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As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. A

• BatFastard 7mo ago
  IMHO any idiot can create a piece of crap. It takes experience to create good software. Use your experience Luke! Now you have a team of programmers to create what ever you fancy! Its been great for me, but I have only been programming C++ for 36 years.
• elevation 7mo ago
  I’m with you here. I grew up without a mentor and my understanding of software stalled at certain points. When I couldn’t get a particular os API to work, in Google and stack overflow didn’t exist, and I had no one around me to ask. I wrote programs for years by just working around it. After decades writing software I have done my best to be a mentor to those new to the field. My specialty is the ability to help people understand the technology they’re using, I’ve helped juniors understand and fix linker errors, engineers understand ARP poisoning, high school kids debug their robots. I’ve really enjoyed giving back. But today, pretty much anyone except for a middle schooler could type their problems into a ChatGPT and get a more direct answer that I would be able to give. No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly.
  • atonse 7mo ago
    Today every single software engineer has an extremely smart and experienced mentor available to them 24/7. They don't have to meet them for coffee once a month to ask basic questions. That said, I still feel strongly about mentorship though. It's just that you can spend your quality time with the busy person on higher-level things, like relationship building, rather than more basic questions.
    • Ronsenshi 7mo ago
      How would this affect future generations of ... well anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem they might face? Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not physically in size, obviously).
      • atonse 7mo ago
        I agree with you about using our brains. I honestly have no idea. But I can tell you that, just like with most things in life, this is yet another area where we are increasingly getting to do just the things we WANT to do (like think about code or features and have it appear, pixel pushing, smoothing out the actual UX, porting to faster languages) and not have to do things most people don't want to do, like drudgery (writing tests, formatting code, refactoring manually, updating documentation, manually moving tickets around like a caveman). Or to use a non tech example, having to spend hours fixing word document formatting. So we're getting more spoiled. For example, kids have never waited for a table at a restaurant for more than 20 mins (which most people used to do all the time before abundant food delivery or reservation systems). Not that we ever enjoyed it, but learning to be bored, learning to not just get instant gratification is something that's happening all over in life. Now it's happening even with work. So I honestly don't know how it'll affect society.
      • ipaddr 7mo ago
        Just because you have every instruction manual doesn't mean you can follow and perform the steps or have time to or can adapt to a real world situation.
  • simonw 7mo ago
    "No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly." The "as long as they know how..." is doing a lot of work there. I expect developers with mentors who help give them the grounding they need to ask questions will get there a whole lot faster than developers without.
  • socalgal2 7mo ago
    I have this feeling as well. At one point I thought when I got older it might be nice to teach - Steve Wozniak apparently does. But, it doesn't feel like I can really add much. Students have infinite teachers on youtube, and now they have Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT which are amazing. Sure, today, maybe, I could see myself as mostly a chaperone in some class to once in a while help a student out with some issue but that possibility seems like it will be gone in 1 to 2 years.
• ilc 7mo ago
  As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff. I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same skill. Making good technical decisions. And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins a hair.
  • herdymerzbow 7mo ago
    As a self teaching beginner* this is where I find AI a bit limiting. When I ask ChatGPT questions about code it is always about to offer up a solution, but it often provides inappropriate responses that don't take into account the full context of a project/task. While it understands what good structure and architecture are, it's missing the awareness of good design and architecture and applying to the questions I have, and I don't have have the experience or skill set to ask those questions. It often suggests solutions (I tend to ask it for suggestions rather than full code, so I can work it out myself) that may have drawbacks that I only discover down the line. Any suggestions to overcome this deficit in design experience? My best guess is to read some texts on code design or alternatively get a job at a place to learn design in practice. Mainly learning javascript and web app development at the moment. *Who has had a career in a previous field, and doesn't necessarily think that learning programming with lead to another career (and is okay with that).
    • ilc 7mo ago
      I can't summarize 40~ YOE of programming easily. (30+ professional) I can tell you: Your problems are a layer higher than you think. Coding, Architecture, etc. Those get the face time. Process, and Discipline, and where the money is made and lost in AI. To give a minor example: My first attempt at a major project with AI failed HORRIBLY. But I stepped back and figured out why. What short-comings did my approach have, what short-comings did the AI have. Root Cause Analysis. Next day I sat down with the AI and developed a PLAN of what to do. Yes, a day spent on a plan. Then we executed the plan. (or it did and I kept it on track, and fixed problems in the plan as things happened.) On the third day I'd completed a VERY complex task. I mean STUPIDLY complex, something I knew WHAT I wanted to do, and roughly how, but not the exact details, and not at the level to implement it. I'm sure 1-2 weeks of research could have taught me. Or I could let the AI do it. ... And that formed my style of working with AI. If you need a mentor pop in the Svalboard discord, and join #sval-dev. You should be able to figure out who I am.
• atonse 7mo ago
  > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as a result, I'll want to (and be able to) do even more. I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities. Any "idiot" can build their own software tailored to how their brains think, without having to assemble gobs of money to hire expensive software people. Most of them were never going to hire a programmer anyway. Those ideas would've died in their heads.
  • samiv 7mo ago
    What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this? One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume. But..cost = revenue. What is a cost to one party is a revenue to another party. The revenue is what pays salaries. So when software costs go down the revenues will go down too. When revenues go down lay offs will happen, salary cuts will happen. This is not fictional. Markets already reacted to this and many software service companies took a hit.
    • rps93 7mo ago
      Just sold a house/moved out after being laid off in mid-January from a govt IT contractor(there for 8 great years and mostly remote). I started my UX Research, Design and Front End Web Design coding career in 2009, but now I think it's almost a stupid go nowhere vanishing career, thanks to AI. I think much like you that AI is and will just continue to destroy the economy! At least I got to sell a house and make a profit--stash it away for when the big AI market crash happens (hopefully not a 2030 great depression tho). As then it's a down market and buying stocks, bitcoin and houses is always cheaper.
    • atonse 7mo ago
      I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to. But my take on this is that accountability will still be a purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM, and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3 words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff). When I confronted him about them, he said the AI generated them. So I told him that: 1. That's not an excuse, his job is to verify what it generated and ensure it's still good. 2. That actually makes it look WORSE, that not only did he do nearly 0 work, that he didn't even check the most basic outputs. And I'm not anti-AI, I expressly said that we should absolutely use AI tools to accelerate our work. But that's not what happened here. So you won't get to say (at least I think for another few years) "my AI was at fault" – you are ultimately responsible, not your tools. So people will still want to delegate those things down the chain. But ultimately they'll have to delegate to fewer people.
• LPisGood 7mo ago
  On the bright side, working in tech between 2006 and 2026 means you should be extremely wealthy and able to retire comfortably.
  • bcrosby95 7mo ago
    Uh if you worked for a top company or something. Most tech workers have made relatively ordinary salaries the last 20 years.
  • niorad 7mo ago
    In SV probably. As a lead FE dev with 14 yoe in Munich I‘m at 85k€, thats not even enough to pay off a loan for a house around here.
  • cube00 7mo ago
    Cries in federal employee wages
• therealdrag0 7mo ago
  No offense but you sound more like a “principle coder”, not a principle engineer. At least in many domains and orgs, Most principal engineers are already spending most their time not coding. But -engineering- still take sip much or most of their time. I felt what you describe feeling. But it lasted like a week in December. Otherwise there’s still tons of stuff to build and my teams need me to design the systems and review their designs. And their prompt machine is not replacing my good sense. There’s plenty of engineering to do, even if the coding writes itself.
  • dionian 7mo ago
    I make documentation and diagrams for myself rather than writing code much of the time
• pelcg 7mo ago
  > As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! Really? The vibe coders are running into a dark forest with a bunch of lobsters (OpenClaw) getting lost and confused in their own tech debt and you're saying they can prompt their way to the same software? Someone just ended up wiping their entire production database with Claude and you believe that your experience is for nothing, towards companies that need stable infrastructure and predictability. Cognitive debt is a real thing and being unable to read / write code that is broken is going to be an increasing problem which experienced engineers can solve. Do not fall for the AI agent hype.
  • Ronsenshi 7mo ago
    > Do not fall for the AI agent hype. Problem is, it's the people in higher positions who should be aware of that, except they don't care. All they would see is how much more profit company can make if it reduces workforce. Plenty of engineers do realize that AI is not some magical solution to everything - but the money and hype tends to overshadow cooler heads on HN.
    • fma 7mo ago
      This is exactly it. The junior and mids on my team produce Junior and mid quality level vibe code. Too generic prompts, unaccounted edge casez, inattentive code reviews...
• YZF 7mo ago
  I consider myself very good at writing software. I built and shipped many projects. I built systems from zero. Embedded, distributed, SaaS- you name it. I'm having a lot of fun with AI. Any idiot can't prompt their way to the same software I can write. Not yet anyways.
• bitwize 7mo ago
  What I keep hearing is that the people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones reluctant to embrace LLMs because they are too emotionally attached to "coding" as a discipline rather than design and architecture, which are where the interesting and actually difficult work is done.
  • Ronsenshi 7mo ago
    Really? To me it seems that quite the opposite is true - people who were never very good at writing code are excited about LLMs because suddenly they can pretend to be architects without understanding what's happening in the codebase. Same as with AI-art, where people without much drawing skills were excited about being able to make "art".
    • sawmurai 7mo ago
      Perhaps you are both right. People who see coding as a means to an end enjoy LLMs while people who saw it as the most enjoyable part don’t.
      • oulu2006 7mo ago
        This is more accurate, I've written enough code in my life to never really want to do it again ....but I still love creating (code was merely the way to do it) so LLMs help with my underlying passion.
• Ronsenshi 7mo ago
  Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon. What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!" This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic but because of the way life goes he never really had opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super excited about it, used it a lot to make tons and tons of pictures for everything that his mind could think of. However, after awhile this excitement waned and he realized that he didn't actually learn anything at all. At that point he decided to find some time and spend more time practicing drawing to be able to make things by himself with his own skills, not by some chip on the other side of the world and he greatly improved in the past couple of years. So, AI can certainly help create all the "fun!!!" projects for people who just want to see the end result, but in the end would they actually learn anything?
  • pizza 7mo ago
    I mean. Sounds like the guy had existing long term goals, needed to overcome an activation threshold, and used AI as a catalyst to just get started. Seems like, behaviorally, AI was pivotal for him to learn things, even if the things he learned came from elsewhere / his own effort.
    • Ronsenshi 7mo ago
      I suppose, yes, AI was like a kickstart. But the point is - he didn't just stick to AI, he realized that in terms of skill and fulfillment it's a no-go direction. Because you neither learn anything, nor create anything yourself.
      • bitwize 7mo ago
        I feel the same way. But this is a new economy now, software is cheap, and regarding the skill and fulfillment you derive writing it yourself, to quote Chris Farley: "that and a nickel will get you a nice hot cup of JACK SQUAT!!!"
• JSR_FDED 7mo ago
  I urge you to actually try these tools. You will very quickly realize you have nothing to worry about. In the hands of a knowledgeable engineer these tools can save a lot of drudge work because you have the experience to spot when they’re going off the rails. Now imagine someone who doesn’t have the experience, and is not able to correct where necessary. Do you really think that’s going to end well?
  • slopinthebag 7mo ago
    Yeah, even just now I had to go and correct some issues with LLM output that I only knew were an issue because I have extensive experience with that domain. If I didn't have that I would not have caught it and it would have been a major issue down the line. LLM's remove much of the drudgery of programming that we unfortunately sort of did to ourselves collectively.
• bri3d 7mo ago
  This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief. My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me. Where my concern about LLM generated software comes in is much more existential: how do we train people who know the difference between bad software and good software in the future? What I've seen is a pattern where experienced engineers are excellent at steering AI to make themselves multiples more effective, and junior engineers are replacing their previous sloppy output with ten times their previous sloppy output. For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term, and overall, many organizations strategically think they are pointed in the right direction doing this and are happy to downsize blaming "AI." And, for places where this never really mattered (like "make my small business landing page,") this is an complete upheaval, without a doubt. My concern is basically: what will we do long term to get people from one end to another without the organic learning process that comes from having sloppy output curated and improved with a human touch by more senior engineers, and without an economic structure which allows "junior" engineers to subsidize themselves with low-end work while they learn? I worry greatly that in 5-10 years many organizations will end up with 10x larger balls of "legacy" garbage and 10x fewer knowledgeable people to fix it. For an experienced engineer I actually think this is a great career outlook and I can't understand the rug pull take at all; I think that today's strong and experienced engineer will be command a high amount of money and prestige in five years as the bottom drops out of software. From a "global outcomes" perspective this seems terrible, though, and I'm not quite sure what the solution is.
  • socalgal2 7mo ago
    My guesses are 1. We'll train the LLMs not to make sloppy code. 2. We'll come up with better techinques to make guardrails to help Making up examples: * right now, lots of people code with no tests. LLMs do better with tests. So, training LLMs to make new and better tests. * right now, many things are left untested because it's work to build the infrastructure to test them. Now we have LLMs to help us build that infrustructure so we can use it make better tests for LLMs. * ...?
• bcrosby95 7mo ago
  Really? I love LLMs because I can't stand the process of taking the model in my brain and putting it in a file. Flow State is so hard for me to hit these days. So now I spec it out, feed it to an LLM, and monitor it while having a cup of tea. If it goes off the rails (it usually does) I redirect it. Way better than banging it out by hand.
  • bitfilped 7mo ago
    It's only going to get harder to achieve if you keep letting your skills and resoning abilities rot from LLM reliance.
• JKCalhoun 7mo ago
  I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding feels even more valuable now. It was never about writing the code—anyone can do that, students in college, junior engineers… Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well structured (and well-organized) framework… Keeping it as simple as possible that just gets the job done. Designing the code-base in a way that anticipates expansion… I've never felt the least bit threatened by LLMs. Now if management sees it differently and experienced engineers are losing their jobs to LLMs, that's a tragedy. (Myself, I just retired a few years ago so I confess to no longer having a dog I this race.)
  • mk89 7mo ago
    Sorry for the dumb question but how could you feel threatened by LLMs if you retired just a few years ago? Considering the hype started somewhere in 2022-2023.
    • latenightcoding 7mo ago
      and they only got really good like last December.
    • JKCalhoun 7mo ago
      You're right, as I say, I no longer have skin in the game. Retired, I have continued to code, and have used Claude to vibe code a number of projects—initially I dod so out of curiosity as to how good LLM are, and then to handle things like SwiftUI that I am hesitant to have to learn. It's true then that I am not in a position of employment where I have to consider a performance review, pleasing my boss or impressing my coworkers. I don't doubt that would color my perception. But speaking as someone who has used LLMs to code, while they impress me, again, I don't feel the threat. As others have pointed out in past threads here on HN, on blogs, LLMs feel like junior engineers. To be sure they have a lot of "facts" but they seem to lack… (thinking of a good word) insight? Foresight? And this too is how I have felt as I was aging-out of my career and watched clever, junior engineers come on board. The newness, like Swift, was easy for them. (They no doubt have rushed headlong into Swift UI and have mastered it.) Never though did I feel threatened by them though. The career itself, I have found, does in fact care little for "grey beards". I felt by age 50 I was being kind of… disregarded by the younger engineers. (It was too bad, I thought, because I had hoped that on my way out of the profession I might act more as mentor than coder. C'est la vie!) But for all the new engineer's energy and eagerness, I was comfortable instead with my own sense of confidence and clarity that came from just having been around the block a few times. Feel free to disregard my thoughts on LLMs and the degree to which they are threatening the industry. They may well be an existential threat. But, with junior engineers as also a kind of foil, I can only say that I still feel there is value in my experience and I don't disparage it.
• adampunk 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• jv22222 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. It may look the same, but it isn't the same. In fact if you took the time to truly learn how to do pure agentic coding (not vibe coding) you would realize as a principal engineer you have an advantage over engineers with less experience. The more war stories, the more generalist experience, the more you can help shape the llm to make really good code and while retaining control of every line. This is an unprecedented opportunity for experienced devs to use their hard won experience to level themselves up to the equivalence of a full team of google devs.
  • kazinator 7mo ago
    > while retaining control of every line What I want when I'm coding, especially on open source side projects, is to retain copyright licensing over every line (cleanly, without lying about anything). Whoops!
    • jv22222 7mo ago
      Hmm. TIL: The real exposure isn't Anthropic, OpenIA claiming your code, it's you unknowingly distributing someone else's GPL code because the model silently reproduced it, with essentially zero recourse for the model owner.
      • ad_hockey 7mo ago
        It depends on your plan, but Google[1] and Anthropic[2] at least provide indemnity against this. Haven't checked the others. Still not a situation you want to find yourself in, though. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/protecting-customers-with-generative-ai-indemnification https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-api-improvements https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap...
        • kazinator 7mo ago
          > Under the updated terms, we will defend our customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of our services or their outputs, and we will pay for any approved settlements or judgments that result "We are going to use our deep billionaire pockets to squash the fucker artist who dares identify something of his that we stole, that made its way into your output ..."
• lovelearning 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way. I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because: - book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia - web content publication and production were democratized away from academia and corporations - OSes/software/software libraries were all democratized away from corporations through open-source projects - computer hardware was democratized away from corporations and universities Each of the above must have cost some gatekeepers some revenue and opportunities. You were not really an idiot just because you benefited from any of them. Analogously, when someone else benefits at some cost to you, that doesn't make them an idiot either.
  • michaelhoney 7mo ago
    This is a good response. Progress has always been resisted by incumbents
  • card_zero 7mo ago
    So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things. I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.
    • ipdashc 7mo ago
      I'm not sure how you're getting that from their post? None of the four things mentioned (book publishing, web publishing, open-source software, computer hardware) involve stealing someone's property, he's saying that the ability to produce those things widened and the cost went down massively, so more people were able to gain access to them. Nobody stole your bike, but the bike patents expired and a bunch of bike factories popped up, so now everyone can get a cheap bike.
      • card_zero 7mo ago
        I did have misgivings about saying that because I'm from the old "information wants to be free" school. But the subject was idiocy, and the point isn't to say that the bike was stolen, but that the bike-taker didn't do anything clever, or have much of a learning experience. Maybe it's of value that any idiot can do this, but we're still idiots.
• dilap 7mo ago
  I thought this was parody until the last sentence.
• michaelhoney 7mo ago
  I think it’s important for you to understand that there were always way more people who loved programming than were able to work professionally as high-level coders. Sure, if you spent most of your working life writing code, you’d be very proficient. But for many, many others, they haven’t been able to spend the time developing those muscles. Modern LLMs really are a joyful experience for people who enjoy software creation but haven’t had the 10,000 hours.
• seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
  > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. My experience is the opposite. Those with a passion for the field and the ability to dig deeply into systems are really excited right now (literally all that power just waiting to be guided to do good...and oh does it need guidance!). Those who were just going through the motions and punching a clock are pretty unmotivated and getting ready to exit. Sometimes I dream about being laid off from my FAANG job so I have some time to use this power in more interesting than I'm doing at work (although I already get to use it in fairly interesting ways in my job).
  • abm53 7mo ago
    I wouldn’t say the pessimists fall into that category. In my experience they are mostly the subset of engineers who enjoyed coding in and of itself and ——in some cases—— without concern for the end product.
• nurettin 7mo ago
  Completely the opposite experience here! I am a tech lead with decades of experience with various programming languages. When it comes to producing code with an llm, most noobs get stuck producing spaghetti and rolling over. It is so bad that I have to go prompt-fix their randomly generated architecture, de-duplicate, vectorize and simplify. If they lack domain knowledge on top of being a noob it is a complete disaster. I saw llm code pick a bad default (0) for a denominator and then "fix" that by replacing with epsilon. It isn't the end, it is a new beginning. And I'm excited.
• ipaddr 7mo ago
  I find fun in using opencode and Claude to create projects but I can't find the energy to run the project or read the code. Watching this program do stuff is more enjoyable then using or looking at the stuff produced. But it doesn't produce code that looks or is designed the way I would normally. And it can't do the difficult or novel things.
• oulu2006 7mo ago
  I don't find the same, like you, principle/CTO engineer, there's a world of difference between simplistic prompt/vibe coding and building a properly architected/performant/maintainable system with agentic coding.
• visarga 7mo ago
  > I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. Do you like the craft of programming more than the outcomes? Now you are in a better position than ever to achieve things.
• bitfilped 7mo ago
  I'm not sure why you feel devalued or let down, LLM code is a joke and will be a thing of the past after everyone has had their production environment trashed for the nth time by "AI."
• rendall 7mo ago
  I know that your post has lots of comments, but I'd like to weigh in kindly too. > I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Listen to the comments that say that experience is more valuable than ever. > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. No they cannot. You and an LLM can build something together far more powerful and sophisticated than you ever could have dreamt, and you can do it because of your decades of experience. A newbie cannot recognize the patterns of a project gone bad without that experience. > I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Welcome to the industry. :) It happens. Why not take a break? Work on a side project, something you love to do. > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. Once upon a time painters and illustrators were not "artists", but archivists and documenters. They were hired to archive what something looked like, and they were largely evaluated on that metric alone. When photography took that role, painters and illustrators had to re-evaluate their social role, and they became artists and interpreters. Impressionism, surrealism, conceptualism, post-modernism are examples of art movements that, in my interpretation, were still attempting to grapple with that shift decades, even a century later. Today, we SWE are grappling with a very similar shift. People using LLMs to create software are not poor coders any more (or less) than photographers were poor painters. Painters and illustrators became very valuable after the invention of photography, arguably more valuable socially than before.
• jorl17 7mo ago
  In my experience, the truly best in class have gone from being 10x engineers to being 100x engineers, assuming they embrace AI. It's incredible to watch. I wouldn't say I'm a 10x-er, but I'm comfortable enough with my abilities nowadays to say I am definitely "above average", and I feel beyond empowered. When I joined college 15 years ago, I felt like I was always 10 steps ahead of everyone else, and in recent years that feeling had sort of faded. Well, I've got that feeling back! So much of the world around me feels frozen in place, whereas I am enjoying programming perhaps as much as when I learned it as a little kid. I didn't know I MISSED this feeling, but I truly did! Everything in my daily life (be it coding or creating user stories — who has time to use a mouse when you can MCP to JIRA/notion/whatever?) is happening at an amazing speed and with provable higher levels of quality (more tests, better end-user and client satisfaction, more projects/leads closed, faster development times, less bug reports, etc.). I barely write lines of code, and I barely type (often just dictate to MacWhisper). I completely understand different people like different things. Had you asked me 5 years ago I probably would have told you I would be miserable if I stopped "writing" code, but apparently what I love is the problem solving, not the code churning. I'm not trying to claim my feelings are right, and other people are "wrong" for "feeling upset". What is "right" or "wrong" in matters of feelings? Perhaps little more than projection or a need for validation. There is no "right" or "wrong" about this! If I now look at average-to-low-tier-engineers, I think they are a mixed bag with AI on their hands. Sometimes they go faster and actually produce code as good as or better than before. Often, though, they lack the experience, "taste" or "a priori knowledge" to properly guide LLMs, so they churn lots of poorly designed code. I'd say they are not a net-positive. But Opus 4.6 is definitely turning the tide here, making it less likely that average engineers do as much damage as before (e.g. with a Sonnet-level model) On top of this divide within the "programming realm", there's another clear thing happening: software has finally entered the DIY era. Previously, anyone could already code, but...not really. It would be very difficult for random people to hack something quickly. I know we've had the terms "Script kiddies" for a long time, but realistically you couldn't just wire your own solution to things like you can with several physical objects. In the physical world, you grab your hammer and your tools and you build your DIY solutions — as a hobby or out of necessity. For software...this hadn't really been the case....until now! Yes, we've had no-code solutions, but they don't compare. I know 65 year olds who have never even written a line of code that are now living the life by creating small apps to improve their daily lives or just for the fun of it. It's inspiring to see, and it excites me tremendously for the future. Computers have always meant endless possibilities, but now so many more people can create with computers! To me it's a golden age for experimentation and innovation! I could say the same about music, and art creation. So many people I know and love have been creating art. They can finally express themselves in a way they couldn't before. They can produce music and pictures that bring tears to my eyes. They aren't slop (though there is an abundance of slop out there — it's a problem), they are beautiful. There is something to be said about the ethical implications of these systems, and how artists (and programmers, to a point?) are getting ripped off, but that's an entirely different topic. It's an important topic, but it does not negate that this is a brand new world of brand new artists, brand new possibilities, and brand new challenges. Change is never easy — often not even fair.
• antirez 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. Not only it would be good if true, but it is also not true. Good programmers learn how to build things, for the most part, since they know what to build, and have a general architectural idea of what they are going to build. Without that, you are like the average person in the 90s with Corel Draw in their hands, or the average person with an image diffusion model today: the output will be terrible because of lack of taste and ideas.
• tiew9Vii 7mo ago
  You don't know what you don't know. Playing with Claude, if you tell it to do something, it'll produce something. Sometimes it's output is ok, sometimes it's not. I find I need to iterate with Claude, tell it no, tell it how to improve it's solution or do something in a different way. It's kind of like speed running iterating over my ideas without spending a few hours doing it manually, writing lots of code then deleting it to end with my final solution. If I had no prior coding knowledge i'd go with what ever the LLM gave me and end up with poor quality applications. Knowing how to code gives you the advantage still using an LLM. Saying that, i'm pessimistic what my future holds as an older software engineer starting to find age/experince is an issue when an employer can pay someone less with less experience to churn out code with prompts when a lot of time the industry lives by "it's good enough".
• stpedgwdgfhgdd 7mo ago
  No worries. True, you need to learn new skills to work properly with Claude. However, 30 yrs of coding experience come in handy to quickly detect it is going in the wrong direction. Especially on an architectural level you need to guide it. Embrace
• Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software I have been thinking about the "same software" Because I remember seeing Sonnet 4.5 and I had made comments that time as well that I just wanted AI to stop developing more as the more it develops, the more harm to the economy/engineers it would do than benefit in totality. It was good enough to make scripts, I could make random scripts/one-off projects, something which I couldn't do previously but I used to still copy-paste it and run commands and I gave it the language to choose and everything. At that time, All I wanted was the models getting smaller/open source. Now, I would say that even an Idiot making software with AI is gonna reach AI fatigue at one point or another and it just feels so detached with agents. I do think that we would've been better off in society if we could've stopped the models at sonnet 4.5. We do now have models which are small and competitive to sonnet (Qwen,GLM,[kimi is a little large])
• outside1234 7mo ago
  It is weird because I am the opposite. The symbols were never the objective for me but instead how they all fit together. Now I am like a perfect weapon because I have the wisdom to know what I want to build and I don't have to translate it to an army of senior engineers. I just have Github Copilot implement it directly.
• bob1029 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. They simply can't in my experience. Most people cannot prompt their way out of a wet paper sack. The HN community is bathed in thoughtful, high quality writing 24/7/365, so I could see how a perception to the contrary might develop.
• schainks 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. You sound quite jaded. The people I see struggling _the most_ at prompting are people who have not learned to write elegantly. HOWEVER, a huge boon is that if you're a non-native English speaker and that got in your way before, you can now prompt in your native language. Chinese speakers in particular have an advantage since you use fewer tokens to say the same thing in a lot of situations. > Talk about a rug pull! Talk to product managers and people who write requirements for a living. A PM at MSFT spoke to me today about how panicked he and other PMs are right now. Smart senior engineers are absorbing the job responsibilities of multiple people around them since fewer layers of communication are needed to get the same results.
  • smackeyacky 7mo ago
    I see this at my workplace. The PMs and BAs are now completely redundant since you can prompt your way to decent specs with the right access and setup.
• vb7132 7mo ago
  Same level of engineer here - I feel that the importance of expertise has only increased, just that the language has changed. Think about the engineer who was an expert in Cobol and Fortran but didn't catch the C++ / Java wave. What would you say to them? LLMs goof up, hallucinate, make many mistakes - especially in design or architecting phase. That's where the experience truly shines. Plus, it let's you integrate things that you aren't good at (UI for me).
• jdmoreira 7mo ago
  As a senior engineer if your value add was "accumulated expert knowledge". Then yes, you are in a bad place. If instead it was building and delivering products / business value. Good judgement, coordination and communication skills, intuition, etc… then you are now way way more leveraged than you ever were and it has never been greater.
  • ValentineC 7mo ago
    I think "accumulated expert knowledge" was never really useful if an organisation could just replace that person with a wiki.
• vmykyt 7mo ago
  Short answer: use your expertise in complex project. Story: I'm dev for about 20 years. First time I had totally the same felling when desktop ui fading away in favor of html. I missed beauty of c# winforms controls with all their alignment and properties. My experience felt irrelevant anymore. Asp.net (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers") looked like evil joke. Next time it have happened with the raise of clouds. So were all my lovely crafted bash scripts and notes about unix command irrelevant? This time however that was not that personal for me. Next time - fall of scala as a primary language in big data and its replacement with python. This time it was pretty routine. Oh and data bases... how many times I heard that rdbms is obsolete and everybody should use mongo/redis/clickhouse? So learn new things and carry on. Understanding how "obsolete" things works helps a lot to avoid silly mistake especially in situation when world literally reinvent bicycle
• jgilias 7mo ago
  With all due respect. If _any idiot_ can prompt their way to the _same_ software you’d have written, and your primary value proposition is to churn out code, then you’re… a bit of an outlier when it comes to principal engineers.
  • kubb 7mo ago
    It's more common than you might think.
• frankohn 7mo ago
  I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling. However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy, and embrace life and the present moment as it is. I am just finishing the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and your comment made me think about what is explained in it. Tolle talks about how much of our suffering comes from how deeply we (understandably) tie our core identity and self-worth to our external skills, our past achievements, and our status among peers. He explains that our minds construct an ego, with which we identify. To exist, this ego needs to create and constantly feed an image of itself based on our past experiences and achievements. Normally we do this out of fear, in an attempt to protect ourselves, but the book explains that this never works. We actually build more suffering by identifying with our mind-constructed ego. Instead of living in the present and accepting the world as it is, we live in the past and resist reality in order to constantly feed an ego that feels menaced. The deep expertise you built is real, but your identity is so much more than just being a 'principal engineer'. Your real self is not the mind-constructed ego or the image you built of yourself, and you don't need to identify with it. The book also explores the Buddhist concept that all things are impermanent, and by clinging to them we are bound to suffer. We need to accept that things come and go, and live in the present moment without being attached to things that are by their nature impermanent. I suggest you might take this distress you are feeling right now as an opportunity to look at what is hurting inside you, and disidentify yourself from your ego. It may bring you joy in your life—I am trying to learn this myself!
  • guitarlimeo 7mo ago
    I'm reading The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and I find it shares many similar ideas. Also I've been interested by Buddhist concepts like impermanency for a while. While I think rationally what you said is good and makes sense, at the same time it feels like it says you should forget your roots and be this impermanent being existing in the present and only the present. I value everything about my life, the past, my role models when I was a kid, my past and current skills, all friends from all ages, my whole path essentially. When considering current choices I have to make, I feel more drawn to think "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" instead of forgetting the past and my ego and just hustling with the $CURRENT technology. At least that's how I have thought about my ego when I have tried to approach it with topics like these. It might allow me to make more money in the present if I just disidentified with it, but that thought legitimately feels horrifying because it would mean devaluing my roots. Interested to hear your take on this.
• huflungdung 7mo ago
  [dead]
• hi_hi 7mo ago
  Nah man. I understand the frustration, but this is a glass is half empty view. You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but its inevitable. Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new world. And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't changed, and won't change. It's not even about writing the code, the language, the style, the clever tricks. What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years. This game is a long game. And not just how well does the computer run the code, but how well can the humans work with the code. Use your experience to generate the value from the LLMs, cuase they aren't going to generate anything by themselves.
  • luc_ 7mo ago
    ^ Big this. If we take a pessimistic attitude, we're done for.
  • Dumblydorr 7mo ago
    Glass half empty view? Their whole skill set built up over decades, digitized, and now they have to shift everything they do, and who knows humans will even be in the loop, if they’re not c-suite or brown nosers. Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens. How is that supposed to make skillful coders feel? Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere, probable bubble, it seems naive to be optimistic at this juncture.
    • mactavish88 7mo ago
      > Their whole skill set This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done. People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.
    • seba_dos1 7mo ago
• guitarlimeo 7mo ago
  You summed up my feelings pretty well, thanks for this counterpoint to usual comments in HN
• Kiro 7mo ago
  The best programmers I know are the ones most excited about it. The mediocre programmers who are toxic gate keepers seem to be the ones most upset by it.
  • wiz21c 7mo ago
    definitely. With AI I can stop working on the painful tasks and spend much more time on things that matter most to me: building the right abstractions, thinking about the maths, talking to the customer... But TBH, I have been a bit "shocked" by AI as well. It's much more troubling that the coming of the internet. But my hope is that having worked with AI extensively for the past 1-2 years, I'm confident they miss the important things: how to build the abstractions to solve the non-code constraints (like ease of maintenance, explainability to others, etc.) And the way it goes at the moment shows no sign of progress in that area (throwing more agents at a problem will not help).
  • kalskjUQh 7mo ago
    Yeah right. Only mediocre people like Rob Pike would be a toxic gate keeper. The reality is that in the theft of Chardet at least 2000 people supported Mark Pilgrim and almost no one supported the three programmers who constantly blog about AI and try to reprogram people. Incidentally, everyone who unironically uses the word "gate keeper" is mediocre.
• nextaccountic 7mo ago
  For me this is a painting vs photography thing Painting used to be the main way to make portraits, and photography massively democratized this activity. Now everyone can have as many portraits as they want Photography became something so much larger Painting didn't disappear though
  • luke5441 7mo ago
    Compared to painting, software allows you to solve the problem once, then distribute the solution to the problem basically for free. Market frictions cause the problem to be solved multiple times. LLMs learn the solution patterns and apply it devaluing coming up with solutions in the first place.
    • anonyfox 7mo ago
      Well, slightly different take: it's like telling an artist the world doesn't need another song about love, these already exist and can be re-heard as needed. Sharper formulated: a CRM or TODO-list is a solved problem in theory, right? tons of solutions even free ones to use out there. still look at what people are doing and selling - CRMs and TODO-list variations. because, in fact, its not solved, and always has certain tradeoffs that doesn't fit some people.
• elevatortrim 7mo ago
  Nah - I've also spent decades trying to become the best software developer I can and now it is giving me enormous power. What used to take me 5 days is now taking me a day, and my output is now higher quality. I now finish things properly with the docs, and the nooks and crannies before moving on. What used to take incompetent developers 5 days - it is still taking them 5 days.
• KellyCriterion 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. Well, this is not what the main value of software actually is? Its not about prompting a one shot app, sure there will be some millionaires making an app super successful by coincidence (flapp bird, eg.), but in most cases software & IT engineering is about the context, integration, processes, maintenance, future development etc. So actually you are in perfect shape? And no worries: The one who werent good at writing code, will now fail because of administration/uptime/maintenance/support. They will fail just one step later.
• bluegatty 7mo ago
  CC is not nearly that good. It may never be. It's an amplifier not a replacer.
• InsideOutSanta 7mo ago
  > I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. That remains to be seen. There's a huge difference between an experienced engineer using LLMs in a controlled way, reviewing their code, verifying security, and making sure the architecture makes sense, and a random person vibecoding a little app - at least for now. Maybe that will change in a year or two or five or never, but today LLMs don't devalue expert knowledge. If anything, LLMs allow expert programmers to increase productivity at the same level of quality, which makes them even more valuable compared to entry-level programmers than they were before.
• nly 7mo ago
  On the plus side you're retiring soon... imagine if your were a graduate today
  • djeastm 7mo ago
    At least they're young enough to re-train into something else if they want. It's the mid-career devs who are flailing at the moment.
• anonyfox 7mo ago
  youre getting it backwards. anyone can get to something that looks alright in a browser... until you actually click something and it fails spectacularly, leaks secrets, doesn't scale beyond 10 users and is a swamp of a codebase that prevents clean ongoing extension = hard wall for non techies, suddenly the magical LLM stops producing results and makes things worse. All this senior engineering experience is a critical advantage in these new times, you implicitly ask things slightly different and circumvent these showstoppers without even thinking if you are that experienced. You don't even need to read the code at all, just a glimpse in the folder and scrolling a few meters of files with inline "pragmatic" snippets measured in meters and you know its wrong without even stepping through it. even if the autogenerated vanity unit tests say all green. Don't feel let down. Slightly related to when Google sprung into existence - everyone has access and can find stuff, but knowing how to search well is an art even today most people don't have, and makes dramatic differences in everyday usage. Amplified now with the AI search results even that often are just convincing nonsense but most people cannot see it. That intuitive feel from hard won experience about what is "wrong" even without having an instant answer what would be "right" is getting more and more the differentiator. Anyone can force their vibe coded app into some shape thats sufficient for their own daily use and they're used to avoiding their own pitfalls of the tool they created and know are there, but as soon as there's some kind of scaling (scope, users, revenue, ...) involved, true experts are needed. Even the new agent tools like Claude for X products at the end perform dramatically different in the hands of someone who knows the domain in depth.
• bobjordan 7mo ago
  Yes, the LLM can write it. No, the LLM cannot architect a complex system and weave it all together into a functioning, workable, tested system. I have a 400 table schema networked together with relationships, backrefs, services, well tested, nobody could vibe code their way to what I've built. That kind of software requires someone like yourself to steer the LLM.
• fsloth 7mo ago
  I am sorry you feel that way but I feel professionally strongly insulted by your statement. Specifically the implication high LLM affinity implies low professional competence. "My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM." Strong disagree. I've earned my wings. 5 years realtime rendering in world class teams. 13 years in AEC CAD developing software to build the world around us. In the past two years I designed and architected a complex modeling component, plus led the initial productization and rendering efforts, to my employers map offering. Now I've managed to build in my freetime the easy-to-use consumer/hobbyist CAD application I always wanted - in two years[0]. The hard parts, that are novel and value adding are specific, complex and hand written. But the amount on ungodly boilerplate needed to implement the vision would have taken either a) team and funding or b) 10 years. It's still raw and alpha and it's coming together. Would have been totally impossible without Claude, Codex and Cursor. I do agree I'm not an expert in several of the non-core technologies used - webview2 for .net for example, or xaml. But I don't have to be. They are commodity components, architected to their specific slot, replaceable and rewritable as needed. As an example of component I _had_ professional competence 15 years ago - OpenGL - I don't need to re-learn. I can just spec quickly the renderpasses, stencil states, shader techniques etc etc and have the LLM generate most of that code in place. If you select old, decades old technlogies and techniques and know what you want the output is very usable most of the time (20 year old realtime rendering is practically already timeless and good enough for many, many things). [0] https://www.adashape.com/ https://www.adashape.com/
  • dccoolgai 7mo ago
    Why would I need this tool if I can just say "Claude, make me a CAD drawing of XYZ"? Not trying to be rude, just generating some empathy for the OP's situation, which I think was missed: Like them, there is something you are passionate about that there is no longer really a point to. You could argue "but people will need to use my tool to generate really _good_ CAD drawings" but how much marginal value does that create over getting a "good enough" one in 2 minutes from Claude? I feel sorry for bringing this up, but I think you might have missed how the thing that makes this possible makes it unnecessary.
• eru 7mo ago
  That's how progress looks like! We need less to produce more. The less includes less skill and human capital. For me, LLMs just help a lot with overcoming writer's block and other ADHD related issues.
• jaynate 7mo ago
  Good engineers are way more important than they’ve ever been and the job market tells the story. Engineering job posts are up 10% year over year. The work is changing but that’s what happens when a new technology wave comes ashore. Don’t give up, ride the new wave. You’re uniquely qualified.
• tamimio 7mo ago
  Indeed, and I noticed companies now are focusing on hiring coops, paying them peanuts and just use AI, and have maybe one senior and one wrangler (engineering/project manager), that’s basically what I have noticed what neo-teams are.
• voxleone 7mo ago
  Yes, anyone can generate code, but real engineering remains about judgment and structure. AI amplifies throughput, but the bottleneck is still problem framing, abstraction choice, and trade-off reasoning. Capabilities without these foundations produce fragile, short-lived results. Only those who anchor their work in proper abstractions are actually engineering, no matter who’s writing the code.
• ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. No they can't. They think they can, but they will still need to put in the elbow grease to get it done right. But, in my case (also decades of experience), I have had to reconcile with the fact that I'll need to put down the quill pen, and learn to use a typewriter. The creativity, ideas, and obsession with Quality are still all mine, but the execution is something that I can delegate.
  • Tade0 7mo ago
    This. LLMs don't always produce correct code - sometimes it's subtly wrong and it takes an expert to notice the mistake(s).
  • jbs789 7mo ago
    As an idiot, I am very aware that Claude can help me, but also very aware I am not an experienced SWE and continue to seek out their views.
• DocTomoe 7mo ago
  > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I consider myself to have been a 'pretty good' programmer in my heyday. Think 'assembly for speed improvements' good. Then came the time of 'a new framework for everything, relearn a new paradigm every other week. No need to understand the x % 2 == 0 if we can just npm an .iseven()' era ... which completely destroyed my motivation to even start a new project. LLMs cut the boilerplate away for me. I've been back building software again. And that's good.
• aristofun 7mo ago
  Based on your comment you’re probably not a very good principal engineer ;) Hence, you are back in the group of those who should benefit from LLMs. Following your own logic :) Ps: please don’t take it seriously
• w4yai 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software If you really think it's the reality, then your expert knowledge is not that good to begin with.
• dkrich 7mo ago
  > My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. My greatest frustration with AI tools is along a similar line. I’ve found that people I work with who are mediocre use it constantly to sub in for real work. A new project comes in? Great, let me feed it to Copilot and send the output to the team to review. Look, I contributed! When it comes time to meet with customers let’s show them an AI generated application rather than take the time to understand what their existing processes are. There’s a person on my team who is more senior than I am and should be able to operate at a higher level than I can who routinely starts things in an AI tool but then asks me to take over when things get too technical. In general I feel it’s all allowed organizations to promote mediocrity. Just so many distortions right now but I do think those days are numbered and there will be a reversion to the mean and teams will require technical excellence again.
• emerongi 7mo ago
  I review PRs daily and people are pushing changes that have basic problems, not to talk about more serious flaws. The amount of code an engineer can produce is higher, but it's also less thought through. There will be more code with lower quality. If you want to be valued for your expertise, you need to find niches where quality has to stay high. In a lot of the SaaS-world, most products do not require perfection, so more slop is acceptable. Or you can accept the slop, grind out however more years you need to retire, and in the meanwhile find some new passion.
• elzbardico 7mo ago
  > Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. No, it can't. I use claude code and AMP a lot, and yet, unless I pay attention, it easily generate bad code, introduces regressions while trying to fix bugs, get stuck in suboptimal ideas. Modularity is usually terrible, 50 year ideas like cohesion and coupling are, by the very nature of it, mostly ignored except in the most formal rigid ways of mimicry introduced by post-training. Coding agents are wonderful tools, but people who think they can create and mantain complex systems by themselves are not using them in an optmal way. They are being lazy, or they lack software engineering knowledge and can't see the issues, and in that case they should be using the time saved by coding agents to read hard stuff and elevate their technique.
• juanre 7mo ago
  I think that the biggest difference is between people who mostly enjoy the act of programming (carefully craft beautiful code; you read and enjoyed "Programming Pearls" and love SICP), vs the people who enjoy having the code done, well structured and working, and mostly see the act of writing it as an annoying distraction. I've been programming for 40 years, and I've been on both sides. I love how easy it is to be in the flow when writing something that stretches my abilities in Common Lisp, and I thoroughly enjoy the act of programming then. But coding a frontend in React, or yet another set of Python endpoints, is just necessary toil to a desired endpoint. I would argue that people like you are now in the perfect position to help drive what software needs writing, because you understand the landscape. You won't be the one typing, but you can still be the one architecting it at a much higher level. I've found enjoyment and solace in this.
• spotijk 7mo ago
  I don't understand this sentiment at all. For me it, feels more like a way integrate search results immediately into my code. Did you also feel threatened by stack overflow? If you actually try it you'll find it's a multiplier of insight and knowledge.
• eej71 7mo ago
  I think you've got this backwards! I've been working with computers since an Apple ][+ landed in our living room in the early 80s. My perspective on what AI can do for me and for everyone has shifted dramatically in the last few weeks. The most recent models are amazing and are equipping me to take on tasks that I just didn't have the time or energy for. But I have the knowledge and experience to direct them. I haven't been this enthused about the possibilities in a long time. This is a huge adjustment, no doubt. But I think if I can learn to direct these tools better, I am going to get a lot done. Way more than I ever thought possible. And this is still early days! Just incredible stuff.
• mft_ 7mo ago
  It's not black/white. There's are scales of complexity and innovation, and at the moment, the LLMs are mostly good (with obvious caveats) at helping with the lower end of the complexity scale, and arguably almost nowhere on the innovation scale. If, as a principal engineer, you were performing basic work that can easily be replicated by an LLM, then you were wasted and mistasked. Firstly, high-end engineers should be working on the hard work underlying advances in operating systems, compilers, databases, etc. Claude currently couldn't write competitive versions of Linux, GCC (as recently demonstrated), BigQuery, or Postgres. Secondly, and probably more importantly, LLMs are good at doing work in fields already discovered and demonstrated by humans, but there's little evidence of them being able to make intuitive or innovative leaps forwards. (You can't just prompt Claude to "create a super-intelligent general AI"). To see the need for advances (in almost any field) and to make the leaps of innovation or understanding needed to achieve those advances still takes smart (+/- experienced) humans in 2026. And it's humans, not LLMs, that will make LLMs (or whatever comes after) better. Thought experiment: imagine training a version of Claude, only all information (history, myriad research, tutorials, YouTube takes and videos, code for v1, v2, etc.) related to LLMs is removed from the training data. Then take that version and prompt it to create an LLM. What would happen?
• deleted 7mo ago
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• sumitkumar 7mo ago
  I feel it is about being disinterested than about being good. the ones who were not interested(whether good or bad) and were trapped in a job are liberated and happy to see it be automated. The ones who are frustrated are the ones who were interested in doing(whether good or bad) but are being told by everyone that it is not worth it do it anymore.
• NinjaTrance 7mo ago
  Even as a principal engineer, there is an infinite number of things you don't know. Suppose you get out of your comfort zone to do something entirely new; AI will be much more helpful for you than it is for people who spent years developing their skills. AI is the great equalizer.
• bianat 7mo ago
  I love it. I can't stand this sentiment and this type of technologist pompous ass. You are why software mostly sucks. You have no imagination. Hopefully the models make your limited, extraordinarily overvalued skill set the last 20 years completely democratized. We will see who is the idiot going forward.
  • ejahsg 7mo ago
    Spoken like a loser and a thief.
• phlakaton 7mo ago
  I fancy myself pretty good at writing software, and here's my path in: All the tools I passed up building earlier in my career because they were too laborious to build, are now quite easy to bang out with Claude Code and, say, an hour of careful spec writing...
• asimeqi 7mo ago
  I am a principal engineer too. In the last 5 months I have been working on a project using the latest LLMs. 5 years ago that project would have required 30 engineers. Now I am alone but need at least 5 more months to have an MVP. You are just not working on projects that are complex and difficult enough. There are so many projects that I have in mind that feel within reach and I would have never considered 5 years ago.
• shadowgovt 7mo ago
  From my point of view, having the llm as co-pilot is like having the junior engineer that the team would never justify the budget to hire. I get quite a bit more done when I can assign the tool a task to work on, work on something else in the meantime, and come back in 5 or 10 minutes to check on its progress and make adjustments. There are many aspects of software engineering that are fun, but the pure mechanical part gets sold quickly; there are only but so many times you can type "emplace" and feel fulfilled. I'm finding that co-pilot is extremely good at that part.
• rpdillon 7mo ago
  I'm surprised that as a principal engineer, you view your greatest skill set as your expertise in programming. While that is certainly an enormous asset, I have never met a principal engineer that hadn't also mastered how to work within the organization to align the right resources to achieve big goals. Working with execs and line managers and engineers directly to bring people together to chase something complex and difficult: that skill is not going to be replaced by LLMs and remains extremely valuable.
  • zzrrt 7mo ago
    I'm not a principal, but I would wonder: if AI increases every "coder's" productivity, say, 5x doesn't that replace some teams with 1 person, meaning less "alignment" necessary? Some whole org layers may disappear. Soft skills become less relevant when there are fewer people to interface with. Even regarding "chase something complex and difficult", there are currently only so many needs for that, so I think any given person is justified fearing they won't be picked. It may be several years between AI eating all the CRUD work from principal down, and when it expands the next generation of complex work on robotics or whatever. Also, to speak on something I'm even less qualified – the economy feels weak, so I don't have a lot of hope for either businesses or entrepreneurs to say "Let's just start new lines of business now that one person can do what used to take a whole team." The businesses are going to pocket the safe extra profits, and too many entrepreneurs are not going to find a foothold regardless how fast they can code.
• stevepotter 7mo ago
  I might be wrong but this sounds like an ego issue more than anything. Twice you berated less skilled programmers. I’m skilled as well and it did sting when I realized that a relatively new technology could beat me. But there’s so much more to it, especially PMs. PMs find big high value problems and solve them. The coding should be the easy part. If your coding skills are such a big part of your identity and you enjoy the feeling of superiority, a good therapist (chatgpt maybe lol) could be useful.
• malthaus 7mo ago
  very hard to feel sorry of you when countless professions experienced the same in the past - only that they were poor / working class and not overpaid software engineers at FAANG. also very egocentric & pessimist way to look at things. humankind is much better off when anyone can produce software and skilled experts will always be needed, just maybe with a slightly different skillset.
• jlas 7mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...
• rstuart4133 7mo ago
  I'm in the hard disagree camp. I'm heading towards late 60s now, and have been writing software for all of my working life. I am wondering how your conclusions are so different from mine. One is you only write "in the small [0]". LLMs are at least as good as a human at turning out "web grade" software in the small. Claude CLI is as good an example of this sort of software as anything. Every week or two I hit some small bug. This type of software doesn't need a "principal software engineer". The second is you never used an LLM to write software in the large. LLMs are amazing things, far far better than humans at reading and untangling code. You can give some obfuscated javascript and they regurgitate commented code with self explanatory variable and function names in a minute or two. Give them a task and they will happily spit out 1000s of lines of code in 10 minutes or so which is amazing. Then you look closer, and it's spaghetti. The LLM has no trouble understanding the spaghetti of course, and if you are happy to trust your tests and let the LLM maintain the thing from then on, it's a workable approach. Until, that is, it gets large enough for a few compile loops to exceed the LLM's context window, then it turns to crap. At that point you have to decompose it into modules it can handle. Turns out decomposition is something current LLMs (and junior devs) are absolutely hopeless at. But it's what a principal software engineer is paid to do. The spaghetti code is the symptom of that same deficiency. If they decide they need code to do X while working on concept Y, they will drop the code for X right beside the code for Y, borrowing state from Y as needed. The result is a highly interconnected ball of mud. Which the LLM will understand perfectly until it falls off the context window cliff, then all hope is lost. While LLM ability to implement a complex request as simple isolated parts remains, a principal engineer's job is safe. In fact given LLMs are accelerating things, my guess is the demand will only grow. But I suspect the LLM developers are working hard at solving this limitation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_in_the_large_and_programming_in_the_small https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_in_the_large_and_p...