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This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experience they have, the better. I know some guys who were road warriors for many years —- everything from racking and cabling servers, setting up infrastructure, and getting huge cloud deployments going all the way to embedded software, video game backends, etc. These guys were already really good at automation, seeing the whole life cycle of software, and understanding all the pressure points. For them, AI is the ultimate power tool. They’re just flying with it right now. (All of them also are aware that the AI vampire is very real.) There’s still a lot to learn, and the tools are still very, very early on, but the value is clear. I think for quite a few people, engaging with AI is maybe the first time ever in their entire career they are having to engage with systems thinking in a very concrete and directed way. Consequently, this is why so many software engineers are having an identity crisis: they’ve spent most of their career focusing on one very small section of the overall SDLC, meanwhile believing that was mostly all there was that they needed to know. So I think we’re going to keep talking for quite a while, and the conversation will continue to be very unevenly distributed. Paradoxically, I’m not bored of it, because I’m learning so much listening to intelligent people share their learnings.

djeastm 7mo ago
Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have. For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill. I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past. The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim. So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.
  - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
    > So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.
    - SpecialistK 7mo ago
      And to take the analogy even further, I'm sure there will be a subset of people who develop really strong opinions about a particular toolchain or workflow. Like how we have people who specialize in 70s diesel trucks or 90-00s JDM sports cars, there'll likely be programmers who are SMEs at updating COBAL to Rust using Claude.
      - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
        yup. I do early bosch EFI and K-Jet... thats what I know!
  - a1o 7mo ago
    I am pretty sure network knowledge and all those things are still necessary for people running data centers and really big computers and I imagine we will build a lot more of that. Also anyone making a homelab has to know these stuff.
- eloisant 7mo ago
  When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience. Then the same happened with languages that managed memory. And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls. And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.
  - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
    And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the rest was history. So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.
    - eloisant 7mo ago
      Sure, "it's handy" and once every few years you encounter a bug where ASM or C knowledge is valuable. Yet most programmers nowadays can't write ASM or C and still manage to produce useful software.
  - bGl2YW5j 7mo ago
    I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.
    - wild_egg 7mo ago
      I think we're a long ways from that. But with that said, those who learn the underlying mechanisms will always be able to solve more problems than the folks who don't. When you know the lower pieces, your mental model tells you when and where the higher level pieces are likely to break. Legit superpower.
bengale 7mo ago
Spot on take. The people I’ve noticed that say things like “it’s not useful” are the ones who are doing so little they can’t see the value. This isn’t to say there’s not hype. Just that if you’re not seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.
- imiric 7mo ago
  I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority. Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share. In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are vastly blown out of proportion. In the context of software development specifically, sure, you can now generate thousands of lines of code in an instant, but writing code was never the bottleneck. It was always the effort to carefully design and implement correct solutions to real-world problems. These new tools can approximate this to an extent, when given relevant context and expert guidance, but the output is always unreliable, and very difficult to verify. So anyone who claims "big productivity gains" is likely not bothering to verify the output, which in most cases will eventually come back to haunt them and/or anyone who depends on their work. And this should concern everyone.
  - SpaceNoodled 7mo ago
    That's only because we're trying to not be too condescending.
  - hparadiz 7mo ago
    "productivity" is a misnomer. Sort of. The things I'm building are all things I've had on the back burner for years. Most of which I never would have bothered to do. But AI lets me ignore that excuse and just do it.
    - ok_dad 7mo ago
      The productivity comes from not having the startup costs. You don’t need to research the best way to do X, just verify that X works via tests and documentation. I find it still takes T hours to actually implement X with an agent, but if I didn’t know how to do X it eliminates that startup cost which might make it take 3T hours instead. The only downside is not learning about method Y or Z that work differently than X but would also be sufficient, and you don’t learn the nuances and details of the problem space for X, Y, and Z.
amelius 7mo ago
This is really not true. There are stories of people who had no background in software engineering who now write entire applications using AI. And I have personally seen this happen.
- pojzon 7mo ago
  Its silly to say this but one such person is „pewdiepie”
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  Smart people can hit the ground running if they're freed from the need to first learn the intricacies of a new language. We're going to see an explosion in the number of people writing software as clever people who invested their time in something other than learning to program are now able to write software for themselves.
- switchbak 7mo ago
  What is not true, that "so many software engineers are having an identity crisis"? I don't believe they said that folks new to AI can't make impressive use of it. They did however say that senior folks with lots of scrappy and holistic knowledge can do amazing things with it. Both can be true.
- strken 7mo ago
  Before AI, there were also stories of people who had no background in software engineering who wrote entire applications using their fingers. This was called "learning to be a software engineer". I don't mean to snipe at AI, because it really does seem to have set more people on the path of learning, but I was writing VB5 apps when I was 14 by copying poorly understood bits and pieces from books. Now people are doing basically the same but with less typing and everyone thinks it's a revolution.
  - anon-3988 7mo ago
    I have never seen people learn how to be a software engineer in a weekend tho.
d675 7mo ago
absolutely. as a early/mid level SDET/SRE, I can move so fast on prototyping full good apps now. That style of thinking is serving me well, knowing about queues, docker, basic infra knowledge, good coding practices, is plenty to produce decent code. Interesting time to be laid off. AI makes a ton of bad decisions too and it's up to you to work with it. If I had the knowledge of the dangers hidden in things I'm developing, I'd move even faster Was able to make a great full web app, which I think is hardened for prod but it had to be refactored to do so. Which it happily did. It's really about asking the right questions, breaking down tasks, and planning now. I'm going to tackle a huge project, hoping to share it here.
gAI 7mo ago
Agreed, though I prefer "Fae Folk" to vampires.
- Terr_ 7mo ago
  If LLMs were vampires, they'd be better at counting, if they were fae, they'd be better at legalistic logic. :p
cyanydeez 7mo ago
Isn't that scary though: A bunch of people are going to be forced to use a tool that keeps them ignorant and they absolutely won't know if it's doing correct things, to the point that as you retire, the next crop is going to be much less involved in knowing whats going on. It's what happened with the internet and computer usage. As Apple made it easier to get online with zero computer knowledge, suddenly we're electing people like donald trump.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  Serious reply to this one: I truly don’t find it any more scary than what’s already taken place many times in human history. We have hundreds and thousands of years of history showing humans committing atrocities against each other well before the advent of computers, or even the introduction of electricity. So while the tool may become so ubiquitous that there’s no option not to engage with it, I don’t think it really fundamentally alters the dynamics of human behavior. Some people are motivated by greed. Others are motivated by nobility. It really just comes down to which wolf they're feeding. In terms of the tool keeping people ignorant, there’s a part I agree with and a part that I don’t. I think, in terms of information dissemination, AI is probably the autocrat’s wet dream in terms of finally being able to achieve real-time redefinition of reality. That’s pretty scary, and I’m not sure what to do about it. On the other hand, people have always been free to not really learn their craft and to just sort of get by and make a living. That was true a thousand years ago, and it’s true today. There’s always somebody who can do really a high-quality job, but they’re very expensive, and then there's a vast population who will do a medium to terrible job for less money. You get what you pay for. There's a reason history is primarily written about people with power and wealth, they were the only ones with the means to do anything. I don’t agree with the assertion about the internet and the election of someone like Donald Trump. Well before the internet existed, politicians were using communication mediums to influence things and get elected—whether it was the telegraph, the telephone, or the TV. JFK famously was the first TV president (notably, he didn't wear a hat). These technologies simply give politicians more reach, and they may change the dynamics of how voters are persuaded. But what’s true today was true three hundred years ago: there’s the face of power that you see publicly, and then there’s what really happens behind the scenes.
jakelsaunders94 7mo ago
Hey, I don't think this sounded like snark at all. Super grounded take. > I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. This I agree with completely. You can see it in the difference between a prompt where you know exactly what you want and when things are a little woolley. A tool in the hands of a well trained craftsperson is always better used. > So I think we’re going to keep talking for quite a while Me neither, and to be clear I'm okay with that. This was mostly a rant at the lack of diversity of discourse.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  Thanks friend! Appreciate it. Agree, the diversity of the discourse is not great. There's a lot of "omg I just got started waaauw" articles out there along with "we're all gonna die!" stuff. And then a few seams of very excellent insight. Deep research at least helps with dowsing for the knowledge...
  - artur_makly 7mo ago
    your HN handle is one of my top 10 fav tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2RSniyYNSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2RSniyYNSc {heart}
    - mindcrime 7mo ago
      And here I was expecting this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Rl8TpGIP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Rl8TpGIP4
      - RyanOD 7mo ago
        And here I was expecting this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0iuMByFjCQ&list=PLEouLkiLHdSD5HWr5Iz-fgDz4ssosHrtb&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0iuMByFjCQ&list=PLEouLkiLHd...
QuantumGood 7mo ago
> I’m learning so much listening to intelligent people share their learnings. Me too. A key purpose of HN, and a bright time for that.
LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
Spot on, I am having the time of my life with AI, more fun than I've had in decades. But I was in the top 10% of engineering, and top 1% of the bits of engineering I do best, so it's easy for me to use AI to explore more ideas than I could have possibly explored by hand. And if I get replaced, cool bro, my investments are in compute, and compute's just getting started IMO.
- LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
  Wow, replying to myself here, but also, wow, yes I'm pretty good at something pretty in demand right now. And that didn't happen by chance, and because I was a decade early on that skill, I got all the arrows in my back along with the headstart. We are all created equal, sure, but if I put 100,000+ hours into something that most barely get past 10,000, if I don't end up world class at it, then what was I even doing? I know, I know, hubris, right? Also, didn't have kids so I had the time. But that said, this will be the 3rd major industry transition of my career. And having survived the past two, you will adapt, or you won't have a job. And that's why, once again, you will ultimately adapt, kicking and screaming if that's what it takes, so why not start early? AI coding agents are useful already, but they make too many mistakes and they need handholding from expert engineering talent in 2026. Ask me again in 2027. But that's why the best results are coming from the talent right now with the experience to ask the right questions and propose the right tests and fixes as the human in the loop. Otherwise, it's still hallucinatory vibe coding in a loop IMO. The surprise and disappointment, well not the surprise, is the usual hatred of success that defines humanity. Whatever, downvotes, right?
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sigbottle 7mo ago
The "AI Vampire", huh. Unironically, I've been feeling that way. Well, there was also a lot of unrelated things that happened as well around last November for me, but yes, getting into vibecoding for real was one of them, and man I feel physically drained coming back from work and going to use more AI. Not sure what it is. I'm using AI personally to learn and bootstrap a lot of domain knowledge I never would have learned otherwise (even got into philosophy!, but man is it exhausting keeping up with AI. I would burn through a week's worth of credits in a day, and now I haven't vibe coded a week. I think, I will chill. One day at a time.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  AI Vampire is from Steve Yegge, credit where it's due. My take is that it's similar to what Amber Case described in Calm Technology - with AI you are not steering one car, you're really steering three cars at the same time. The human mind isn't really designed for that. I am finding that really structuring my time helps in terms of fighting back. And adopting an hours restriction, even if I could rage for 4 more hours, I don't. Instead I stop and go outside.
keybored 7mo ago
A post supposedly about being bored of talking about AI. But psyche, it’s the same AI talking points. And psyche, the top comment is the same sentiment about how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine. I don’t know if it’s the Universe delivering this farce or it’s the emergent LLM Singularity.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  > how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine. That's not what I said. I said that those who are already shining, are now shining even brighter. Give a great craftsman a new tool and he will find a way to apply it. If it is valueless, he will throw it away. For what it's worth, your comment is also an HN trope, the disaffected low-effort armchair keyboard warrior.
  - keybored 7mo ago
    Expressing a negative sentiment is a trope now?
    - Rapzid 7mo ago
      Keybored is a trending vibe, yeah.
      - keybored 7mo ago
        Is anyone else bored of talking about posting with that keybored vibe? Hey, don’t get me wrong!—I’m not some heretic. I love the keybored posting vibe. Lots of sarcasm, complaining about American geopolitical decisions, recommending socialism on some venture capitalist/hacker forum, absolutely no hint of any Show HN bragging rights or any technical accomplishments whatsover, just lots of complaining in general (but I repeat myself). It’s fantastic and I could not go back to posting any other way. But why are talking about it so much? Why not just live it, live that beautiful vibe, and let it permeate our whole Internet persona—in fact just let it become water around us, like we are fish, something vital to our existence and wholly unquestioned until the dam breaks somewhere.
heliumtera 7mo ago
>They’re just flying with it right now. Where are they flying and why software has gone to shit? Maybe this super stars programmers have to keep their reality breaking technology secret, but everything has not only degraded, but turned to absolute trash.
hbarka 7mo ago
> For them, AI is the ultimate power tool. Yup
- SpaceNoodled 7mo ago
  When all you've got AI, every problem looks like ... Uh, whatever hole an LLM's output goes into. A garbage can, ideally. AI seems great when you have no way of truly validating its output.
deadbabe 7mo ago
If you have to really understand software development to be a good user of AI, we’re screwed. All the best users of AI we’ll ever have already exist I think.
- throwawaytea 7mo ago
  That's a good point. Im a novice self taught developer that somehow pushed through and made a decent PM tool for the construction industry. It works, if your users aren't malicious or too demanding. Now I'm working on a second project, all with AI. I haven't written a single line. It works better than a non programmer would make because I knew what to ask for. But I'll admit I'm not learning anything.
  - hparadiz 7mo ago
    Can't say the same. I've been super hands on with a C project. Really getting into the details of the event bus and how to make things performant. The AI is still writing 99% of the code but I'm being super strict about what I consider acceptable.
    - deadbabe 7mo ago
      And when you get memory leaks and don’t know how to debug?
      - hparadiz 7mo ago
        Lol what a silly assumption
        deadbabe 7mo ago
        Fuck, another C developer who will just let memory leaks grow uncontrollably is born.
        hparadiz 7mo ago
username135 7mo ago
AI Vampire is so perfect. Ive never thought of it that way but its right there.
llmthrow0827 7mo ago
This would be a more compelling argument if the conversations weren't so extremely dull and derivative, with most of the articles written in LLMspeak. I see a lot of discussion and not a lot of substance; articles and discussions about AI have a much smaller chance of being compelling compared to any other technical subject posted on HN.
- piva00 7mo ago
  The signal-to-noise ratio seems worse than many other hypes but it's the general way hypes go. It's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff at this point but I've been positively surprised by the relatively few articles sharing their more advanced workflow, lessons learnt which helps me to avoid the traps, patterns emerging that taught me something new (or at least validated approaches I tried on my own which worked). Gets tiresome to keep pace so I try to not fall for FOMO, and avoid experimenting too much to not get lost until I see a pattern emerging from different sources.
strangattractor 7mo ago
Agreed - another tool in the old tool pouch. I find it fascinating in that it provides insight into the role of language in intelligence. Certainly not AGI but makes ELIZA seem neolithic;) I am amazed at the incredible things it can do - only to turnaround and not be able to do a simple task a child can do. Just like people.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  Your handle caught my attention - yes - and for folks studying non-linear and dynamical systems, fascinating how much of prompting is sensitive dependence to initial conditions.
ChimpWithHat 7mo ago
Completely agree. It’s very telling that the majority of write ups on effect agentic coding are essentially summaries of software engineering best practices.
AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago
[flagged]
- dogleash 7mo ago
  >The identity crisis observation is the most accurate thing It's also a nasty tool used to dismiss criticism by tearing people down in work-friendly language. Software does employ a lot turds that it shouldn't. We been knowing this. Impossible to ignore following the 2010s push to expand the hiring pool. Newcomers didn't even pretend to try or care. Convenient that we're suddenly calling them out now. At the same time there's a need to indiscriminately invalidate professional-informed opinions.
abustamam 7mo ago
This! I've actually learned a lot about what I don't know by using AI. It made me dig into learning proper systems design, app architecture, etc. But at the same time the more I read about AI, the more I realize I need to learn about AI. Thus far I'm just using cursor and the Claude code extension alongside obra superpowers, and I've been quite happy with it. But on Twitter I see people with multiple instances of Claude code or open claw talking to each other and I don't even know how to begin to understand what's going on there. But I'm not letting myself get distracted — Claude code and open claw are tools. They could go away at any time. But systems thinking is something that won't go away. At least, that's my gambit.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  It’s telling those people mostly talk about the complexity of the AI setup they’ve engineered to write code. Much more so than bragging about the software created by that process.
  - abustamam 7mo ago
    That's a good point, but I've seen a lot of interesting meta-setups as well (like visualizations of agents interacting with one another). Does it write good code? I dunno. But it looks cool, and I think interesting in its own right, even if it ends up being functionally useless.
pjmlp 7mo ago
I am having an identity crisis that thankfully is sorted out by being senior and close to retirement than early career days. Since COVID I have seen teams scaled down, lots of custom development or devops/infra work work got replaced with SaaS and iPaaS cloud products, serverless/lambda, managed containers. This is the next step. Great that people feel more productive, unfortunely for many of them, us, more productivity means the C-suites can do some head count reduction yet again.
randusername 7mo ago
> Consequently, this is why so many software engineers are having an identity crisis: they’ve spent most of their career focusing on one very small section of the overall SDLC, meanwhile believing that was mostly all there was that they needed to know. Specialists/generalists, top-down/bottom-up, BFS/DFS, pragmatists/idealists, ADHD/ASD; lots of continuums in software work and those at either extreme have biases. Personally I think that there will be less programmers needed and the ones that will remain will have had to mellow out towards the center in all these continuums. We won't be able to rely on big teams balancing each other out. Generalists will need to learn which details matter. Specialists will need to learn the delegation and risk tolerance usually reserved for the bemoaned management track. Hard to say which is the easier journey.

djeastm 7mo ago

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

_doctor_love 7mo ago
Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have. For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill. I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past. The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim. So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.
- calvinmorrison 7mo ago
  > So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.
  - SpecialistK 7mo ago
    And to take the analogy even further, I'm sure there will be a subset of people who develop really strong opinions about a particular toolchain or workflow. Like how we have people who specialize in 70s diesel trucks or 90-00s JDM sports cars, there'll likely be programmers who are SMEs at updating COBAL to Rust using Claude.
    - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
      yup. I do early bosch EFI and K-Jet... thats what I know!
- a1o 7mo ago
  I am pretty sure network knowledge and all those things are still necessary for people running data centers and really big computers and I imagine we will build a lot more of that. Also anyone making a homelab has to know these stuff.
eloisant 7mo ago
When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience. Then the same happened with languages that managed memory. And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls. And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.
- calvinmorrison 7mo ago
  And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the rest was history. So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.
  - eloisant 7mo ago
    Sure, "it's handy" and once every few years you encounter a bug where ASM or C knowledge is valuable. Yet most programmers nowadays can't write ASM or C and still manage to produce useful software.
- bGl2YW5j 7mo ago
  I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.
  - wild_egg 7mo ago
    I think we're a long ways from that. But with that said, those who learn the underlying mechanisms will always be able to solve more problems than the folks who don't. When you know the lower pieces, your mental model tells you when and where the higher level pieces are likely to break. Legit superpower.

bengale 7mo ago

Spot on take. The people I’ve noticed that say things like “it’s not useful” are the ones who are doing so little they can’t see the value. This isn’t to say there’s not hype. Just that if you’re not seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.

imiric 7mo ago
I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority. Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share. In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are vastly blown out of proportion. In the context of software development specifically, sure, you can now generate thousands of lines of code in an instant, but writing code was never the bottleneck. It was always the effort to carefully design and implement correct solutions to real-world problems. These new tools can approximate this to an extent, when given relevant context and expert guidance, but the output is always unreliable, and very difficult to verify. So anyone who claims "big productivity gains" is likely not bothering to verify the output, which in most cases will eventually come back to haunt them and/or anyone who depends on their work. And this should concern everyone.
- SpaceNoodled 7mo ago
  That's only because we're trying to not be too condescending.
- hparadiz 7mo ago
  "productivity" is a misnomer. Sort of. The things I'm building are all things I've had on the back burner for years. Most of which I never would have bothered to do. But AI lets me ignore that excuse and just do it.
  - ok_dad 7mo ago
    The productivity comes from not having the startup costs. You don’t need to research the best way to do X, just verify that X works via tests and documentation. I find it still takes T hours to actually implement X with an agent, but if I didn’t know how to do X it eliminates that startup cost which might make it take 3T hours instead. The only downside is not learning about method Y or Z that work differently than X but would also be sufficient, and you don’t learn the nuances and details of the problem space for X, Y, and Z.

amelius 7mo ago

This is really not true. There are stories of people who had no background in software engineering who now write entire applications using AI. And I have personally seen this happen.

pojzon 7mo ago
Its silly to say this but one such person is „pewdiepie”
mikkupikku 7mo ago
Smart people can hit the ground running if they're freed from the need to first learn the intricacies of a new language. We're going to see an explosion in the number of people writing software as clever people who invested their time in something other than learning to program are now able to write software for themselves.
switchbak 7mo ago
What is not true, that "so many software engineers are having an identity crisis"? I don't believe they said that folks new to AI can't make impressive use of it. They did however say that senior folks with lots of scrappy and holistic knowledge can do amazing things with it. Both can be true.
strken 7mo ago
Before AI, there were also stories of people who had no background in software engineering who wrote entire applications using their fingers. This was called "learning to be a software engineer". I don't mean to snipe at AI, because it really does seem to have set more people on the path of learning, but I was writing VB5 apps when I was 14 by copying poorly understood bits and pieces from books. Now people are doing basically the same but with less typing and everyone thinks it's a revolution.
- anon-3988 7mo ago
  I have never seen people learn how to be a software engineer in a weekend tho.

d675 7mo ago

absolutely. as a early/mid level SDET/SRE, I can move so fast on prototyping full good apps now. That style of thinking is serving me well, knowing about queues, docker, basic infra knowledge, good coding practices, is plenty to produce decent code. Interesting time to be laid off. AI makes a ton of bad decisions too and it's up to you to work with it. If I had the knowledge of the dangers hidden in things I'm developing, I'd move even faster Was able to make a great full web app, which I think is hardened for prod but it had to be refactored to do so. Which it happily did. It's really about asking the right questions, breaking down tasks, and planning now. I'm going to tackle a huge project, hoping to share it here.

gAI 7mo ago

Agreed, though I prefer "Fae Folk" to vampires.

Terr_ 7mo ago
If LLMs were vampires, they'd be better at counting, if they were fae, they'd be better at legalistic logic. :p

cyanydeez 7mo ago

Isn't that scary though: A bunch of people are going to be forced to use a tool that keeps them ignorant and they absolutely won't know if it's doing correct things, to the point that as you retire, the next crop is going to be much less involved in knowing whats going on. It's what happened with the internet and computer usage. As Apple made it easier to get online with zero computer knowledge, suddenly we're electing people like donald trump.

_doctor_love 7mo ago
Serious reply to this one: I truly don’t find it any more scary than what’s already taken place many times in human history. We have hundreds and thousands of years of history showing humans committing atrocities against each other well before the advent of computers, or even the introduction of electricity. So while the tool may become so ubiquitous that there’s no option not to engage with it, I don’t think it really fundamentally alters the dynamics of human behavior. Some people are motivated by greed. Others are motivated by nobility. It really just comes down to which wolf they're feeding. In terms of the tool keeping people ignorant, there’s a part I agree with and a part that I don’t. I think, in terms of information dissemination, AI is probably the autocrat’s wet dream in terms of finally being able to achieve real-time redefinition of reality. That’s pretty scary, and I’m not sure what to do about it. On the other hand, people have always been free to not really learn their craft and to just sort of get by and make a living. That was true a thousand years ago, and it’s true today. There’s always somebody who can do really a high-quality job, but they’re very expensive, and then there's a vast population who will do a medium to terrible job for less money. You get what you pay for. There's a reason history is primarily written about people with power and wealth, they were the only ones with the means to do anything. I don’t agree with the assertion about the internet and the election of someone like Donald Trump. Well before the internet existed, politicians were using communication mediums to influence things and get elected—whether it was the telegraph, the telephone, or the TV. JFK famously was the first TV president (notably, he didn't wear a hat). These technologies simply give politicians more reach, and they may change the dynamics of how voters are persuaded. But what’s true today was true three hundred years ago: there’s the face of power that you see publicly, and then there’s what really happens behind the scenes.

jakelsaunders94 7mo ago

Hey, I don't think this sounded like snark at all. Super grounded take. > I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. This I agree with completely. You can see it in the difference between a prompt where you know exactly what you want and when things are a little woolley. A tool in the hands of a well trained craftsperson is always better used. > So I think we’re going to keep talking for quite a while Me neither, and to be clear I'm okay with that. This was mostly a rant at the lack of diversity of discourse.

_doctor_love 7mo ago
Thanks friend! Appreciate it. Agree, the diversity of the discourse is not great. There's a lot of "omg I just got started waaauw" articles out there along with "we're all gonna die!" stuff. And then a few seams of very excellent insight. Deep research at least helps with dowsing for the knowledge...
- artur_makly 7mo ago
  your HN handle is one of my top 10 fav tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2RSniyYNSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2RSniyYNSc {heart}
  - mindcrime 7mo ago
    And here I was expecting this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Rl8TpGIP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Rl8TpGIP4
    - RyanOD 7mo ago
      And here I was expecting this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0iuMByFjCQ&list=PLEouLkiLHdSD5HWr5Iz-fgDz4ssosHrtb&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0iuMByFjCQ&list=PLEouLkiLHd...

QuantumGood 7mo ago

> I’m learning so much listening to intelligent people share their learnings. Me too. A key purpose of HN, and a bright time for that.

LogicFailsMe 7mo ago

Spot on, I am having the time of my life with AI, more fun than I've had in decades. But I was in the top 10% of engineering, and top 1% of the bits of engineering I do best, so it's easy for me to use AI to explore more ideas than I could have possibly explored by hand. And if I get replaced, cool bro, my investments are in compute, and compute's just getting started IMO.

LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
Wow, replying to myself here, but also, wow, yes I'm pretty good at something pretty in demand right now. And that didn't happen by chance, and because I was a decade early on that skill, I got all the arrows in my back along with the headstart. We are all created equal, sure, but if I put 100,000+ hours into something that most barely get past 10,000, if I don't end up world class at it, then what was I even doing? I know, I know, hubris, right? Also, didn't have kids so I had the time. But that said, this will be the 3rd major industry transition of my career. And having survived the past two, you will adapt, or you won't have a job. And that's why, once again, you will ultimately adapt, kicking and screaming if that's what it takes, so why not start early? AI coding agents are useful already, but they make too many mistakes and they need handholding from expert engineering talent in 2026. Ask me again in 2027. But that's why the best results are coming from the talent right now with the experience to ask the right questions and propose the right tests and fixes as the human in the loop. Otherwise, it's still hallucinatory vibe coding in a loop IMO. The surprise and disappointment, well not the surprise, is the usual hatred of success that defines humanity. Whatever, downvotes, right?
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sigbottle 7mo ago

The "AI Vampire", huh. Unironically, I've been feeling that way. Well, there was also a lot of unrelated things that happened as well around last November for me, but yes, getting into vibecoding for real was one of them, and man I feel physically drained coming back from work and going to use more AI. Not sure what it is. I'm using AI personally to learn and bootstrap a lot of domain knowledge I never would have learned otherwise (even got into philosophy!, but man is it exhausting keeping up with AI. I would burn through a week's worth of credits in a day, and now I haven't vibe coded a week. I think, I will chill. One day at a time.

_doctor_love 7mo ago
AI Vampire is from Steve Yegge, credit where it's due. My take is that it's similar to what Amber Case described in Calm Technology - with AI you are not steering one car, you're really steering three cars at the same time. The human mind isn't really designed for that. I am finding that really structuring my time helps in terms of fighting back. And adopting an hours restriction, even if I could rage for 4 more hours, I don't. Instead I stop and go outside.

keybored 7mo ago

A post supposedly about being bored of talking about AI. But psyche, it’s the same AI talking points. And psyche, the top comment is the same sentiment about how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine. I don’t know if it’s the Universe delivering this farce or it’s the emergent LLM Singularity.

_doctor_love 7mo ago
> how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine. That's not what I said. I said that those who are already shining, are now shining even brighter. Give a great craftsman a new tool and he will find a way to apply it. If it is valueless, he will throw it away. For what it's worth, your comment is also an HN trope, the disaffected low-effort armchair keyboard warrior.
- keybored 7mo ago
  Expressing a negative sentiment is a trope now?
  - Rapzid 7mo ago
    Keybored is a trending vibe, yeah.
    - keybored 7mo ago
      Is anyone else bored of talking about posting with that keybored vibe? Hey, don’t get me wrong!—I’m not some heretic. I love the keybored posting vibe. Lots of sarcasm, complaining about American geopolitical decisions, recommending socialism on some venture capitalist/hacker forum, absolutely no hint of any Show HN bragging rights or any technical accomplishments whatsover, just lots of complaining in general (but I repeat myself). It’s fantastic and I could not go back to posting any other way. But why are talking about it so much? Why not just live it, live that beautiful vibe, and let it permeate our whole Internet persona—in fact just let it become water around us, like we are fish, something vital to our existence and wholly unquestioned until the dam breaks somewhere.

heliumtera 7mo ago

>They’re just flying with it right now. Where are they flying and why software has gone to shit? Maybe this super stars programmers have to keep their reality breaking technology secret, but everything has not only degraded, but turned to absolute trash.

hbarka 7mo ago

> For them, AI is the ultimate power tool. Yup

SpaceNoodled 7mo ago
When all you've got AI, every problem looks like ... Uh, whatever hole an LLM's output goes into. A garbage can, ideally. AI seems great when you have no way of truly validating its output.

deadbabe 7mo ago

If you have to really understand software development to be a good user of AI, we’re screwed. All the best users of AI we’ll ever have already exist I think.

throwawaytea 7mo ago
That's a good point. Im a novice self taught developer that somehow pushed through and made a decent PM tool for the construction industry. It works, if your users aren't malicious or too demanding. Now I'm working on a second project, all with AI. I haven't written a single line. It works better than a non programmer would make because I knew what to ask for. But I'll admit I'm not learning anything.
- hparadiz 7mo ago
  Can't say the same. I've been super hands on with a C project. Really getting into the details of the event bus and how to make things performant. The AI is still writing 99% of the code but I'm being super strict about what I consider acceptable.
  - deadbabe 7mo ago
    And when you get memory leaks and don’t know how to debug?
    - hparadiz 7mo ago
      Lol what a silly assumption
      - deadbabe 7mo ago
        Fuck, another C developer who will just let memory leaks grow uncontrollably is born.
        hparadiz 7mo ago

username135 7mo ago

AI Vampire is so perfect. Ive never thought of it that way but its right there.

llmthrow0827 7mo ago

This would be a more compelling argument if the conversations weren't so extremely dull and derivative, with most of the articles written in LLMspeak. I see a lot of discussion and not a lot of substance; articles and discussions about AI have a much smaller chance of being compelling compared to any other technical subject posted on HN.

piva00 7mo ago
The signal-to-noise ratio seems worse than many other hypes but it's the general way hypes go. It's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff at this point but I've been positively surprised by the relatively few articles sharing their more advanced workflow, lessons learnt which helps me to avoid the traps, patterns emerging that taught me something new (or at least validated approaches I tried on my own which worked). Gets tiresome to keep pace so I try to not fall for FOMO, and avoid experimenting too much to not get lost until I see a pattern emerging from different sources.

strangattractor 7mo ago

Agreed - another tool in the old tool pouch. I find it fascinating in that it provides insight into the role of language in intelligence. Certainly not AGI but makes ELIZA seem neolithic;) I am amazed at the incredible things it can do - only to turnaround and not be able to do a simple task a child can do. Just like people.

_doctor_love 7mo ago
Your handle caught my attention - yes - and for folks studying non-linear and dynamical systems, fascinating how much of prompting is sensitive dependence to initial conditions.

ChimpWithHat 7mo ago

Completely agree. It’s very telling that the majority of write ups on effect agentic coding are essentially summaries of software engineering best practices.

AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago

[flagged]

dogleash 7mo ago
>The identity crisis observation is the most accurate thing It's also a nasty tool used to dismiss criticism by tearing people down in work-friendly language. Software does employ a lot turds that it shouldn't. We been knowing this. Impossible to ignore following the 2010s push to expand the hiring pool. Newcomers didn't even pretend to try or care. Convenient that we're suddenly calling them out now. At the same time there's a need to indiscriminately invalidate professional-informed opinions.

abustamam 7mo ago

This! I've actually learned a lot about what I don't know by using AI. It made me dig into learning proper systems design, app architecture, etc. But at the same time the more I read about AI, the more I realize I need to learn about AI. Thus far I'm just using cursor and the Claude code extension alongside obra superpowers, and I've been quite happy with it. But on Twitter I see people with multiple instances of Claude code or open claw talking to each other and I don't even know how to begin to understand what's going on there. But I'm not letting myself get distracted — Claude code and open claw are tools. They could go away at any time. But systems thinking is something that won't go away. At least, that's my gambit.

jimbokun 7mo ago
It’s telling those people mostly talk about the complexity of the AI setup they’ve engineered to write code. Much more so than bragging about the software created by that process.
- abustamam 7mo ago
  That's a good point, but I've seen a lot of interesting meta-setups as well (like visualizations of agents interacting with one another). Does it write good code? I dunno. But it looks cool, and I think interesting in its own right, even if it ends up being functionally useless.

pjmlp 7mo ago

I am having an identity crisis that thankfully is sorted out by being senior and close to retirement than early career days. Since COVID I have seen teams scaled down, lots of custom development or devops/infra work work got replaced with SaaS and iPaaS cloud products, serverless/lambda, managed containers. This is the next step. Great that people feel more productive, unfortunely for many of them, us, more productivity means the C-suites can do some head count reduction yet again.

randusername 7mo ago

> Consequently, this is why so many software engineers are having an identity crisis: they’ve spent most of their career focusing on one very small section of the overall SDLC, meanwhile believing that was mostly all there was that they needed to know. Specialists/generalists, top-down/bottom-up, BFS/DFS, pragmatists/idealists, ADHD/ASD; lots of continuums in software work and those at either extreme have biases. Personally I think that there will be less programmers needed and the ones that will remain will have had to mellow out towards the center in all these continuums. We won't be able to rely on big teams balancing each other out. Generalists will need to learn which details matter. Specialists will need to learn the delegation and risk tolerance usually reserved for the bemoaned management track. Hard to say which is the easier journey.