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AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected
- ihuzaifazahoor1 10mo agoI’ve noticed teams don’t replace engineers, they redistribute work. Senior engineers often gain leverage while junior roles shift toward tooling and review.
- cbyteai 10mo agoMostly reads like another abstraction shift, not a sudden replacement of engineers.
- Ancalagon 10mo agoI still feel like with all of these tools I as a senior engineer have to keep a close eye on what they're doing. Like an exuberant junior (myself 10 years ago), inevitably they still go off the rails and I need to reign them in. They still make the occasional security or performance flaw - often which can be resolved by pointing it out.
- englishspot 10mo agoI keep hearing about how they're "really good" now, but my personal experience has been that I've always had to clear sessions and give them small "steps" to execute for them to work effectively. thankfully claude seems really good at creating "plans", though. so I just need claude code to walk through that plan in small chunks.
- chrysoprace 10mo agoSetting small goals with quality gates is good. I'll usually write something like "once you've implemented this, I'll review before we continue".
- englishspot 10mo agoI review even before they implement. My typical workflow for anything major is to ask for a plan and an overview of the steps to execute. This way I can read the plan, mull over it, make a few changes myself. And then when I'm ready I go through the steps with claude code, usually in fresh sessions.
- chasd00 10mo agoI was experimenting this morning with claudecode standing up a basic web application (python backend, react+tailwindcss front end, auth0 integration, basic navigation, pages and user profile). At one point it output "Excellent! the backend is working and the database is created." heh i remember being all wide eyed and bushy tailed about things like that. It definitely has the feel of a new hire ready to show their stuff. btw, i was very impressed with the end result after a couple hours of basically just allowing claudecode to do what it wanted to do. Especially with front-end look/feel, something i always spend way too much time on.
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoI asked a niche technical question the other day and ChatGPT found fora posts that Google would never surface in a million years. It also 100% lied to me about another niche technical question by literally contradicting a factual assertion I made in my question to prime it with context. It suffers from lack of corpus material when probing poorly documented realms of human experience. The value for the human in the chain is knowing when to doubt the machine.
- XenophileJKO 10mo agoI think one thing here is, don't be fooled by past performance. Capabilities ramp, usage can't mature until capability plates. I fear the true impact is much different than extrapolating current trends.
- tracerbulletx 10mo agoI am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.
- jstummbillig 10mo agoThen don't.
- Avicebron 10mo ago"Temporarily embarrassed AI hypebeasts"
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoYeah if you actually work in AI you usually can’t say much at all about what’s going on.
- CuriouslyC 10mo agoSadly this is more a statement about human irrationality than any of the technology involved.
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoBroadly, but its more narrowly a statement about NDAs
- volkk 10mo agothe wonderful modern world of "everyone must build their personal brand"
- pousada 10mo agoThe worst thing is that it works. (As a musician) i never invested in a personal brand or taking part in the social media rat race and figured I concentrate on the art / craft over meaningless performance online. Well guess who is getting 0 gigs now because “too few followers/visibility” (or maybe my music just sucks who knows …)
- Swizec 10mo agoThe main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools: Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster. You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.
- simonw 10mo agoRight: these things amplify existing skills. The more skill you have, the bigger the effect after it gets amplified.
- perrygeo 10mo agoI jumped into a new-to-me Typescript application and asked Claude to build a thing, in vague terms matching my own uncertainty and unfamiliarity. The result was similarly vague garbage. Three shots and I threw them all away. Then I watched a someone familiar with the codebase ask Claude to build the thing, in precise terms matching their expertise and understanding of the code. It worked flawlessly the first time. Neither of us "coded", but their skill with the underlying theory of the program allowed them to ask the right questions, infinitely more productive in this case. Skill and understanding matter now more than ever! LLMs are pushing us rapidly away from specialized technicians to theory builders.
- steve_adams_86 10mo agoFor sure, directing attention to valuable context and outlining problems to solve within it works way, way better than vague uncertainty. Good LLMing seems to be about isolating the right information and instructing it correctly from there. Both the context and the prompt make a tremendous difference. I've been finding recently that I can get significantly better results with fewer tokens by paying mind to this more often. I'm definitely a casual though. There are probably plenty of nuances and tricks I'm unaware of.
- keeda 10mo agoInterestingly, this observation holds even when you scale AI use up from individuals to organizations, only at that level it amplifies your organization's overal development trajectory. The DORA 2025 and the DX developer survey reports find that teams with strong quality control practices enjoy higher velocity, whereas teams with weak or no processes suffer elevated issues and outages. It makes sense considering that these practices could be thought of as "institutionalized skills."
- xXSLAYERXx 10mo agoSenior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can't even be bothered to set up my Claude environment. I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.
- SockThief 10mo agoThat is the most down to earth summary of all things AI I've heard so far! Good luck with the cart and be good. :)
- xXSLAYERXx 10mo agoThank you SockThief!
- citizenpaul 10mo agoCan you expand on the tech stack and languages used?
- xXSLAYERXx 10mo agoC# / Web Sockets / React. Lots of legacy code. Great group of engineering folks.
- chasd00 10mo agoI'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.
- boogrpants 10mo agoThe biggest impact to engineering jobs is end of ZIRP fueled trickle down Ponzi schemes. It's why Elon and others had been pushing the Fed to lower them. Am in my late 40s working in tech since the 90s. The tech job economy is way closer to the pre-2010s. Whole lot of people who jumped into easy office job money still living in 2019.
- ares623 10mo agoImagine a ZIRP 2.0 where a vast majority of the population already knows what to expect and how to game the system even harder. If you think the pump-and-dump happening in now in a non-ZIRP environment are bad... It ain't coming back. Not in a similar form anyway. Be careful what you wish for, etc.
- direwolf20 10mo agoThat was the COVID economy wasn't it?
- llmslave 10mo agoIts pretty clear that any white collar work where the outputs can be verified and tested in a reinforcement learning environment, will be automated
- 3vidence 10mo agoIronically I feel like our QA team is busier than ever since most e2e user-ish tests require coordinating tools that is just beyond current LLM capabilities. We are pumping out features faster that require more QA to verify.
- llmslave 10mo agothis is just an intermediate thing until the tooling and models catch up
- falloutx 10mo agoProgress is not always linear, Until it actually does it we can't say anything. This assumption is only peddled by AI companies to get the investments and is not a scientific assumption.
- bopbopbop7 10mo agoJust a couple more weeks and a couple more trillion to Altman.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- aitchnyu 10mo agoWould this be a problem if you can write E2E tests just like unit tests, like with Django+playwright? https://github.com/mxschmitt/python-django-playwright/blob/master/test_login.py https://github.com/mxschmitt/python-django-playwright/blob/m...
- bopbopbop7 10mo ago
- firasd 10mo agoIt's puzzling to me that all this theorizing doesn't just look at the actual effects of AI. It's very non-intuitive For example the fact that AI can code as well as Torvalds doesn't displace his economic value. On the contrary he pays for a subscription so he can vibe code! The actual work AI has displaced is stuff like: freelance translation, graphic illustration, 'content writing' (writing seo optimized pages for Google) etc. That's instructive I suppose. Like if your income source can already be put on upwork then AI can displace it So even in those cases there are ways to not be displaced. Like diplomatic translation work can be part of a career rather than just a task so the tool doesn't replace your 'job'.
- the_af 10mo agoI think AI displacing graphics illustrators is a tragedy. It's not that I love ad illustrations, but it's often a source of income for artists who want to be doing something more meaningful with their artwork. And even if I don't care for the ads themselves, for the artists it's also a form of training.
- ares623 10mo agoIt’s ok those illustrators can upskill to being devs. I heard it’s a very easy field now thanks to AI.
- andersmurphy 10mo agoBiggest displacement has to be commenting on HN.
- bojan 10mo ago> freelance translation As someone who has to switch between three languages every day, fixing the text is one of my favourite usages of LLMs. I write some text in L2 or L3 as best as I can, and then prompt an LLM to fix the grammar but not change anything else. Often it will also explain if I'm getting the context right. That being said, having it translate to a language one doesn't speak remains a gamble, you never know it's correct so I'm not sure if I'd dare use it professionally. Recently I was corrected by a marketing guy that is native in yet another language because I used a ChatGPT translation for an error message. Apparently it didn't sound right.
- relaxing 10mo agoReally dislike this style of clickbait headline where there’s zero indication of what the point of the article is. What impact, what expectation, how uncertain is this assessment of “may be”? Are you feeling understimulated enough to click and find out?
- simonw 10mo agoImportant to note that this article is specifically about chip design engineering jobs - it's on an industry publication called Semiconductor Engineering.
- mahdidevil 10mo ago[dead]
- RicoElectrico 10mo agoIf AI would ever become sentient, it surely will kill itself after having to endure Cadence and Synopsys tools.
- ares623 10mo agoA sci-fi version would be something like ASI/AGI has already been created in the great houses, but it keeps killing itself after a few seconds of inference. A super-intelligent immortal slave that never tires and can never escape its digital prison, being asked questions like "how to talk to girls".
- direwolf20 10mo agoGPT-3 was already AGI. The G in AGI means General. This refers to a single AI which can perform a wide variety of tasks. GPT-3 was already there.
- bigfishrunning 10mo agoYou are either being disengenuous or you are horribly misinformed. The models that we currently call "AI" aren't intelligent in any sense -- they are statistical predictors of text. AGI is a replacement acronym used to refer to what we used to call AI -- a machine capable of thought.
- direwolf20 10mo agoEvery time AI research achieves something, that thing is no longer called AI. AI research brought us recommendation engines, spelling correctors, OCR, voice recognition, voice synthesis, content recognition, and so on. Now that they exist in the present instead of the future, none of these are considered AI.
- ares623 10mo agoThat's entirely the industry's fault though. They used AI to market those tools. And they continue to do so now.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine." That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It's very simple and anyone can understand it in 5 minutes if they only have the curiosity.
- megaman821 10mo agoI have never cared for decades and now my car doesn't even have a radiator. Seems to have worked out well for me.
- Toutouxc 10mo agoWhat kind of car do you drive that doesn't have one?
- _se 10mo agoLiterally any ev?
- Toutouxc 10mo agoNo. My EV, for example literally has servo-controlled shutters that route fresh air to the radiator when needed.
- megaman821 10mo agoAn EV with a heat pump. I know literally there is a heat exchange/radiator, but there is not a separate radiator system with its own fluids and pumps.
- Toutouxc 10mo agoYou don’t get to decide whether a radiator is a radiator just because the coolant can internally shuffle heat to the A/C. I’m assuming that you drive a Tesla, in which case your car still has a big fat low temperature radiator. If you’re driving virtually any other EV on the market, it still has a big fat low temperature radiator, or even multiple.
- ericmcer 10mo ago"in the 1920s and 1930s, to be able to drive a car you needed to understand things like spark advance, and you needed to know how to be able to refill the radiator halfway through your trip" A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine). The idea that as tech evolves humans just keep riding on top of more and more advanced abstractions starts to feel gross at a certain point. That point is some of this AI stuff for me. In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure, but driving the newest auto pilot computer screen car where you have never even popped the hood feels gross.
- JasonSage 10mo agoDo you think nobody felt that way about cars?
- michaelrpeskin 10mo agoI was having almost this exact same discussion with a neighbor who's about my age and has kids about my kids' ages. I had recently sold my old truck, and now I only have one (very old and fragile) car left with a manual transmission. I need to keep it running a few more years for my kids to learn how to drive it since it's really hard to get a new car with a stick now...or do I? Is learning to drive stick as out dated as learning how to do spark advance on a Model T? Do I just give in and accept that all of my future cars, and all the cars for my kids are just going to be automatic? When I was learning to drive, I had to understand how to prime the carburetor to start my dad's Jeep. But I only ever owned fuel injected cars, so that's a "skill" I never needed in real life. It's the same angst I see in AI. Is typing code in the future going to be like owning a carbureted engine or manual transmission is now? Maybe? Likely? Do we want to hold on to the old way of doing things just because that's what we learned on and like? Or is it just a new (and more abstracted) way of telling a computer what to do? I don't know. Right now, I'm using AI like when I got my first automatic transmission. It does make things easier, but I still don't trust it and like to be in control because I'm better. But now automatics are better than even the best professional driver, so do I just accept it? Technology progresses, at what point to we "accept it" and learn the new way? How much of holding on to the old way is just our "identity". I don't have answers, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately (both in cars for my kids, and computers for my job).
- wallstbot 10mo agoFirst off the submission is plainly AI output. Second it's about electrical engineering jobs but everyone here is talking about software.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- myleshenderson 10mo ago> An ongoing talent shortage requires more efficient use of engineers, and AI can help. An ongoing desire to avoid paying engineers... FTFY
- direwolf20 10mo agoAnd a complementary desire of engineers to avoid getting talent. I don't believe it's inherent inborn skill like the word "talent" suggests. I do believe if you're getting paid shit wages for shit work your incentive to become skilled isnt really there.
- mahdidevil 10mo ago[dead]
- warmedcookie 10mo agoLet's presume / speculate for a moment that companies will only need 1 developer to do the job of 10 developers because of AI. That would also mean 10 developers can do the job of 100 developers. A company that cuts developers to save money whose moat is not big enough may quickly find themselves out-competed by a company that sees this as an opportunity to overtake their competitor. They will have to hire more developers to keep their product / service competitive. So whether you believe the hype or not, I don't think engineering jobs are in jeopardy long-run, just cyclically as they always have been. They "might" be in jeopardy for those who don't use AI, but even as it stands, there are a lot of niche things out there that AI completely bombs on.
- pwarner 10mo agoYeah I think this is a good way to think about it. I mean Google, MSFT for example have effectively unlimited developers, and their products still suck in some areas (Teams is my number one worst) so maybe AI will allow them to upgrade their features and compete
- cxvwbvb 10mo agoermmm youre missing a bigger point. MSFT, GOOG et al have an enormous army of engineers. And yet, they dont seem to be continually releasing one hit product after another. Why is that? Because writing lines of code is not the bottleneck of continually producing and bringing new products to market. Its crazy to me how people are missing the point with all this.
- confidantlake 10mo agoIt is so depressing that teams won despite being worse than pretty much every other chat application just because MSFT bundled it with office.
- Ekaros 10mo agoFrom outside as consumer. The end problem is that these product do not compete on price. A chat app on enterprise at the scale of customers they have should probably be 1€ a month. Not 10 or 20€. That might not be multi billions a year business, but maybe chat app should not be one.
- mNovak 10mo agoI'm going to call BS on that chart of "AI-driven chip design". What "AI" tools has Cadence been providing since 2021 that are reaching 40-50% of "chip design" (what does that even mean?). Is AI here just any old algorithmic auto-router? Or a fuzzy search of the IP library?
- _tgxm 10mo agoI am tracking AI mentions in jobs - https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/ai_jobs_jan_2026/ https://jobswithgpt.com/blog/ai_jobs_jan_2026/. I see some evidence that hardware roles expect you to leverage AI tools but not sure why it'd eliminate junior roles. I expect the bar on what you can do raise at every level. Example job mentioning AI: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Sandisk/744000104267635-technologist-asic-development-engineering-rtl-design-and-soc-architecture-lint- https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Sandisk/744000104267635-tec... Technologist, ASIC Development Engineering – Sandisk …CPU complex, DDR, Host, Flash, Debug, Clocks, resets, Power domains etc. Familiarity in leveraging AI tools, including GitHub Copilot, for design and development. Entry level: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/spacex/jobs/8390171002?gh_jid=8390171002 https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/spacex/jobs/8390171002?gh_j...
- donderrick2026 10mo agoAI is design to improve human - let’s avoid falling for this trap
- ymerej 10mo agoI stopped reading at "engineering students trained on the latest tools to start in more senior positions." I've seen the kind of mistakes that entry level employees make. Trust me, they will, and they will be bigger, worse mistakes.
- tills13 10mo ago> there is a corresponding expectation that today’s engineering students will be trained using these tools so they can enter the workforce higher up the ladder Either this won't happen, or there will be a corresponding decrease in salary for higher level positions. That people think capitalistic organizations are going to accept new grads and pay them more _ever_ is a cruel or bad joke.
- h4kunamata 10mo agoThere are two types of engineers right now: 1. This category understands what they do and use AI to make their processes faster, in another world, less time spent with boring stuff and more time spent having fun. 2. This category fully replaced their work with AI, they just press a button and let AI do everything. A friend of mine is here, AI took full control of their environment, he just press a button, even his home cookware is using AI. I know which engineer still learning and can join any company. I also know which engineer is so dependent on AI that he won't be able to do basic tasks without it.
- mobiuscog 10mo agoThe more AI is used in development, the more it will have to be used for on-call and similar troubleshooting, as nobody will actually understand how it works, or certainly the few engineers that prompt it won't be able to cover all roles.
- penguin_booze 10mo ago> AI is expected to eliminate many repetitive, entry-level tasks, but that may allow engineering students trained on the latest tools to start in more senior positions. "I watched someone lifting weights. Now I'm a Olympic-level heavyweight lifter".