> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted.
> Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to think that other brilliant engineers that spent their lives collecting domain knowledge are now competing on the same lane.
If the author's vision of the future is correct, then competent software engineers are safe. Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.
Engineers whose main competitive advantage is domain knowledge are probably not that brilliant at engineering. They might still find employment in other areas of the industry where they accumulated domain knowledge.
That's an extraordinarily rosy view of the future.
I'm old enough to remember the dot-com crash, specifically the years afterwards. In 2002-2003, the unemployment rate of software engineers was something like 40%. In fact, the only reason it wasn't higher was because of the number of people who had permanently left the field to become plumbers (or other trades).
I think this is going to be worse. In the dot-com crash, what really happened is that non-businesses got funded and it basically the capital markets ceased to function to a large degree. That's not what's happening now. Yes, huge amounts of money are going into AI companies but the change is more structural.
Other industries have gone through this. In the 1980s a bunch of industries were intentionally destroyed or offshored in areas that have never recovered. This has continuing social, economic and political impacts. I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech.
>>"Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles."
I'm not sure that's universally true. Good software engineers who are arrogant about easily acquired domain knowledge have been the downfall of many an ERP system.
There's SO much IT that's literally all about putting business rules into the system.
> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.
Partially disagree. Broad-strokes domain knowledge can be learned quickly, but honing that domain knowledge with nuance and consideration for complexity, particularly for organisations that are unique and are not often thought of as 'software development houses', can take years if not decades.
> Engineers whose main competitive advantage is domain knowledge are probably not that brilliant at engineering.
The same is also true of engineers without domain knowledge, certainly in my experience. Maybe we just got unlucky...
Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks about, is regularly wrong, frequently myopic, and just outright dumb constantly. It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.
Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"
Are banks that concerned about velocity? Because moving fast and breaking things in the banking sector can get extremely expensive. It's also not a who-gives-a-shit industry like operating a taxi service or hosting images, but a very tightly regulated sector.
My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently.
LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is always many things subtly wrong iterating and expanding our domain.
This might be because the companies I worked for happen to be tackling complex domains precisely for moat-building reasons. They stay in business explicitly because there's not a book out there you can read to build a clone, the knowhow stays inside.
Also, a fintech whose managers recommend speeding up design docs with AI sounds way too careless to be in the money handling business. It's way, way too easy to end up with millions incorrectly allocated, particularly if you deal with high volumes of small transactions. These bugs are always a bitch to deal with because correcting the logic is just step one, you then have to correct all the wrongly calculated data in immutable DBs, move around the red tape and client comms, and your fix is bound to become a gotcha that new features and observability have to take into account ("remember that there's a bump in the data in february 2 because we had incident X".)
> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession...
Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe).
Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
We are less than a year into good-enough coding agents, and as of right now there is not a single job opening I see that offers a salary for non-AI output.
It is fairly obvious that the majority of people who buy software (>99%) don't really care how it's built. They care a lot about the outcome of using it, they care a little bit about whether there are bugs or not, and they care about the cost a lot, but beyond that nothing seems to matter to the purchaser. Even obvious things like whether or not there are tests, documentation, SLAs for fixes, or backwards compatibility between versions don't really seem to matter much.
That doesn't mean you couldn't carve out a niche providing hand built software to people it does matter to, because the software industry is large, but saying 'zero percent of the market isn't willing to pay for it' isn't really wrong. It's just a rounding error that does care.
(One massive caveat though ... the argument assumes that 'hand built' means 'higher quality than AI-assisted', and that's probably not true for >99% of developers.)
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
This is a provably false statement, given that eg. Handmade Hero exists and sold a ton of pre-orders despite never coming to fruition, and spawned an entire community that prides themselves on handmade software. There are also content creators like Tsoding who make a living by having people watch them do handmade coding for the love of the craft.
Some non-zero percentage of people will also always be willing to pay a premium for superior-quality superior. The author's thesis isn't that LLMs can produce S-grade software but that 'nobody cares' about quality and that C-grade software is good enough. While it's true that software quality isn't valued at scale, I think the minority who care is larger than the minority who care about premium woodworking goods, particularly because as an artisan software developer you more or less have access to the global market of every single person who cares, while as an artisan woodworker you mostly only have access to the market of people in your town who care.
This also overlooks that LLMs are politically divisive and there are movements to boycott them and shame people for using them. There's a niche for organic, free-range, vegan, etc. products at the supermarket for conscientious objectors, there will undoubtedly be such a niche for software. All the more so if LLMs reach a point where they actually are putting everyone out of a job, they will get much more divisive.
I work with a guy who does decking (gardens, caravans, etc) and builds sheds, fences, things like that and he does very well indeed (he's also incredibly good at it to be fair)
Custom furniture/cabinetry is already a pretty tough market, and woodworking is such a common programmer hobby that if a significant chunk of us decided to make a go of it the market would get heavily oversupplied pretty fast :).
I’ve had people tell me I should try selling some of the furniture I make and my response is always that I made the mistake of turning a hobby into a career once, I don’t intend to make that mistake again, and at least software still pays pretty well.
Same boat here, just a couple years more experience.
Current LLMs are still kind of shit at actually programming so many jobs do still care to have professional programmers. However, I think it's evident that if things stand where they are, employers will care to have far fewer of them, at least of highly paid highly experienced programmers. If this is the state we're in with LLM adoption when they can't help but create the same helper functions 15 times, god knows we're screwed.
So we should probably work on clearing out our debts and figuring out what else we might want to do with our time, I reckon.
I'm still going to try to do a good job. I'm still trying to learn the best effective ways to apply current LLMs (Right now I still prefer to mostly write code myself but have been using LLMs to bang code into shape via iterative code review; this is a way to exploit LLMs to make better code, especially applicable if your velocity was already good.)
To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end.
Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a human backing that, with thought, with ideas, with human output.
Whether you like it or not, "Economic output" is just a different phrase for "Human output that is valuable". When all human output is valued at the fractions of a penny per month of work, there is no future.
There’s one force where software engineering is being automated by LLMs, but the other force is that there isn’t really much more software that needs to be built. Even before AI coding became big, back in 2021, we were already in late stage SaaS territory where each new idea was an increasingly minor variation of an existing idea. There were no new GitHubs, Herokus, Stripes, Salesforces, Instagrams, Reddits, just variations of those for more specialized markets.
It’s really unfortunate that AI hasn’t raised the ceiling on the space of possibilities as much as it’s raised the floor on how much can be automated, we’re all getting squeezed in the space between.
I still hold out a belief that there are creative or intuitive things human beings can do that AI will never do, based off of Penrose’s argument that consciousness is not computational, but it’s similar to how the author describes “taste” which no one seems to care about anymore.
> All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.
Is it really though? Access to information is quicker, but you still need to know what ‘good’ looks like to leverage it effectively. I can prompt my way to a medical diagnosis, but I’d still want to run it by a doctor.
> I still have one pillar standing, though: code quality and software architecture - what's now being reduced to being called "taste".
Genuine question: what exactly is "quality"?
It's something I've been trying to understand for a very long time. It seems like it's entirely contextual, and it has both subjective and objective facets (the latter only for quantifiable things, and still entirely contextual).
He says that taste doesn't matter and it hasn't in the past. In an era of "extruded code product" (by analogy to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExtrudedBookProd... ) automatically generated by the truckload at negligible cost, the differentiator for software developers will necessarily be the ability to create a product that doesn't reek of extruded code product, i.e. the things like quality that he labels taste.
(Whether any one reading this, myself included, survives in the industry long enough to reach the other side of that transition is a different question.)
I think this experience is universal. The answer is the same as always has been - develop skills that are becoming most important.
Right now that is (at least from what I can see):
- Data analysis, data pipelines, models, etc.
- Tacit business knowledge
- architecture and design patterns (always has been, but now the scale os larger so this is even more important)
It's harsh but nobody cares if a model or a human made a system.
The "good" bits are that now automating anything and providing value from software is much easier. If I have an idea or a nitpick somewhere, I can just do it, up to a limit (which is quickly rising).
I have always been a generalist and generally interested in a very wide array of things, and this period has been the most exciting in my engineering career (13y now).
Learning about anything is so frictionless, looking back at my first learning experience - picking up a fat C++ book and spending days/weeks debugging, while I can romanticize that, I would never go back.
I can also now write software solo or with an extremely small team at a huge scale in comparison, and that is super exciting.
A lot of skills that took sleepless nights to acquire, they are "gone", but I still don't regret anything or wouldn't go back. Their "usefulness" has degraded, true, but this has always been the case with engineering.
We are now able to spend much more time thinking about utility rather than low level implementation and imo that's great.
We have many challenges ahead of us, and there are seriously bad things, the biggest one I have experienced is the hours are increasing and mental load is vastly increasing as well. As capacity, speed and leverage increases, so do expectations and hours, and that is probably a social problem.
Sorry for the unstructured stream of thoughts, and this is just an opinion (quite an unpopular one I believe), I hope your distress decays away for a new excitement and new opportunities.
The saying goes... first we shape our tools, then they shape us
We are now manufacturing intelligence (why it's artificial) and it shall be interesting to see how it shapes us individually and as a whole.
While marching on May Day, the woman next to me made the comment that Ai will force every human and humanity to reflect on what it means to be human, all of us at the same time over a short time period. What makes a human valuable beyond their work? Why do we go to other people when their expertise is at everyone's fingertip? What value are we giving, trading, or sharing in the time we have in this world?
Realistically, what should we have done instead? Not invent LLMs? What happens when a couple thousand people invent the next disruptive technology and even more of the population loses their jobs?
It seems like new tech is something most of us have to lie down and accept as the new reality each time it's invented, barring full-scale rioting. Much as with the Cold War.
I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely.
I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants.
People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.
I am also feeling anxious. I lucked out by having natural inclination towards software development, career which can provide good upper middle class life to anyone. But I feel like writing is on the wall. If I don’t find a way to pivot to something else, I might experience class migration, but in the opposite direction this time.
"Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession."
As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game.
In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People will no longer focus on utility alone, but instead on the enjoyment of the process of writing code itself.
The direction I'm given is to take humans out of the loop. As much as possible. Everything AI. Automate everything. If you are in the loop you are overhead.
"Except that nobody cares anymore." Noone (from mid-management) cared about it also before. You hit the deadline, get promoted and leave the technical debt to the next one. Even if you're the one to deal with it, you set up the next project, get the budget, prioritize the issues etc. Not much changed in this regard with LLMs
This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless"
I secretly wish LLMs take my job away because I'll get about two years of unprogrammed rest, which I absolutely will not take of my own accord. But it's unlikely to happen.
Maybe just maybe here in HN we are in an echo chamber that is convincing us that there is a theoretical limit to how far the LLMs can make progress. It’s not unthinkable that LLMs will make better overall architectural decisions or follow the good practices better or understand the problem in bigger picture (more access to company/product context already makes a huge difference)
Lots of jobs have been automated away and careers based on those jobs faded away in history. Maybe in near future there won’t be a ton of opportunities for software engineers in the traditional form. I’m also embracing for that future.
There were people called calculators that did manual calculations in the past. There were people hand weaving all the fabric. There were people painting cars in the factory. All those jobs are gone for the most part.
We are sitting here portending there is going to be demand for software engineers managing those engineer robots but let’s be real. The demand for software is not increasing at the rate software engineering is becoming efficient using those robots. Some (many) of us have to find new careers.
Code quality and architecture still matter, because they also make it easier for LLMs to reason about the system.
That said, Opus 4.8 and Codex 5.5 both can write code that is higher quality than your average engineer. They are not quite there yet in terms of code re-use, but I think that's a solvable problem.
The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees.
LLMs have made domain knowledge and reasoning "cheap"; it doesn't matter if the output is lower quality - look around you for countless examples of where cheap wins and "cheap" continues to improve.
It's crazy the crazed anti-AI people yelling with foam with their mouth that it's useless, meanwhile Claude for me at work oneshots complex bugs in a massive project with a 95% success rate. And the customer happiness survey has never been as good as it's now btw
> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted.
> Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to think that other brilliant engineers that spent their lives collecting domain knowledge are now competing on the same lane.
If the author's vision of the future is correct, then competent software engineers are safe. Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.
Engineers whose main competitive advantage is domain knowledge are probably not that brilliant at engineering. They might still find employment in other areas of the industry where they accumulated domain knowledge.
> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.
There was an entire thread a week ago about how domain expertise has always been the real moat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340411
That's an extraordinarily rosy view of the future.
I'm old enough to remember the dot-com crash, specifically the years afterwards. In 2002-2003, the unemployment rate of software engineers was something like 40%. In fact, the only reason it wasn't higher was because of the number of people who had permanently left the field to become plumbers (or other trades).
I think this is going to be worse. In the dot-com crash, what really happened is that non-businesses got funded and it basically the capital markets ceased to function to a large degree. That's not what's happening now. Yes, huge amounts of money are going into AI companies but the change is more structural.
Other industries have gone through this. In the 1980s a bunch of industries were intentionally destroyed or offshored in areas that have never recovered. This has continuing social, economic and political impacts. I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech.
>>"Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles."
I'm not sure that's universally true. Good software engineers who are arrogant about easily acquired domain knowledge have been the downfall of many an ERP system.
There's SO much IT that's literally all about putting business rules into the system.
> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.
Partially disagree. Broad-strokes domain knowledge can be learned quickly, but honing that domain knowledge with nuance and consideration for complexity, particularly for organisations that are unique and are not often thought of as 'software development houses', can take years if not decades.
> Engineers whose main competitive advantage is domain knowledge are probably not that brilliant at engineering.
The same is also true of engineers without domain knowledge, certainly in my experience. Maybe we just got unlucky...
Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks about, is regularly wrong, frequently myopic, and just outright dumb constantly. It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.
The author has written his job is in backend web development, not finance.
It's probably a lot less critical. Most web development is crud.
Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"
Are banks that concerned about velocity? Because moving fast and breaking things in the banking sector can get extremely expensive. It's also not a who-gives-a-shit industry like operating a taxi service or hosting images, but a very tightly regulated sector.
My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently.
LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is always many things subtly wrong iterating and expanding our domain.
This might be because the companies I worked for happen to be tackling complex domains precisely for moat-building reasons. They stay in business explicitly because there's not a book out there you can read to build a clone, the knowhow stays inside.
Also, a fintech whose managers recommend speeding up design docs with AI sounds way too careless to be in the money handling business. It's way, way too easy to end up with millions incorrectly allocated, particularly if you deal with high volumes of small transactions. These bugs are always a bitch to deal with because correcting the logic is just step one, you then have to correct all the wrongly calculated data in immutable DBs, move around the red tape and client comms, and your fix is bound to become a gotcha that new features and observability have to take into account ("remember that there's a bump in the data in february 2 because we had incident X".)
> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession...
Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe).
Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
You took this statistic out of your rear end?
> You took this statistic out of your rear end?
We are less than a year into good-enough coding agents, and as of right now there is not a single job opening I see that offers a salary for non-AI output.
You better plug it because the statistics keep on coming
That odor you are smelling is entirely generated on your end.
It is fairly obvious that the majority of people who buy software (>99%) don't really care how it's built. They care a lot about the outcome of using it, they care a little bit about whether there are bugs or not, and they care about the cost a lot, but beyond that nothing seems to matter to the purchaser. Even obvious things like whether or not there are tests, documentation, SLAs for fixes, or backwards compatibility between versions don't really seem to matter much.
That doesn't mean you couldn't carve out a niche providing hand built software to people it does matter to, because the software industry is large, but saying 'zero percent of the market isn't willing to pay for it' isn't really wrong. It's just a rounding error that does care.
(One massive caveat though ... the argument assumes that 'hand built' means 'higher quality than AI-assisted', and that's probably not true for >99% of developers.)
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
People are increasingly associating “AI art” with cheap slop. I wonder if the same will ever happen to programming.
People can’t even reliably recognize AI art anymore.
The classic “AI images were everywhere in 2023, but I rarely see them now” phenomenon.
I see a lot more bad art now. I suspect most of it is AI, but I can’t prove it.
What are you talking about? They’re so ubiquitous.
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.
This is a provably false statement, given that eg. Handmade Hero exists and sold a ton of pre-orders despite never coming to fruition, and spawned an entire community that prides themselves on handmade software. There are also content creators like Tsoding who make a living by having people watch them do handmade coding for the love of the craft.
Some non-zero percentage of people will also always be willing to pay a premium for superior-quality superior. The author's thesis isn't that LLMs can produce S-grade software but that 'nobody cares' about quality and that C-grade software is good enough. While it's true that software quality isn't valued at scale, I think the minority who care is larger than the minority who care about premium woodworking goods, particularly because as an artisan software developer you more or less have access to the global market of every single person who cares, while as an artisan woodworker you mostly only have access to the market of people in your town who care.
This also overlooks that LLMs are politically divisive and there are movements to boycott them and shame people for using them. There's a niche for organic, free-range, vegan, etc. products at the supermarket for conscientious objectors, there will undoubtedly be such a niche for software. All the more so if LLMs reach a point where they actually are putting everyone out of a job, they will get much more divisive.
Depends what you mean by woodworking
I work with a guy who does decking (gardens, caravans, etc) and builds sheds, fences, things like that and he does very well indeed (he's also incredibly good at it to be fair)
Most people would just call that construction
Custom furniture/cabinetry is already a pretty tough market, and woodworking is such a common programmer hobby that if a significant chunk of us decided to make a go of it the market would get heavily oversupplied pretty fast :).
I’ve had people tell me I should try selling some of the furniture I make and my response is always that I made the mistake of turning a hobby into a career once, I don’t intend to make that mistake again, and at least software still pays pretty well.
Same boat here, just a couple years more experience.
Current LLMs are still kind of shit at actually programming so many jobs do still care to have professional programmers. However, I think it's evident that if things stand where they are, employers will care to have far fewer of them, at least of highly paid highly experienced programmers. If this is the state we're in with LLM adoption when they can't help but create the same helper functions 15 times, god knows we're screwed.
So we should probably work on clearing out our debts and figuring out what else we might want to do with our time, I reckon.
I'm still going to try to do a good job. I'm still trying to learn the best effective ways to apply current LLMs (Right now I still prefer to mostly write code myself but have been using LLMs to bang code into shape via iterative code review; this is a way to exploit LLMs to make better code, especially applicable if your velocity was already good.)
To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end.
Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a human backing that, with thought, with ideas, with human output.
Whether you like it or not, "Economic output" is just a different phrase for "Human output that is valuable". When all human output is valued at the fractions of a penny per month of work, there is no future.
Owners of capital, yes, but also owners of the means of production (which now means AI companies). See https://blog.oberbrunner.com/blog/ai-risks-taxonomy/#economi...
> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack
Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones.
Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.
There’s one force where software engineering is being automated by LLMs, but the other force is that there isn’t really much more software that needs to be built. Even before AI coding became big, back in 2021, we were already in late stage SaaS territory where each new idea was an increasingly minor variation of an existing idea. There were no new GitHubs, Herokus, Stripes, Salesforces, Instagrams, Reddits, just variations of those for more specialized markets.
It’s really unfortunate that AI hasn’t raised the ceiling on the space of possibilities as much as it’s raised the floor on how much can be automated, we’re all getting squeezed in the space between.
I still hold out a belief that there are creative or intuitive things human beings can do that AI will never do, based off of Penrose’s argument that consciousness is not computational, but it’s similar to how the author describes “taste” which no one seems to care about anymore.
> All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.
Is it really though? Access to information is quicker, but you still need to know what ‘good’ looks like to leverage it effectively. I can prompt my way to a medical diagnosis, but I’d still want to run it by a doctor.
What I tell my team to do is to drop using so many cloud saas apps, and build more themselves using LLMs.
I’m not planning on firing people, but I am planning on building more, using more tokens, and less app subscriptions.
One aspect of building that doesn’t erode is human values.
LLMs don’t create software with zero direction and although I do have 12 agents building constantly, I run out of attention to increase that to 100.
you dont need to vibe code shitty apps. you just need to learn how to use apps like codex, claude desktop.
I think this is the first time I saw someone describe so clearly my concerns and experience with LLMs.
I have little to add to it, except that I agree completely. Not sure what’s next
> I still have one pillar standing, though: code quality and software architecture - what's now being reduced to being called "taste".
Genuine question: what exactly is "quality"?
It's something I've been trying to understand for a very long time. It seems like it's entirely contextual, and it has both subjective and objective facets (the latter only for quantifiable things, and still entirely contextual).
He says that taste doesn't matter and it hasn't in the past. In an era of "extruded code product" (by analogy to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExtrudedBookProd... ) automatically generated by the truckload at negligible cost, the differentiator for software developers will necessarily be the ability to create a product that doesn't reek of extruded code product, i.e. the things like quality that he labels taste.
(Whether any one reading this, myself included, survives in the industry long enough to reach the other side of that transition is a different question.)
I think this experience is universal. The answer is the same as always has been - develop skills that are becoming most important. Right now that is (at least from what I can see): - Data analysis, data pipelines, models, etc. - Tacit business knowledge - architecture and design patterns (always has been, but now the scale os larger so this is even more important)
It's harsh but nobody cares if a model or a human made a system.
The "good" bits are that now automating anything and providing value from software is much easier. If I have an idea or a nitpick somewhere, I can just do it, up to a limit (which is quickly rising).
I have always been a generalist and generally interested in a very wide array of things, and this period has been the most exciting in my engineering career (13y now). Learning about anything is so frictionless, looking back at my first learning experience - picking up a fat C++ book and spending days/weeks debugging, while I can romanticize that, I would never go back.
I can also now write software solo or with an extremely small team at a huge scale in comparison, and that is super exciting.
A lot of skills that took sleepless nights to acquire, they are "gone", but I still don't regret anything or wouldn't go back. Their "usefulness" has degraded, true, but this has always been the case with engineering.
We are now able to spend much more time thinking about utility rather than low level implementation and imo that's great.
We have many challenges ahead of us, and there are seriously bad things, the biggest one I have experienced is the hours are increasing and mental load is vastly increasing as well. As capacity, speed and leverage increases, so do expectations and hours, and that is probably a social problem.
Sorry for the unstructured stream of thoughts, and this is just an opinion (quite an unpopular one I believe), I hope your distress decays away for a new excitement and new opportunities.
Thanks for the article .
>Of course, I'm still employable because someone has to review the code and steer the robot...
We will work for the robots, steering them to steer us.
The saying goes... first we shape our tools, then they shape us
We are now manufacturing intelligence (why it's artificial) and it shall be interesting to see how it shapes us individually and as a whole.
While marching on May Day, the woman next to me made the comment that Ai will force every human and humanity to reflect on what it means to be human, all of us at the same time over a short time period. What makes a human valuable beyond their work? Why do we go to other people when their expertise is at everyone's fingertip? What value are we giving, trading, or sharing in the time we have in this world?
Realistically, what should we have done instead? Not invent LLMs? What happens when a couple thousand people invent the next disruptive technology and even more of the population loses their jobs?
It seems like new tech is something most of us have to lie down and accept as the new reality each time it's invented, barring full-scale rioting. Much as with the Cold War.
I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely.
I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants.
People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.
funny i was able to do all my taxes this year with ai help and not needing accountant.
I am also feeling anxious. I lucked out by having natural inclination towards software development, career which can provide good upper middle class life to anyone. But I feel like writing is on the wall. If I don’t find a way to pivot to something else, I might experience class migration, but in the opposite direction this time.
The last sentence in the article is correct:
"Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession."
As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game.
In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People will no longer focus on utility alone, but instead on the enjoyment of the process of writing code itself.
The direction I'm given is to take humans out of the loop. As much as possible. Everything AI. Automate everything. If you are in the loop you are overhead.
The market still seems to be hot for roles that provide leverage like platform engineers and Staff+ engineers
"Except that nobody cares anymore." Noone (from mid-management) cared about it also before. You hit the deadline, get promoted and leave the technical debt to the next one. Even if you're the one to deal with it, you set up the next project, get the budget, prioritize the issues etc. Not much changed in this regard with LLMs
This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless"
'Maybe I should consider woodworking' - Fuck off.
I secretly wish LLMs take my job away because I'll get about two years of unprogrammed rest, which I absolutely will not take of my own accord. But it's unlikely to happen.
Maybe just maybe here in HN we are in an echo chamber that is convincing us that there is a theoretical limit to how far the LLMs can make progress. It’s not unthinkable that LLMs will make better overall architectural decisions or follow the good practices better or understand the problem in bigger picture (more access to company/product context already makes a huge difference)
Lots of jobs have been automated away and careers based on those jobs faded away in history. Maybe in near future there won’t be a ton of opportunities for software engineers in the traditional form. I’m also embracing for that future.
There were people called calculators that did manual calculations in the past. There were people hand weaving all the fabric. There were people painting cars in the factory. All those jobs are gone for the most part.
We are sitting here portending there is going to be demand for software engineers managing those engineer robots but let’s be real. The demand for software is not increasing at the rate software engineering is becoming efficient using those robots. Some (many) of us have to find new careers.
Code quality and architecture still matter, because they also make it easier for LLMs to reason about the system.
That said, Opus 4.8 and Codex 5.5 both can write code that is higher quality than your average engineer. They are not quite there yet in terms of code re-use, but I think that's a solvable problem.
"Except that nobody cares anymore."
:-(
The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees.
LLMs have made domain knowledge and reasoning "cheap"; it doesn't matter if the output is lower quality - look around you for countless examples of where cheap wins and "cheap" continues to improve.
Good luck out there; we will all need it.
This has been said millions of times but yet you felt the need to say this again. maybe our jobs are safe :)
Yes this has been my experience as well.
It's crazy the crazed anti-AI people yelling with foam with their mouth that it's useless, meanwhile Claude for me at work oneshots complex bugs in a massive project with a 95% success rate. And the customer happiness survey has never been as good as it's now btw