8 ms·

The next two years of software engineering

• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• ahmetomer 9mo ago
  > Junior developers: Make yourself AI-proficient and versatile. Demonstrate that one junior plus AI can match a small team’s output. Use AI coding agents (Cursor/Antigravity/Claude Code/Gemini CLI) to build bigger features, but understand and explain every line if not most. Focus on skills AI can’t easily replace: communication, problem decomposition, domain knowledge. Look at adjacent roles (QA, DevRel, data analytics) as entry points. Build a portfolio, especially projects integrating AI APIs. Consider apprenticeships, internships, contracting, or open source. Don’t be “just another new grad who needs training”; be an immediately useful engineer who learns quickly. If I were starting out today, this is basically the only advice I would listen to. There will indeed be a vacuum in the next few years because of the drastic drop in junior hiring today.
  • ares623 9mo ago
    What. That’s written in a way that’s like “men writing women”. Not putting themselves in the shoes of a junior who has no context or almost no opportunities.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    And you think juniors aren't doing this? At this point everyone in the market does more Vibe coding than those who are not in the market. Market is saturated most because Execs cutting jobs not because juniors are not good.
  • Anamon 9mo ago
    > be an immediately useful engineer who learns quickly Then also nothing has really changed. This was, verbatim, the advice everybody was giving when I was a grad student almost 20 years ago. Back then, the conclusion was to learn the frameworks du jour, even if it was unfulfilling plumbing and the knowledge had a half-life of a few weeks. You needed it to get hired, but you made your career because of all the solid theory you learned and the adaptability that knowing it gave you. Now, the conclusion is to learn how to tickle the models du jour in the right way, even though it's intellectually braindead, unaspiring work and knowledge with a half-life of a few days. It's still the theoretical foundation that will actually make the junior become a valuable engineer. The more I read between the lines of AI evangelists' posts like this, the more I'm convinced that expectations will return to grounded reality soon. They are new tools to help the engineer. They enable new workflows and maybe can even allow a two-digit percentage increase in speed while upholding quality. But they're in no way a revolution that will make possible "10× engineers" or considerably replace engineering positions beyond the "it doesn't really matter" area of PoCs, prototypes, one-offs, cookie-cutter solutions, etc.
• mellosouls 9mo ago
  On the junior developer question: A humble way for devs to look at this, is that in the new LLM era we are all juniors now. A new entrant with a good attitude, curiosity and interest in learning the traditional "meta" of coding (version control, specs, testing etc) and a cutting-edge, first-rate grasp of using LLMs to assist their craft (as recommended in the article) will likely be more useful in a couple of years than a "senior" dragging their heels or dismissing LLMs as hype. We aren't in coding Kansas anymore, junior and senior will not be so easily mapped to legacy development roles.
  • snovv_crash 9mo ago
    Sorry but no. Software engineering is too high dimensional such that there is no rulebook for doing it the way there is for building a bridge. You need to develop taste, much like high level Go players do. This is even more critical as LLMs start to spit out code at an ever higher rate allowing entropy to accumulate much faster and letting unskilled people paint themselves into corners. I think of it a bit like ebike speed limits. Previously to go above 25mph on a 2-wheeled transport you needed a lot of time training on a bicycle, which gave you the skills, or you needed your motorcycle licence, which required you to pass a test. Now people can jump straight on a Surron and hare off at 40mph with no handling skills and no license. Of course this leads to more accidents. Not to say LLMs can't solve this eventually, RL approaches look very strong and maybe some kind of self-play can be introduced like AlphaZero. But we aren't there yet, that's for sure.
    • mellosouls 9mo ago
      I don't think that conflicts with what I said but perhaps counters with something I didn't; your ebike analogy implies a recklessness that the junior with the attributes I mentioned will be averse to. Conversely the senior with the full grasp of LLMs and the "taste" and judgement will naturally be ahead. But the comparison I made was between the junior with a good attitude and expert grasp on LLMs, and the stick-in-the-mud/disinterested "senior". Those are where the senior and junior roles will be more ambiguous in demarcation as time moves forward.
• austin-cheney 9mo ago
  I have been telling people that, titles aside, senior developers were the people not afraid to write original code. I don’t see LLMs changing this. I only envision people wishing LLMs would change this.
  • CSSer 9mo ago
    I almost think what a lot of people are coming to grips is with is how much code is unoriginal. The ones who've adjusted the fastest were humble to begin with. I don't want to claim the title, but I can certainly claim the imposter syndrome! If anything, LLMs validated something I always suspected. The amount of truly unique, relevant to success, code in a given project is often very small. More often than not, it's not grouped together either. Most of the time it's tailored to a given functionality. For example, a perfectly accurate Haversine distance is slower than an optimized one with tradeoffs. LLMs have not yet become adept at housing the ability to identify the need for those tradeoffs in context well or consistently, so you end up with generic code that works but not great. Can the LLM adjust if you explicitly instruct it to? Sure, sometimes! Sometimes it catches it in a thought loop too. Other times you have to roll up your sleeves and do the work like you said, which often still involves traditional research or thinking.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 9mo ago
    I disagree. 1) Senior developers are more likely to know how to approach a variety of tasks, including complex ones, in ways that work, and are more likely to (maybe almost subconsciously) stick to these proven design patterns rather than reinvent the wheel in some novel way. Even if the task itself is somewhat novel, they will break it down in familar ways into familar subtasks/patterns. For sure if a task does require some thinking outside the box, or a novel approach, then the senior developer might have better intuition on what to consider. The major caveat to this is that I'm an old school developer, who started professionally in the early 80's, a time when you basically had to invent everything from scratch, so certainly there is no mental block to having to do so, and I'm aware there is at least a generation of developers that grew up with stack overflow and have much more of a mindset of building stuff using cut an paste, and less having to sit down and write much complex/novel code themselves. 2) I think the real distinction of senior vs junior programmers, that will carry over into the AI era, is that senior developers have had enough experience, at increasing levels of complexity, that they know how to architect and work on large complex projects where a more junior developer will flounder. In the AI coding world, at least for time being, until something closer to AGI is achieved (could be 10-20 years away), you still need to be able to plan and architect the project if you want to achieve a result where the outcome isn't just some random "I let the AI choose everything" experiment.
• doug_durham 9mo ago
  The author has a bizarre idea of what a computer science degree is about. Why would it teach cloud computing or dev ops? The idea is you learn those on your own.
  • tibbar 9mo ago
    Why is this necessarily true?
    • sys_64738 9mo ago
      A CS degree is there to teach you concepts and fundamentals that are the foundation of everything computing related. It doesn't generally chase after the latest fads.
      • tibbar 9mo ago
        Sure, but we need to update our definitions of concepts/fundamentals. A lot of this stuff has its own established theory and has been a core primitive for software engineering for many years. For example, the primitives of cloud computing are largely explained by papers published by Amazon, Google, and others in the early '00s (DynamoDB, Bigtable, etc.). If you want to explore massively parallel computation or container orchestration, etc, it would be natural to do that using a public cloud, although of course many of the platform-specific details are incidentals. Part of the story here is that the scale of computing has expanded enormously. The DB class I took in grad school was missing lots of interesting puzzle pieces around replication, consistency, storage formats, etc. There was a heavy focus on relational algebra and normalization forms, which is just... far from a complete treatment of the necessary topics. We need to extend our curricula beyond the theory that is require to execute binaries on individual desktops.
        • michaelsalim 9mo ago
          I do agree that the scale has expanded a lot. But this is true with any other fields. Does that mean that you need to learn everything? Well at some point it becomes unfeasible. See doctors for example, you learn a bit of everything. But then if you want to specialise, you choose one.
• wakawaka28 9mo ago
  The outlook on CS credentials is wrong. You'll never be worse off than someone without those credentials, all other things equal. Buried in this text is some assumption that the relatively studious people who get degrees are going to fall behind the non-degreed, because the ones who didn't go to school will out-study them. What is really going to happen generally is that the non-degreed will continue to not study, and they will lean on AI to avoid studying even the few things that they might have otherwise needed to study to squeak by in industry.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    The fundamentals of CS dont change and are more valuable to learn for the long term. Vibe coders think they can just bypass everything because they can ask a machine to write them a todo list.
    • wakawaka28 9mo ago
      I think you're right but it's more like the theory and other thinking skills are harder to pick up on your own than particular technologies. You definitely still ought to learn both theory and particular tech skills, as they are not interchangeable. A person who only knows pure CS is difficult to employ as an engineer because programming entails particular technological skills.
• PraddyChippzz 9mo ago
  The points mentioned in the article, regarding the things to focus on, is spot on.
• babblingfish 9mo ago
  My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but without having to look up library function calls and language specific syntax
  • antonymoose 9mo ago
    It’s a better Google for me. Instead of searching AWS or StackOverflow it hallucinates a good enough output that I can refactor into an output.
    • bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
      The reason why it is better is that with search you have to narrow your search down to a specific part of what you are trying to do, for example if you need a unique id generating function as part of what you are trying to do you first search for that, then if you need to make sure that whatever gets output is responsive 3 columns then you might search for that, and then do code to glue the things together to what you need, with AI you can ask for all of this together, get something that is about what the searched for results would have been, do your glue code and fixes you would normally have done. It trims the time requirement of a bit of functionality that you might have searched for 4 examples down by the time requirement of 3 of those searches. It does however remove the benefit of having done the search which might be that you see the various results, and find that a secondary result is better. You no longer get that benefit. Tradeoffs.
      • thunspa 9mo ago
        I resonate with the phrase: "You never learn to ask good questions"
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    > My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs. The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
• gassi 9mo ago
  > Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and Gemini Ah, there it is.
  • lesser-shadow 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    Ahhhh, this is like that guy who works at Claude Code and runs 100 agents at the same time to replace 100 juniors. Everyone is convinced he will be the last software engineer on earth.
  • mikemarsh 9mo ago
    Yep, it never fails. Here's another prediction for "The next two years of software engineering"; AI vendors will start to utilize their senior devs' personal domains to write their advertising pieces to attempt to mitigate scrutiny when such things are posted to social media.
• Eong 9mo ago
  Love the article, I had a struggle with my new identity and thus had to write https://edtw.in/high-agency-engineering/ https://edtw.in/high-agency-engineering/ for myself, but also came to the realisation that the industry is shifting too especially for junior engineers. Curious about how the Specialist vs Generalist theme plays out, who is going to feel it more *first* when AI gets better over time?
• ch4s3 9mo ago
  > junior developer employment drops by about 9-10% within six quarters, while senior employment barely budges. Big tech hired 50% fewer fresh graduates over the past three years. This study showing 9-10% drop is odd[1] and I'm not sure about their identification critria. > We identify GenAI adoption by detecting job postings that explicitly seek workers to implement or integrate GenAI technologies into firm workflows. Based on that MIT study it seems like 90+% of these projects fail. So we could easily be seeing an effect where firms posting these GenAI roles are burning money on the projects in a way that displaces investment in headcount. The point about "BigTech" hiring 50% fewer grads is almost orthogonal. All of these companies are shifting hiring towards things where new grads are unlikely to add value, building data centers and frontier work. Moreover the TCJA of 2017 caused software developers to not count for R&D tax write offs (I'm oversimplifying) starting in 2022. This surely has more of an effect than whatever "GenAI integrator roles" postings correlates to. [1] https://download.ssrn.com/2025/11/6/5425555.pdf https://download.ssrn.com/2025/11/6/5425555.pdf
  • garbawarb 9mo ago
    Hiring was booming until about 2020 though.
    • ch4s3 9mo ago
      The TCJA change (of 2017) went into effect in 2022, I should have been more clear.
      • garbawarb 9mo ago
        I didn't know that but that makes perfect sense. A lot of layoffs and outsourcing coincided with that. Are there any signs it'll be reintroduced?
        • ch4s3 9mo ago
          It was late last year.
  • 9mo ago
• bradleyjg 9mo ago
  The bottom up and top down don’t seem to match. Where is all the new and improved software output we’d expect to see?
• osigurdson 9mo ago
  >> The skillset is shifting from implementing algorithms to knowing how to ask the AI the right questions and verify its output. The question is, how much faster is verification only vs writing the code by hand? You gain a lot of understanding when you write the code yourself, and understanding is a prerequisite for verification. The idea seems to be a quick review is all that should be needed "LGTM". That's fine as long as you understand the tradeoffs you are making. With today's AI you either trade speed for correctness or you have to accept a more modest (and highly project specific) productivity boost.
  • torben-friis 9mo ago
    And there's a ton of human incentives here to take shortcuts in the review part. The process almost pushes you to drop your guard: you spend less physical time observing the code while you write, you get huge chunks of code dropped on you, iterations change a lot to keep a mind model, there's FOMO involved about the speed gain you're supposed to get... We're going to see worse review quality just by a mater of UX and friction of the tool.
    • judahmeek 9mo ago
      Yes! It depends on the company, of course, but I think plenty of people are going to fall for the perverse incentives while reviewing AI output for tech debt. The perverse incentives being that tech debt is non-obvious & therefore really easy to avoid responsibility for. Meanwhile, velocity is highly obvious & usually tired directly to personal & team performance metrics. The only way I see to resolve this is strict enforcement of a comprehensive QA process during both the planning & iteration of an AI-assisted development cycle. But when even people working at Anthropic are talking about running multiple agents in parallel, I get the idea that CTO's are not taking this seriously.
      • andrekandre 9mo ago
        > enforcement of a comprehensive QA process during both the planning & iteration of an AI-assisted development cycle and a new bottleneck appears... (i don't disagree with this take though, qa should be done from start to finish and integral every step of the way)
• streetcat1 9mo ago
  For some reason miss two important points: 1) The AI code maintainence question - who would maintain the AI generated code 2) The true cost of AI. Once the VC/PE money runs out and companies charge the full cost, what would happen to vibe coding at that point ?
  • NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
    I think this post is a great example of a different point made in this thread. People confuse vibe-coding with llm-assisted coding all the time (no shade for you, OP). There is an implied bias that all LLM code is bad, unmaintainable, incomprehensible. That's not necessarily the case. 1) Either you, the person owning the code, or you + LLms, or just the LLMs in the future. All of them can work. And they can work better with a bit of prep work. The latest models are very good at following instructions. So instead of "write a service that does X" you can use the tools to ask for specifics (i.e. write a modular service, that uses concept A and concept B to do Y. It should use x y z tech stack. It should use this ruleset, these conventions. Before testing run these linters and these formatters. Fix every env error before testing. etc). That's the main difference between vibe-coding and llm-assisted coding. You get to decide what you ask for. And you get to set the acceptance criteria. The key po9int that non-practitioners always miss is that once a capability becomes available to these models, you can layer them on top of previous capabilities and get a better end result. Higher instruction adherence -> better specs -> longer context -> better results -> better testing -> better overall loop. 2) You are confusing the fact that some labs subsidise inference costs (for access to data, usage metrics, etc) with the true cost of inference on a given model size. Youc an already have a good indication on what the cost is today for any given model size. 3rd party inference shops exist today, and they are not subsidising the costs (they have no reason to). You can do the math as well, and figure out an average cost per token for a given capability. And those open models are out, they're not gonna change, and you can get the same capability tomorrow or in 10 years. (and likely at lower costs, since hardware improves, inference stack improves, etc).
  • haspok 9mo ago
    Perhaps thinking about AI generated code in terms of machine code generated by a compiler helps. Who maintains the compiled program? Nobody. If you want to make changes to it, you recompile the source. In a similar fashion, AI generated code will be fed to another AI round and regenerated or refactored. What this also means is that in most cases nobody will care about producing code with high quality. Why bother, if the AI can refactor ("recompile") it in a few minutes?
• stack_framer 9mo ago
  Funny that he mentions people not pivoting away from COBOL. My neighbors work for a bank, programming in COBOL every day. When I moved in and met them 14 years ago, I wondered how much longer they would be able to keep that up. They're still doing it.
  • bossyTeacher 9mo ago
    The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
    • bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
      it sounds like these people are staying solvent as long as the market stays irrational.
    • webdevver 9mo ago
      to be fair, that cobol program has been working for probably 30 years (maybe even longer than that) - thats unusually reliable and long-lived for a software project. the only real contender in this regard is the win32 api, and actually that did get used in enterprise for a long time too before the major shift to cloud and linux in the mid 2010s. ultimately the proof is in the real-world use, even if its ugly to look at... id say, even as someone who is a big fan of linux, if i were given a 30 year old obscure software stack that did nothing but work, i would be very hesitant to touch it too!
      • generic92034 9mo ago
        > the only real contender in this regard I would like to add the business core functions of SAP R/3 (1992). Much of the code created for it in the early 90s still lives in the current SAP S/4HANA software.
      • WorldMaker 9mo ago
        It still needs continual software maintenance though. The developers still making their money in COBOL make it because it doesn't just keep working untouched. (Just about no software does.)
• hncoder12345 9mo ago
  Sometimes I wonder if I made the wrong choice with software development. Even after getting to a senior role, according to this article, you're still expected to get more education and work on side projects outside of work. Am I supposed to want to code all the time? When can I pursue hobbies, a social life, etc.
  • jedberg 9mo ago
    It's funny you should ask this. When I started out, 30 years ago, here were the answers you'd get from most people: > Am I supposed to want to code all the time? Yes. > When can I pursue hobbies, Your hobby should be coding fun apps for yourself > a social life, etc. You social life should be hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things. And the most successful people I know basically did exactly that. I'm not saying y'all should be doing that now, I'm just saying, that is in fact how it used to be.
    • KaiserPro 9mo ago
      > You social life should be hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things. Fuck. That. I worked at a faang, successful people weren't people that did engineering, it was people who did politics. The most successful people were the ones that joined at the same time as the current VP. Your hobbies need to be fun, to you. Not support your career. If its just there to support your career, its unpaid career development, not a hobby. Should people not code in their free time? thats not for me to decide. If they enjoy it, and its not hurting anyone, then be my guest. Engineers are generally useless at understanding whats going on in the real world, they are also quite bad at communicating. do. fun. things.
      • izacus 9mo ago
        You just sound very angry your career isn't fun to you. I'm sorry.
        • raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
• tommica 9mo ago
  One thing that fucks with juniors is the expecration of paying for subscriptions for AI models. If you need to know how the AI tools work, you need to learn them with your own money. Not everyone can afford it, and then we are at the point of changing the field that was so proud about just needing a computer and access to internet to teach oneself into a subscription service.
  • ares623 9mo ago
    If the AI gets so good then they shouldn’t need to pre-learn.
  • boulos 9mo ago
    You can get by pretty well with the ~$20/month plans for either Claude or Gemini. You don't need to be doing the $200/month ones just to get a sense of how they work.
    • tommica 9mo ago
      Again, not everyone can afford it, and it becomes a hurdle. Computers are acquirable, but 20$ extra a month might not be. And yes, that plan can get you started, but when I tested it, I managed to get 1 task done, before having to wait 4 hours.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    This is why opencode is giving free access to one or two models, unlimited access.
• zqna 9mo ago
  My question: are those people who were building crappy, brittle software, which was full of bugs and and orher suboptimal behavior, that were the main reasons of slowing down the evolution that software, will they now begin writing better software because of AI? Answering yes, implies that the main reason of those problems was that those developers didn't have enough time to spend on analyzing those problems or to build protection harnesses. I would stronly argue that was not the case, as the main reason is of intelectual and personal nature - inability to build abstractions, to follow up the route causes (thus not aquiring necessary knowledge), or to avoid being distracted by some new toy. In 2-5 years I expect the industry going into panic mode, as there will be a shortage of people who could maintain the drivel that is now being created en masse. The future is bright for those with the brains, just need to wait this out
• burnermore 9mo ago
  Something very odd about the tone of this article. Is it mostly AI written? There is a lot of references and info. But I am feeling far more disconnected with it. For the record, I was genuinely trying to read it properly. But it is becoming unbearable by mid article.
  • nerdsniper 9mo ago
    Yes, lots of AI style/writing in this article. I wouldn't necessarily discredit an article just based on stylization if the content was worth engaging with ... but like you mentioned, when the AI is given too much creative control it goes off the rails by the middle and turns into what the kids call "AI slop". It resembles an article, it has the right ingredients (words), but they aren't combined and cooked into any kind of recognizable food.
    • burnermore 9mo ago
      Thanks a lot for taking the time to confirm. Not hating on AI slop or something. But I do genuinely feel if he/she/they tried to invest time in writing it, people would consume and enjoy it better. Its hard to put my finger on it. But it lacks soul, it factor or whatever you want to call it. Feels empty in a way. I mean, this is not the first AI assisted article am reading. But usually, it's to a negligible level. Maybe it's just me. :)
    • godshatter 9mo ago
      I suppose that eventually enough people will have grown up reading mostly ai slop that that way of speaking will eventually become the norm.
  • gofreddygo 9mo ago
    100% has that AI slop smell. intro... Problem... (The Bottom line... What to do about it...) Looped over and over. and then Finally... I want to read it, but I can't get myself to.
    • burnermore 9mo ago
• tigrezno 9mo ago
  The next two years of software engineering will be the last two years of software engineering (probably).
  • kubb 9mo ago
    Please don’t get my hopes up. Adaptable people like me will outcompete hard in the post-engineering world. Alas, I don’t believe it’s coming. The tech just doesn’t seem to have what it takes to do the job.
    • falloutx 9mo ago
      Some related fields will be gone too. And the jobs which will remain will be impossible to get.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      • menaerus 9mo ago
        > And the jobs which will remain will be impossible to get. Exactly my thoughts lately ... Even by yesterday's standards it was already very difficult to land a job and, by tomorrow's standards, it appears as if only the very best of the best will be able to keep their jobs and the ones in a position of decision making power.
  • amelius 9mo ago
    I don't see the market flooded yet with software that was "so easy to build using LLMs". Last year was, as it seems, just a normal year in terms of global software output.
    • steve1977 9mo ago
      If anything, looking at for example what Microsoft has been releasing, it's been a year below average (in terms of quality).
    • 9mo ago
• mawadev 9mo ago
  I mean it's pretty simple: management will take bad quality (because they don't understand the field) over having and paying more employees any day. Software engineer positions will shrink and be unrecognizable: one person expected to be doing the work of multiple departments to stay employed. People may leave the field or won't bother learning it. When the critical mass is reached, AI will be paywalled and rug pulled. Then the field evens itself out again over a long, expensive period of time for every company that fell for it, lowering the expectations back to reality.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    This is truly the problem: You either get fired or you get to work 10x more to survive. Only question is how many of us will be in 1st group and how many in the 2nd group, its a lose lose situation.
    • mawadev 9mo ago
      Exactly. Some jobs moved from database, backend, frontend and devops to "fullstack", which means 4 jobs with the pay of one. People do that job, but with only 8h-10h in a day the quality is as expected. I think overall people will try to move out of the field, no matter how much of a force multiplier AI might be. Its simply a worse trade to carry so much responsibility and burden when you can work in IT or outside of IT in a less cognitively demanding field with set hours and expectations for the same pay (in EU, very hyperbolic statement tbh). Especially when the profit you bring dwarfs the compensation with all the frustrations that come with knowing that and being kept down in the corporate ladder.
  • Anamon 9mo ago
    That's another one for concluding that there's nothing new under the sun. This is the exact dynamic that happened during the offshoring hype. Now, it's expecting senior engineers to "orchestrate" 10 coding agents, then it was expecting them to orchestrate 10 cheap developers on the other side of the world. Then, the reckoning came when those offshore developers realised that if they produced code as good as that of a "1st world" engineer, they can ask a similar salary, too, and those offshoring clients who didn't want to pay up were left with those contractors who weren't good enough to do that. This time, it will be agent pricing approaching the true costs. Both times, the breaking point is when managers realise that writing code was never the bottleneck in the first place.
• danieltanfh95 9mo ago
  The most useful thing juniors can do now is use AI to rapidly get up to the speed with the new skill floor. Learn like crazy. Self learning is empowered by AI. Engineers > developers > coders.
  • auggierose 9mo ago
    Scientists > engineers > developers > coders
    • auggierose 9mo ago
      Mathematicians > scientists > engineers > developers > coders
      • auggierose 9mo ago
        https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
  • haspok 9mo ago
    That is quite some wishful thinking there. Most juniors won't care, just vibe-code their way through. It takes extra discipline and willpower to force yourself do the painful thing, if there is a less painful way to do it.
  • torben-friis 9mo ago
    AI has a lot of potential as a personal, always on teaching assistant. It's also an 'skip intro' button for the friction that comes with learning. You're getting a bug? just ask the thing rather than spending time figuring it out. You don't know how to start a project from scratch? ask for scaffolding. Your first boss asks for a ticket? Better not to screw up, hand it to the machine just to be safe. If those temptations are avoided you can progress, but I'm not sure that lots of people will succeed. Furthermore, will people be afforded that space to be slow, when their colleagues are going at 5x? Modern life offers little hope. We're all using uber eats to avoid the friction of cooking, tinder to avoid the awkwardness of a club, and so on. Frictionless tends to win.
• keybored 9mo ago
  Is there a Jeapordy for guessing prompts? Give an executive summary of GenAI trends where GenAI is the destiny and everything reacts to it. Touch on all “problems”. Don’t be divisive by making hard proclamations. Summarize in a safe way by appealing to the trope of the enthusiastic programmer who dutifully adapts to the world around them in order to stay “up to date”; the passive drone that accepts whatever environment they are placed in and never tries to change it. But add insult to injury by paradoxically concluding that the only safe future is the one you (individual) “actively engineer”. I’m not saying that this was prompted. I’m just summarizing it in my own way.
• globular-toast 9mo ago
  This article suggests it is specialists who are "at risk", but as much more of a generalist I was thinking the opposite and starting to regret not specialising more. My value so far in my career has been my very broad knowledge of basically the entire of computer science, IT, engineering, science, mathematics, and even beyond. Basically, I read a lot, at least 10x more than most people it seems. I was starting to wonder how relevant that now is, given that LLMs have read everything. But maybe I'm wrong about what my skill actually is. Everyone has had LLMs for years now and yet I still seem better at finding info, contextualising it and assimilating it than a lot of people. I'm now using LLMs too but so far I haven't seen anyone use an LLM to become like me. So I remain slightly confused about what exactly it is about me and people like me that makes us valuable.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    I mean there is no strat that saves you 100% from it. The layoffs are kind of random, based on teams they dont see any vision for, or engineers who dont perform. Generalising is better imo.
  • cowl 9mo ago
    LLMs have read EVERYTHING yes. that includes a lot of not optimal solutions, repeating mantras about past best practices that are not relevant anymore, thousands of blog posts about how to draw an owl by drawing two circles and leaving the rest as an exercise to the reader etc. The value of a good engineer is his current-context judgment. Something that LLMs can not do Well. Second point, something that is being mentioned occasionally but not discussed seriously enough, is that the Dead Internet Theory is becoming a reality. The amount of good, professionally written training materials is by now exhausted and LLMs will start to feed on their own slop. See How little the LLM's core competency increased in the last year even with the big expansion of their parameters. Babysitting LLM's output will be the big thing in the next two years.
• megamix 9mo ago
  The most important question is who will get paid the most? I don't think the future of software engineering will be attractive if all you do is more work for same or even less pay. A second danger is too much reliance on AI tools will centralise knowledge and THAT is the scariest thing. Software systems will need to perform for a long time, having juniors on board and people who understand software architecture will be massively important. Or will all software crash when this generation retires?
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    The people who don't lose their jobs will also not be in a great spot, there wont be a guarantee that they will never lose their jobs, they will continue to live on the wobbly and uncertain foundation, will get fired for first no they say to the management. If software engineering falls, all the related industries will fall too, thus creating a domino effect, that none of the execs can imagine right now.
    • hoss1474489 9mo ago
      > there wont be a guarantee that they will never lose their jobs, they will continue to live on the wobbly and uncertain foundation The people who lose their jobs prove this was always the case. No job comes with a guarantee, even ones that say or imply they do. Folks who believe their job is guaranteed to be there tomorrow are deceiving themselves.
    • menaerus 9mo ago
      I really do wonder what sort of economy change is coming to us because companies will hypothetically need to hire less people to sustain the equal output of today. They can do that basically today so not even hypothetically anymore, it just needs some time to take off. The question IMO is, who will be creating the demand on the other side for all of these goods produced if so many people will be left without the jobs? UBI, redistribution of wealth through taxes? I'm not so convinced about that ...
      • falloutx 9mo ago
• athrowaway3z 9mo ago
  I've been saying for a decade that one of the fundamental issues with SWE in the average company, is that management does not seem to understand that SWE is a management level job. Its not an assembly line worker. It requires reorganizing, streamlining, stake-holders, etc - in code and data - which directly affect people much the same that any other management role has. There are just fewer issues with HR and more with CDNs or CVEs. > A CEO of a low-code platform articulated this vision: in an “agentic” development environment, engineers become “composers,” I see we'll be twisting words around to keep avoiding the comparison.
• reedf1 9mo ago
  All well-documented knowledge fields will be gone if software goes. Then the undocumented ones will become documented, and they too will go. The best advice to junior devs is get a hands on job before robotic articulating sausages are perfected and humans become irrelevant blobs of watery meat.
  • djeastm 9mo ago
    I'm looking forward to the antics of first-generation robotic plumbers and electricians, myself.
    • jimbokun 9mo ago
      Will be amusing watching them fail at common tasks for a couple years then they will suddenly be better than any human plumber or electrician.
  • dw_arthur 9mo ago
    I think the GPT3 or 4 minute mile moment for robotics will be when we see a robotic hand with the dexterity of a 6 year old. Once that happens it will quickly be over.
• qsera 9mo ago
  I would like to see how things will be when using AI would require half of a devs current paycheck.
• Jean-Papoulos 9mo ago
  >The flip scenario: AI unlocks massive demand for developers across every industry, not just tech. Healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and finance all start embedding software and automation. I find this one hard to believe. Software is already massively present in all these industries and has already replaced jobs. The last step is complete automation (ie drone tractors that can load up at a hub, go to the field and spray all by themselves) but the bottleneck for this isn't "we need more code", it's real-world issues that I don't see AI help solving (political, notably)
  • Eupolemos 9mo ago
    I think there's a good chance demand goes up in Europe. We are going to need to de-risk our software dependencies, and Germany is going to need to use computers. Germany is going to be crazy, I think.
    • cheschire 9mo ago
      Germans were so quick to revert back to paper after COVID that it felt like one of the only reasons they came out of lockdown eventually was to get paper back. The Gewerkschaft tactics to resist AI is what I’m really interested in seeing.
  • alansaber 9mo ago
    Agree, people were already worried about the excessive focus on software over physical technology well before LLMs significantly reduced the barrier to entry
  • encyclopedism 9mo ago
    I tend to agree with your assessment. The increase in demand cannot possibly equal the loss from AI. Given projections of AI abilities over time AI necessarily creates downward pressure on new job creation. AI is for reducing and/or eliminating jobs (by way of increasing efficiency). AI isn't creating 'new' things, it's reducing the time needed to do what was already being done. Unlike the automobile revolution new job categories aren't being created with AI.
• misja111 9mo ago
  > Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plate I'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.
  • thw_9a83c 9mo ago
    > More or less the same thing. Worse. The AI doesn't share any responsibility.
    • cheschire 9mo ago
      And can’t be mentored by the senior except in some ersatz flat text instruction files.
      • icedrift 9mo ago
        And the mistakes AI makes don't carry the same code smells juniors make. There are markers in human code that signals how well they understood the problem, AI code more often looks correct at a glance even if it's horribly problematic.
      • sanderjd 9mo ago
        Yeah, this is a big thing. AIs (at the moment) don't learn. You wait for a new model to come out and hope it is better than the last one. But that isn't the same thing as a person learning over time.
        • thw_9a83c 9mo ago
          > AIs (at the moment) don't learn. Yes, and even when it learns (because there's new version of the AI model) it doesn't learn according to your company/team's values. Those values might be very specific to your business model. Currently, AI (LLM) is just a tool. It's a novel and apparently powerful tool. But it's still just a tool.
  • 9mo ago
• maciejzj 9mo ago
  TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life. This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.
  • schnitzelstoat 9mo ago
    I felt a lot safer when I was a young grad than now that I have kids to support and I can't just up and move to wherever the best job opportunity is or live off lentils to save money or whatever.
    • maciejzj 9mo ago
      Yeah, kids change the landscape a lot. On the other hand, if you don't have any personal ties, its easier to grab opportunities, but you are unlikely to build any kind of social network when chasing jobs all over the country/world. Either way, there is very little to no path toward "family + place to live + stable job" model.
      • reactordev 9mo ago
        This. At 43 I have friends that are all over the country now. Where I am I’m alone. Don’t underestimate the value of community.
    • abc123abc123 9mo ago
      True. This is one of the best arguments for not having kids. I could never imagine putting myself in that uncertain situation. Much better to reduce those risks, and focus on yourself.
      • SecretDreams 9mo ago
• wagey90 9mo ago
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• xkcd1963 9mo ago
  Please dear developers be as lazy as possible and use LLMs. The amount of bugs that get shipped enable me a comfortable life as opsec.
• afro88 9mo ago
  > The bottom line: Junior developer hiring could collapse as AI automates entry-level tasks If AI automated entry-level tasks from today, that just means "entry-level" means something different now. It doesn't mean entry-level ceases to exist. Entey-level as we know it, but not entry-level in general.
  • pydry 9mo ago
    Entry level jobs have been in decline for years though. I used to work on teams which were 50% entry level. Then just one. Then all senior teams became the norm. This all happened after I became senior but before AI came along.
    • sanderjd 9mo ago
      Yeah this is truly my biggest concern. I think it's really bad.
    • panopticon 9mo ago
      Definitely. Our hiring pipeline seized up in 2022 and we've been disproportionately hiring senior+ roles since, and many teams are senior heavy. I think AI is a convenient scapegoat for other macro trends.
  • achow 9mo ago
    One indicator is intern hiring. I have seen the intern budgets getting slashed by 60-70% (4 interns in 2025 vs 14 interns in 2024).
  • tenacious_tuna 9mo ago
    It's not just juniors. One of my partners carries a PhD in epidemiology and bimolecular science; they've been job searching for eight months with no bites, just silence. A friend of mine is a chemical engineering PhD, she's been searching for a year and just had her first interview. I have eight years of software engineering experience but am only one rung up from the bottom of our SWE ladder, and we don't even hire the bottom rung anymore at my org. Seems like there's crushing pressure from above to limit hiring at every stage.
• jillesvangurp 9mo ago
  Change is a constant for software engineers. It always has been. If your job is doing stuff that should be automated, either you are automating it or you are not a very good software engineer. A few key fallacies at play here. - Assuming a closed world assumption: we'll do the same amount of work but with less people. This has never been true. As soon as you meaningfully drop the price of a unit of software (pick your favorite), demand goes up and we'll need more of them. Also it opens the door to building software that previously would have been too expensive. That's why the amount of software engineers has consistently increased over the years. This despite a lot of stuff getting a lot easier over time. - Assuming the type of work always stays the same. This too has never been true. Stuff changes over time. New tools, new frameworks, new types of software, new jobs to do. And the old ones fade away. Being a software engineer is a life of learning. Very few of us get to do the same things for decades on end. - Assuming people know what to ask for. AIs do as you ask, which isn't necessarily what you want. The quality of what you get correlates very much to your ability you ask for it. The notion that you get a coherent bit of software in response to poorly articulated incoherent prompts is about as realistic as getting a customer to produce coherent requirements. That never happened either. Converting customer wishes into maintainable/valuable software is still a bit of a dark art. The bottom line: many companies don't have a lot of in house software development capacity or competence. AI doesn't really help these companies to fix that in exactly the same way that Visual Basic didn't magically turn them into software driven companies either. They'll use third party companies to get the software they need because they lack the in house competence to even ask for the right things. Lowering the cost just means they'll raise the ambition level and ask for more/better software. The type of companies that will deliver that will be staffed with people working with AI tools to build this stuff for them. You might call these people software engineers. Demand for senior SEs will go through the roof because they deliver the best AI generated software because they know what good software looks like and what to ask for. That creates a lot of room for enterprising juniors to skill up and join the club because, as ever, there simply aren't enough seniors around. And thanks to AI, skilling up is easier than ever. The distinction between junior and senior was always fairly shallow. I know people that were in their twenties that got labeled as senior barely out of college. Maybe on their second or third job. It was always a bit of a vanity title that because of the high demand for any kind of SEs got awarded early. AI changes nothing here. It just creates more opportunities for people to use tools to work themselves up to senior level quicker. And of course there are lots of examples of smart young people that managed to code pretty significant things and create successful startups. If you are ambitious, now is a good time to be alive.
• Havoc 9mo ago
  One of the better analysis of this question I think. On the optimistic take side - I suspect it might end up being true that software might be infused into more niches but not sure it follows that this helps on the jobs market side. Or put different demand for software and SWE might decouple somewhat for much of that additional software demand.
  • slfnflctd 9mo ago
    I'm mostly convinced at this point that the jobs market will only be affected temporarily. This is really just another form of automation, speeding things up. We can now make more customized software more quickly and cheaply. The market is already realizing that fact, and demand for more performant, bespoke software at lower costs/prices is increasing. Those who are good at understanding the primary areas of concern in software design generally, and who can communicate well, will continue to be very much in demand.
    • Havoc 9mo ago
      I‘m leaning more towards significant job impact. It’s hard to tell though not just because it’s inherently uncertain where this goes but also because those closest to it are also the least likely to view it objectively. So near impossible to find someone clued up but also not invested in a specific outcome
• FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
  Maybe a harsh criticism. The article seemed to be all over the place, maybe because the subject is also all over the place. I agree with everything, its just that it seemed like the same story we've been in for awhile. Wasn't the main take away generally "study everything even more than you were, and talk/network to everybody even more than you were, and hold on. Work more more more"
• bwfan123 9mo ago
  imo, The OP has bad ai-assisted takes on almost every single "critical question". This makes me doubt if he has breadth of experience in the craft. For example. > Narrow specialists risk finding their niche automated or obsolete Exactly the opposite. Those with expertise will oversee the tool. Those without expertise will take orders from it. > Universities may struggle to keep up with an industry that changes every few months Those who know the theory of the craft will oversee the machine. Those who dont will take orders from it. Universities will continue to teach the theory of the discipline.
  • solaire_oa 9mo ago
    I think this is a fair take (despite the characteristic HN negativity/contrarianism), and succinctly summarizes a point that I was finding hard to articulate while reading the article. My similar (verbose) take is that seniors will often be able to wield LLMs productively, where good-faith LLM attempts will be the first step, but will be frequently be discarded when they fail to produce the intended results (personally I find myself swearing at the LLMs when they produce trite garbage; output that gets `gco .`-ed immediately- or LLM MR/PRs that get closed in favor of manually accomplishing the prompted task). Conversely, juniors will often wield LLMs counterproductively, accepting (unbeknown) tech debt that the neither the junior nor the LLM will be able to correct past a given complexity.
• mishkovski 9mo ago
  This article reads like it was written by an AI.
• dhruv3006 9mo ago
  I recently started as a developer advocate - I have similar opinions to the author - junior devs have a hard time getting hired and flipping to something like devrel makes a lot of sense.
• dust42 9mo ago
  From my experience AI is only good with mainstream coding tasks. Javascript, node, react, crud. Whatever it has seen in overabundance, it is good with. Already with typescript it is less strong than with javascript. It is just a clever token generator without intelligence. Often it resembles intelligence but so can a human by learning quotes of famous people. It is a new and exciting tool but immediately limited with medium complex tasks. Also we will see a lot more code with tricky bugs coming out of AI assistants and all of that needs to be maintained. If software development gets cheaper per line of code then there will be more demand. And someone has to clean up the mess created by people who have no clue whatsoever of SWE. Once upon a time people developed software with punch hole cards. Even without AI a developer today is orders of magnitude more proficient than that. The only thing I hope I am not going to see in my lifetime is real artificial intelligence.
• crassus_ed 9mo ago
  This was an amazing read! The entire thought of being so versatile as the article mentions is similar to the book Homo Deus by Harari. In my opinion we always needed to be versatile to stand any chance of being comfortable in these insanely rapid changing times.
• sanderjd 9mo ago
  > The flip scenario: AI unlocks massive demand for developers across every industry, not just tech. Healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and finance all start embedding software and automation. Rather than replacing developers, AI becomes a force multiplier that spreads development work into domains that never employed coders. We’d see more entry-level roles, just different ones: “AI-native” developers who quickly build automations and integrations for specific niches. This is what I expect to happen, but why would these entry-level roles be "developers". I think it's more likely that they will be roles that already exist in those industries, where the responsibilities include (or at least benefit from) effective use of AI tools. I think the upshot is that more people should probably be learning how to work in some specific domain while learning how to effectively use AI to automate tasks in that domain. (But I also thought this is how the previous iteration of "learn to code" should be directed, so maybe I just have a hammer and everything looks like a nail.) I think dedicated "pure tech" software where the domain is software rather than some other thing, is more likely to be concentrated in companies building all the infrastructure that is still being built to make this all work. That is, the models themselves and all the surrounding tools, and all the services and databases etc. that are used to orchestrate everything.
  • pphysch 9mo ago
    An AI-enabled developer is still a full-time job that requires SWE expertise. I think the quoted portion is correct, but it will be a gradual change as CTO/CIOs realize the arbitrage opportunity in replacing most of their crappy SaaS subscriptions with high-velocity in-house solutions. The savvy ones, at least.
    • sanderjd 9mo ago
      This is true if you want to build professional software. But what I foresee is a lot more tasks being accomplished with task-specific tools created by the people responsible for doing those tasks. Like how people use spreadsheets to get their jobs done, but with a much broader set of use cases. Once it is easier to just make almost anything yourself than it is to go through a process of expressing your requirements to a professional software development group and iterating on the results, that will be a popular choice.
• bjt12345 9mo ago
  I honestly think middle management will be where AI causes job cuts. In today's corporate environment, 70% of the costs are in management and admin muddlement, do we really think these "people skills" translate into anything useful in an AI economy? The junior devs have far more hope.
  • fogzen 9mo ago
    I agree. The lack of discussion about replacing middle-management with AI betrays the real politics of business. Middle-managers output exactly what LLMs do: chats, documents, summaries. Particularly working remotely. They don't even generate tickets/requirements – that's pushed to engineers and product people.
• kasane_teto 9mo ago
  Ah, time to drop out and shoot myself in the woods
• claytongulick 9mo ago
  One option that didn't seem to be discussed in TFA is turning away from AI. There's an implicit assumption in the article that the coding models are here to stay in development. It's possible that assumption is incorrect for multiple reasons. Maybe (as some research indicates) the models are as good as they are going to get. They're always going to be a cross between a chipper stochastic parrot and that ego inflated junior dev that refuses to admit a mistake. Maybe when the real (non-subsidized) economics present themselves, the benefit isn't there. Perhaps the industry segments itself to a degree. There's a big difference in tolerance for errors in a cat fart app and a nuclear cooling system. I can see a role for certified 100% AI free development. Maybe vibe coders go in one direction, with lower quality output but rapid TTM, but a segment of more highly skilled developers focus on AI free development. I also think it's possible that over time the AI hyper-productivity stuff is revealed to be mostly a mirage. My personal experience and a few studies seem to indicate this. The purported productivity boost is a result of confirmation bias and ridiculous metrics (like LOC generated) that have little to do with actual value creation. When the mirage fades, companies realize they are stuck with heaps of AI slop and no technical talent able to deal with it. A bitter lesson indeed. Since we're reading tea leaves, I think the most likely outcome is that the massive central models for code generation fade due to enormous costs and increased endpoint device capabilities. The past 50 years have shown us clearly that computing will always distribute, and centralized mainframe style compute gets pushed down to powerful local devices. I think it settles at an improved intellisense running locally. The real value of the "better search engine" that LLMs hold today reduces as hard economics drive up subscription fees and content is manipulated by sponsors (same thing that happened to the Google search results). For end users, I think the models get shoved into a box to do things they're really good at, like giving a much more intuitive human-computer interface, but structured data from that is handed off to a human developer to reason about, MCP will expand and become the glue. I think that over time market forces will balance between AI and human created content, with a premium placed on the latter. McDonalds vs a 5 star steakhouse.
  • godshatter 9mo ago
    >Maybe (as some research indicates) the models are as good as they are going to get. They're always going to be a cross between a chipper stochastic parrot and that ego inflated junior dev that refuses to admit a mistake. Maybe when the real (non-subsidized) economics present themselves, the benefit isn't there. I'd put my money on this. From my understanding of LLMs, they are basically mashing words together via markov chains and have added a little bit of subject classification with attention, a little bit of short-term memory, and enough grammar to lay things out correctly. They don't understand anything they are saying, they are not learning facts and trying to build connections between them, they are not learning from their conversations with people. They aren't even running the equivalent of a game loop where they can even think about things. I would expect something we're trying to call an AI to call you up sometimes and ask you questions. Trillions of dollars have got us this far, how far can it actually take us? I want my actual AI personal assistant that I have to coerce somehow into doing something for me like an emo teen.
• j_w 9mo ago
  > Demonstrate that one junior plus AI can match a small team’s output. I don't understand the take that a junior with AI is able to replace a small team. Maybe a horribly performing small team? Even then, wouldn't it just be logical to outfit the small team with AI and then have a small team of small teams? The alleged increased AI output of developers has yet to be realized. Individuals perceive themselves as having greatly increased output, but the market has not yet demonstrated that with more products (or competitors to existing products) and/or improved products.
• pier25 9mo ago
  Do companies hire less because of AI or try to rely more on AI because they can’t afford to hire? Tech layoffs have been happening even before LLMs.
• tom_m 9mo ago
  I don't know, we hired a junior developer and are about to hire another. Not sure it collapsed. I just think it's really hard to get a job across the board right now.
• jason_s 9mo ago
  > Senior developers: Position yourself as the guardian of quality and complexity. Agreed but it's not an easy charge to fulfill.
• Kate5477 9mo ago
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