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There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day be
by VincentEvans 1y ago
There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup.
Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years.
But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no longer be constrained by sandboxes of Excel or Access - they will ship multi-cloud edge-deployed kubernetes micro-services wired with Kafka, and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.
- Jtsummers 1y agoSuperfund repos.
- throwup238 1y agoNow that's an open source funding model governments can get behind.
- binary132 1y agoA lot of big open source repos need to be given the superfund treatment
- notachatbot123 1y agoA whole bigger lot of closed source software needs to be given the superfund treatment!
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoWhat makes you so sure it will have a repo? I don’t recall the last time Claude suggested anything about version control :-)
- mcny 1y agoClaude will give what you asked for. My sensible chuckle moment was when I asked it to create a demo asp net web API and it did everything but add the authorize tag or any kind of authentication. I asked what was missing and until i mentioned it, it didn't mention authentication or authorization at all.
- LtWorf 1y ago> Claude will give what you asked for. And how many know they need to ask for version control?
- Traubenfuchs 1y ago"As per my last email that contained the code claude wrote in a .pdf file I would like you to ask to fix two different users being able to see each others data if they are logged in at the same time, thank you for your attention in this matter."
- dhorthy 1y agoWhen Claude starts deploying Kafka clusters I’m outro
- CuriouslyC 1y agoIt's already happening brother, https://github.com/containers/kubernetes-mcp-server https://github.com/containers/kubernetes-mcp-server.
- dhorthy 1y agostill don’t know why you need an MCP for this when the model is perfectly well trained to write files and run kubetctl on its own
- CuriouslyC 1y agoClaude is, some models aren't. In some cases the MCPs do get the models to use tools better as well due to the schema, but I doubt kubectl is one of them (using the git mcp in claude code... facepalm)
- dhorthy 1y agoYeah fair enough lol…usually I end up building model-optimized scripts instead of mcp which just flood context window with json and uuids (looking at you, linear) - much better to have Claude write 100 lines of ts to drop a markdown file with the issue and all comments and no noise
- nsonha 1y ago> on its own does it? Did you forget the prompts? MCP is just a protocol for tool/function calling which in turn is part of the prompt, quite an important part actually. Did you think AI works by prompts like "make magic happen" and it... just happens? Anyone who makes dumb arguments like this should not deserve a job in tech.
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- goosejuice 1y agoDevelopers do that too. Consultants have be doing rescue projects for quite a long time. I don't think anything has or will change on that front.
- pkdpic 1y agoAgreed, sometimes it seems like there are only two types of roles. Maintaining / updating hot mess legacy code bases for an established company or work 100 hours a week building a new hot mess code base for a startup. Obviously oversimplifying but just my very limited experience scoping out postings and talking to people about current jobs. Regardless this just made me shudder thinking about the weird little ocean of (now maybe dwindling) random underpaid contract jobs for a few hours a month maintaining ancient Wordpress sites... Surely that can't be our fate...
- inejge 1y ago> Developers do that too. Not at that speed. Scale remains to be seen, so far I'm aware only of hobby-project wreck anecdotes.
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoI for one can’t wait. It will be absolutely spectacular!
- jiggawatts 1y ago> There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers New? New!? This is my job now! I call it software archeology — digging through Windows Server 2012 R2 IIS configuration files with a “last modified date” about a decade ago serving money-handling web apps to the public.
- mjomaa 1y agoWebForms?
- jiggawatts 1y agoYes, and classic ASP, WCF, ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, etc… It’s “fun” in the sense of piecing together history from subtle clues such as file owners, files on desktops of other admins’ profiles, etc… I feel like this is what it must be like to open a pharaoh’s tomb. You get to step into someone else’s life from long ago, walk in their shoes for a bit, see the world through their eyes. “What horrors did you witness brother sysadmin that made you abandon this place with uneaten takeaway lunch still on your desk next to the desiccated powder that once was a half drunk Red Bull?”
- aitchnyu 1y agoDo we have a method to let AI analyze the data within the DBs and figure out how to port it to a well designed db? I'm a fan of the philosophy of write strong data structures and stupid algorithms around them, your data will outlive your application, etc. Simple example is a Mongodb field which stores same thing as int or string, relationships without foreign keys in Postgres etc. Then frustrating shit like somebody creating an entire table since he cant `ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN`
- danielbln 1y ago"Claude, connect to DB A via FOO and analyze the data, then figure out to to port it to well designed DB B, come back to me with a proposal and implementation plan"
- enos_feedler 1y agoIts alright because you can shove all of that into an LLM and have it fixed instantly
- worthless-trash 1y agoSee, you're using the definition of "Fixed" from the future, not the current definition of fixed.
- meander_water 1y agoI think we're already there [0]. [0] https://x.com/PovilasKorop/status/1959590015018652141 https://x.com/PovilasKorop/status/1959590015018652141 Im really curious about what other jobs will pop up. As long as there is an element of probability associated with AI, there will need to be manual supervision for certain tasks/jobs.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago> and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time. This will be the big counter to AI generated tools; at one point they become black boxes and the only thing people can do is to try and fix them or replace them altogether. Of course, in theory, AI tooling will only improve; today's vibe coded software that in some cases generate revenue can be fed into the models of the future and improved upon. In theory. Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes.
- worldsayshi 1y agoThe prevailing counter narrative around vibe coding seems to be that "code output isn't the bottle neck, understanding the problem is". But shouldn't that make vibe coding a good tool for the tool belt? Use it to understand the outermost layer of the problem, then throw out the code and write a proper solution.
- thyristan 1y ago> [create prototype], then throw out the code and write a proper solution. Problem is, that in everyones' experience, this almost never happens. The prototype is declared "good enough, just needs a few small adjustments", rewrite is declared too expensive, too time-consuming. And crap goes to production.
- josefx 1y agoThe description makes it sound like someone wanted to deploy a single static site and followed a how to article they found on hacker news.
- ssss11 1y agoFoxpro, the horror
- ddingus 1y agoThis whole discussion is blowing my mind! When I hit your comment: 1. I thought, "YES! Indeed!" 2. Then, "For Sale: Baby Shoes." 3. The similar feel caused me to do a rethink on all this. We are moving REALLY fast! Nice comment
- ddingus 1y agoSorry all. The short comment parent to mine tells a very suggestive story with high brevity. This is similar to Hemingway writing a story in a few words: "For Sale: Baby Shoes." The hook aspect of these appears similarly suggestive and brief and I thought that intriguing and thought provoking given the overall subject matter. And that just gave me some reference to the speed this whole tech branch has.
- broast 1y ago> it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time. These are my favorite types of code bases to work on. The source of truth is the code. You have to read it and debug it to figure it out, and reconcile the actual behaviors with the desired or expected behaviors through your own product oriented thinking
- mr_toad 1y agoA big part of the reason that people develop solutions in Excel is that they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. No business case, no scope, no plan, and most importantly no budget. Unless a business allows any old employee to spin up cloud services on a whim we’re not going to see sales people spinning up containers and pipelines, AI or not.
- boston_clone 1y agoWhat about a sales person interacting with an LLM that is already authz'd to spin up various cloud resources? I don't think that scenario is too far-fetched...
- VincentEvans 1y agoI imagine something along the lines of cloud platforms rolling out functionality that caters to vibe-coding crowd - one stop shop: you enter your prompts and it spins up your code along with the infra. I mean why wouldn’t they - seem like a goldmine.
- Breza 1y agoGiven how easy it is to spin up GCP resources with a text file, I'm surprised Gemini doesn't already offer this service. The prompt below gave me a 167-line file that uses Cloud Run, Cloud Built, Artifact Registry, Firestore, Maps, and IAM. >I'm creating an app for dog walkers to optimize their routes. It should take all client locations and then look for dog-friendly cafes for the walker to get lunch and then find the best route. I'm vibe coding this on GCP. Please generate a Terraform file to allocate the necessary resources.
- zurtri 1y agoSo very true. And then over time these Excel spreadsheets become a core system that runs stuff. I used to live in fear of one of these business analyst folks overwriting a cell or sorting by just the column and not doing the rows at the same time. Also VLOOKUP's are the devil.
- linsomniac 1y ago>it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time. IMHO, there's a strong case for the opposite. My vibe coding prompts are along the lines of "Please implement the plan described in `phase1-epic.md` using `specification.prd` as a guide." The specification and epics are version controlled and a part of the project. My vibe coded software has better design documentation than most software projects I've been involved in.
- VincentEvans 1y agoI assume you have some software engineering fundamentals training.
- linsomniac 1y agoTraining? Not a lick. I took AP Pascal back in High School...
- surajrmal 1y agoDoes anyone remember the websites that front page and dreamweaver used to generate from its wysiwyg editor? It was a nightmare to modify manually and convinced me to never rely on generated code.
- gr8niss 1y ago[dead]
- djeastm 1y agoI definitely remember that. Got paid $400 for my very first site in the early 00s. But we also didn't have an AI tool to do the modifying of that bad code. We just had our own limited-capacity-brain, mistake-making, relatively slow-typing selves to depend on.
- slipnslider 1y agoI still remember that Frontpage exploit in which a simple google search would return websites that still had the default Frontpage password and thus you could login and modify the webpage.
- mr_toad 1y agoI agree that the code that dreamweaver generated was truely awful. But compilers and interpreters also generate code, and these days they are very good at it. Technically the browser’s rendering engine is a code generator as well, so if you’re hand-coding HTML you’re still relying on code generation. Declarative languages and AI go hand in hand. SQL was intended to be a ‘natural’ language that the query engine (an old-school AI) would use to write code. Writing natural language prompts to produce code is not that different, but we’re using “stochastic” AI, and stochastic means random, which means mistakes and other non-ideal outputs.
- mnky9800n 1y agoI met a guy on the airplane the other day whose job is to vibe code for people who can't vibe code. He showed me his discord server (he paid for plane wifi), where he charges people 50$/month to be in the server and he helps them unfuck their vibe coded projects. He had around 1000 people in the server.
- daveidol 1y agoSo wait is he an actual software engineer doing this as a side hustle? Or like a vibe coder guru that basically only works with AI tools?
- mnky9800n 1y agoHe said he used to be a software dev. Then he started consulting on the side making websites, doing SEO, and he just started doing that fulltime. But then SEO died because of AI (according to him anyways). then he started vibe coding like a year or two ago and saw all these people posting in forums about how everything they made broke and they don't know what to do. So he started helping people for money and it turned into a thing. I watched him text people and say "set up a lovable account, put in your credit card info then send me the login". Then he would just write some prompts for them on lovable to build their websites for them. Then text them back on discord and be like "done". He said he had multiple tiers, like 50$/month got you in the discord and he would reply your questions and whatever. but for 500$/month he would do everything you want and just chat with you about what you wanted for your incredible facebook replacement app for whatever. But I mean most of the stuff seemed like it was just some small business trying to figure out a way to use the internet in 2025. All this gave me anxiety because I'm here as an academic scientist NOT making 50$/month*1000 signups to vibe code for people who can't vibe code when I definitely know how to vibe code at least. Haha. Maybe I should listen to all my startup friends and go work at a startup instead.
- BostonFern 1y agoI need to start hanging out in more lucrative forums, apparently.