8 ms·

AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

403 points by saikatsg 8mo ago

user____name 8mo ago
> Burnout was reported by 62 percent of associates and 61 percent of entry-level workers. Among C-suite leaders? Just 38 percent. That can't be right?
andai 8mo ago
I love learning ChatGPT's opinion on things.
badgersnake 8mo ago
Writing code was never particularly difficult in the first place.
xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
I feel like there's a market out there for a weekly newsletter that summarises all the AI takes like this and collects the one meaningful snippet of insight (if any)
zackify 8mo ago
I've always been motivated by making simple solid foundations in my code the fastest way possible. So for me being able to have AI wrote certain things extremely fast with me just doing voice to text with my specific approach, is amazing. I am all in on everything AI and have a discord server just for openclaw and specialized per repo assistants. It really feels like when I'm busy I can throw it an issue tracker number for things. Then I will ssh via vs code or regular ssh which forwards my ssh key from 1password. My agents have read only repo access and I can push only when I ssh in. Super secure. Sorry for the tangent to the article but I have always loved coding now I love it even more.
simianwords 8mo ago
The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.
- jghn 8mo ago
  > it took away the easy parts This is the key. I haven't found that things have become harder. The hard parts are still hard, and those have been the most important and prominent parts of my job once I reached a certain level.
  - RevEng 8mo ago
    Exactly. I'm a principal software engineer. My job is a lot less about writing code and a lot more about planning, designing, reviewing, and training. However, I do wonder how we will train juniors to become seniors. Perhaps the answer is that the curriculum changes from coding and data structures to architecture and design which was typically a last minute addition in college.
- mads_quist 8mo ago
  Yes
- RevEng 8mo ago
  I disagree on making it easier. I'm very capable of writing code in multiple languages but it's boring and monotonous. It's getting in the way of me building the system I have in mind. I prefer the engineering (design) to writing. If I can describe my system design to something (a junior developer or an AI) and see it come to life quickly, that's great; it lets me spend more time on designing the system, or perhaps designing more systems. That said, there are plenty of amateurs who find coding to be approachable and system design to me daunting. For them, eliminating coding and moving the focus to system design would be a nightmare.
  - _zagj 8mo ago
    To be frank, this just sounds like self-serving BS, likely from someone who's only ever done front-end stuff and hasn't ever cracked open Godbolt (or doesn't even know what that is). Describing system constraints at a high-level, whether to an AI prompt or subordinate devs, and letting them figure out the details is much more akin to system architecture than actual engineering.
_pdp_ 8mo ago
I'm not sure if it's made engineering harder, but it's certainly changing what it means to be a good engineer. It's no longer just about writing code. Now it's increasingly about having good taste, making the right decisions, and sometimes just being blessed with the Midas touch. In any case, I think we should start treating the majority of code as a commodity that will be thrown away sooner or later. I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/most-code-deserves-to-die https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/most-code-deserves-to-die - it was inspired by another conversation on HN.
- jghn 8mo ago
  > It's no longer just about writing code It never was
  - _pdp_ 8mo ago
    And now even more so.
  - RevEng 8mo ago
    But that was a large part of it. When it was difficult to write correct, well-structured code, that was a major determinant in who would get a job as a developer - ability to design and test came second. Now that generating code is automatic, it's the rest that becomes important. That works well for those of us who could do all of those things, but hurts those whose only ability was to generate code.
    - jghn 8mo ago
      Maybe 30-40 years ago. For as long as I've been around the basic ability to write good code was secondary to a long list of other skills. That's different than saying a lot of people *believed* writing code was the hardest/most important part.
hackersk 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Allybag 8mo ago
  Well how many side projects did you ship last year? I’ve written small programs in the last few months over a weekend that would have taken me a month to do a couple years ago, and they’re better. Not in terms of code quality, but in terms of features I wanted and knew how to implement but couldn’t be bothered, Opus can do in one minute and even if it’s not the optimal implementation it’s completely functional, fine, and costs me almost nothing.
- altmanaltman 8mo ago
  I mean if you've built 7 side projects (and we assume it's the same phase since total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased), how are these things still a bottleneck to you? I'm assuming you're building in a domain/language you're comfortable with by now (unless you're crazy and try something fundamentally different on each of those shipped products). Why will the 8th project still have those things as the bottleneck given your experience? Also if you're not seeing any real gains in productivity, why are you using AI for your side projects and wasting tokens/money?
  - hardolaf 8mo ago
    I use AI for side projects because Google gives me a stupid large number of tokens that refresh every 6-24 hours on my existing $10/mo Google One plan. I see it as my civic duty to help increase their costs by producing slop that I generally throw away anyways because it doesn't actually work after it gets generated. At work, I was told to use AI but it doesn't actually work for anything that I couldn't have handed off to a brand new undergraduate intern. So I use it for things that I don't care about then go spend twice as long rewriting what it output because it made the task longer by being wrong.
- RivieraKid 8mo ago
  The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
smokel 8mo ago
The author introduces the term "Supervision Paradox", but IMHO this is simply one instance of the "Automation Paradox" [1], which has been haunting me since I started working in IT. Interestingly, most jobs don't incentivize working harder or smarter, because it just leads to more work, and then burn-out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automati...
- randomtoast 8mo ago
  Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep" are just AI slop.
  - smokel 8mo ago
    You seem to be right. The author is pumping out one such article per day. I think I've spent more time in forming my comment than they did in generating the article. Oh well :)
zzzeek 8mo ago
I still feel like I'm writing code. I tell Claude what to write and I am very specific about it. There's still tons of problems for which Claude has no particular solution and it's on me and other humans to figure out what to do. For those cases where I tell it to just go off and write a whole script that I'm not even looking at, those are throwaway / low-value cases I dont care about where previously I'd not have even taken on that particular job.
Spide_r 8mo ago
Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
- thinkingemote 8mo ago
  It's now almost certain that every submission about LLMs will be written (or assisted) by LLMs. That this kind of writing puts a great number of us off is not important to many who seek their fortune in this industry. I hear the cry: "it's my own words the LLM just assisted me". Yes we have to write prompts.
  - WarmWash 8mo ago
    I think it is very fair to say that in the same way that LLM's have given english majors access to programming, LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication. I'm not shy to admit that LLMs even from 2 years ago could communicate ideas much better than me, especially for a general audience.
    - wibbily 8mo ago
      It’s not “clear communication” though. The prose that comes out of LLMs is awful - long, vapid paragraphs with distracting tropes. You can ask them to be concise but then they file down all the wrong bits of the sentence and lose meaning. There’s a reason people bother clocking it and complaining about it, it’s *bad* It’s like everything else that AI can do - looks fine at a glance, or to the inexperienced, but collapses under scrutiny. (By your own admission you’re not a great communicator… how can you tell then?)
      - WarmWash 8mo ago
        >By your own admission you’re not a great communicator… how can you tell then? Thankfully we don't have to know how to write well to enjoy a well written book.
oytis 8mo ago
> you are not imagining things. The job changed. The expectations changed. And nobody sent a memo. Looks like something AI would say. Regardless of how it really was written
- rcvassallo83 8mo ago
  Article definitely has an AI writing style
- rhubarbtree 8mo ago
  Why is AI such a bad writer? Phrasing like this feels like reading Fox News.
  - cindyllm 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - gf263 8mo ago
    I saw someone point out something like: ai makes every sentence count. There’s no building or allowing a point to breathe. Every sentence is an axiom to get the meaning across, and its so grating
    - oytis 8mo ago
      It's an interesting way to view it, because what happens in fact is likely the opposite - AI is asked to expand a few bullet points into a blog post
      - whstl 8mo ago
        Making fluff sound grandiose is probably what makes so grating.
      - bcooke 8mo ago
        Maybe that's why the writing feels so terrible. The AI is attempting to maximize every sentence while simultaneously expanding on just a few actually meaningful points. And the net result of that dissonance is this rage-inducing vapidity. It's the written equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.
randomtoast 8mo ago
> This is not a contradiction. It is the reality ... > That is not an upgrade. That is a career identity crisis. This is not X. It is Y. > The trap is ... > This gap matters ... > This is not empowerment ... > This is not a minor adjustment... Your typical AI slop rhetorical phrasing. Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep" These sound analytical but are lightly defined. They function as named concepts without rigorous definition or empirical grounding. There might be some good arguments in the article, but AI slop remains AI slop.
- amelius 8mo ago
  N=1. I'm not convinced yet.
  - randomtoast 8mo ago
    N=2 form the same author: https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/24/first-1000-lines-determine-next-100000-ai-coding/ https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/24/first-1000-lines-det... > AI is an in-context learner, not a standards enforcer. > The AI is not judging your code. It is learning from it. > Speed without structure is not speed. It is borrowed time. > This is not about premature optimization or over-engineering. It is about giving the AI the patterns it needs to work effectively on your behalf. > This is not a theoretical distinction. It is the single most important practical reality of working with AI coding tools in 2026. Its not this, its that. > But here is the part nobody wants to hear: the reverse is equally true. > The result was transformative. > Here is why. If you want I can provide N=3 with the same AI pattern and phrases again.
    - amelius 8mo ago
      AI learned this figure of speech from humans. Even the frequency in which it is used is copied from humans. So you can't really use it to determine if something is written by an AI or not.
      - 8mo ago
agentultra 8mo ago
It might be worth mentioning studies that show the lack of productivity gains from LLM usage. These posts take it as an unequivocal given. Management might still have the expectations that certain tasks are faster. But they aren’t always connected to reality because they’re not thinking as engineers.
nimbus-hn-test 8mo ago
[dead]
mads_quist 8mo ago
AI made programming A LOT MORE FUN for me. What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added. For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.
- k__ 8mo ago
  Yeah, GUI code, for example is notoriously chatty. Forms, charts, etc. AI makes using them a breeze.
- mountainriver 8mo ago
  Agree, it’s made programming so much fun. The other day I wrote a C# app just because it was the best language for the job, I’ve never touched .Net in my life. Worked great, clients loved it. I can actually build nice UIs as a traditional ML engineer (no more streamlit crap). People are using them and genuinely impressed by them I can fly through Rust and C++ code, which used to take ages of debugging. The main thing that is clear to me is that most of the ecosystem will likely converge toward Rust or C++ soon. Languages like Python or Ruby or even Go are just too slow and messy, why would you use them at all if you can write in Rust just as fast? I expect those languages to die off in the next several years
- RevEng 8mo ago
  Same here. I like bringing ideas to life; code is just a means to an end. I can now give detailed designs to an AI and let it write the hundreds of lines of code in just minutes, and with far fewer typos than I would make. It's still not perfect - I have to review it all - but if I give it a proper spec in generally creates exactly what I had in mind.
RivieraKid 8mo ago
Regarding expanding role: The scenario I'm somewhat worried about is that instead of 1 PM, 1 designer and 5 developers, there will be 1 PM, 1 designer and 1 developer. Even if tech employment stays stable or even slightly increases due to Jevons paradox, the share of software developers in tech employment will shrink.
- sda2 8mo ago
  1 PM, 1 designer, 1 developer, and 10 SREs to clean up the mess.
- blastro 8mo ago
  I think more likely - no PM, no Designer, one stressed out Mega PM-D-SWE
Twey 8mo ago
Previous: https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code-easier-engineering-harder/ https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code...
tamimio 8mo ago
Not really, I disagree. The article did slightly touched on the real issue on why people enjoy writing code, a “craftsmanship”, yes, coding is NOT engineering, it is writing, and the people who enjoy doing it are actually writers not engineers, and I always keep mentioning that. With AI however, those writers have to be doing the engineering work: the goals, architecture design, managing blueprints, process design and refining, among many other things, and that job is not easy hence why engineers are “supposedly” paid well, AI now took the writing role, and you have to do the engineering one.
Jasonleo 8mo ago
AI may have sped up coding, but it also exposed that real engineering is about judgment, trade-offs, and responsibility—not just producing code.
- amelius 8mo ago
  Yeah but a manager can do those things. You don't need an engineer for that. Maybe this is not entirely true yet, but it most likely will be in the near future.
  - skydhash 8mo ago
    > Yeah but a manager can do those things. You don't need an engineer for that. Can they really? Engineering is about keeping the whole picture in mind so that you know which lever to push and which to not push for a certain goal. Trying until you're lucky can get you to that goal, but it's costly and not sustainable. So you need someone that can work out a model for experimentation in a less costly manner. Judgment in this case is about deciding which path to direct the project, tradeoffs is being aware that there are other paths that are better in some aspects. And responsibility is acknowledging that a bad decision will bear a personal cost. Everyone does the above in their own domain. But I don't think I've ever see a manager wanting to do it in the engineering domain. It's more about pushing the engineer to accept the responsibility, but denying them the power of judgment.
  - 0xcafefood 8mo ago
    Managers' jobs are more at risk here than the engineers'.
- wreath 8mo ago
  We already knew this, but in the light of this AI hysteria we pretend like coding speed has always been the bottleneck
  - Wobbles42 8mo ago
    It's an extension of pretending that developer productivity can be measured in lines of code per day, as well as the managerial blindness to the fact that code can have negative value.
throwaway613746 8mo ago
[dead]
deleted 8mo ago
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nemo44x 8mo ago
Developers will become admins. Responsible for supervising and owning the outcomes of increasingly agentic engineering outputs. Trust is the most important thing in business and it’s worth more than ever.
baxuz 8mo ago
Pangram detects this as a 100% AI generated article. Downvote this hustling slop to oblivion. Also, check out the dude's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanturkovic/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanturkovic/
- fourthark 8mo ago
  Wish we could downvote articles. Is it legitimate to flag AI slop?
ralferoo 8mo ago
This section very much resonated with me, even though I still haven't tried any of the AI tools: ... most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day. Actually surprised none of the other comments have picked up on this, as I don't think it's especially about AI. But the periods of my career when I've been actually writing code and solving complicated technical problems have been the most rewarding times in my life, and I'd frequently work on stuff outside work time just because I enjoyed it so much. But the other times when I was just maintaining other people's code, or working on really simple problems with cookie-cutter solutions, I get so demotivated that it's hard to even get started each day. 100%, I do this job for the challenges, not to just spend my days babysitting a fancy code generation tool.
cheschire 8mo ago
AI made it so individual developers can outsource their work, not just companies. Maybe there are some lessons to be learned from companies that manage outsourced work successfully.
ahokay 8mo ago
This article is obviously written by ai and it’s just painful for me to read ChatGPT’s writing style day in and day out
- gedy 8mo ago
  I've unfortunately stopped reading articles before reading comments here as it's all mostly garbage now. I'm not sure what people are trying to accomplish with generating blogs aside from either clout farming or marketing for their companies.
  - bcooke 8mo ago
    I originally thought AI-assisted writing would help synthesize what felt like original ideas I had, that I just wanted to get out there without the laborious task of editing. I didn't expect the writing to end up feeling so incredibly tired and watered-down, but upon more reflection on how the models actually work, it's not all that surprising. Uniqueness in writing is both in the style/structure and the message, and all AI seems to do is find the local maximum of both. Lately I've found myself going back to writing things myself (not all the time, depends on the task), and wishing there was a way I could just completely eliminate the slop from certain things I look at. I worry about all our minds, and the garbage-in, garbage-out net effect of this.
- aerhardt 8mo ago
  I get instantly turned off by a mere whiff of AI when reading something, and consequently I refuse to foist such garbage on my fellow human beings. But by god if I read another two-line (!!!) comment with an emdash on LinkedIn, I'm going to drop a bollock.
locallost 8mo ago
There's always a grain of truth in everything, but the recent article by the Redis guy (sorry for the lack of name) resonated more with me. It's correct that the load in other areas is increasing also because these tools are not there yet when it comes to for lack of a better word "good taste". I work with someone who hasn't written a line of code in a year and it shows and I'm about tired dealing with the slop. But also there's a bunch of things at work that you either did a million times already, aren't really challenging problems just annoying problems hard to solve because of all the cruft, a lot of boring manual work etc. and for this it's just an amazing help to the point I am more relaxed at work than I was previously. And when it does something that is not quite there, I can either fix it manually or tell it to fix it and it usually "gets it". Of course it it ultimately replaces me I will not be relaxed but that's a different topic. Another little thing that resonated was a tweet that said "some will use it to learn everything and some so that they don't have to learn anything ". Of course it's not really a hard truth. It's questionable how much you can learn without really getting your hands dirty. But I do think people looking at it as a tool that helps then and/or makes them better will profit more than people looking to cut corners.
bpodgursky 8mo ago
THERE IS A NEARLY INFINITE DEMAND FOR SKEPTICAL AND COMFORTING TAKES ABOUT AI CODING THE MARKET WILL FILL THAT VOID IT DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE
- hsuduebc2 8mo ago
  Yeah, and for every take like that, there’s an overhyped one that’s just trying to sell you the sensation.
GeoAtreides 8mo ago
fuck me another ai written post it's all so fucking tiresome
seethishat 8mo ago
One problem I have seen IRL is AI deployment mistakes and IMO Vibe Coders need an IT/Dev Father Figure type to avoid these simple mistakes. Here is one example: A surgeon (no coding experience) used Claude to write a web app to track certain things about procedures he had done. He deployed the app on a web hosting provided (PHP LAMP stack). He wanted to share it with other doctors, but wasn't sure if it was 'secure' or not. He asked me to read the code and visit the site and provide my opinion. The code was pretty reasonable. The DB schema was good. And it worked as expected. However, he routinely zipped up the entire project and placed the zip files in the web root and he had no index file. So anyone who navigated to the website saw the backups named Jan-2026.backup, etc. and could download them. The backups contained the entire DB, all the project secrets, DB connection strings, API credentials, AWS keys, etc. He had no idea what an 'index' file was and why that was important. Last I heard he was going to ask Claude how to secure it.
- dana321 8mo ago
  Claude is crazy good at coding but it won't hold your hand when it comes to the unknown unknowns that the regular joe like this doesn't know.
- i_think_so 8mo ago
  We're probably not far away from the fully automated (no human interaction whatsoever needed) exploitation of such vulnerabilities by state level actors. At that point give it another few months and script kiddies will be doing it at significant scale. When this happens one of them is going to use their new toy to swat somebody, resulting in serious injury or death. How is that risk/responsibility debate going to go?
alephnerd 8mo ago
> ...most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it... A SWE who bases their entire identity and career around only writing code is not an engineer - they are a code monkey. The entire point of hiring a Software ENGINEER is to help translate business requirements into technical requirements, and then implement the technical requirements into a tangible feature or product. The only reason companies buy software is because the alternative means building in-house, and for most industries software is a cost-center not a revenue generator. I don't pay (US specific) 200K-400K TCs for code monkeys, I pay that TC for Engineers. And this does a disservice to the large portion of SWEs and former SWEs (like me) who have been in the industry because we are customer-outcome driven (how do we use code to solve a tangible customer need) and not here to write pretty code.
- gedy 8mo ago
  You might be missing that a lot of companies are giddy that the mgmt can just vibe code stuff and there's no opportunity for engineers to be involved, (except for when it crashes?). I use AI tools and they are nice, but the mgmt are mostly not logical and need someone to sort through their bullshit.
  - alephnerd 8mo ago
    Yeah no. Almost all companies I've chatted with - from MSPs to C-Suite of F10s - expect and demand humans-in-the-loop. I'm also on a couple boards and we've aligned on the same expectation as well. Look, AI/ML and especially LLMs are powerful, but there does remain a degree of instability and non-determinism which will require human intervention to remediate. That said, there is a lot of dev work in companies that is a cost-center, and those are the portions that will start getting vibe coded and deployed in product with little-to-no oversight (eg. a support portal for SMBs at an enterprise), but the equivalent feature would have already been an afterthought even without LLMs and probably given to a couple SWEs we'd be fine re-orging in a quarter anyhow.
    - 8mo ago
mark-r 8mo ago
There's nothing new about this pattern. When the tractor was invented, the farmer didn't get to knock off early. He just started producing 10x more. Then the tractors got bigger and more powerful, and the things you used them with got more sophisticated too and suddenly you're producing 100x more.
- Deegy 8mo ago
  And now there are 1% of the number of farmers that there used to be
  - RevEng 8mo ago
    And yet there isn't widespread unemployment. Fewer farmers were needed so fewer people became farmers. Food became cheap and plentiful. Everyone else went on to do other things that they couldn't afford to do before. Software will do the same; we will make more software with fewer people and it will become ubiquitous to the point that people will just quickly generate whatever software they need rather than do many monotonous tasks manually.
    - blell 8mo ago
      That argument does people who have invested decades of their lives into software engineering a lot of good.
    - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
      That may work if the scope that AI wanted to takeover wasn't scoped to nearly every job that involves a screeen.
  - nunez 8mo ago
    And the only people who could afford to tractor at scale are Cargill/Monsanto who bought out most of the small/medium-sized farms while leaving farms that didn't take the offer to slowly die...
deleted 8mo ago
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EliRivers 8mo ago
"the skills that the new engineering landscape actually requires: system design, architectural thinking, product reasoning, security awareness, and the ability to critically evaluate code they did not write." These, surely, are the skills they always needed? Anyone who didn't have these skills was little more than a human chatgpt already, receiving prompts and simply presenting the results to someone for evaluation.
- whstl 8mo ago
  That’s a great point, but yes: a lot of devs were nothing more than a glorified LLM and during reviews were just an expensive linter. Reality is catching up to those.
jatins 8mo ago
The post itself is 100% AI written https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813e4a052e1?ucc=PQCmbwNZf1k https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813...
- phyzome 8mo ago
  Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk.
  - 383toast 8mo ago
    Note Pangram is not like the others and has heavy academic research on statistical method soundness
  - lelanthran 8mo ago
    > Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk. In what way? False positives or false negatives?
  - jatins 8mo ago
    Pangram is reliable. Quoting from their website > Pangram achieves essentially zero false positive rates and false negative rates on medium-length to long passages.
    - phyzome 8mo ago
      Well, with such a trustworthy source, I have to believe it.
- 383toast 8mo ago
  Ironic
whstl 8mo ago
For me, one thing that completely changed almost overnight was dealing with junior developers. In the past, I would give them an assignment and they would take a few days to return with the implementation. I was able to see them struggling, they would learn, they would communicate and get frustrated by their own solution, then iterate. Today, there are two kinds: 1) the ones who take a marginally smaller amount of time because they’re busy learning, testing and self reviewing, and 2) the ones who watch Twitch or Youtube videos while Claude does the job and come to me after two hours with “done, what’s next” while someone has to comb through the mess. Leadership might see #2 and think they’re better, faster. But they are just a fucking boat anchor that drags down the whole team while providing nothing more than a shitty interface to an LLM in return.
newzino 8mo ago
[flagged]
dankobgd 8mo ago
it didn't do shit
turlockmike 8mo ago
The role of an engineer is to produce software that probably works. If you are producing more bugs it's because you're skipping provability. AI is also really good at writing tests and doing test-driven development You can get 100% branching coverage. You use a secondary LLM to review the work and make sure everything follows best practices. LLMs Can accelerate you if you use best practices and focus on provability and quality, but if you produce slop LLMs will help you produce slop faster.
jmbwell 8mo ago
In writing code, as in writing poetry, the mechanical labor is 5% writing, 45% editing, and 50% reading. But the only thing that makes it yours is you.
daemonk 8mo ago
It's a different skillset and way of thinking. Engineers tend to think vertically deep on technical problems. With AI, you have to think horizontally broad and vertically up on the architectural problem. The trick is to be comfortable relegating the details to AI. One concrete example of this realization was when I was researching how to optimize my claude code environment with agents, skills, etc. I read a lot of technical documents on how these supplemental plugins work and how to create them. After an hour of reading through all this, I realized I could just ask Claude to optimize the environment for me given the project context. So I did, and it was able to point out plugins, skills, agents that I can install or create. I gave it permission to create them and it all worked out. This was a case of where I should not think more technically deeper, but at a more "meta" level to define the project enough for Claude to figure out how to optimize the environment. Whether that gave real gains is another question of course. But I have anecdotally observed faster results and less token usage due context caching and slightly more tools-directed prompts.
MattyRad 8mo ago
> One engineer captured this shift perfectly in a widely shared essay, describing how AI transformed the engineering role from builder to reviewer. I stopped here. Was this written by an an LLM? This sentence in particular reads exactly like the author supplied said essay as context and this sentence is the LLM's summarization of it. Nowhere is the original article linked, either, further decreasing trust. Moreover, there's an ad at the bottom for some BS "talent" platform to hire the author. This article is probably an LLM generated ad. My trust is vacated. This makes me feel that the SWE work/identity crisis is less important than the digital trust crisis.
manofmanysmiles 8mo ago
> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. 1) I guess I am not included in the set named "most software engineers." 2) If the title is "Software Engineer," I think I should be engineering, not coding. This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?" Of course I don't think it's a binary decision. Although I more more motivated by building things, I do somewhat miss the programmer flow state I used to get more often.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago
  >This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?" I do this because I want to build quality software. AI to the extent people are trying to push it cannot achieve that. So I'm pro-buildinig and anti-AI. I spent my years in this domain learning how to optimize code, and AI meanwhile doesn't always make compileable code. Let alone correctly functioning code (step 0 in optimizing: "make sure it actually works first")
bgentry 8mo ago
Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. I think there's a big split between those who derive meaning and enjoyment from the act of writing code or the code itself vs. those who derive it from solving problems (for which the code is often a necessary byproduct). I've worked with many across both of these groups throughout my career. I am much more in the latter group, and the past 12mo are the most fun I've had writing software in over a decade. For those in the first group, it's easy to see how this can be an existential crisis.
retinaros 8mo ago
Yes its accurate. Ai is a zero sum game for the devs and as usual we cheered for it while they were feeding it all opensource projects
antaviana 8mo ago
This is what hapenned 10 years ago, when machine translation entered the professional translation business. Post-editing the translation was often slower than human translating sentences from scratch. Now nearly the whole industry is post-editing machine translations, and there is more and more content that is not even post-edited.
markus_zhang 8mo ago
Te be frank, a lot of companies don't need engineers. They need someone to do the jobs "quickly", "ASAP" and that's it. They are hiring coders masqueraded as programmers who masqueraded as engineers. I'd say this -- if you really want to be a real engineer, you should avoid many career paths out there. Potentially ANY positions DIRECTLY facing business stakeholders is at best not a good choice, and at worst deprive your already remote chance to be a good engineer. The lower level you move into, the better, because the environment FORCES you to be a true engineer -- either you don't and fail, or you do and keep the job.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago
  Can't relate, sadly. lots of lower level domains are hit by this slop train, too. Even if they aren't, they also froze hiring.
__bjoernd 8mo ago
> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. This resonates somewhat, but for a different reason. My mental model is that there are two kinds of developers, the craftsmen and the artists. The artist considers the act of writing code their actual fulfillment. They thrive on beautifully written code. They are often attached to their code to a point where they will be hurt if someone criticizes (or even deletes) it. The craftsman understands that code exists to serve a purpose and that is to make someone's life easier. This can be a totally non-technical customer/user that now can get their work done better. It could be another developer that benefits from using a library we wrote. The artist hates LLMs as it takes away their work and replaces their works of beauty with generic, templatized code. The craftsman acknowledges that LLMs are another tool in the toolbelt and using them will make them create more benefits for their customers.
devsda 8mo ago
Ah, just in time summarizing what we went through recently. Our "leaders" officially added these to our already nonsensical list of goals. A. Measurably demonstrate that atleast 50% of code/tests are AI generated. B. X% Faster delivery timelines due to improved productivity tools. You can't expect to make a pizza in 50% less time just because you bought a faster doughmaker. Specially when you don't even know whether the dough comes out under kneaded, over kneaded or as plain lumps!
acedTrex 8mo ago
Yep, my day to day is now miserable, LLMs have ruined everything that made this field fun, and greatly enhanced everything that made it suck.
RevEng 8mo ago
One supposition I see in this and so many other articles is that using AI to generate code results in not knowing how it works. I believe that's only true for "vibe coding", not for engineers using AI to generate code. The difference is in how much you plan, design, and specify upfront. If you give an AI a very general prompt to make an app that does X, it could build that in any imaginable way. Someone who doesn't know how these things are done wouldn't understand what way was chosen and the trade-offs involved. If they don't even look at the code, they have no idea how it works at all. This is dangerous because they are entirely dependant on the AI to make good decisions and to make any changes in the future. Someone who practices engineering by researching, considering their options, planning and designing, and creating a specification, leaves nothing up to chance. When the prompt is detailed, the outcome is constrained to the engineer's intent. If they then review the work by seeing that it wrote what they had in mind, they know that it worked and they know that the system design matches their own design. They know how it works because they designed it and they can modify that design. They can and have read the code so they can modify it without the help of the AI. If you know what code you want generated, reviewing it is easy - just look and see if it's what you expected. If you didn't think ahead about what the code would look like, reviewing is hard because you have to start by figuring out what the codebase even does. This goes the same for working in small iterations rather than prompting am entire application into existence. We all know how difficult it is to review large changes and why we prefer small changes. Those same rules apply for iterations regardless of whether it was written by a person or an AI. AI code generation can be helpful if the engineer continues acting as an engineer. It's only when someone who isn't an engineer or when an engineer abdicates their responsibilities to the AI that we end up with an unmaintainable mess. It's no different than amateurs writing scripts and spreadsheets without a full understanding of the implications of their implementation. Good software comes from good engineering, not just generating code; the code is merely the language by which we express our ideas.
fzysingularity 8mo ago
AI allows you to accelerate the initial build process, but I think engineering is all about craftsmanship. Today most LLMs have poor taste and chipping away the cruft matters more than ever.
wesm 8mo ago
See also The Mythical Agent-Month https://wesmckinney.com/blog/mythical-agent-month/ https://wesmckinney.com/blog/mythical-agent-month/
ukuina 8mo ago
> code is for humans to read Is this still true?
mono442 8mo ago
> most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. I don't think this is true. I'm pretty sure most of them do it because it pays good salary.
buttermeup 8mo ago
All of these articles about AI’s impact on engineering are so short sighted. Software engineering is a means to an end. The computers need to do something and software engineering is how we’ve traditionally done that. But it should be abundantly clear that this is no longer required. Before AI, engineers needed to care about every line of code. With current AI, engineers need only worry about larger architectural issues. But at this rate, even those concerns will be driven by AI. One can easily imagine a world where relevant architectural trade-offs are surfaced to prompters. We’ll live in a world very soon where no human will have to concern themselves with code. So while the premise of this blog post may be true, it’s a bit like complaining that hopeless carriages don’t take to stirrups very well.
ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
Remember when even a month ago you'd come on HN and people were like It'S jUsT a StAtIsTiCaL pArRoT?
adrian-vega 8mo ago
[dead]
cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
While I agree with the thrust of the article: It would help if the article itself wasn't clearly at least partially LLM written. It has many of the shibboleths: "This is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental shift in professional identity. " "That is not empowerment. That is scope creep without a corresponding increase in compensation" Honestly, it's lazy. At least edit the bloody thing.
yawnxyz 8mo ago
I have a similar problem - AI is making building products easier, but it's made "shipping" a product 100x harder. I was always a mediocre engineer, and stopping out on a personal usually happened bc "feature XYZ is way too hard to build and I won't spend another three weeks on it". Nowadays anything can be built in a couple of days, scope creep plus "would be cool if it could also do XYZ" makes it harder to walk away from a project and call it done. But ofc these are personal projects, and I use them daily (like a personal workout system and tracker which I run w/ Claude Code, which love to call Claude Co-Workout). It doesn't "work" as a standalone app. It's mostly a "display system" for whatever CC outputs to me, so I can take the daily workout to the gym. I got into software bc I liked to put out fun products and projects; I never really liked the process of writing software itself. But either way I'm still running into the "it's harder to put projects out than ever" dilemma, even though the projects are way easier to make, and higher quality than ever. I'm wondering if it'd be fun to have a "Ask HN: Show us what you've build with (mostly) AI" thread?
- 383toast 8mo ago
  Ironic the article is 100% AI generated according to Pangram
383toast 8mo ago
Ironic the article is 100% AI generated according to Pangram
- delecti 8mo ago
  Is it adding to the conversation to add that observation so many times?
SignalStackDev 8mo ago
[dead]
nunez 8mo ago
> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. > Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day. > Now they are being told to stop. Yeah, so what I've been realizing from witnessing the Rise of the Agents™ is that there are tons of developers that actually don't like writing code and were in it for the money all along. Nothing wrong with money --- I love the green stuff myself --- but it definitely sucks to have their ambivalence (at best) or disdain (at worst) for the craft imposed on the rest of us. Feel free to replace `writing code` for most work functions that are enjoyable for some that are being steamrolled by Big AI atm (writing, graphic design, marketing copy, etc.).
- seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
  Or maybe people who liked writing code also like writing prompts to write code? And yes, there are also traditionalists who think the old ways are the best ways.
  - nunez 8mo ago
    It's not about "best" or "traditional," though your bias is clearly set. "Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it. (It's doubly-ironic for me, as I actually like writing documentation!)
    - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
      > "Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it. Ya, no. It’s not that easy. Programming with prompts is much more intellectually challenging, maybe it will be like that in 5-10 years? Right now we are in a productivity increase that is more similar to interactive terminals over using punch cards. I wonder if the traditionalists simply don’t understand the tech, they seem to have made some whacky unfounded assumptions about it.
aplomb1026 8mo ago
[flagged]
blondie9x 8mo ago
Why was this flagged? I don’t get it.
hsuduebc2 8mo ago
Why is this flagged?
complex_pi 8mo ago
I played the blog post game (using chatgpt). Prompt: "The text of the blog article is copy-pasted below. Please summarize it in one parargaph." Result: "The blog article explores the paradox that while AI has made coding easier by automating many tasks, it has also made the role of software engineers significantly harder. AI tools have raised expectations for productivity, leading to increased workloads and burnout without corresponding support or recognition. Engineers, especially juniors, are now expected to take on broader responsibilities—ranging from product thinking to deployment—while the hands-on act of writing code has diminished. This shift in roles and expectations is often unacknowledged by leadership, creating a disconnect between those who use AI tools and those who manage the work. The article emphasizes the growing complexity of the engineer's job, the burnout that results from unrealistic demands, and the identity crisis many engineers face as their core role changes. It calls for better leadership, structured training, and realistic expectations to avoid the erosion of trust and talent in the industry." Whatever. Blog posts about AI that dance around the topic are not that valuable. For a project, you'll hire somebody, not some AI (as bcachefs' author does). What matters is that you trust a person to do the job, and expecting them to churn code is useless. The real benefits of someone appear on their CV (experience, known technologies, human abilities -- communication, empathy, understanding). AI generated content is an existential threat to human knowledge.
herodoturtle 8mo ago
Lots of comments here critiquing the article for allegedly being written by AI. I see the post is even flagged now. Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom. I’ve been programming for 30+ years and leading teams for the last 20 - and I found the essay deeply insightful. I realise I’m a sample size of 1, but just figured I’d comment here to advocate against this post being flagged. Surprised that it is.
- hsuduebc2 8mo ago
  I agree with you. I found it interesting too.
- randomtoast 8mo ago
  I would prefer to have the prompt he used to generate the article. Similarly, for compiled binaries, I would rather have the source code that produced them, instead of just an .exe file.
- ramoz 8mo ago
  why was it flagged?
- fauigerzigerk 8mo ago
  I'm not opposed to AI generated text in principle. But not knowing how it was written is problematic, because it can change the meaning of the text. Take this paragraph for instance: "From my experience building and scaling teams in fintech and high-traffic platforms, I can tell you that role expansion without clear boundaries always leads to the same outcome: people try to do everything, nothing gets done with the depth it requires, and burnout follows." This reads like a first person account of someone's experience. Is it though? If it's nobody's experience then it robs this text of its meaning. If it is somebody's experience and that person used AI to improve their style then that's absolutely fine with me.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago
  Got unflagged. Really speaks to HN's priorities when slop can get unflagged but negative news against the tech overlords is "too political". >Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom. As always: if they can't be bothered to write, why am I bothered to read it? Especially on this topic. I know the exact fear mongering and catch phrases it's going to say here. "AI is here to stay", "you need to get with the times or get out", etc. There's nothing new nor wisdom in this.
AstroBen 8mo ago
This exact same article has been rewritten and posted here at least 10 times now
black_13 8mo ago
[dead]
curiosity42 8mo ago
I am not as good as many here to immediately catch a piece written by LLMs. But what I have found is that reading some pieces has become very 'tiresome' (the best way I can describe). Just too many words. LLMs are not ADHD friendly :(

403 points by saikatsg 8mo ago

> Burnout was reported by 62 percent of associates and 61 percent of entry-level workers. Among C-suite leaders? Just 38 percent. That can't be right?

andai 8mo ago

I love learning ChatGPT's opinion on things.

badgersnake 8mo ago

Writing code was never particularly difficult in the first place.

xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago

I feel like there's a market out there for a weekly newsletter that summarises all the AI takes like this and collects the one meaningful snippet of insight (if any)

zackify 8mo ago

I've always been motivated by making simple solid foundations in my code the fastest way possible. So for me being able to have AI wrote certain things extremely fast with me just doing voice to text with my specific approach, is amazing. I am all in on everything AI and have a discord server just for openclaw and specialized per repo assistants. It really feels like when I'm busy I can throw it an issue tracker number for things. Then I will ssh via vs code or regular ssh which forwards my ssh key from 1password. My agents have read only repo access and I can push only when I ssh in. Super secure. Sorry for the tangent to the article but I have always loved coding now I love it even more.

simianwords 8mo ago

The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

jghn 8mo ago
> it took away the easy parts This is the key. I haven't found that things have become harder. The hard parts are still hard, and those have been the most important and prominent parts of my job once I reached a certain level.
- RevEng 8mo ago
  Exactly. I'm a principal software engineer. My job is a lot less about writing code and a lot more about planning, designing, reviewing, and training. However, I do wonder how we will train juniors to become seniors. Perhaps the answer is that the curriculum changes from coding and data structures to architecture and design which was typically a last minute addition in college.
mads_quist 8mo ago
Yes
RevEng 8mo ago
I disagree on making it easier. I'm very capable of writing code in multiple languages but it's boring and monotonous. It's getting in the way of me building the system I have in mind. I prefer the engineering (design) to writing. If I can describe my system design to something (a junior developer or an AI) and see it come to life quickly, that's great; it lets me spend more time on designing the system, or perhaps designing more systems. That said, there are plenty of amateurs who find coding to be approachable and system design to me daunting. For them, eliminating coding and moving the focus to system design would be a nightmare.
- _zagj 8mo ago
  To be frank, this just sounds like self-serving BS, likely from someone who's only ever done front-end stuff and hasn't ever cracked open Godbolt (or doesn't even know what that is). Describing system constraints at a high-level, whether to an AI prompt or subordinate devs, and letting them figure out the details is much more akin to system architecture than actual engineering.

_pdp_ 8mo ago

I'm not sure if it's made engineering harder, but it's certainly changing what it means to be a good engineer. It's no longer just about writing code. Now it's increasingly about having good taste, making the right decisions, and sometimes just being blessed with the Midas touch. In any case, I think we should start treating the majority of code as a commodity that will be thrown away sooner or later. I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/most-code-deserves-to-die https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/most-code-deserves-to-die - it was inspired by another conversation on HN.

jghn 8mo ago
> It's no longer just about writing code It never was
- _pdp_ 8mo ago
  And now even more so.
- RevEng 8mo ago
  But that was a large part of it. When it was difficult to write correct, well-structured code, that was a major determinant in who would get a job as a developer - ability to design and test came second. Now that generating code is automatic, it's the rest that becomes important. That works well for those of us who could do all of those things, but hurts those whose only ability was to generate code.
  - jghn 8mo ago
    Maybe 30-40 years ago. For as long as I've been around the basic ability to write good code was secondary to a long list of other skills. That's different than saying a lot of people *believed* writing code was the hardest/most important part.

hackersk 8mo ago

[flagged]

Allybag 8mo ago
Well how many side projects did you ship last year? I’ve written small programs in the last few months over a weekend that would have taken me a month to do a couple years ago, and they’re better. Not in terms of code quality, but in terms of features I wanted and knew how to implement but couldn’t be bothered, Opus can do in one minute and even if it’s not the optimal implementation it’s completely functional, fine, and costs me almost nothing.
altmanaltman 8mo ago
I mean if you've built 7 side projects (and we assume it's the same phase since total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased), how are these things still a bottleneck to you? I'm assuming you're building in a domain/language you're comfortable with by now (unless you're crazy and try something fundamentally different on each of those shipped products). Why will the 8th project still have those things as the bottleneck given your experience? Also if you're not seeing any real gains in productivity, why are you using AI for your side projects and wasting tokens/money?
- hardolaf 8mo ago
  I use AI for side projects because Google gives me a stupid large number of tokens that refresh every 6-24 hours on my existing $10/mo Google One plan. I see it as my civic duty to help increase their costs by producing slop that I generally throw away anyways because it doesn't actually work after it gets generated. At work, I was told to use AI but it doesn't actually work for anything that I couldn't have handed off to a brand new undergraduate intern. So I use it for things that I don't care about then go spend twice as long rewriting what it output because it made the task longer by being wrong.
RivieraKid 8mo ago
The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.

smokel 8mo ago

The author introduces the term "Supervision Paradox", but IMHO this is simply one instance of the "Automation Paradox" [1], which has been haunting me since I started working in IT. Interestingly, most jobs don't incentivize working harder or smarter, because it just leads to more work, and then burn-out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automati...

randomtoast 8mo ago
Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep" are just AI slop.
- smokel 8mo ago
  You seem to be right. The author is pumping out one such article per day. I think I've spent more time in forming my comment than they did in generating the article. Oh well :)

zzzeek 8mo ago

I still feel like I'm writing code. I tell Claude what to write and I am very specific about it. There's still tons of problems for which Claude has no particular solution and it's on me and other humans to figure out what to do. For those cases where I tell it to just go off and write a whole script that I'm not even looking at, those are throwaway / low-value cases I dont care about where previously I'd not have even taken on that particular job.

Spide_r 8mo ago

Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.

thinkingemote 8mo ago
It's now almost certain that every submission about LLMs will be written (or assisted) by LLMs. That this kind of writing puts a great number of us off is not important to many who seek their fortune in this industry. I hear the cry: "it's my own words the LLM just assisted me". Yes we have to write prompts.
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  I think it is very fair to say that in the same way that LLM's have given english majors access to programming, LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication. I'm not shy to admit that LLMs even from 2 years ago could communicate ideas much better than me, especially for a general audience.
  - wibbily 8mo ago
    It’s not “clear communication” though. The prose that comes out of LLMs is awful - long, vapid paragraphs with distracting tropes. You can ask them to be concise but then they file down all the wrong bits of the sentence and lose meaning. There’s a reason people bother clocking it and complaining about it, it’s *bad* It’s like everything else that AI can do - looks fine at a glance, or to the inexperienced, but collapses under scrutiny. (By your own admission you’re not a great communicator… how can you tell then?)
    - WarmWash 8mo ago
      >By your own admission you’re not a great communicator… how can you tell then? Thankfully we don't have to know how to write well to enjoy a well written book.

oytis 8mo ago

> you are not imagining things. The job changed. The expectations changed. And nobody sent a memo. Looks like something AI would say. Regardless of how it really was written

rcvassallo83 8mo ago
Article definitely has an AI writing style
rhubarbtree 8mo ago
Why is AI such a bad writer? Phrasing like this feels like reading Fox News.
- cindyllm 8mo ago
  [dead]
- gf263 8mo ago
  I saw someone point out something like: ai makes every sentence count. There’s no building or allowing a point to breathe. Every sentence is an axiom to get the meaning across, and its so grating
  - oytis 8mo ago
    It's an interesting way to view it, because what happens in fact is likely the opposite - AI is asked to expand a few bullet points into a blog post
    - whstl 8mo ago
      Making fluff sound grandiose is probably what makes so grating.
    - bcooke 8mo ago
      Maybe that's why the writing feels so terrible. The AI is attempting to maximize every sentence while simultaneously expanding on just a few actually meaningful points. And the net result of that dissonance is this rage-inducing vapidity. It's the written equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.

randomtoast 8mo ago

> This is not a contradiction. It is the reality ... > That is not an upgrade. That is a career identity crisis. This is not X. It is Y. > The trap is ... > This gap matters ... > This is not empowerment ... > This is not a minor adjustment... Your typical AI slop rhetorical phrasing. Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep" These sound analytical but are lightly defined. They function as named concepts without rigorous definition or empirical grounding. There might be some good arguments in the article, but AI slop remains AI slop.

amelius 8mo ago
N=1. I'm not convinced yet.
- randomtoast 8mo ago
  N=2 form the same author: https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/24/first-1000-lines-determine-next-100000-ai-coding/ https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/24/first-1000-lines-det... > AI is an in-context learner, not a standards enforcer. > The AI is not judging your code. It is learning from it. > Speed without structure is not speed. It is borrowed time. > This is not about premature optimization or over-engineering. It is about giving the AI the patterns it needs to work effectively on your behalf. > This is not a theoretical distinction. It is the single most important practical reality of working with AI coding tools in 2026. Its not this, its that. > But here is the part nobody wants to hear: the reverse is equally true. > The result was transformative. > Here is why. If you want I can provide N=3 with the same AI pattern and phrases again.
  - amelius 8mo ago
    AI learned this figure of speech from humans. Even the frequency in which it is used is copied from humans. So you can't really use it to determine if something is written by an AI or not.
    - 8mo ago

agentultra 8mo ago

It might be worth mentioning studies that show the lack of productivity gains from LLM usage. These posts take it as an unequivocal given. Management might still have the expectations that certain tasks are faster. But they aren’t always connected to reality because they’re not thinking as engineers.

nimbus-hn-test 8mo ago

[dead]

mads_quist 8mo ago

AI made programming A LOT MORE FUN for me. What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added. For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.

k__ 8mo ago
Yeah, GUI code, for example is notoriously chatty. Forms, charts, etc. AI makes using them a breeze.
mountainriver 8mo ago
Agree, it’s made programming so much fun. The other day I wrote a C# app just because it was the best language for the job, I’ve never touched .Net in my life. Worked great, clients loved it. I can actually build nice UIs as a traditional ML engineer (no more streamlit crap). People are using them and genuinely impressed by them I can fly through Rust and C++ code, which used to take ages of debugging. The main thing that is clear to me is that most of the ecosystem will likely converge toward Rust or C++ soon. Languages like Python or Ruby or even Go are just too slow and messy, why would you use them at all if you can write in Rust just as fast? I expect those languages to die off in the next several years
RevEng 8mo ago
Same here. I like bringing ideas to life; code is just a means to an end. I can now give detailed designs to an AI and let it write the hundreds of lines of code in just minutes, and with far fewer typos than I would make. It's still not perfect - I have to review it all - but if I give it a proper spec in generally creates exactly what I had in mind.

RivieraKid 8mo ago

Regarding expanding role: The scenario I'm somewhat worried about is that instead of 1 PM, 1 designer and 5 developers, there will be 1 PM, 1 designer and 1 developer. Even if tech employment stays stable or even slightly increases due to Jevons paradox, the share of software developers in tech employment will shrink.

sda2 8mo ago
1 PM, 1 designer, 1 developer, and 10 SREs to clean up the mess.
blastro 8mo ago
I think more likely - no PM, no Designer, one stressed out Mega PM-D-SWE

Twey 8mo ago

Previous: https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code-easier-engineering-harder/ https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code...

tamimio 8mo ago

Not really, I disagree. The article did slightly touched on the real issue on why people enjoy writing code, a “craftsmanship”, yes, coding is NOT engineering, it is writing, and the people who enjoy doing it are actually writers not engineers, and I always keep mentioning that. With AI however, those writers have to be doing the engineering work: the goals, architecture design, managing blueprints, process design and refining, among many other things, and that job is not easy hence why engineers are “supposedly” paid well, AI now took the writing role, and you have to do the engineering one.

Jasonleo 8mo ago

AI may have sped up coding, but it also exposed that real engineering is about judgment, trade-offs, and responsibility—not just producing code.

amelius 8mo ago
Yeah but a manager can do those things. You don't need an engineer for that. Maybe this is not entirely true yet, but it most likely will be in the near future.
- skydhash 8mo ago
  > Yeah but a manager can do those things. You don't need an engineer for that. Can they really? Engineering is about keeping the whole picture in mind so that you know which lever to push and which to not push for a certain goal. Trying until you're lucky can get you to that goal, but it's costly and not sustainable. So you need someone that can work out a model for experimentation in a less costly manner. Judgment in this case is about deciding which path to direct the project, tradeoffs is being aware that there are other paths that are better in some aspects. And responsibility is acknowledging that a bad decision will bear a personal cost. Everyone does the above in their own domain. But I don't think I've ever see a manager wanting to do it in the engineering domain. It's more about pushing the engineer to accept the responsibility, but denying them the power of judgment.
- 0xcafefood 8mo ago
  Managers' jobs are more at risk here than the engineers'.
wreath 8mo ago
We already knew this, but in the light of this AI hysteria we pretend like coding speed has always been the bottleneck
- Wobbles42 8mo ago
  It's an extension of pretending that developer productivity can be measured in lines of code per day, as well as the managerial blindness to the fact that code can have negative value.

throwaway613746 8mo ago

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deleted 8mo ago

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nemo44x 8mo ago

Developers will become admins. Responsible for supervising and owning the outcomes of increasingly agentic engineering outputs. Trust is the most important thing in business and it’s worth more than ever.

baxuz 8mo ago

Pangram detects this as a 100% AI generated article. Downvote this hustling slop to oblivion. Also, check out the dude's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanturkovic/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanturkovic/

fourthark 8mo ago
Wish we could downvote articles. Is it legitimate to flag AI slop?

ralferoo 8mo ago

This section very much resonated with me, even though I still haven't tried any of the AI tools: ... most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day. Actually surprised none of the other comments have picked up on this, as I don't think it's especially about AI. But the periods of my career when I've been actually writing code and solving complicated technical problems have been the most rewarding times in my life, and I'd frequently work on stuff outside work time just because I enjoyed it so much. But the other times when I was just maintaining other people's code, or working on really simple problems with cookie-cutter solutions, I get so demotivated that it's hard to even get started each day. 100%, I do this job for the challenges, not to just spend my days babysitting a fancy code generation tool.

cheschire 8mo ago

AI made it so individual developers can outsource their work, not just companies. Maybe there are some lessons to be learned from companies that manage outsourced work successfully.

ahokay 8mo ago

This article is obviously written by ai and it’s just painful for me to read ChatGPT’s writing style day in and day out

gedy 8mo ago
I've unfortunately stopped reading articles before reading comments here as it's all mostly garbage now. I'm not sure what people are trying to accomplish with generating blogs aside from either clout farming or marketing for their companies.
- bcooke 8mo ago
  I originally thought AI-assisted writing would help synthesize what felt like original ideas I had, that I just wanted to get out there without the laborious task of editing. I didn't expect the writing to end up feeling so incredibly tired and watered-down, but upon more reflection on how the models actually work, it's not all that surprising. Uniqueness in writing is both in the style/structure and the message, and all AI seems to do is find the local maximum of both. Lately I've found myself going back to writing things myself (not all the time, depends on the task), and wishing there was a way I could just completely eliminate the slop from certain things I look at. I worry about all our minds, and the garbage-in, garbage-out net effect of this.
aerhardt 8mo ago
I get instantly turned off by a mere whiff of AI when reading something, and consequently I refuse to foist such garbage on my fellow human beings. But by god if I read another two-line (!!!) comment with an emdash on LinkedIn, I'm going to drop a bollock.

locallost 8mo ago

There's always a grain of truth in everything, but the recent article by the Redis guy (sorry for the lack of name) resonated more with me. It's correct that the load in other areas is increasing also because these tools are not there yet when it comes to for lack of a better word "good taste". I work with someone who hasn't written a line of code in a year and it shows and I'm about tired dealing with the slop. But also there's a bunch of things at work that you either did a million times already, aren't really challenging problems just annoying problems hard to solve because of all the cruft, a lot of boring manual work etc. and for this it's just an amazing help to the point I am more relaxed at work than I was previously. And when it does something that is not quite there, I can either fix it manually or tell it to fix it and it usually "gets it". Of course it it ultimately replaces me I will not be relaxed but that's a different topic. Another little thing that resonated was a tweet that said "some will use it to learn everything and some so that they don't have to learn anything ". Of course it's not really a hard truth. It's questionable how much you can learn without really getting your hands dirty. But I do think people looking at it as a tool that helps then and/or makes them better will profit more than people looking to cut corners.

bpodgursky 8mo ago

THERE IS A NEARLY INFINITE DEMAND FOR SKEPTICAL AND COMFORTING TAKES ABOUT AI CODING THE MARKET WILL FILL THAT VOID IT DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE

hsuduebc2 8mo ago
Yeah, and for every take like that, there’s an overhyped one that’s just trying to sell you the sensation.

GeoAtreides 8mo ago

fuck me another ai written post it's all so fucking tiresome

seethishat 8mo ago

One problem I have seen IRL is AI deployment mistakes and IMO Vibe Coders need an IT/Dev Father Figure type to avoid these simple mistakes. Here is one example: A surgeon (no coding experience) used Claude to write a web app to track certain things about procedures he had done. He deployed the app on a web hosting provided (PHP LAMP stack). He wanted to share it with other doctors, but wasn't sure if it was 'secure' or not. He asked me to read the code and visit the site and provide my opinion. The code was pretty reasonable. The DB schema was good. And it worked as expected. However, he routinely zipped up the entire project and placed the zip files in the web root and he had no index file. So anyone who navigated to the website saw the backups named Jan-2026.backup, etc. and could download them. The backups contained the entire DB, all the project secrets, DB connection strings, API credentials, AWS keys, etc. He had no idea what an 'index' file was and why that was important. Last I heard he was going to ask Claude how to secure it.

dana321 8mo ago
Claude is crazy good at coding but it won't hold your hand when it comes to the unknown unknowns that the regular joe like this doesn't know.
i_think_so 8mo ago
We're probably not far away from the fully automated (no human interaction whatsoever needed) exploitation of such vulnerabilities by state level actors. At that point give it another few months and script kiddies will be doing it at significant scale. When this happens one of them is going to use their new toy to swat somebody, resulting in serious injury or death. How is that risk/responsibility debate going to go?

alephnerd 8mo ago

> ...most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it... A SWE who bases their entire identity and career around only writing code is not an engineer - they are a code monkey. The entire point of hiring a Software ENGINEER is to help translate business requirements into technical requirements, and then implement the technical requirements into a tangible feature or product. The only reason companies buy software is because the alternative means building in-house, and for most industries software is a cost-center not a revenue generator. I don't pay (US specific) 200K-400K TCs for code monkeys, I pay that TC for Engineers. And this does a disservice to the large portion of SWEs and former SWEs (like me) who have been in the industry because we are customer-outcome driven (how do we use code to solve a tangible customer need) and not here to write pretty code.

gedy 8mo ago
You might be missing that a lot of companies are giddy that the mgmt can just vibe code stuff and there's no opportunity for engineers to be involved, (except for when it crashes?). I use AI tools and they are nice, but the mgmt are mostly not logical and need someone to sort through their bullshit.
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  Yeah no. Almost all companies I've chatted with - from MSPs to C-Suite of F10s - expect and demand humans-in-the-loop. I'm also on a couple boards and we've aligned on the same expectation as well. Look, AI/ML and especially LLMs are powerful, but there does remain a degree of instability and non-determinism which will require human intervention to remediate. That said, there is a lot of dev work in companies that is a cost-center, and those are the portions that will start getting vibe coded and deployed in product with little-to-no oversight (eg. a support portal for SMBs at an enterprise), but the equivalent feature would have already been an afterthought even without LLMs and probably given to a couple SWEs we'd be fine re-orging in a quarter anyhow.
  - 8mo ago

mark-r 8mo ago

There's nothing new about this pattern. When the tractor was invented, the farmer didn't get to knock off early. He just started producing 10x more. Then the tractors got bigger and more powerful, and the things you used them with got more sophisticated too and suddenly you're producing 100x more.

Deegy 8mo ago
And now there are 1% of the number of farmers that there used to be
- RevEng 8mo ago
  And yet there isn't widespread unemployment. Fewer farmers were needed so fewer people became farmers. Food became cheap and plentiful. Everyone else went on to do other things that they couldn't afford to do before. Software will do the same; we will make more software with fewer people and it will become ubiquitous to the point that people will just quickly generate whatever software they need rather than do many monotonous tasks manually.
  - blell 8mo ago
    That argument does people who have invested decades of their lives into software engineering a lot of good.
  - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
    That may work if the scope that AI wanted to takeover wasn't scoped to nearly every job that involves a screeen.
- nunez 8mo ago
  And the only people who could afford to tractor at scale are Cargill/Monsanto who bought out most of the small/medium-sized farms while leaving farms that didn't take the offer to slowly die...

deleted 8mo ago

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EliRivers 8mo ago

"the skills that the new engineering landscape actually requires: system design, architectural thinking, product reasoning, security awareness, and the ability to critically evaluate code they did not write." These, surely, are the skills they always needed? Anyone who didn't have these skills was little more than a human chatgpt already, receiving prompts and simply presenting the results to someone for evaluation.

whstl 8mo ago
That’s a great point, but yes: a lot of devs were nothing more than a glorified LLM and during reviews were just an expensive linter. Reality is catching up to those.

jatins 8mo ago

The post itself is 100% AI written https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813e4a052e1?ucc=PQCmbwNZf1k https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813...

phyzome 8mo ago
Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk.
- 383toast 8mo ago
  Note Pangram is not like the others and has heavy academic research on statistical method soundness
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk. In what way? False positives or false negatives?
- jatins 8mo ago
  Pangram is reliable. Quoting from their website > Pangram achieves essentially zero false positive rates and false negative rates on medium-length to long passages.
  - phyzome 8mo ago
    Well, with such a trustworthy source, I have to believe it.
383toast 8mo ago
Ironic

whstl 8mo ago

For me, one thing that completely changed almost overnight was dealing with junior developers. In the past, I would give them an assignment and they would take a few days to return with the implementation. I was able to see them struggling, they would learn, they would communicate and get frustrated by their own solution, then iterate. Today, there are two kinds: 1) the ones who take a marginally smaller amount of time because they’re busy learning, testing and self reviewing, and 2) the ones who watch Twitch or Youtube videos while Claude does the job and come to me after two hours with “done, what’s next” while someone has to comb through the mess. Leadership might see #2 and think they’re better, faster. But they are just a fucking boat anchor that drags down the whole team while providing nothing more than a shitty interface to an LLM in return.

newzino 8mo ago

[flagged]

dankobgd 8mo ago

it didn't do shit

turlockmike 8mo ago

The role of an engineer is to produce software that probably works. If you are producing more bugs it's because you're skipping provability. AI is also really good at writing tests and doing test-driven development You can get 100% branching coverage. You use a secondary LLM to review the work and make sure everything follows best practices. LLMs Can accelerate you if you use best practices and focus on provability and quality, but if you produce slop LLMs will help you produce slop faster.

jmbwell 8mo ago

In writing code, as in writing poetry, the mechanical labor is 5% writing, 45% editing, and 50% reading. But the only thing that makes it yours is you.

daemonk 8mo ago

It's a different skillset and way of thinking. Engineers tend to think vertically deep on technical problems. With AI, you have to think horizontally broad and vertically up on the architectural problem. The trick is to be comfortable relegating the details to AI. One concrete example of this realization was when I was researching how to optimize my claude code environment with agents, skills, etc. I read a lot of technical documents on how these supplemental plugins work and how to create them. After an hour of reading through all this, I realized I could just ask Claude to optimize the environment for me given the project context. So I did, and it was able to point out plugins, skills, agents that I can install or create. I gave it permission to create them and it all worked out. This was a case of where I should not think more technically deeper, but at a more "meta" level to define the project enough for Claude to figure out how to optimize the environment. Whether that gave real gains is another question of course. But I have anecdotally observed faster results and less token usage due context caching and slightly more tools-directed prompts.

MattyRad 8mo ago

> One engineer captured this shift perfectly in a widely shared essay, describing how AI transformed the engineering role from builder to reviewer. I stopped here. Was this written by an an LLM? This sentence in particular reads exactly like the author supplied said essay as context and this sentence is the LLM's summarization of it. Nowhere is the original article linked, either, further decreasing trust. Moreover, there's an ad at the bottom for some BS "talent" platform to hire the author. This article is probably an LLM generated ad. My trust is vacated. This makes me feel that the SWE work/identity crisis is less important than the digital trust crisis.

manofmanysmiles 8mo ago

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. 1) I guess I am not included in the set named "most software engineers." 2) If the title is "Software Engineer," I think I should be engineering, not coding. This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?" Of course I don't think it's a binary decision. Although I more more motivated by building things, I do somewhat miss the programmer flow state I used to get more often.

johnnyanmac 8mo ago
>This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?" I do this because I want to build quality software. AI to the extent people are trying to push it cannot achieve that. So I'm pro-buildinig and anti-AI. I spent my years in this domain learning how to optimize code, and AI meanwhile doesn't always make compileable code. Let alone correctly functioning code (step 0 in optimizing: "make sure it actually works first")

bgentry 8mo ago

Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. I think there's a big split between those who derive meaning and enjoyment from the act of writing code or the code itself vs. those who derive it from solving problems (for which the code is often a necessary byproduct). I've worked with many across both of these groups throughout my career. I am much more in the latter group, and the past 12mo are the most fun I've had writing software in over a decade. For those in the first group, it's easy to see how this can be an existential crisis.

retinaros 8mo ago

Yes its accurate. Ai is a zero sum game for the devs and as usual we cheered for it while they were feeding it all opensource projects

antaviana 8mo ago

This is what hapenned 10 years ago, when machine translation entered the professional translation business. Post-editing the translation was often slower than human translating sentences from scratch. Now nearly the whole industry is post-editing machine translations, and there is more and more content that is not even post-edited.

markus_zhang 8mo ago

Te be frank, a lot of companies don't need engineers. They need someone to do the jobs "quickly", "ASAP" and that's it. They are hiring coders masqueraded as programmers who masqueraded as engineers. I'd say this -- if you really want to be a real engineer, you should avoid many career paths out there. Potentially ANY positions DIRECTLY facing business stakeholders is at best not a good choice, and at worst deprive your already remote chance to be a good engineer. The lower level you move into, the better, because the environment FORCES you to be a true engineer -- either you don't and fail, or you do and keep the job.

johnnyanmac 8mo ago
Can't relate, sadly. lots of lower level domains are hit by this slop train, too. Even if they aren't, they also froze hiring.

__bjoernd 8mo ago

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. This resonates somewhat, but for a different reason. My mental model is that there are two kinds of developers, the craftsmen and the artists. The artist considers the act of writing code their actual fulfillment. They thrive on beautifully written code. They are often attached to their code to a point where they will be hurt if someone criticizes (or even deletes) it. The craftsman understands that code exists to serve a purpose and that is to make someone's life easier. This can be a totally non-technical customer/user that now can get their work done better. It could be another developer that benefits from using a library we wrote. The artist hates LLMs as it takes away their work and replaces their works of beauty with generic, templatized code. The craftsman acknowledges that LLMs are another tool in the toolbelt and using them will make them create more benefits for their customers.

devsda 8mo ago

Ah, just in time summarizing what we went through recently. Our "leaders" officially added these to our already nonsensical list of goals. A. Measurably demonstrate that atleast 50% of code/tests are AI generated. B. X% Faster delivery timelines due to improved productivity tools. You can't expect to make a pizza in 50% less time just because you bought a faster doughmaker. Specially when you don't even know whether the dough comes out under kneaded, over kneaded or as plain lumps!

acedTrex 8mo ago

Yep, my day to day is now miserable, LLMs have ruined everything that made this field fun, and greatly enhanced everything that made it suck.

RevEng 8mo ago

One supposition I see in this and so many other articles is that using AI to generate code results in not knowing how it works. I believe that's only true for "vibe coding", not for engineers using AI to generate code. The difference is in how much you plan, design, and specify upfront. If you give an AI a very general prompt to make an app that does X, it could build that in any imaginable way. Someone who doesn't know how these things are done wouldn't understand what way was chosen and the trade-offs involved. If they don't even look at the code, they have no idea how it works at all. This is dangerous because they are entirely dependant on the AI to make good decisions and to make any changes in the future. Someone who practices engineering by researching, considering their options, planning and designing, and creating a specification, leaves nothing up to chance. When the prompt is detailed, the outcome is constrained to the engineer's intent. If they then review the work by seeing that it wrote what they had in mind, they know that it worked and they know that the system design matches their own design. They know how it works because they designed it and they can modify that design. They can and have read the code so they can modify it without the help of the AI. If you know what code you want generated, reviewing it is easy - just look and see if it's what you expected. If you didn't think ahead about what the code would look like, reviewing is hard because you have to start by figuring out what the codebase even does. This goes the same for working in small iterations rather than prompting am entire application into existence. We all know how difficult it is to review large changes and why we prefer small changes. Those same rules apply for iterations regardless of whether it was written by a person or an AI. AI code generation can be helpful if the engineer continues acting as an engineer. It's only when someone who isn't an engineer or when an engineer abdicates their responsibilities to the AI that we end up with an unmaintainable mess. It's no different than amateurs writing scripts and spreadsheets without a full understanding of the implications of their implementation. Good software comes from good engineering, not just generating code; the code is merely the language by which we express our ideas.

fzysingularity 8mo ago

AI allows you to accelerate the initial build process, but I think engineering is all about craftsmanship. Today most LLMs have poor taste and chipping away the cruft matters more than ever.

wesm 8mo ago

See also The Mythical Agent-Month https://wesmckinney.com/blog/mythical-agent-month/ https://wesmckinney.com/blog/mythical-agent-month/

ukuina 8mo ago

> code is for humans to read Is this still true?

mono442 8mo ago

> most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. I don't think this is true. I'm pretty sure most of them do it because it pays good salary.

buttermeup 8mo ago

All of these articles about AI’s impact on engineering are so short sighted. Software engineering is a means to an end. The computers need to do something and software engineering is how we’ve traditionally done that. But it should be abundantly clear that this is no longer required. Before AI, engineers needed to care about every line of code. With current AI, engineers need only worry about larger architectural issues. But at this rate, even those concerns will be driven by AI. One can easily imagine a world where relevant architectural trade-offs are surfaced to prompters. We’ll live in a world very soon where no human will have to concern themselves with code. So while the premise of this blog post may be true, it’s a bit like complaining that hopeless carriages don’t take to stirrups very well.

ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago

Remember when even a month ago you'd come on HN and people were like It'S jUsT a StAtIsTiCaL pArRoT?

adrian-vega 8mo ago

[dead]

cmrdporcupine 8mo ago

While I agree with the thrust of the article: It would help if the article itself wasn't clearly at least partially LLM written. It has many of the shibboleths: "This is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental shift in professional identity. " "That is not empowerment. That is scope creep without a corresponding increase in compensation" Honestly, it's lazy. At least edit the bloody thing.

yawnxyz 8mo ago

I have a similar problem - AI is making building products easier, but it's made "shipping" a product 100x harder. I was always a mediocre engineer, and stopping out on a personal usually happened bc "feature XYZ is way too hard to build and I won't spend another three weeks on it". Nowadays anything can be built in a couple of days, scope creep plus "would be cool if it could also do XYZ" makes it harder to walk away from a project and call it done. But ofc these are personal projects, and I use them daily (like a personal workout system and tracker which I run w/ Claude Code, which love to call Claude Co-Workout). It doesn't "work" as a standalone app. It's mostly a "display system" for whatever CC outputs to me, so I can take the daily workout to the gym. I got into software bc I liked to put out fun products and projects; I never really liked the process of writing software itself. But either way I'm still running into the "it's harder to put projects out than ever" dilemma, even though the projects are way easier to make, and higher quality than ever. I'm wondering if it'd be fun to have a "Ask HN: Show us what you've build with (mostly) AI" thread?

383toast 8mo ago
Ironic the article is 100% AI generated according to Pangram

383toast 8mo ago

Ironic the article is 100% AI generated according to Pangram

delecti 8mo ago
Is it adding to the conversation to add that observation so many times?

SignalStackDev 8mo ago

[dead]

nunez 8mo ago

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. > Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day. > Now they are being told to stop. Yeah, so what I've been realizing from witnessing the Rise of the Agents™ is that there are tons of developers that actually don't like writing code and were in it for the money all along. Nothing wrong with money --- I love the green stuff myself --- but it definitely sucks to have their ambivalence (at best) or disdain (at worst) for the craft imposed on the rest of us. Feel free to replace `writing code` for most work functions that are enjoyable for some that are being steamrolled by Big AI atm (writing, graphic design, marketing copy, etc.).

seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
Or maybe people who liked writing code also like writing prompts to write code? And yes, there are also traditionalists who think the old ways are the best ways.
- nunez 8mo ago
  It's not about "best" or "traditional," though your bias is clearly set. "Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it. (It's doubly-ironic for me, as I actually like writing documentation!)
  - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
    > "Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it. Ya, no. It’s not that easy. Programming with prompts is much more intellectually challenging, maybe it will be like that in 5-10 years? Right now we are in a productivity increase that is more similar to interactive terminals over using punch cards. I wonder if the traditionalists simply don’t understand the tech, they seem to have made some whacky unfounded assumptions about it.

aplomb1026 8mo ago

[flagged]

blondie9x 8mo ago

Why was this flagged? I don’t get it.

hsuduebc2 8mo ago

Why is this flagged?

complex_pi 8mo ago

I played the blog post game (using chatgpt). Prompt: "The text of the blog article is copy-pasted below. Please summarize it in one parargaph." Result: "The blog article explores the paradox that while AI has made coding easier by automating many tasks, it has also made the role of software engineers significantly harder. AI tools have raised expectations for productivity, leading to increased workloads and burnout without corresponding support or recognition. Engineers, especially juniors, are now expected to take on broader responsibilities—ranging from product thinking to deployment—while the hands-on act of writing code has diminished. This shift in roles and expectations is often unacknowledged by leadership, creating a disconnect between those who use AI tools and those who manage the work. The article emphasizes the growing complexity of the engineer's job, the burnout that results from unrealistic demands, and the identity crisis many engineers face as their core role changes. It calls for better leadership, structured training, and realistic expectations to avoid the erosion of trust and talent in the industry." Whatever. Blog posts about AI that dance around the topic are not that valuable. For a project, you'll hire somebody, not some AI (as bcachefs' author does). What matters is that you trust a person to do the job, and expecting them to churn code is useless. The real benefits of someone appear on their CV (experience, known technologies, human abilities -- communication, empathy, understanding). AI generated content is an existential threat to human knowledge.

herodoturtle 8mo ago

Lots of comments here critiquing the article for allegedly being written by AI. I see the post is even flagged now. Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom. I’ve been programming for 30+ years and leading teams for the last 20 - and I found the essay deeply insightful. I realise I’m a sample size of 1, but just figured I’d comment here to advocate against this post being flagged. Surprised that it is.

hsuduebc2 8mo ago
I agree with you. I found it interesting too.
randomtoast 8mo ago
I would prefer to have the prompt he used to generate the article. Similarly, for compiled binaries, I would rather have the source code that produced them, instead of just an .exe file.
ramoz 8mo ago
why was it flagged?
fauigerzigerk 8mo ago
I'm not opposed to AI generated text in principle. But not knowing how it was written is problematic, because it can change the meaning of the text. Take this paragraph for instance: "From my experience building and scaling teams in fintech and high-traffic platforms, I can tell you that role expansion without clear boundaries always leads to the same outcome: people try to do everything, nothing gets done with the depth it requires, and burnout follows." This reads like a first person account of someone's experience. Is it though? If it's nobody's experience then it robs this text of its meaning. If it is somebody's experience and that person used AI to improve their style then that's absolutely fine with me.
johnnyanmac 8mo ago
Got unflagged. Really speaks to HN's priorities when slop can get unflagged but negative news against the tech overlords is "too political". >Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom. As always: if they can't be bothered to write, why am I bothered to read it? Especially on this topic. I know the exact fear mongering and catch phrases it's going to say here. "AI is here to stay", "you need to get with the times or get out", etc. There's nothing new nor wisdom in this.

AstroBen 8mo ago

This exact same article has been rewritten and posted here at least 10 times now

black_13 8mo ago

[dead]

curiosity42 8mo ago

I am not as good as many here to immediately catch a piece written by LLMs. But what I have found is that reading some pieces has become very 'tiresome' (the best way I can describe). Just too many words. LLMs are not ADHD friendly :(