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The consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
- jongjong 8mo agoPart of me feels like LLMs will struggle to architect code properly, no matter how good they get. Software engineering is different from programming. Other kinds of engineers often ridiculed software engineers as "not real engineers" because mainstream engineers never had to build arbitrarily complex software systems from scratch. They have never experienced the cascading issues which often happen when trying to make changes to complex software systems. Their brief exposure to programming during their university days gave them a glimpse into programming but not software engineering. They think they understand it but they don't. Other engineers think that they're the only ones wrestling with the laws of nature. They're wrong. Software engineering involves wrestling with entropy itself. In some ways, it's an even purer form of engineering. Software engineering struggles against the most fundamental forces and requires reasoning skills of the highest order. I think software engineers will be among the last of the white collar professions to be automated besides the ones which have legal protections like lawyers, judges, politicians, accountants, pilots... where a human is required to provide a layer of accountability. Though I think lawyers will be reduced to being "official human stamping machines" before software engineers are reduced to mere Product Owners.
- sebmellen 8mo agoBeautifully expressed… you missed doctors in your list of white collar professions, but I’m sure surgeons and pilots will outlive all of us from an AI resilience standpoint.
- jongjong 8mo agoAh yes 100%, doctors have legal moats too. It's kind of terrifying to think that all professions are going to have to shift away from value creation to pure politics to survive. I have a feeling that big tech companies will be legally forced to pay royalties to software engineers. Once software engineers stop applying their reasoning skills to solving real problems and start vengefully focusing it on politics, we're going to corrupt the whole system in our favor. We have enough collective knowledge to frame such corruption as moral in the context of an already corrupt system. Either software engineers will create regulatory moats for themselves or there will be a more broad political movement like communism. I've met many people working deep in the critical systems which underpin our society who are full-blown communists.
- whattheheckheck 8mo agoOpenclaw as your own person political advisor is pretty cool
- linkregister 8mo agoSoftware engineering as a field has exceptionally low worker solidarity. This is largely because the talent and productivity is so stratified that even the median engineer produces an order of magnitude less value than the p95. Furthermore, a sufficient amount of opportunities exist —for engineers to become capitalists by founding, joining, or investing in an enterprise early enough to capture its upside— to credibly convince individuals that they may achieve this. Software engineers in aggregate will happily automate themselves out of a job. Legal cartels like the AMA and the ABA will persist. It would take years of strong threats to software engineers' livelihoods to compel them to support a cartel of their own. Even the first step for their regulatory capture, credentialization, is rejected, as enough autodidacts without degrees practice in the field. Essentially, too many software engineers view themselves as temporary embarrassed millionaires, rather than workers who need to band together. Automation in the field is happening faster than individuals' minds will change.
- Swizec 8mo ago> Though I think lawyers will be reduced to being "official human stamping machines" before software engineers are reduced to mere Product Owners GeLLMan Amnesia – AI can fully automate every profession except the ones I’m deeply familiar with. I’m a software engineer who wears the product owner hat a lot these days, there’s no way AI will automate this any time soon. Too much peopling and accountability.
- Herring 8mo agoDon't be so sure about that. These days I'm already finding it 100x easier/informative to have complicated charged discussions (eg immigration) with Gemini than with actual people. It's day and night. Accountability might be solvable too, maybe escrow and pay me if you waste my time. Or amazon-like reviews.
- Aurornis 8mo ago> These days I'm already finding it 100x easier/informative to have complicated charged discussions (eg immigration) with Gemini than with actual people. It’s scary how quickly people start to mistake LLMs appeasing them for actual conversation. Discussing something with an LLM isn’t equivalent to having a conversation with a person. It’s just a text generator trained to show you what you want to see.
- Herring 8mo agoDon't assume everyone is like you. I'm an early adopter and I know how to scaffold it. I generally love the bleeding edge in all things, and I'm increasingly sure it's an actual talent to be able to quickly adapt to unfamiliar things (this includes not making assumptions).
- paulryanrogers 8mo agoWhat do you feel like you get out of discussions with Gemini about politically charged topics like immigration?
- metadat 8mo agoWith the requisite planning steps Codex and Claude are already coming up with better architecture and design than I can. I've been doing this for more than 25 years.
- whattheheckheck 8mo agoWhat's the most complicated thing its designed so far for you
- Herring 8mo agoNot that guy, but for me it's something like Tensorflow/Pytorch. A domain-specific language for a scientific application, Python API with a Rust core for very fast/safe calculations. It has all kinds of bells & whistles you'd want, like automatic differentiation, lazy evaluation, provenance, serialization, etc. Occasionally dips down to raw pointer work too. It's easy to test, so AI excels at this type of thing.
- _se 8mo agoBrother, you are just outing yourself as being incompetent here. That is embarrassing.
- kalessin 8mo agoI like the idea of "cognitive debt" vs "technical debt".
- evmar 8mo agoThe term he’s searching for is possibly “intellectual control”: https://www.georgefairbanks.com/ieee-software-v36-n1-jan-2019-intellectual-control https://www.georgefairbanks.com/ieee-software-v36-n1-jan-201...
- themafia 8mo ago> a third of them were instantly converted to being very pro-LLM. That suggests that practical experience I wasn't aware one could get 'practical experience' "instantly." I would assume that their instant change of heart owes more to other factors. Perhaps concern over the source of their next paycheck? You have admitted you just "forced" them to do this. Isn't the question then, why didn't they do it before? Shouldn't you answer that before you prognosticate? > that junior developers will still be needed, if nothing else because they are open-minded about LLMs You're broadcasting, to me, that you understand all of the above perfectly, yet instead of acknowledging it, you're planning on taking advantage of it. > I think the equivalent of cruft is ignorance Exceedingly ironic. > Will two-pizza teams shrink to one-pizza teams The language you use to describe work, workers, and overcoming challenges are too depressing to continue. You have become everything we hated about this profession.
- simonw 8mo agoIf you haven't experenced a post-November-2025 coding agent before and someone coaches you through how to one-shot prompt it into solving a difficult problem in your own codebase that you are deeply familiar with I can see how you might be an almost instant convert. (Based on your comment history I'm guessing you haven't experienced this yourself yet.)
- habinero 8mo agoI have literally heard this exact vague phrase about every single stupid model that has come out, plus more than a few companies. So far it's all been endless unfounded FOMO hype by people who have something to sell or podcasts to be on. I am so tired of it.
- simonw 8mo agoAsk around and see if you can find anyone you know who's experienced the November 2025 effect. Claude Code / Codex with GPT-5.1+ or Opus 4.5+ really did make a material difference - they flipped the script from "can write code that often works" to "can write code that almost always works". I know you'll dismiss that as the same old crap you've heard before, but it's pretty widely observed now.
- simonw 8mo agoThis cognitive debt bit from the linked article by Margaret-Anne Storey at https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ is fantastic: > But by weeks 7 or 8, one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. When I met with them, the team initially blamed technical debt: messy code, poor architecture, hurried implementations. But as we dug deeper, the real problem emerged: no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The code might have been messy, but the bigger issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.
- appplication 8mo agoThis was essentially my experience vibe coding a web app. I got great results initially and made it quite far quickly but over time velocity exponentially slowed due to exactly this cognitive debt. Took my time and did a ground up rewrite manually and made way faster progress and a much more stable app. You could argue LLMs let me learn enough about the product I was trying to build that the second rewrite was faster and better informed, and that’s probably true to some degree, but it also was quite a few weeks down the drain.
- Mavvie 8mo agoThat makes sense, but surely there's a middle ground somewhere between "AI does everything including architecture" and writing everything by hand?
- r_lee 8mo agoI think the sweet spot is to make the initial stuff yourself and then extend or modify somewhat with LLMs it acts as a guide for the LLM too, so it doesn't have to just come up with everything on its own in terms of style or design choices in terms of consistency I'd say?
- phren0logy 8mo agoI'm not a coder, I'm a medical doctor. I see some interesting parallels in how medical students sort themselves into specialties by cognitive style to this new rift in programming with LLMs. Some people like the deep work, some like managing a steady rain of chaos. There's no one right answer. But I'll tell you that my classmates who are happy as nephrologists are very different to the ones that are happy as transplant surgeons.
- sebmellen 8mo agoBy that token, I’m curious to know what your specialty is and why you chose it.
- wittlesus 8mo ago[dead]
- kittbuilds 8mo ago[dead]
- tomsmithtld 8mo agothe cognitive debt framing clicks for me. I've been using claude code on a laravel project and the thing that actually keeps velocity up isn't the AI getting better, it's me writing tests first. sounds boring but when the LLM generates code against an existing test suite it basically has to follow your architecture. you keep the mental model because you wrote the tests, and the AI keeps the codebase coherent because it has concrete constraints to work against. without that the codebase drifts into this weird state where technically everything works but you can't reason about any of it.
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoIf after 7 or 8 weeks you can’t change the software, it’s wise to start putting tests in to document retroactively how things work / worked and why. The more the test suite grows, the more you & future agents will be able to consult it to understand how things should work - but also, why. Imagine a test case that covers some non-compliant API response from a third party. The commit that’s tied to, the date the test was added, all that becomes metadata.. and the fact it’s executable means your agent can’t undo that fix without something very visible in the PR.