5 ms·

The economics of the force multiplier is too high to ignore, and I’m guessing an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently and effectively will be out of

The economics of the force multiplier is too high to ignore, and I’m guessing an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently and effectively will be out of the job market in 5 or so years.

data-ottawa 11mo ago
I’m sceptical The models seem to still (claude opus 4.5) not get things right, and miss edge cases, and work code in a way that’s not very structured. I use them daily, but I often have to rewrite a lot to reshape the codebase to a point where it makes sense to use the model again. I’m sure they’ll continue to get better, but out of a job better in 5 years? I’m not betting on it.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
  Ya, you have to shape your code base, not just that but get your AI to document your code base and come with some sort of pipeline to have different AI check things. It’s fine to be skeptical, and I definitely hope I’m wrong, but it really is looking bad for SWEs who don’t start adopting at this point. It’s a bad bet in my opinion, at least have your F-u money built up in 5 if you aren’t going full in on it.
  - kranke155 11mo ago
    Why would you go full on ? There is no learning curve it seems like. What is there to learn about using AI to code?
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
      I hope you are joking and/or being sarcastic with this comment…
      - swatcoder 11mo ago
        I don't think they really are. There is, effectively, a "learning curve" required to make them useful right now, and a lot of churn on technique, because the tools remain profoundly immature and their results are delicate and inconsistent. To get anything out of them and trust what you get, you need to figure out how to hold them right for your task. But presuming that there's something real here, and there does seem to be something, eventually all that will smooth out and late adopters who decide want to use the tools will be able onboard themselves plenty fast. The whole vision of them is to make the work easier, more accessible, and more productive, after all. Having a big learning curve doesn't align with that vision. Unless they happen to make you more significantly productive today on the tasks you want to pursue, which only seems to be true for select people, there's no particular reason to be an early adopter.
        bdangubic 11mo ago
        fantastic comment! I disagree on two fronts: - we are far removed from “early adopter” stages at this point - “eventually all that will smooth out…” is assuming that this is eventually going to be some magic that just works - if this actually happens both early and late adopters will be unemployed. it is not magic, it is unlikely to ever be magic. but from my personal perspective and many others I read - if you spend time (I am now just over 1,200 hours spent, I bill it so I track it :) ) it will pay dividends (and also will feel like magic ocassionally)
        kranke155 11mo ago
        What is this fantasy about people being unemployed? The layoffs we’ve seen don’t seem to be discriminating against or in favor of AI - they appear to be moves to shift capital from human workers to capex for new datacenters. It doesn’t appear like anything of this sort is happening and the idea that good employer with a solid technical team would start firing people for not “knowing AI” instead of giving them a 2 week intro course seems unrealistic to me. The real nuts and bolts are still software engineering. Or is that going to change too?
    - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
      The learning curve is actually huge. If you just vibe code with AI, the results are going to suck. You basically have to reify all of your software engineering artifacts and get AI to iterate on them and your code as if it were am actual software engineering (who forgot everything whenever you rebooted it, so that’s why you have to make sure it can re-read artifacts to get its context back up to speed again). So a lot more planning, design, and test documentation than you would do in a normal project. The nice thing is that AI will maintain all of it as long as you set up the right structure. We are also in the early days still, I guess everyone has their own way of doing this ATM.
      - kranke155 11mo ago
        That’s interesting but how much of this if written down, documented and made into video tutorials could be learnt by just about any good engineer in 1-2 weeks?
        seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
        I don’t see much yet, maybe everyone is just winging it until someone influential gives it a name. The vibe coding crowd have set us back a lot, and really so did the whole leetcode interview fad that are just throwing off. It’s kind of obvious though: just tell the AI to do what a normal junior SWE does (like write tests), but write a lot more documentation because they forget things all the time (a junior engineer who makes more mistakes, so they need to test more, and remembers nothing).
        stuaxo 11mo ago
        The trick is being a good engineer in the first place.
      - Madmallard 11mo ago
        This is all bullshit btw. Speaking as someone with a ton of experience here. None of the things they do can go without immense efforts in validation and verification by a human who knows what they're doing. All of the extra engineering effort could have been spent just making your own infrastructure and procedures far more resilient and valuable to far more people in your team and yourself going forward. You will burn more and more and more hours overtime because of relying on LLMs for ANYTHING non-trivial. It becomes a technical debt factory. That's the reality. Please stop listening to these grifters. Listen to someone who actually knows what they're talking about, like Carl Brown.
    - stuaxo 11mo ago
      The concepts in the LLMs latent space are close to each other and you find them by asking in the right way, so if you ask like an expert you find better stuff. For it to work best you should be an expert in the subject matter, or something equivalent. You need to know enough about what your making not just to specify it, but to see where the LLM is deviating (perhaps because you needed to ask more specifically). Garbage in garbage out is as important as ever.
risyachka 11mo ago
There is nothing to learn, the entry barrier is zero. Any SWE can just start using it when they really need to.
- masfuerte 11mo ago
  Some of us will need time to learn to give less of a shit about quality.
  - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
    Or you could learn how to do it the right way with quality intact. But it’s definitely your choice.
kibwen 11mo ago
Back in the early 2000s the sentiment was that IDEs were a force multiplier that was too high to ignore, and that anyone not using something akin to Visual Studio or Eclipse would be out of a job in 5 or so years. Meanwhile, 20 years later, the best programmers you know are still using Vim and Emacs.
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  But the vast majority are still using an IDE - and I say this as someone who has adamantly used Vim with plugins for decades. Something similar will happen with agentic workflows - those who aren't already productive with the status quo will have to eventually adopt productivity enhancing tooling. That said, it isn't too surprising if the rate of AI adoption starts slowing down around now - agentic tooling has been around for a couple years now, so it makes sense that some amount of vendor/tool rationalization is kicking in.
  - lmf4lol 11mo ago
    I think no one can predict what will happen. We need to wait until we can empirically observe who will be more productive on certain tasks. Thats why I started with AI coding. I wanted to hedge against the possibility that this takes off and I am useless. But it made me sad as hell and so I just said: Screw it. If this is the future, I will NOT participate.
    - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
      That’s fine, but you don’t want to be blind sided by changes in the industry. If it’s not for you, have a plan B career lined up so you can still put food on the table. Also, if you are good at old fashioned SE and AI, you’ll be OK either way.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    - Anamon 11mo ago
scuff3d 11mo ago
They'll be more employable, not less. Since they're the only ones who will be able to fix the huge mess left behind by the people relying on them.
- b0Ring 11mo ago
  [dead]
- seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
  Never in the history of tech did luddites have an advantage in employment.
  - watwut 11mo ago
    I mean, yeah they did, in this sense literally all the time. The people who generated crap copy pasting from stack overflow or generated scaffold with tools without understanding that were literally the kind of programmers you tried to weed out. This is equivalent of that.
    - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
      Crappy engineers are going to be crappy engineers, so what? > This is equivalent of that. In the hands of a crappy engineer from above, you are correct.
fpauser 11mo ago
Don't think so.
kranke155 11mo ago
It’s the opposite. The more you know to do without them the more employable you are. AI has no learning curve, not at the current level of complexity anyway. So anyone can pick it up in 5 years and if you’ve used it less your brain is better.
- JamesSwift 11mo ago
  With all due respect, claiming “AI has no learning curve” can be an effective litmus test to see who has actually dig into agentic AI enough to give it a real evaluation. Once you start to peel back the layers of how to get good output you understand just how much skill is involved. Its very similar to being a “good googler”. Yeah on its face it seems like it shouldn’t be a thing but absolutely there are levels to it, and its a skill that must be learned.
rs186 11mo ago
> ... an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently ... an SWE does not necessarily need to "learn" Claude Code any more than someone who does not know programming at all to be able to use the tool effectively. What actually matters is that they know how things should be done without coding assistants, they understand what the tools may be doing, and then give directions/correct mistakes/review code. In fact, I'd argue tools should be simple and intuitive for any engineer to quickly pick up. If an engineer who has solid background in programming but with no prior experience with the tools cannot be productive with such a tool after an hour, it is the tool that failed us. You don't see people talk about "prompt engineering" as much these days, because that simply isn't so important any more. Any good tool should understand your request like another human does.
- JamesSwift 11mo ago
  People dont talk about prompt engineering because it has become “context engineering“. Agentic AI is the real deal future
beefnugs 11mo ago
Good. The smartest and best should be cutting out middlemen and selling something of their own instead of keep shoveling all the money up the company pyramids. I think the pyramids will become easier and easier to spot their trash and avoid

The economics of the force multiplier is too high to ignore, and I’m guessing an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently and effectively will be out of the job market in 5 or so years.

data-ottawa 11mo ago

I’m sceptical The models seem to still (claude opus 4.5) not get things right, and miss edge cases, and work code in a way that’s not very structured. I use them daily, but I often have to rewrite a lot to reshape the codebase to a point where it makes sense to use the model again. I’m sure they’ll continue to get better, but out of a job better in 5 years? I’m not betting on it.

seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
Ya, you have to shape your code base, not just that but get your AI to document your code base and come with some sort of pipeline to have different AI check things. It’s fine to be skeptical, and I definitely hope I’m wrong, but it really is looking bad for SWEs who don’t start adopting at this point. It’s a bad bet in my opinion, at least have your F-u money built up in 5 if you aren’t going full in on it.
- kranke155 11mo ago
  Why would you go full on ? There is no learning curve it seems like. What is there to learn about using AI to code?
  - bdangubic 11mo ago
    I hope you are joking and/or being sarcastic with this comment…
    - swatcoder 11mo ago
      I don't think they really are. There is, effectively, a "learning curve" required to make them useful right now, and a lot of churn on technique, because the tools remain profoundly immature and their results are delicate and inconsistent. To get anything out of them and trust what you get, you need to figure out how to hold them right for your task. But presuming that there's something real here, and there does seem to be something, eventually all that will smooth out and late adopters who decide want to use the tools will be able onboard themselves plenty fast. The whole vision of them is to make the work easier, more accessible, and more productive, after all. Having a big learning curve doesn't align with that vision. Unless they happen to make you more significantly productive today on the tasks you want to pursue, which only seems to be true for select people, there's no particular reason to be an early adopter.
      - bdangubic 11mo ago
        fantastic comment! I disagree on two fronts: - we are far removed from “early adopter” stages at this point - “eventually all that will smooth out…” is assuming that this is eventually going to be some magic that just works - if this actually happens both early and late adopters will be unemployed. it is not magic, it is unlikely to ever be magic. but from my personal perspective and many others I read - if you spend time (I am now just over 1,200 hours spent, I bill it so I track it :) ) it will pay dividends (and also will feel like magic ocassionally)
        kranke155 11mo ago
        What is this fantasy about people being unemployed? The layoffs we’ve seen don’t seem to be discriminating against or in favor of AI - they appear to be moves to shift capital from human workers to capex for new datacenters. It doesn’t appear like anything of this sort is happening and the idea that good employer with a solid technical team would start firing people for not “knowing AI” instead of giving them a 2 week intro course seems unrealistic to me. The real nuts and bolts are still software engineering. Or is that going to change too?
  - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
    The learning curve is actually huge. If you just vibe code with AI, the results are going to suck. You basically have to reify all of your software engineering artifacts and get AI to iterate on them and your code as if it were am actual software engineering (who forgot everything whenever you rebooted it, so that’s why you have to make sure it can re-read artifacts to get its context back up to speed again). So a lot more planning, design, and test documentation than you would do in a normal project. The nice thing is that AI will maintain all of it as long as you set up the right structure. We are also in the early days still, I guess everyone has their own way of doing this ATM.
    - kranke155 11mo ago
      That’s interesting but how much of this if written down, documented and made into video tutorials could be learnt by just about any good engineer in 1-2 weeks?
      - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
        I don’t see much yet, maybe everyone is just winging it until someone influential gives it a name. The vibe coding crowd have set us back a lot, and really so did the whole leetcode interview fad that are just throwing off. It’s kind of obvious though: just tell the AI to do what a normal junior SWE does (like write tests), but write a lot more documentation because they forget things all the time (a junior engineer who makes more mistakes, so they need to test more, and remembers nothing).
      - stuaxo 11mo ago
        The trick is being a good engineer in the first place.
    - Madmallard 11mo ago
      This is all bullshit btw. Speaking as someone with a ton of experience here. None of the things they do can go without immense efforts in validation and verification by a human who knows what they're doing. All of the extra engineering effort could have been spent just making your own infrastructure and procedures far more resilient and valuable to far more people in your team and yourself going forward. You will burn more and more and more hours overtime because of relying on LLMs for ANYTHING non-trivial. It becomes a technical debt factory. That's the reality. Please stop listening to these grifters. Listen to someone who actually knows what they're talking about, like Carl Brown.
  - stuaxo 11mo ago
    The concepts in the LLMs latent space are close to each other and you find them by asking in the right way, so if you ask like an expert you find better stuff. For it to work best you should be an expert in the subject matter, or something equivalent. You need to know enough about what your making not just to specify it, but to see where the LLM is deviating (perhaps because you needed to ask more specifically). Garbage in garbage out is as important as ever.

risyachka 11mo ago

There is nothing to learn, the entry barrier is zero. Any SWE can just start using it when they really need to.

masfuerte 11mo ago
Some of us will need time to learn to give less of a shit about quality.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
  Or you could learn how to do it the right way with quality intact. But it’s definitely your choice.

kibwen 11mo ago

Back in the early 2000s the sentiment was that IDEs were a force multiplier that was too high to ignore, and that anyone not using something akin to Visual Studio or Eclipse would be out of a job in 5 or so years. Meanwhile, 20 years later, the best programmers you know are still using Vim and Emacs.

alephnerd 11mo ago
But the vast majority are still using an IDE - and I say this as someone who has adamantly used Vim with plugins for decades. Something similar will happen with agentic workflows - those who aren't already productive with the status quo will have to eventually adopt productivity enhancing tooling. That said, it isn't too surprising if the rate of AI adoption starts slowing down around now - agentic tooling has been around for a couple years now, so it makes sense that some amount of vendor/tool rationalization is kicking in.
- lmf4lol 11mo ago
  I think no one can predict what will happen. We need to wait until we can empirically observe who will be more productive on certain tasks. Thats why I started with AI coding. I wanted to hedge against the possibility that this takes off and I am useless. But it made me sad as hell and so I just said: Screw it. If this is the future, I will NOT participate.
  - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
    That’s fine, but you don’t want to be blind sided by changes in the industry. If it’s not for you, have a plan B career lined up so you can still put food on the table. Also, if you are good at old fashioned SE and AI, you’ll be OK either way.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Anamon 11mo ago

scuff3d 11mo ago

They'll be more employable, not less. Since they're the only ones who will be able to fix the huge mess left behind by the people relying on them.

b0Ring 11mo ago
[dead]
seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
Never in the history of tech did luddites have an advantage in employment.
- watwut 11mo ago
  I mean, yeah they did, in this sense literally all the time. The people who generated crap copy pasting from stack overflow or generated scaffold with tools without understanding that were literally the kind of programmers you tried to weed out. This is equivalent of that.
  - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
    Crappy engineers are going to be crappy engineers, so what? > This is equivalent of that. In the hands of a crappy engineer from above, you are correct.

fpauser 11mo ago

Don't think so.

kranke155 11mo ago

It’s the opposite. The more you know to do without them the more employable you are. AI has no learning curve, not at the current level of complexity anyway. So anyone can pick it up in 5 years and if you’ve used it less your brain is better.

JamesSwift 11mo ago
With all due respect, claiming “AI has no learning curve” can be an effective litmus test to see who has actually dig into agentic AI enough to give it a real evaluation. Once you start to peel back the layers of how to get good output you understand just how much skill is involved. Its very similar to being a “good googler”. Yeah on its face it seems like it shouldn’t be a thing but absolutely there are levels to it, and its a skill that must be learned.

rs186 11mo ago

> ... an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently ... an SWE does not necessarily need to "learn" Claude Code any more than someone who does not know programming at all to be able to use the tool effectively. What actually matters is that they know how things should be done without coding assistants, they understand what the tools may be doing, and then give directions/correct mistakes/review code. In fact, I'd argue tools should be simple and intuitive for any engineer to quickly pick up. If an engineer who has solid background in programming but with no prior experience with the tools cannot be productive with such a tool after an hour, it is the tool that failed us. You don't see people talk about "prompt engineering" as much these days, because that simply isn't so important any more. Any good tool should understand your request like another human does.

JamesSwift 11mo ago
People dont talk about prompt engineering because it has become “context engineering“. Agentic AI is the real deal future

beefnugs 11mo ago

Good. The smartest and best should be cutting out middlemen and selling something of their own instead of keep shoveling all the money up the company pyramids. I think the pyramids will become easier and easier to spot their trash and avoid