I miss the old days (which were just a few years ago?).
I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.
I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.
Doing coding professionally already stripped nearly all the fun out of coding for me years before AI got good at coding, so when it comes to "how fun is it to be a software engineer", AI didn't have any negative impact for me. Being a professional software engineer was already extremely boring. Cycle after cycle, ticket after ticket, feature after feature, meeting after meeting... constant blur of meaningless shit. Not totally meaningless - it delivers actual value for customers. But meaningless for me.
If anything, AI has made it more fun simply because it means not having to think as much about the drudgery of details: syntax, API schemas, boilerplate code... And by "more fun" I mean "somewhat less unfun". Cause it's still not fun. But AI makes my burnout somewhat more tolerable.
I don't know, sometimes I feel like I've been misled, I come back to the code that was generated, I find so many bad choices, claude never subtracts, it keeps piling on new code. Some minor things get declared as unbreakable rules, regardless of context. It memorizes the tiniest exception as some big decision and all new code follows those new rules it made up. Good luck cleaning up all the nonsense to all who just vibe coded their apps. It has to be steered constantly, if you care about understanding the code that is. The LLM will happily use gibberish variable names, long functions that mix responsibilities, inconsistent code style and so on. Give it a prompt to review the code over and over again, ten times in a row, it will always find something, that one race condition that wasn't handled, or it will warn about something that is clearly not important, but it won't realize that it showed rendering code into the core logic component. It can fix it once it's pointed out, it's good for refactoring and doing sweeping changes across the codebase, but it's better to be on top of things, because it can lose its way behind your back.
I am an OSS maintainer and I can tell you the job is terrible. Not because of the thankless work (I am sponsored by a corp for the work) but because we're still allowing public PRs. Plenty of people that "want to help" just push walls of text and code and 2 days later ask why hasn't their contribution been accepted yet. And when will it be? Because they need it ASAP!
"Closing as too broad / not focused enough in language and scope / not adhering to our PR submission guidelines (see [link])"
(where the top guideline on [link] clearly states: "we do not accept submissions that are either outright AI-generated or conceptually similar in terms of style, verbosity, generality, scope-creep or signal-to-noise ratio")
I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.
It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.
It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.
People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".
Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.
As a maybe interesting contrast. I got into tech because I wanted to build things. Coding was just a necessary step. What I really liked was creating ideas for what we could build, thinking about UX, thinking about error conditions and what we do when two things disagree.
of course there'll be a FOSS community. with everything that's been happening I've yet to see anything even suggesting xkcd 2347 is being impacted here, except the thankless maintainer can bounce ideas off an agent now.
My favorite part about gushing about the new age of AI development is how oblivious the authors always seem to be about the next phase.
It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.
until 1) software is saturated or 2) llms or their creators will take accountability for any issues its code causes i think there will continuously be the next phase
Tbh i dont see software demand being saturated anytime soon (which is why im bullish SWEs, and we're seeing both demand and compensation increase as of late), we keep moving up abstractions and increasing ambition and scope for new projects.
If all the companies use {frontier model} then your competitive advantage is what you have that is not legible to the model
There are a bajillion apps on the app store that get little to no recognition. Most software startups fail to find a foothold and go under. An uncountable number of FOSS projects have been seen by at most a handful of people, and even fewer who have used/cloned the code.
> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.
Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.
>the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
Why do you assume this to be the case? Look at your own company culture--has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks? What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
>the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Only if you completely misunderstand how business and economics works. The price of code is falling because it's turning into a commodity. The amount of people needed to produce it is drastically decreasing.
We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
> has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks
doesn't feel like it, collaboration is more important than ever for high level direction even if nobody pair programs anymore. relationships feel more important than ever especially customer ones. theres no RL environment for competing in business
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
Yes, because there is a limit to human desire for food, as we tend to get full. is there a limit to humanity's appetite for software? I would posit probably not, because software is infinitely abstractable and can be applied to any industry and domain
the price of code is falling but the value of differentiated ideas and market alpha is rising. human attention is scarce - as the mini-ceo with your army of agents, how will you compete with the other mini-ceos with their army of agents that can produce software at a whim?
I've actually been noticing this with a bunch of staff+ engineers at my current workplace. Previously what could be done with a TL plus 2 or 3 juniors can be done by a single person. I'm seeing some really sophisticated internal tools being built to help internal users with issues that previously required oncall engineer time.
Enter key? Just talk to the LLM, no enter key needed ;-)
Now anyone who can talk can vibe code apps.
Personally I vibe code apps while driving. I still have to test them once no longer in motion, so im thinking maybe humans are still needed for testing but in a few years or more maybe not?
How so? For safety its the same as hands free phone conversations in the car which is perfectly legal. Also, it's much safer then looking/using phones (that's illegal) while driving, which millions unfortunately do now.
Also, talking and listening to AI for directions is safer where the Ai is like an intelligent person. An example the AI giving you contextual directions like that new mechanic you are looking for is next to your favorite McDonalds in XYZ city or town (provides context to something you're familiar with so you just drive to a familiar place).
>How so? For safety its the same as hands free phone conversations in the car which is perfectly legal.
The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
I don't think this is a responsible thing to be doing unless you've completely relinquished all control of how things are built/designed/implemented to the AI.
Just because you __can__ does not mean you __should__.
You think programming still requires a lot of brain power? Definitely not as much as anyone who can talk can create software, iPhone apps, etc, etc.
Recently on a long drive I was working on an AI agent network concept talking it through and after each push to it's repo I would discuss more and prompt it to make more updates. On Wednesday at a bar with 2 unemployed software dev friends they were testing out my dating app Ive been working on in the car/in general. They provided me feedback on the dating app and boom GPT made the updates in less then minute.
"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
>You think programming still requires a lot of brain power?
Maybe not for you.
>"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
You can embrace AI agents all you want, but don't risk other peoples lives by distracting yourself while driving.
>The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
Ok got it never have a handsfree phone conversation while driving if it involves a lot of brainpower. Which is super subjective and id say talk to chatGPT to create an idea of yours and see if your mind changes on this topic ;). It sounds like you have not talked to conversational AI to create software yet. cheers
Until either the enter key wears out and breaks, or we get pervasive sandboxes that act according to the users interests. It seems like Windows Vista UAC all over again for a new generation.
We'll keep doing it for as long as those making the blog posts keep making the same sort of blog posts we have seen on this cycle several times before. Slop begets slop, human or automaton made or a mix, and always has done.
I maintain a browser extension to nuke the endless stream of boring AI noise articles: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ Sometimes it misses articles with less clear titles, like this one, and you gotta nuke 'em manually.
My journey from hand-written code to agents is very similar. I think once a person exposed to agents goes through initial "I want to build anything I can think of" psychosis, it results in a much more productive workflow.
I've been spending less and less time glued to my screen, and more time thinking about concepts, as well as doing thing I like. The key for me was realizing that building with agents is very fun, but not every idea is worth building.
I am not too worried about the future of my career, as long as I stay in sync with the latest tools (agents). I think of it as elevator operators being misplaced by elevator controllers: the ones who refused to upskill into elevator technicians probably did not get a return offer. Not because nobody needed people to work with elevators, but because their skills were not economically valuable anymore.
every elevator needed an operator, how many elevators can a technician support? And what is the upskilling software developers can do? Not every software developer can be a good architect, PM or sales person (and even if they could be, there aren't going to be as many open positions anyways).
It won't be a student on $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work? One of them and a couple of AI licences could try to replace several people the way things are going.
At least until the investment capital starts to be called in and use of decent AI models becomes noticeable more expensive, assuming that happens long before open free models are good enough to replace them.
Of course that will lead to there being very few experienced people in a couple of decades, as most of the remaining ones age out, but I'll be long done by the time that becomes a big problem, I'm not on the right side of the mid-life divide!
not sure where this meme of 'ai will become very expensive any time now!' comes from
consumer subscriptions are subsidized but the companies make very healthy margins via api pricing, which is what enterprises use, and cost per intelligence is dropping rapidly
That can't go on forever, which is why the big AI companies are crying for regulation to slow things down - they need to make some of that money back before others come along and start eating what little moat they have.
That, and a lot of that investment money seems to be moving in a rather circular fashion, which usually means that when things change it will happen quickly as there is effectively one pot that will all dry up at the same time.
valuations and funding look at *growth*, not money out and money in
ai has produced some of the fastest growing companies of All Time and plotting the trend leads to very profitable businesses in the future (which is the whole point of investing)
i think it would be a more nuanced and interesting conversation to talk about 1) how growth will change and 2) how the rapidly falling cost of intelligence will affect the different players in the ecosystem
(not a bullpost for the labs, i think their situation is precarious)
open weight models from China are there now, produced using an entirely different economic model, so whatever happens to openai or anthropic doesn't have that big of an impact on "will I have an agent to code with".
> It won't be a student in $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work?
Yeah it won't be a student making $10 an hour replacing him, it will be an experienced dev making $10 an hour because hey at least that beats starving to death.
The next step after "juniors are doomed, but seniors still get work" is pretty obviously that senior salaries are going to start rapidly dropping.
> next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.
I mean numerous firms seem to already be doing this, and they're making HN's front page regularly for week-long downtimes, blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product.
My employer has absolutely no interest in cutting any engineering staff in favor of AI. But we're also not a VC-funded human misery mill, and we have a sustainable business model involving selling actual products, so these facts may be related to that.
> blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product
So far I've seen relatively little anger of that level, except perhaps aimed at MS for the state of Windows. And unfortunately for the humans most companies high on AI juice are more likely to follow the path of finding better ways to use AI (or switching to what they think is a better model) rather than re-engaging with the meat workers, is such a user revolt seems imminent.
My DayJob is riding high on AI AMT, though quality is not currently falling (in fact by some metrics there is an improvement) because people are properly reviewing everything that comes out of it. I'm still planning on not touching the stuff though, if it comes to a choice of “AI or be redundant”, I'll be redundant, but even the Luddite that I am can see there is a benefit if it is used well.
Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc. We can still hand craft code. There may always be a market for it too, like Rolls Royce.
However, I agree with OP, that the career in the main has changed. The cost of an engineer is probably going to fall precipitously once we hit saturation point. (I believe we're running on a backlog of software that was previously economically infeasible to make right now). IDK how long that will take (10 months? 10 years? 10 decades?)
But I do think LoC is going to fall in price to be like rice, a lot of the world just gives it away for free (to it's poor) because it's so plentiful. If AGI hits we may see many other goods follow.
i dont think we'll ever saturate the amount of software there is in the world unless we get some sort of scifi superintelligence scenario
Software allows us to build essentially infinite abstractions with infinite room to run. cheaper and better models released to the world means higher competition which drives up the cost for talent
however i think the value of 'hand crafted code' drops to zero unless we convince consumers to purchase software as a status symbol like rolls royces (seems unlikely, unless there is a concentrated marketing effort)
I feel it’s important to point out that the word “value” has different meanings to different people.
I think that the value of hand written code has gone up, and will continue to do so, as a direct consequence of anyone now being able to generate code with LLMs.
That’s how I feel, in any case. Win my heart with a euphoric 3am commit message, typos left in.
I think of it more like framework laptops, light phone etc which exist due to a fundamental decision to be a certain way and buyers value that fundamental feature.
We not only can, but we should. It will result in a much higher quality product, which works better, is easier to maintain, and has fewer bugs. Despite the hype, LLMs are not actually good at writing code.
I think it's heavily dependent on what type of dev role it is. There has always been a split between the startups and the corporate world.
In the case of working at startups, I'd agree that you don't (and never really needed to) hire extra devs.
Since this is HN, I know most hate corporate jobs, but that's where all the stability is and where AI is struggling to find footing. This rejection of AI puts a sorely needed spotlight on the cultural divide, and much of SV bet way too big on the wrong side of this misunderstanding.
I realized recently that I no longer get stuck. I don't sit and figure something out for a few hours, trying thing after thing. "Banging my head against the wall" isn't really part of my vocab anymore.
I learned a lot of what I know by banging my head against the wall.
Knowing these things might not really be needed going forward, but it was a good workout, and I'm grateful I got a chance to go through that even if it becomes largely unnecessary.
I want the UI to be snappy. I used to dictate using
observables and other optimization preferences - and
sometimes still do. But I can also merely add
constraints - the image should process within 15ms
presses <enter>. Oh shoot - I meant to write 150ms
but… oh… I guess lets simply see i the model can do
it? Wow. I realize… I need to re-evaluate what I
think of as possible and not.
this resonates with me. Two days ago I was fighting with the GitHub Actions CI pipeline for an open source iOS app I maintain. It was stalling out after an hour, not completing. Sometimes, if I was lucky, it would finish after 45-50 minutes. I told Claude Code "make the CI pass in under 10 minutes. Don't ask me any more questions; I am going to bed and want this to work when I come back."
Claude Code wished me a restful night of sleep (seriously), and when I came back in the morning it had diligently chewed through the problem and was consistently getting the results I'd asked for.
I am transfixed watching gpt-sol-6-1 program all day non-stop. I am building a succesor to my web2.0 groupware platform and now on a low budget you can get the code built without having financial backing. Strategy is now what you need to get usage. How to grab customers who are unhappy with big players and want a more bespoke system.
This feels a bit like someone with one of the first cars thinking about how much faster they can distribute feed for all the horses.
That is, you haven't projected this forward just a bit further and are still thinking in terms of the old world where software is at all valuable and where you can have customers to sell it to.
I still feel myself falling into that trap, but haven't figured out what world replaces this.
Where a lot of this gets stuck is that AI software dev isn't a closed loop. They're still completely dependent on complex human written codebases to actually do anything. They're adept users of libraries and platforms but, at least for now, not so adept builders of the same. The ability cutoff being roughly where public documentation ends.
I don't think this will be a hill forever, after all folks have managed to get new
novel mathematics out of these models, but for the medium term
it seems like the good (software) business to be in is selling shovels to the people digging for AI gold.
I guess the primary benefit of LLMs is that they give you more time to write navelgazy thinkpieces about LLMs. (And how long before the author starts reaching for the same tools to "assist" their writing?)
This person is not an engineer anymore, but it'll take a while for them to admit it to themselves.
I miss the old days (which were just a few years ago?).
I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.
I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.
Doing coding professionally already stripped nearly all the fun out of coding for me years before AI got good at coding, so when it comes to "how fun is it to be a software engineer", AI didn't have any negative impact for me. Being a professional software engineer was already extremely boring. Cycle after cycle, ticket after ticket, feature after feature, meeting after meeting... constant blur of meaningless shit. Not totally meaningless - it delivers actual value for customers. But meaningless for me.
If anything, AI has made it more fun simply because it means not having to think as much about the drudgery of details: syntax, API schemas, boilerplate code... And by "more fun" I mean "somewhat less unfun". Cause it's still not fun. But AI makes my burnout somewhat more tolerable.
I don't know, sometimes I feel like I've been misled, I come back to the code that was generated, I find so many bad choices, claude never subtracts, it keeps piling on new code. Some minor things get declared as unbreakable rules, regardless of context. It memorizes the tiniest exception as some big decision and all new code follows those new rules it made up. Good luck cleaning up all the nonsense to all who just vibe coded their apps. It has to be steered constantly, if you care about understanding the code that is. The LLM will happily use gibberish variable names, long functions that mix responsibilities, inconsistent code style and so on. Give it a prompt to review the code over and over again, ten times in a row, it will always find something, that one race condition that wasn't handled, or it will warn about something that is clearly not important, but it won't realize that it showed rendering code into the core logic component. It can fix it once it's pointed out, it's good for refactoring and doing sweeping changes across the codebase, but it's better to be on top of things, because it can lose its way behind your back.
I am an OSS maintainer and I can tell you the job is terrible. Not because of the thankless work (I am sponsored by a corp for the work) but because we're still allowing public PRs. Plenty of people that "want to help" just push walls of text and code and 2 days later ask why hasn't their contribution been accepted yet. And when will it be? Because they need it ASAP!
"Closing as too broad / not focused enough in language and scope / not adhering to our PR submission guidelines (see [link])"
(where the top guideline on [link] clearly states: "we do not accept submissions that are either outright AI-generated or conceptually similar in terms of style, verbosity, generality, scope-creep or signal-to-noise ratio")
If you are not paid to work on it you can just ignore those.
For me that turning point was 10-15 years ago.
I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.
It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.
It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.
People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".
Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.
As a maybe interesting contrast. I got into tech because I wanted to build things. Coding was just a necessary step. What I really liked was creating ideas for what we could build, thinking about UX, thinking about error conditions and what we do when two things disagree.
of course there'll be a FOSS community. with everything that's been happening I've yet to see anything even suggesting xkcd 2347 is being impacted here, except the thankless maintainer can bounce ideas off an agent now.
My favorite part about gushing about the new age of AI development is how oblivious the authors always seem to be about the next phase.
It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.
I envy their optimism.
until 1) software is saturated or 2) llms or their creators will take accountability for any issues its code causes i think there will continuously be the next phase
Tbh i dont see software demand being saturated anytime soon (which is why im bullish SWEs, and we're seeing both demand and compensation increase as of late), we keep moving up abstractions and increasing ambition and scope for new projects.
If all the companies use {frontier model} then your competitive advantage is what you have that is not legible to the model
>until 1) software is saturated
Software has been saturated for a long time.
There are a bajillion apps on the app store that get little to no recognition. Most software startups fail to find a foothold and go under. An uncountable number of FOSS projects have been seen by at most a handful of people, and even fewer who have used/cloned the code.
Each existing software solution having 10,000 clones is not the same as software being saturated. There are still unsolved problems.
that doesn't imply software as a whole is saturated.
does the world use more or less software YoY? (LLMs counts as software btw.)
the differentiating factors have changed but the underlying demand has only increased.
Exactly. Taken from this article:
> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.
Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.
feels like the opposite to me. the 'factory worker' style code monkey job is vaporized
the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
right now the meme is we all became managers of agents. the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
>the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
Why do you assume this to be the case? Look at your own company culture--has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks? What relationship skills are you building while talking to your chatbot all day?
>the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
Only if you completely misunderstand how business and economics works. The price of code is falling because it's turning into a commodity. The amount of people needed to produce it is drastically decreasing.
We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
> has it not become increasingly siloed as people look to their own agents for most questions, tasks
doesn't feel like it, collaboration is more important than ever for high level direction even if nobody pair programs anymore. relationships feel more important than ever especially customer ones. theres no RL environment for competing in business
> We consume more food than ever, but the % of people who work to produce food is far smaller than it was 150 years ago.
Yes, because there is a limit to human desire for food, as we tend to get full. is there a limit to humanity's appetite for software? I would posit probably not, because software is infinitely abstractable and can be applied to any industry and domain
the price of code is falling but the value of differentiated ideas and market alpha is rising. human attention is scarce - as the mini-ceo with your army of agents, how will you compete with the other mini-ceos with their army of agents that can produce software at a whim?
I've actually been noticing this with a bunch of staff+ engineers at my current workplace. Previously what could be done with a TL plus 2 or 3 juniors can be done by a single person. I'm seeing some really sophisticated internal tools being built to help internal users with issues that previously required oncall engineer time.
Enter key? Just talk to the LLM, no enter key needed ;-)
Now anyone who can talk can vibe code apps.
Personally I vibe code apps while driving. I still have to test them once no longer in motion, so im thinking maybe humans are still needed for testing but in a few years or more maybe not?
>Personally I vibe code apps while driving
What a nightmare of a sentence.
How so? For safety its the same as hands free phone conversations in the car which is perfectly legal. Also, it's much safer then looking/using phones (that's illegal) while driving, which millions unfortunately do now.
Also, talking and listening to AI for directions is safer where the Ai is like an intelligent person. An example the AI giving you contextual directions like that new mechanic you are looking for is next to your favorite McDonalds in XYZ city or town (provides context to something you're familiar with so you just drive to a familiar place).
>How so? For safety its the same as hands free phone conversations in the car which is perfectly legal.
The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
I don't think this is a responsible thing to be doing unless you've completely relinquished all control of how things are built/designed/implemented to the AI.
Just because you __can__ does not mean you __should__.
You think programming still requires a lot of brain power? Definitely not as much as anyone who can talk can create software, iPhone apps, etc, etc.
Recently on a long drive I was working on an AI agent network concept talking it through and after each push to it's repo I would discuss more and prompt it to make more updates. On Wednesday at a bar with 2 unemployed software dev friends they were testing out my dating app Ive been working on in the car/in general. They provided me feedback on the dating app and boom GPT made the updates in less then minute.
"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
>You think programming still requires a lot of brain power?
Maybe not for you.
>"Just because you can___doesn't mean you should," I agree with you, as I wish this didnt exist, but it does and times always change. I'm personally embracing this new change!
You can embrace AI agents all you want, but don't risk other peoples lives by distracting yourself while driving.
>The amount of brain power most people use while having a passing conversation is << than the brain power people use while trying to solve a problem, or reason about engineering abstractions.
Ok got it never have a handsfree phone conversation while driving if it involves a lot of brainpower. Which is super subjective and id say talk to chatGPT to create an idea of yours and see if your mind changes on this topic ;). It sounds like you have not talked to conversational AI to create software yet. cheers
> It sounds like you have not talked to conversational AI to create software yet. cheers
No, I prefer to talk to people.
How many times are we going to cycle through these same arguments instead of actually discussing the content of the blog posts?
Circling back to these replies: Ah yes! The best slacktivism is having the bots do it for you!
As long as the daily propaganda articles to refresh the DRAM of people daily appear here.
Until either the enter key wears out and breaks, or we get pervasive sandboxes that act according to the users interests. It seems like Windows Vista UAC all over again for a new generation.
We'll keep doing it for as long as those making the blog posts keep making the same sort of blog posts we have seen on this cycle several times before. Slop begets slop, human or automaton made or a mix, and always has done.
I maintain a browser extension to nuke the endless stream of boring AI noise articles: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ Sometimes it misses articles with less clear titles, like this one, and you gotta nuke 'em manually.
My journey from hand-written code to agents is very similar. I think once a person exposed to agents goes through initial "I want to build anything I can think of" psychosis, it results in a much more productive workflow.
I've been spending less and less time glued to my screen, and more time thinking about concepts, as well as doing thing I like. The key for me was realizing that building with agents is very fun, but not every idea is worth building.
I am not too worried about the future of my career, as long as I stay in sync with the latest tools (agents). I think of it as elevator operators being misplaced by elevator controllers: the ones who refused to upskill into elevator technicians probably did not get a return offer. Not because nobody needed people to work with elevators, but because their skills were not economically valuable anymore.
every elevator needed an operator, how many elevators can a technician support? And what is the upskilling software developers can do? Not every software developer can be a good architect, PM or sales person (and even if they could be, there aren't going to be as many open positions anyways).
next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.
I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago. this guy is driving straight off a cliff and doesn’t even seem to realize.
curious, is this the default culture at tech companies now?
It won't be a student on $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work? One of them and a couple of AI licences could try to replace several people the way things are going.
At least until the investment capital starts to be called in and use of decent AI models becomes noticeable more expensive, assuming that happens long before open free models are good enough to replace them.
Of course that will lead to there being very few experienced people in a couple of decades, as most of the remaining ones age out, but I'll be long done by the time that becomes a big problem, I'm not on the right side of the mid-life divide!
not sure where this meme of 'ai will become very expensive any time now!' comes from
consumer subscriptions are subsidized but the companies make very healthy margins via api pricing, which is what enterprises use, and cost per intelligence is dropping rapidly
> not sure where this meme of 'ai will become very expensive any time now!' comes from
Money out > money in. https://isaiprofitable.com/
That can't go on forever, which is why the big AI companies are crying for regulation to slow things down - they need to make some of that money back before others come along and start eating what little moat they have.
That, and a lot of that investment money seems to be moving in a rather circular fashion, which usually means that when things change it will happen quickly as there is effectively one pot that will all dry up at the same time.
valuations and funding look at *growth*, not money out and money in
ai has produced some of the fastest growing companies of All Time and plotting the trend leads to very profitable businesses in the future (which is the whole point of investing)
i think it would be a more nuanced and interesting conversation to talk about 1) how growth will change and 2) how the rapidly falling cost of intelligence will affect the different players in the ecosystem
(not a bullpost for the labs, i think their situation is precarious)
They look at growth discounted against interest rates. Both seem to be moving unfavorably.
open weight models from China are there now, produced using an entirely different economic model, so whatever happens to openai or anthropic doesn't have that big of an impact on "will I have an agent to code with".
> It won't be a student in $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work?
Yeah it won't be a student making $10 an hour replacing him, it will be an experienced dev making $10 an hour because hey at least that beats starving to death.
The next step after "juniors are doomed, but seniors still get work" is pretty obviously that senior salaries are going to start rapidly dropping.
> I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago.
What do you do now? I'm also looking to get out of this industry, but it's tough to voluntarily give up the pay.
Feels like AI is just exposing what was always glorified software-configuration
Might as well stick around until the option is no longer there, as long as they enjoy it.
Did you retire or do something else?
> next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.
I mean numerous firms seem to already be doing this, and they're making HN's front page regularly for week-long downtimes, blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product.
My employer has absolutely no interest in cutting any engineering staff in favor of AI. But we're also not a VC-funded human misery mill, and we have a sustainable business model involving selling actual products, so these facts may be related to that.
> blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product
So far I've seen relatively little anger of that level, except perhaps aimed at MS for the state of Windows. And unfortunately for the humans most companies high on AI juice are more likely to follow the path of finding better ways to use AI (or switching to what they think is a better model) rather than re-engaging with the meat workers, is such a user revolt seems imminent.
My DayJob is riding high on AI AMT, though quality is not currently falling (in fact by some metrics there is an improvement) because people are properly reviewing everything that comes out of it. I'm still planning on not touching the stuff though, if it comes to a choice of “AI or be redundant”, I'll be redundant, but even the Luddite that I am can see there is a benefit if it is used well.
Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc. We can still hand craft code. There may always be a market for it too, like Rolls Royce.
However, I agree with OP, that the career in the main has changed. The cost of an engineer is probably going to fall precipitously once we hit saturation point. (I believe we're running on a backlog of software that was previously economically infeasible to make right now). IDK how long that will take (10 months? 10 years? 10 decades?)
But I do think LoC is going to fall in price to be like rice, a lot of the world just gives it away for free (to it's poor) because it's so plentiful. If AGI hits we may see many other goods follow.
i dont think we'll ever saturate the amount of software there is in the world unless we get some sort of scifi superintelligence scenario
Software allows us to build essentially infinite abstractions with infinite room to run. cheaper and better models released to the world means higher competition which drives up the cost for talent
however i think the value of 'hand crafted code' drops to zero unless we convince consumers to purchase software as a status symbol like rolls royces (seems unlikely, unless there is a concentrated marketing effort)
I feel it’s important to point out that the word “value” has different meanings to different people.
I think that the value of hand written code has gone up, and will continue to do so, as a direct consequence of anyone now being able to generate code with LLMs.
That’s how I feel, in any case. Win my heart with a euphoric 3am commit message, typos left in.
hand crafted code:
I think of it more like framework laptops, light phone etc which exist due to a fundamental decision to be a certain way and buyers value that fundamental feature.
> We can still hand craft code.
We not only can, but we should. It will result in a much higher quality product, which works better, is easier to maintain, and has fewer bugs. Despite the hype, LLMs are not actually good at writing code.
> Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc.
One of these things is not like the others. Your silicon valley bubble privilege is showing.
Your privilege is showing by only saying one of those stand out.
At least with keyboards you can say they actually replaced typewriters but the other two are just paying someone else to do the same labor.
the contrast intended was the level of automation removing the old way of doing things.
I think it's heavily dependent on what type of dev role it is. There has always been a split between the startups and the corporate world.
In the case of working at startups, I'd agree that you don't (and never really needed to) hire extra devs.
Since this is HN, I know most hate corporate jobs, but that's where all the stability is and where AI is struggling to find footing. This rejection of AI puts a sorely needed spotlight on the cultural divide, and much of SV bet way too big on the wrong side of this misunderstanding.
> where AI is struggling to find footing
As in struggling to find acceptance by the rule makers?
or As in struggling to be capable of delivering value?
(just asking to try and understand your reply)
It's a "yes" for both cases.
I realized recently that I no longer get stuck. I don't sit and figure something out for a few hours, trying thing after thing. "Banging my head against the wall" isn't really part of my vocab anymore.
I learned a lot of what I know by banging my head against the wall.
Knowing these things might not really be needed going forward, but it was a good workout, and I'm grateful I got a chance to go through that even if it becomes largely unnecessary.
Claude Code wished me a restful night of sleep (seriously), and when I came back in the morning it had diligently chewed through the problem and was consistently getting the results I'd asked for.
Did you look closely at what it had done? It's possible to save a lot of time on CI by omitting tests, for example...
https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-ios/pull/1531/chang...
We're not supposed to read code anymore!
I am transfixed watching gpt-sol-6-1 program all day non-stop. I am building a succesor to my web2.0 groupware platform and now on a low budget you can get the code built without having financial backing. Strategy is now what you need to get usage. How to grab customers who are unhappy with big players and want a more bespoke system.
This feels a bit like someone with one of the first cars thinking about how much faster they can distribute feed for all the horses.
That is, you haven't projected this forward just a bit further and are still thinking in terms of the old world where software is at all valuable and where you can have customers to sell it to.
I still feel myself falling into that trap, but haven't figured out what world replaces this.
The world that replaces this has AI actually doing the work of gscott’s web2.0 groupware platform.
Where a lot of this gets stuck is that AI software dev isn't a closed loop. They're still completely dependent on complex human written codebases to actually do anything. They're adept users of libraries and platforms but, at least for now, not so adept builders of the same. The ability cutoff being roughly where public documentation ends.
I don't think this will be a hill forever, after all folks have managed to get new novel mathematics out of these models, but for the medium term it seems like the good (software) business to be in is selling shovels to the people digging for AI gold.
I guess the primary benefit of LLMs is that they give you more time to write navelgazy thinkpieces about LLMs. (And how long before the author starts reaching for the same tools to "assist" their writing?)
This person is not an engineer anymore, but it'll take a while for them to admit it to themselves.
Can't relate at all. AI is only in your life if you let it.
I work 90% without AI, and don't plan to integrate it any further. It's an overhyped and overrated tech that will die out soon.
Another article of unbridled enthusiasm after finding a new religion.