and are needed, but that is very obviously bullshit they are saying to keep people placated while they try to line up AI replacements for everyone. You have my sympathies, brother.
Traditionally those roles of providing "alignment" to overcome organizational inertia were held by program managers. So that seems like IC roles are indeed going away, to be replaced by more "technical program manager" type roles.
Maybe it's my experience, but TPMs were often responsible for coordinating large org-wide or cross-org initiatives. It's prohibitively expensive to have TPMs on anything smaller.
Since engineering with AI is still very technical, I would wager that software engineers would stretch into less technical areas of software development rather than TPMs stretching into technical areas. I only say this as someone with experience with AI and I see how easy it is to write bad code with AI if you're not aware of what it's doing.
I've been both types on and off and on for my whole career. At times, very engrossed in the technology itself - but I got started because I needed tools for my job that didn't exist so I learned how to build them. I've also developed and maintained open source software - some of it very much for its own sake as a technology - some of it quite utilitarian.
Understanding of product and business has always differentiated me though, and this is why I've never really stressed about any of this.
Another thing I've noticed - most developers are really bad at reviewing code - whether AI wrote it or not. Its really hard to make your brain sink in deep enough to really evaluate what you are looking at. I think a lot of developers never - or almost never - find bugs based on code inspection alone. Once they are written - there is often no other practical way to confirm that tests actually test what they claim to other than inspection. And bugs in design are still very costly in this new world.
As long as any human still has an edge in any aspect of the software development process - people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs, test plans and cases and code will be really valuable.
> people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs...
You're describing experience, not "forcing themselves".
On the dev side, the differentiator is enough of this experience that using AI is actually significantly slower for everything but literally typing the code.
Nothing. There will be more of us than ever as the amount of money each engineer can generate goes up. I’m not sure why everyone comes to the conclusion that there will be less engineers as productivity increases. We aren’t that expensive relative to the value we generate and AI, when wielded by an expert, will exponentially increase the amount of return a single engineer can generate.
In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier.
The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with buttons so we could type the programs into the computers. That was more efficient and now all the sudden it lowered the bar entry and more people who are employed and doing the work.
Assembly language to machine code compilers to assembly language high-level languages and LLMs.
Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.
What's going to happen to software engineers? They're going to be overworked and they're going to be given more work and the cycle will never end.
>Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.
I have the same sentiment. So far, no indication that I can be replaced yet. Maybe some day, but right now I'm more productive because of AI (*), but just as if not more busy.
(*) Such as:
Obviously the coding side, but also...
AI is helping scrape logs to diagnose bugs, and doing so with high accuracy, much, much faster than I could have done.
AI is taking care of my work journal (basically how I manage my own state) by scraping slack, emails, git commits, ticket state changes and everything else, and updating and maintaining my journal each day. I can't overstate how pleased I am with this. I am usually pretty diligent but if I get out of the habit, I could go weeks before I was back in. Now it is trivial and I always do it.
But has software engineering really changed that much?
I've barely had any regular fulltime work experience most of my career has been contracting, so I’m not sure.It seems like the perceived change varies depending on the environmen
What I don’t get is using AI agents feels basically the same as what I used to do with legacy codebases of 100k–200k lines—understanding the codebase and making partial fixes or adding features. To me, it feels like nothing has changed.
Most of my career has been about finding parts that won't break within the overall code structure—without necessarily knowing the entire detailed specification—and adding features or fixing bugs there. So I feel like it's no different from finding and fixing small issues and bugs in a large codebase written by AI.
Of course, when delivering a solution that's 70,000–80,000 lines long, there is a change things that used to rely on templates and CMS tools can now be created more diversely using AI. But aside from that, I don't think things have changed as much as people say. It might be different for those who build things entirely from scratch with AI, though.
My code writing ability has declined, but I'm not really seeing a dramatic change in workflow
Now I work with code written by AI, adding features and modifying it…
Most of the codebases I’ve seen were bad anyway—there was no good code to begin with. When coding with AI, I split tasks into P0, P1, P2 based on importance. For P0, I write everything myself. For P1, I write the draft and AI implements it. For P2, AI implements everything. For P0, I only handle things that involve responsibility, like payment logic or login logic.
I don't participate in open source, so I don’t see big changes. The only thing I notice is that AI speeds things up a lot—for things I used to understand by reading documentation and examples, now I can generate them much faster. Personally, I wish open source projects had more simple, short examples in their code
OP here. So I've also been running a survey about how developers are feeling about AI (added a link to the post) and 60% of respondents said that using AI actively makes them more tired. Most also report being more productive with AI. One would think these two things combined make up for initiatives for shorter work weeks and the like, but from what I've seen, at least for now, the opposite seems to be happening.
P.S. Sample size is currently small but I've also gathered a fair amount of qualitative data to indicate both of these things. Of course measuring productivity is also far from a science.
Shorter work weeks don't mean less work though. Not from the point of view of management, at least. It just means that 5 days are now compressed to 4, probably making the problem much worse and burn out much more likely.
In my experience, this is what ended up happening.
When you work for someone, you’re selling hours of time. Reducing days means you’re selling fewer hours. That has always been possible but they’ll probably want to pay less.
I really liked reading through the Mars trilogy. It imagined a world where AI is used for fluent effortless translation - local languages get a renaissance since now you _dont_ need a lengua Franca, everyone just speaks what they like the most, and can understand everyone else. Much more “flavour” to human interaction.
Also ai makes things just resource constrained, not labour - whatever you imagined, you could make happen, just needed to “talk to an ai” about it. Lots of terraforming Mars / Venus in that book were imagined like that.
But it also analysed the social / political / behavioural aspects of it. Places that had to preserve old power structures - aka US/Europe/China - got engulfed with mega corps controlling everything etc.
But Mars - where people had enough freedom to imagine something different, came up with political/financial structures to incorporate all of that, and thrived.
I think it tried to play the card of “if US was being created right now - what would its ideals be” If you had a huge tract of land that was “free” and nobody (powerful enough) claiming it, and a population that didn’t yet have strong allegiances and could be persuaded to band together, what would AI, tech and all these years of progress allow us as humans to achieve politically.
Which also makes you feel kinda sad for the US in that world - it is the old rusted power center that can’t innovate and is stuck in the past…
Now it’s only sci fi of course, but it was quite interesting to imagine a world where AI gets smarter and smarter but never reaches that “sentient” threshold. I think the whole trilogy aged incredibly well all things considered.
The issues are really social/political/behavioural.
If white collar jobs are decimated the economy will collapse, because it's still - nominally - a consumer economy, even though most of the spending comes from the top 10%.
If 25% of that top 10% is suddenly out of work, that's a huge chunk of GDP gone, and a likely depression as the knock on effects spread.
I don't see anyone thinking about this seriously. [Something something UBI] is not a serious attempt to deal with the problem.
Ultimately you end up with an economy where most humans are surplus to economic requirements and will literally be murdered by economics.
Or wealth and opportunity are widely distributed, but "jobs" are nothing like they are today.
>I really liked reading through the Mars trilogy. It imagined a world where AI is used for fluent effortless translation - local languages get a renaissance since now you _dont_ need a lengua Franca, everyone just speaks what they like the most, and can understand everyone else. Much more “flavour” to human interaction.
any multilingual person knows that's simply impossible. some things just don't translate, all the subtleties and much of the meaning are lost. even a galaxy-sized superintelligence made of computronium couldn't possibly translate even something as mundane "she sells seashells on the sea shore" into German without either substituting it for another tongue twister or providing a lengthy translator's note.
LLMs have taken much of the enjoyment out of coding for me, but I don’t think it has to be that way. I hope that as an industry we settle on LLMs being more like tools than human assistants. I think most of the engineers at my company are using LLMs as human assistants- most of them have agentic workflows set up and have premium subscriptions to Claude AND Gemini AND ChatGPT. Many have local LLMs running on their company MacBook Pros, but they can never manage to describe to me in plain English what those local LLMs are doing. I would compare local LLMs to Raspberry Pi clusters. They’re neat, and technically they can do stuff but they are incredibly impractical. I want so desperately to have the power of Claude Opus running locally, but we are incredibly, ridiculously, extremely far off (benchmarks are often misleading and nobody likes to talk about the paltry tokens/s they’re getting on their home rig).
So the problem for me is that I’ve noticed a trend with my coworkers- they usually don’t have a formal CS background (e.g., Comp Sci degree), their resumes are unimpressive, and they have personal websites where anyone can download a copy of their resume. I haven’t seen this at any previous job. It’s just weird, man. Anyway, so my problem is when they are purported to be the best of the best at this company, and they’re chugging the LLM kool-aid, I’m struggling to figure out whether they’re really ahead of the curve and getting the drop on the rest of us, or they’re doing basically no work and waving through each other’s PRs with little to no oversight on what the LLMs are writing. The bush league nature of many of the bugs I’m seeing going all the way to prod makes me think it’s the latter.
Meanwhile, these guys and their teams are completing an absurd number of story points each sprint. My team is dead last (and coincidentally we’re all pretty anti-AI for writing code).
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m waiting for the C suite to call our project a failure and lay everyone off. The product generally works, though I think if the devs were truly rockstars, things would be much smoother. It seems like LLMs are letting middle-of-the-road or mediocre devs appear to be rockstars purely on output speed. Nobody in this org cares if the output has 4x the bugs it should have, just that it was completed quickly.
The main issue I think is that nobody- including the rockstar tech leads- knows how the system works. They don’t know the code. There’s a bug and it takes forever to track down. Don’t ask about unit tests.
I think in a perfect world, these LLMs are treated like another tool rather than another person- meaning you and I still write a large portion of the code, and we read and understand every line- especially the lines generated by LLMs. It’s still a huge productivity multiplier for me to not have to remember how to do mundane things like write out arrays into CSV files- before I’d find a close implementation on StackOverflow and tweak to my needs. Now I can just describe what I want the CSV to look like and Claude Code generally gets it right on the first try.
Software Engineers, like all licensed professional Engineers will be just fine, as AI can't assume liability, nor be professionally licensed.
Programmers, on the other hand have a lot less leverage to bring to bear.
Of course, the above assumes that the job cuts are actually AI related, and not just cover for having to fire people because ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy - aka free money) is over.
> Software Engineers, like all licensed professional Engineers will be just fine, as AI can't assume liability, nor be professionally licensed.
There's no such licensing, unlike other fields such as medicine you are not required by law to hold any license or qualification to perform software engineering.
>after writing all this, I think these categories are a lot more about "what got you into this" rather than what you actually end up doing in this space.
>Nevertheless, my point here was to show a few of the ideas and directions I've been considering, and I'm keen to hear from others what you're thinking about too.
I decided to study computer science in college as a hopeful 18 year old who wanted to learn how video games work and maybe work for a development studio. I needed to find a job right after college, and I ended up going the full stack route. 10 years later (now) I'm working remote, making decent salary, but never fulfilled my original purpose for studying computer science.
What's gonna happen to this software engineer? Anecdotally, I'll ride my IT job as long as I can while using AI to learn about game development.
why do people forget so quickly that you can just code without LLMs? And be hugely impactful? Like in 2020 i coded better shit than my principle agentic engineer
go do a good job. it's increasingly rare nowadays.
It's bizarre isn't it. It being treated as though actually knowing how to write quality code by hand is a skill that's somehow been lost to time...
I can only guess that a lot of the engineers who went into software purely for money were all too happy to distance themselves from writing code and really don't want to go back...
Also skill atrophy due to over-reliance on these tools is a real thing. And for some people it happens really fast, just a couple of months before they start noticing a difference (like with two of my co-workers - one stated directly to me, another indirectly through a team member).
The reason is a
lack of an immediate verification process. The reason LLMs are been great at programming but less so elsewhere is because if it generates non-working code, calling hallucinated libraries or functions, there's immediate feedback. That code doesn't compile, it crashes, it fails tests, it's slow, it's buggy. But if the LLM gives me bad relationship advice, there's no repl that it can use to retry that conversation with my now-ex until we're back together. Or whatever thing that it's being used for that doesn't have some sort of way to give it a verifier.
So taste is still a thing. Software engineering will have to develop (uh oh) taste and the ability to say no. Your app could include a button to make the device scream like a monkey, but if management tells you it has to have a feature that makes no sense, the answer is no.
Any sufficiently large (preexisting) codebase has subtlties and "load bearing" bugs that allow it to function.
In my personal experience, the vibe coded solutions are incapable of delivering "safe" changes outside of anything trivial without breaking something. Folks now just seem to think this is OK? The result is software like my password manager and banking apps no longer reliably work. The trade offs (currently) just aren't worth it imho.
Maybe once we get context windows in the 100M range these systems will handle large scale (and distributed in my case) backend systems just fine. They most certainly are not at the moment, at least not to preexisting backend software systems of modest complexity. Not even close.
I'd say it very much depends on software focused the company/industry in question is.
On the lower end, there are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to build websites for other small/medium sized businesses that don't care enough about tech to pay for a full-time engineering team.
For those companies and developers, I suspect the increasing rise of AI will be a bloodbath. If your whole value proposition is "we can build your website using WordPress/Squarespace/Shopify/[CMS name here]", then AI can basically do about 95% of your job. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to shutter when clients take the work in-house due to AI, and many others will probably lose about 90% of their employees due to AI solutions being generally 'good enough'.
On the other hand, if your company is tech focused and needs to implement more complex functionality as a selling point, then there'll still be a place for software engineers even with AI. This is where the engineer as pseudo project manager thing comes into play, and where the actual coding side of things is probably going to be limited to things the AI can't implement properly.
Both situations will probably see a significant drop in the number of software engineers employed there, but the latter feels like it'll still have some room for a career.
I think AI will make software developers and system administrators a necessity for many more companies, because they'll have AI carry out other jobs.
Given the quantity of such companies that exist, I'd expect a lot more jobs for software devs. Somewhat different, sure, but not fundamentally different.
It will be like offshoring, with the difference this time around there is no team on the other side of the planet getting the jobs.
The few lucky ones to stay employed, get to be promoted to technical architects, and everyone else whose passion was equivalent to brick layers has to find something else where humans haven't yet been replaced by robots or self service machines.
When each team member gets more productive we're not doing e.g. 5x more output, we're doing more with less (team size).
This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky.
Or, thinking about Windows and macOS in the Jobs era, perhaps the difference is more between the quality of taste. Microsoft focused on quality code, and came up with COM, architectures where an instantiable button is 13 levels of inherited classes, and things like DirectX, where the architecture is clean and extendable, but forces every developer to do things like allocate their own @#$! framebuffer. High level of craftsmanship, but poor taste. Jobs tended to focus on the user experience and had good taste, so the results were generally pretty good, but I got the feeling that the code wasn't as much of a priority.
artyom | 16 hours ago
But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more.
Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer).
And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.
calvinmorrison | 16 hours ago
That is to say, somewhere along the way software got really complex, and really artistic, and really full of hubris.
apsurd | 15 hours ago
I appreciate your comment but the entire world I happened to experience in my coming of age was at the dawn of the consumer internet. And so “web stuff” was how I cut my teeth. And its my profession. And i never went to school for it, im basically a dumb untrained web dev, borne from the script kiddie days.
There’s a stigma to it sure, but im well past it. All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction. Theyre just different things now.
artyom | 7 hours ago
Not my point either. I was just referring to the tooling changing over time, with the discipline constantly evolving forward nonetheless.
prplfsh | 16 hours ago
I think on the frontend side we're going to see a lot more scope for teams.
On a backend infra side it seems as hard as ever. Still have to think really hard problems, think deeply about data structure and flow, and deal with second- and third-order effects. Or even harder because the models like to confidently lie.
The harder question is how we train people but that doesn't seem insurmountable either. Most of us cut our teeth as junior engineers somewhere, implementing tasks that Claude can now do without breaking a sweat but was that really the most efficient way to train and learn?
slopinthebag | 15 hours ago
glouwbug | 15 hours ago
It’s not that I don’t disagree, but I wonder what’s going on. Maybe it’s the IPO
hootz | 15 hours ago
glouwbug | 15 hours ago
slopinthebag | 14 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263238
https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578
BobbyTables2 | 13 hours ago
The early ChatGPT versions were also pretty silly and equally oversold.
At this point, the popular messaging of AI is still 90% fiction but the remaining real 10% is now a force to be reckoned with.
Companies laying off Indian call center employees to replace with AI is something I never would have dreamed of.
My experience of using AI as a search engine has surprised me. I never expected an overgrown pile of matrices to work that well.
Fire-Dragon-DoL | 15 hours ago
If AI progress stalls now or grinds to a halt, we get to keep a lot of new jobs that are going to show up (it opens a lot of doors), while maintaining software devs as an interesting career.
Egoistically, I would love that.
If it keeps going and software devs get replaced, so many jobs are going to disappear.
gymbeaux | 14 hours ago
So I’m thinking we’ve just about reached apex with LLMs, and they have failed at replacing software engineers (companies can freeze hiring juniors at their own, future peril using any excuse they like).
bigstrat2003 | 13 hours ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL | 12 hours ago
whateveracct | 12 hours ago
skill atrophy is real. especially for the stupid.
Fire-Dragon-DoL | 11 hours ago
The main atrophy I'm concerned about is keeping in mind the state of a massive piece of code executing in my mind.
Now with LLM I just ask "show me the state by putting comments in the code" and I just read it
sam0x17 | 15 hours ago
stvltvs | 2 hours ago
stlark | 15 hours ago
englishspot | 15 hours ago
idk how anyone else is doing it and managing all of this. supposedly there's people with large teams of agents that they can just trust to do everything end-to-end.
gxs | 14 hours ago
I can do more now…so I do - it’s really that simple
And it’s way more exhausting because there’s no room to breathe - fresh code to work with every few minutes with prepping for the next set of tasks in between
On the one hand the dopamine’s got me hooked on this like a video game
On the other…I’m as overwhelmed as ever line you said, even if it’s my own doing
steve_adams_86 | 14 hours ago
I guess the goal is to stack context rather than spread it.
I find it incredibly exhausting otherwise. It’s a skill I don’t have in spades. I’ll have to develop it, though.
I don’t think the people trusting agents end to end are getting the quality they think they are. I’m bullish on AI as a permanent and genuinely useful tool in our kit, but I’m not seeing signs that you can actually let them loose at all. Looping on a very well defined problem, sure. But open-ended tasks across large infrastructures and complex domains, no, it’s going to be duct tape and sprawl as far as the IDE can see. It’s going to sprawl faster than context limits can grow, and the mess will only get worse.
From what I can tell, the solution is an ever-expanding roster of agents to make piece work of these immense tasks. The token expense for this approach is insane, though. I used deep-research in Claude Code today and it dispatched 103 agents and consumed something like 3.5MM tokens in ten minutes. That can’t be the future, can it?
gymbeaux | 14 hours ago
ChicagoDave | 16 hours ago
My thoughts are distilled in a single page:
https://devarch.ai/trio-paradigm.html
I doubt we will ever need a large team to build software again. PMs will be fractional. Product owners and subject matter experts will become more valuable. And engineers that have deep experience with things like Domain-Driven Design will thrive and vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles.
UncleOxidant | 15 hours ago
but that seems to contradict what you say here:
> vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles.
Isn't vibe coding driving that greater productivity and negating the need for large teams to build software?
ChicagoDave | 14 hours ago
Planned, architected problems led by experienced dev/arch’s will be where success is measured.
ai_fry_ur_brain | 16 hours ago
The guy in Switzerland enjoys his life more, their labor has more leverage and is generally more valued across the world.
You all have a choice. Handmade software isnt going anywhere.
In fact this is all a trick to decrease the bargaining power of your labor, turn you into a de-skilled button pusher and a slave to anyone willing to pay you a morsel. Dont fall for it.
Edit: The people arguing with this have low standards and yearn for slop.
caspper69 | 15 hours ago
thr33 | 15 hours ago
pitched | 4 hours ago
Ghostty is a terminal emulator with a pretty good narrative. The author is very accessible on podcasts to go over the story. It is also actually very good though. I think the jump in performance and usability put it on the map before the narrative could help push it further. The product does have to actually be good before the crafted nature can be invested into.
thaumasiotes | 15 hours ago
But you can't see the "quality" in a high end watch either. They are inferior to low-end watches by every metric you can imagine.
caspper69 | 13 hours ago
thaumasiotes | 11 hours ago
ai_fry_ur_brain | 15 hours ago
caspper69 | 13 hours ago
Maybe you should take a step back and realize that sofware developers themselves are not the primary purchasers of most software. The average joe or jane purchaser doesn't have some magical AI slop detector, especially if the UI is well done.
ai_fry_ur_brain | 6 hours ago
I actually predict that frontend devs and designers will become more valuable in the coming years as people (stupidly) abandon these disciplines.
therealdrag0 | 15 hours ago
jwolfe | 15 hours ago
skdb476 | 15 hours ago
Its not going to happen. For the first time in history we have tools that talk back. Adults arent mentally prepped for that. They will cling to old models of reality they know, when reality has changed. The kids on the other hand can learn and adapt better, but learning takes time and happens through trial and error.
All anyone in a position of responsibility can do, just like parents, protect the kids as much as you can as they keep falling and trust with time they will learn to adapt to the new reality.
salvesefu | 15 hours ago
philipallstar | 8 hours ago
dktp | 15 hours ago
As of today, I've never heard of anyone taking pride in using a SaaS or frequenting a website or an app because it was handcrafted. Maybe some day
ai_fry_ur_brain | 15 hours ago
Platforms that are obviously vibe slop are almost entirely ignored by those that value quality.
If your product has that cheap stench of AI I'll never trust it, I'll instantly think the creators are chumps and I'll look for any alternative that doesn't have that stench.
They all have that stench.
davnicwil | 15 hours ago
For commerical products it certainly exists too, for example in those cases where you know the product is built by one person or a small group of people who you absolutely know take extraordinary care to get all the details right, and it shows through as a really nice intangible feeling when you're using the product.
That (kind of rare to be honest) 'oh this is just really well done' feeling.
evilduck | 14 hours ago
philipallstar | 8 hours ago
The correct argument is, again, about product and not labour. Hand-made software still is a better product, and so it's worth paying for.
kys11 | an hour ago
Very few of them, and if that’s what you want to be, you better start praying that you’ll be selected for one of the extremely limited apprenticeships available.
ryandvm | 16 hours ago
Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.
sokoloff | 15 hours ago
For me, part of craftsmanship is the quality of the shipped product. (I’m also willing to use CNC tools while doing hobby woodworking; others think that takes away the craftsmanship; I think it changes how the craftsmanship is experienced and applied.)
scorpioxy | 15 hours ago
On the other hand, I notice the AI-fundamentalists(I am not sure how to refer to people within that group) just say that you won't be doing any hand coding anymore and you'd "just" ask something like claude to maintain it or re-write.
drzaiusx11 | 5 hours ago
apsurd | 15 hours ago
But immediately, I hate AI work in a company setting. Mandates intentionally want humans managing more “features”. When you get stuck owning someone else’s AI “feature”, it’s game over.
The new hope is that as a founder, the stimulating and creative parts of working with AI are persevered. Fingers crossed so far so good.
bigstrat2003 | 13 hours ago
Well, yeah. There's nothing to be proud of. When an LLM is doing the work, human expertise is relevant. My employer has been trying to tell us that our skills still matter and are needed, but that is very obviously bullshit they are saying to keep people placated while they try to line up AI replacements for everyone. You have my sympathies, brother.
ppeetteerr | 16 hours ago
Here is a post that summarizes what I mean: https://substack.com/home/post/p-200064883
krackers | 15 hours ago
ppeetteerr | 15 hours ago
Since engineering with AI is still very technical, I would wager that software engineers would stretch into less technical areas of software development rather than TPMs stretching into technical areas. I only say this as someone with experience with AI and I see how easy it is to write bad code with AI if you're not aware of what it's doing.
jeremyjh | 15 hours ago
Understanding of product and business has always differentiated me though, and this is why I've never really stressed about any of this.
Another thing I've noticed - most developers are really bad at reviewing code - whether AI wrote it or not. Its really hard to make your brain sink in deep enough to really evaluate what you are looking at. I think a lot of developers never - or almost never - find bugs based on code inspection alone. Once they are written - there is often no other practical way to confirm that tests actually test what they claim to other than inspection. And bugs in design are still very costly in this new world.
As long as any human still has an edge in any aspect of the software development process - people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs, test plans and cases and code will be really valuable.
sublinear | 13 hours ago
You're describing experience, not "forcing themselves".
On the dev side, the differentiator is enough of this experience that using AI is actually significantly slower for everything but literally typing the code.
oompydoompy74 | 15 hours ago
operatingthetan | 15 hours ago
The politics of corporations is such that they don't actually want near infinite productivity. They require churn, cycles, a cadence.
singingtoday | 15 hours ago
In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier.
The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with buttons so we could type the programs into the computers. That was more efficient and now all the sudden it lowered the bar entry and more people who are employed and doing the work.
Assembly language to machine code compilers to assembly language high-level languages and LLMs.
Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.
What's going to happen to software engineers? They're going to be overworked and they're going to be given more work and the cycle will never end.
munksbeer | 10 hours ago
I have the same sentiment. So far, no indication that I can be replaced yet. Maybe some day, but right now I'm more productive because of AI (*), but just as if not more busy.
(*) Such as: Obviously the coding side, but also...
AI is helping scrape logs to diagnose bugs, and doing so with high accuracy, much, much faster than I could have done.
AI is taking care of my work journal (basically how I manage my own state) by scraping slack, emails, git commits, ticket state changes and everything else, and updating and maintaining my journal each day. I can't overstate how pleased I am with this. I am usually pretty diligent but if I get out of the habit, I could go weeks before I was back in. Now it is trivial and I always do it.
And more.
james_marks | 5 hours ago
Making it easier/faster doesn’t increase leisure, it increases the demand for (cheaper) software.
jdw64 | 15 hours ago
What I don’t get is using AI agents feels basically the same as what I used to do with legacy codebases of 100k–200k lines—understanding the codebase and making partial fixes or adding features. To me, it feels like nothing has changed.
Most of my career has been about finding parts that won't break within the overall code structure—without necessarily knowing the entire detailed specification—and adding features or fixing bugs there. So I feel like it's no different from finding and fixing small issues and bugs in a large codebase written by AI.
Of course, when delivering a solution that's 70,000–80,000 lines long, there is a change things that used to rely on templates and CMS tools can now be created more diversely using AI. But aside from that, I don't think things have changed as much as people say. It might be different for those who build things entirely from scratch with AI, though.
My code writing ability has declined, but I'm not really seeing a dramatic change in workflow
Now I work with code written by AI, adding features and modifying it… Most of the codebases I’ve seen were bad anyway—there was no good code to begin with. When coding with AI, I split tasks into P0, P1, P2 based on importance. For P0, I write everything myself. For P1, I write the draft and AI implements it. For P2, AI implements everything. For P0, I only handle things that involve responsibility, like payment logic or login logic.
I don't participate in open source, so I don’t see big changes. The only thing I notice is that AI speeds things up a lot—for things I used to understand by reading documentation and examples, now I can generate them much faster. Personally, I wish open source projects had more simple, short examples in their code
fhub | 15 hours ago
[OP] yakkomajuri | 15 hours ago
P.S. Sample size is currently small but I've also gathered a fair amount of qualitative data to indicate both of these things. Of course measuring productivity is also far from a science.
scorpioxy | 14 hours ago
In my experience, this is what ended up happening.
pitched | 5 hours ago
seer | 15 hours ago
Also ai makes things just resource constrained, not labour - whatever you imagined, you could make happen, just needed to “talk to an ai” about it. Lots of terraforming Mars / Venus in that book were imagined like that.
But it also analysed the social / political / behavioural aspects of it. Places that had to preserve old power structures - aka US/Europe/China - got engulfed with mega corps controlling everything etc.
But Mars - where people had enough freedom to imagine something different, came up with political/financial structures to incorporate all of that, and thrived.
I think it tried to play the card of “if US was being created right now - what would its ideals be” If you had a huge tract of land that was “free” and nobody (powerful enough) claiming it, and a population that didn’t yet have strong allegiances and could be persuaded to band together, what would AI, tech and all these years of progress allow us as humans to achieve politically.
Which also makes you feel kinda sad for the US in that world - it is the old rusted power center that can’t innovate and is stuck in the past…
Now it’s only sci fi of course, but it was quite interesting to imagine a world where AI gets smarter and smarter but never reaches that “sentient” threshold. I think the whole trilogy aged incredibly well all things considered.
TheOtherHobbes | 14 hours ago
If white collar jobs are decimated the economy will collapse, because it's still - nominally - a consumer economy, even though most of the spending comes from the top 10%.
If 25% of that top 10% is suddenly out of work, that's a huge chunk of GDP gone, and a likely depression as the knock on effects spread.
I don't see anyone thinking about this seriously. [Something something UBI] is not a serious attempt to deal with the problem.
Ultimately you end up with an economy where most humans are surplus to economic requirements and will literally be murdered by economics.
Or wealth and opportunity are widely distributed, but "jobs" are nothing like they are today.
Given where we are now option 1 looks closer.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 12 hours ago
any multilingual person knows that's simply impossible. some things just don't translate, all the subtleties and much of the meaning are lost. even a galaxy-sized superintelligence made of computronium couldn't possibly translate even something as mundane "she sells seashells on the sea shore" into German without either substituting it for another tongue twister or providing a lengthy translator's note.
tacocataco | 11 hours ago
Manna - https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
rglover | 15 hours ago
gymbeaux | 14 hours ago
So the problem for me is that I’ve noticed a trend with my coworkers- they usually don’t have a formal CS background (e.g., Comp Sci degree), their resumes are unimpressive, and they have personal websites where anyone can download a copy of their resume. I haven’t seen this at any previous job. It’s just weird, man. Anyway, so my problem is when they are purported to be the best of the best at this company, and they’re chugging the LLM kool-aid, I’m struggling to figure out whether they’re really ahead of the curve and getting the drop on the rest of us, or they’re doing basically no work and waving through each other’s PRs with little to no oversight on what the LLMs are writing. The bush league nature of many of the bugs I’m seeing going all the way to prod makes me think it’s the latter.
Meanwhile, these guys and their teams are completing an absurd number of story points each sprint. My team is dead last (and coincidentally we’re all pretty anti-AI for writing code).
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m waiting for the C suite to call our project a failure and lay everyone off. The product generally works, though I think if the devs were truly rockstars, things would be much smoother. It seems like LLMs are letting middle-of-the-road or mediocre devs appear to be rockstars purely on output speed. Nobody in this org cares if the output has 4x the bugs it should have, just that it was completed quickly.
The main issue I think is that nobody- including the rockstar tech leads- knows how the system works. They don’t know the code. There’s a bug and it takes forever to track down. Don’t ask about unit tests.
I think in a perfect world, these LLMs are treated like another tool rather than another person- meaning you and I still write a large portion of the code, and we read and understand every line- especially the lines generated by LLMs. It’s still a huge productivity multiplier for me to not have to remember how to do mundane things like write out arrays into CSV files- before I’d find a close implementation on StackOverflow and tweak to my needs. Now I can just describe what I want the CSV to look like and Claude Code generally gets it right on the first try.
mikewarot | 13 hours ago
Programmers, on the other hand have a lot less leverage to bring to bear.
Of course, the above assumes that the job cuts are actually AI related, and not just cover for having to fire people because ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy - aka free money) is over.
cube00 | 10 hours ago
There's no such licensing, unlike other fields such as medicine you are not required by law to hold any license or qualification to perform software engineering.
munksbeer | 10 hours ago
Zoo3y | 12 hours ago
>Nevertheless, my point here was to show a few of the ideas and directions I've been considering, and I'm keen to hear from others what you're thinking about too.
I decided to study computer science in college as a hopeful 18 year old who wanted to learn how video games work and maybe work for a development studio. I needed to find a job right after college, and I ended up going the full stack route. 10 years later (now) I'm working remote, making decent salary, but never fulfilled my original purpose for studying computer science. What's gonna happen to this software engineer? Anecdotally, I'll ride my IT job as long as I can while using AI to learn about game development.
whateveracct | 12 hours ago
go do a good job. it's increasingly rare nowadays.
the frauds are growing.
i2km | 9 hours ago
I can only guess that a lot of the engineers who went into software purely for money were all too happy to distance themselves from writing code and really don't want to go back...
Izkata | an hour ago
b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 11 hours ago
cicko | 10 hours ago
I can see very few reasons why AI couldn't replace their expertise for all of us non-experts, the same way it did for software development.
fragmede | 7 hours ago
So taste is still a thing. Software engineering will have to develop (uh oh) taste and the ability to say no. Your app could include a button to make the device scream like a monkey, but if management tells you it has to have a feature that makes no sense, the answer is no.
drzaiusx11 | 5 hours ago
In my personal experience, the vibe coded solutions are incapable of delivering "safe" changes outside of anything trivial without breaking something. Folks now just seem to think this is OK? The result is software like my password manager and banking apps no longer reliably work. The trade offs (currently) just aren't worth it imho.
Maybe once we get context windows in the 100M range these systems will handle large scale (and distributed in my case) backend systems just fine. They most certainly are not at the moment, at least not to preexisting backend software systems of modest complexity. Not even close.
CM30 | 5 hours ago
On the lower end, there are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to build websites for other small/medium sized businesses that don't care enough about tech to pay for a full-time engineering team.
For those companies and developers, I suspect the increasing rise of AI will be a bloodbath. If your whole value proposition is "we can build your website using WordPress/Squarespace/Shopify/[CMS name here]", then AI can basically do about 95% of your job. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to shutter when clients take the work in-house due to AI, and many others will probably lose about 90% of their employees due to AI solutions being generally 'good enough'.
On the other hand, if your company is tech focused and needs to implement more complex functionality as a selling point, then there'll still be a place for software engineers even with AI. This is where the engineer as pseudo project manager thing comes into play, and where the actual coding side of things is probably going to be limited to things the AI can't implement properly.
Both situations will probably see a significant drop in the number of software engineers employed there, but the latter feels like it'll still have some room for a career.
spwa4 | 2 hours ago
Given the quantity of such companies that exist, I'd expect a lot more jobs for software devs. Somewhat different, sure, but not fundamentally different.
pjmlp | 2 hours ago
The few lucky ones to stay employed, get to be promoted to technical architects, and everyone else whose passion was equivalent to brick layers has to find something else where humans haven't yet been replaced by robots or self service machines.
When each team member gets more productive we're not doing e.g. 5x more output, we're doing more with less (team size).
prewett | 2 hours ago
Or, thinking about Windows and macOS in the Jobs era, perhaps the difference is more between the quality of taste. Microsoft focused on quality code, and came up with COM, architectures where an instantiable button is 13 levels of inherited classes, and things like DirectX, where the architecture is clean and extendable, but forces every developer to do things like allocate their own @#$! framebuffer. High level of craftsmanship, but poor taste. Jobs tended to focus on the user experience and had good taste, so the results were generally pretty good, but I got the feeling that the code wasn't as much of a priority.
marssaxman | an hour ago
That's a sentence I have certainly never read before!
Henchman21 | an hour ago