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Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write

• KronisLV 5mo ago
  > Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not even the majority of devs. People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.
  • oblio 5mo ago
    >> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions > The AI is coming for that too. In that case all [1] non manual work is doomed, until robotics has an LLM moment. [1] With the exception of all fields protected by politics or nepotism.
    • rootusrootus 5mo ago
      > all non manual work is doomed All work in general. Knowledge workers can still do manual work, and will compete to do so when there is no option to continue what they do today.
  • dmazzoni 5mo ago
    There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities. However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"? AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.
    • coldtea 5mo ago
      >AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback What part of those you think it doesn't help with?
      • malfist 5mo ago
        There is no shortcut to understanding. No one can understand things for you
        • Animats 5mo ago
          They can make it unnecessary for you to understand. Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks? A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get above 90% full before they have to expand. Who keeps Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms handy any more? I own both the original edition and the revised edition. They're boxed up in the garage. I once read that book cover to cover. That was a long time ago. That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.
  • bborud 5mo ago
    > The AI is coming for that too. To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need. This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs and suchlike. He spent 6 months working in the company. On the factory floor, in the logistics department, in procurement, in accounting and even shadowing the board. Then he delivered a proposal for how to restructure the parts of the company, change manufacturing processes, and show how logistics and procurement could be optimized if you saw them as two parts in a bigger dance. He redesigned the company so that it could a) be automated, and b) leverage automation to increase the efficiency of several parts of the business. THEN, he started planning how to write the software (this was the 80s after all), and then we started implementing it. Now think about what went into this. For instance we changed a lot of what happened on the factory floor. Because my boss had actually worked it. So he knew what pain points existed. Pain points even the factory workers didn't know how to address because they didn't know that they could be addressed. I was naive. I thought this was how everyone approached "software projects". People generally don't. But it did teach me that the job isn't writing code. It is reasoning about complex systems that often are not even known to those who are parts of it. And this is for _boring_ software that requires very little creativity and mostly zero novelty. Now imagine how you do novel things. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up. You make it sound like it is a bad thing that certain tasks become easier. I spent a lot of time writing CRUD stuff. Because the things i really want to work on depend on them. I don't enjoy what is essentially boilerplate. Who does? If you can do the same job in 1/20 the time, then how is this a bad thing? It is only a bad thing if writing CRUD webapps is the limit of your ability. We don't argue for banning excavators because it puts people with shovels out of work. We find more meaningful things for them to do and become more productive. New classes of work becomes low-skilled jobs. If you have been doing software for a while, you are probably doing some subset of this. But these things are hard to articulate. It is hard to articulate because it is not something we think about. Like walking: easy for us to do, hard to program a robot to do it.
  • PunchyHamster 5mo ago
    > The AI is coming for that too. Current AI tech giants prove over and over and over again that this is not the case
    • cromka 5mo ago
      We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?
      • luckystarr 5mo ago
        Discovery of the best solution in a problem space is not generative but only verificative. Meaning: the LLM can see if a solution is better than another, but it can't generate the best one from the start. If you trust it, you'll get sub-par solutions. This is definitely an agent problem instead of an LLM problem. Anybody got something explorative like this working?
        • coldtea 5mo ago
          So? Hundreds of millions of office and devel jobs are about for developing "optimal solutions" to begin with.
      • ASalazarMX 5mo ago
        Hype cycles, AI has made developers obsolete like a dozen times in the las couple of years, at least according to their developers.
      • malfist 5mo ago
        I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.
        • kakacik 5mo ago
          It feels its just around the corner. But when you turn 20th corner and its still behind the next one, maybe things are a bit different than they seem / clueless emotions make us believe. Long term its bleak, but short/medium term - not so much, if I get fired it won't be llm replacing me but rather company politics, budget changes etc. Which was the only real (very real) risk for past 15 years too, consistently. But it helps to not work for US company.
  • LPisGood 5mo ago
    > The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.
    • ge96 5mo ago
      I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.
      • smrq 5mo ago
        People didn't leap from jQuery to React. It's a lot easier to imagine an AI looking at jQuery and [insert any server side MVC framework] and inventing Backbone.
      • ASalazarMX 5mo ago
        News: "AGI refuses to make another JS framework, rages on the follies of misguided developers and their wateful JS crutches" Developer community: Wow, we truly have become obsolete now!
        • ge96 5mo ago
          Who will be the disrupters when there is nothing to disrupt
        • notpachet 5mo ago
          In a shocking twist, it turns out that Mootools is the agents' preferred framework
      • scj 5mo ago
        A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like? My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly. That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.
  • vga1 5mo ago
    >bosses The AI is coming for those too.
    • snozolli 5mo ago
      Something like five to ten years ago, when AI hype was starting to hit media, one of the claims was that AI would come for middle-management first. Since middle-management can generally be described as collecting information from underlings and reporting information to upper management, their work was supposed to be easy to automate with AI. As far as I can tell, this hasn't proven to be true at all, and we software engineers proudly wrote ourselves out of work by constantly publishing our source code and discussing it openly.
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
  • geodel 5mo ago
    Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing. One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability. Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends and other copy/paste junk. But as per industry classification they are just part of same Coder/Developer/IT Engineer group. And their bleak prospects is not some future scenario, it is playing out right now with tons of them getting laid off. And whole lot of people with IT degrees, certifications are not finding any jobs in this field.
    • hjort-e 5mo ago
      What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?
      • evilduck 5mo ago
        Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front ends but everything else is still easy pickings.
        • skydhash 5mo ago
          > I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend That is not hard. It’s just tedious and very slow to do manually. The hard part would be about designing a usb dongle and ensuring that the associated software has good UX. The reason you don’t see kernel devs REing devices is not because it’s impossible or that it requires expert knowledge. It’s because it’s like counting sands on the beach.
  • thisisit 5mo ago
    Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good. I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.
    • lostmsu 5mo ago
      No, I never believed in fully automated tale by Tesla, but as the LLMs improve my personal estimate for the date of human-level AGI is rapidly moving to "present". Before GPT-2 I had it somewhere in 2100, at GPT-2 I thought maybe by 2060 if we are lucky. Now I think it is 2035 or maybe even sooner.
      • rootusrootus 5mo ago
        I like to see the optimism, even if I don't share it. I think it's incredible hubris that humans think we are about to reinvent our own level of intelligence, just because we made a machine that talks pretty.
        • lostmsu 5mo ago
          Your own comment in my timeline is 7 years out of date. GPT-2 talked pretty, that was its whole thing. If you are trying to claim there's no difference between 5.5 and 2 you are delusional (hallucinating?).
          • rootusrootus 5mo ago
            I think I was fairly clear, I said that I think it is hubris to think what we have created is anything even slightly like human intelligence. It talks very pretty (a lot of work has gone into this aspect in particular), and it does demonstrate the extent to which, as individuals, most of us do not have especially unique thoughts nor problems to solve. It exposes how quickly humans jump to anthropomorphizing pretty much anything. Is it a handy tool? Yep! I use it every day. But it is laughable to think this is the path to AGI. The most common counterargument on HN is some variation of "but you can't prove that this isn't just like how a human thinks". A conspiracy theory at best, just reinforcing the fact that we know very little about how even simple non-human brains function.
  • Aperocky 5mo ago
    > The AI is coming for that too. That's where we fundamentally disagree about. Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM parameter count.
    • coldtea 5mo ago
      >but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. And the human mind is not?
      • nothinkjustai 5mo ago
        It’s not.
      • KalMann 5mo ago
        I can give you the exact mathematical formula used to statistically optimize the output of a neural network from input examples. Can you do the same for the brain?
        • coldtea 5mo ago
          Not atm, but does it matter? Is it similar, even if much simpler, of the sort of process that goes on there too? That's the important question.
    • bel8 5mo ago
      > because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. So are humans. Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?) And I argue that current LLMs have surpassed many of my capabilities already. For example GPT/Opus can understand and document some ancient legacy project I never saw before in minutes. I would take a week+ to do the same and my report would probably have more mistakes and oversights than the one generated by the LLM.
  • tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago
    >> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions > The AI is coming for that too. If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. I'm still not convinced by that. But I am convinced that the part of software development that involves typing code manually into an IDE all day is likely gone forever.
    • itsafarqueue 5mo ago
      > If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. Now you’re getting it
    • flatline 5mo ago
      It really doesn't have to come for everything to feel like it's taking everything. If it eliminates 10% of white collar jobs over the next decade, the impact will be felt everywhere.
      • tjwebbnorfolk 5mo ago
        Sure, but who doesn't think that 10% of white collar jobs are mostly bullshit anyway?
        • esafak 5mo ago
          The only thing worse than a bullshit job is no job.
        • jplusequalt 5mo ago
          The roughly 15-20 million people who would suddenly be without a job?
      • bonesss 5mo ago
        I struggle to understand the logic (in general, the way people are talking), normally efficiencies come with increases in production and scale and use-cases. So of 10% of lawyers get AI-d away, let’s say, the remaining 90% are 1.1x+ efficient and also up against other lawyers enjoying the same… work might go up. And on the customer side there is sooooo much BS with lawyers, but if both lawyer and customer can communicate faster or better with the LLMs, we should see more better cases with better dialog and case handling. Again, the total amount of lawyering could go up a lot. And then we have the cases prohibitive without the LLMs, now possible for big money. Better LLM empowered lawyers should be able to create new and more lawyer work. As it stands I see people selling services that are subsidized by VC, template jobs we’d be doing faster with copy paste but it’s not copyright infringement when OpenAI does it, and a rush for valuations to soak up VC because the business model isn’t there. I’m seeing a huge uptick in visual bugs on large commercial platforms and customer facing apps, and don’t feel OpenAI is gonna kill Office anytime soon… or Chromium… or Steam… or emacs… Call me an optimist, but I think those LLM pump and dumpers are creating a wave of fear that would be quite different if they weren’t lying and trying to boost an IPO. Chat GPT 2 was too dangerous to release, lul, and the class action suits are just getting started. An actual lawyer replacing tech company should sell lawyering for infini-money, not pens that’ll totally 10x your lawyering (bro).
  • no_op 5mo ago
    Even if AI advances continue, for quite a while there's likely still going to be the 'Steve Jobs' role. That is, even if AI coding agents can, in the future, replace entire teams of SWEs, competently making all implementation decisions with no guidance from a tech-savvy human, the best software will likely still involve a human deciding what should be built and being very picky about how, exactly, it should externally behave. I don't know if it makes sense to call that person an SWE, and some people currently employed as SWEs either won't be good at this or aren't interested in doing it. But the existing pool of SWEs is probably the largest concentration of people who'll end up doing this job, because it's the largest concentration of people who've thought a lot about, and developed taste with respect to, how software should work.
    • bmiedlar 5mo ago
      This matches what I'm seeing. I've been building software for a long time, but building more now with AI than I ever could with a traditional team. But the throughput that's helpful is from knowing what to build and what tradeoffs matter. The AI doesn't have that. It's a force multiplier on experience, not a replacement for it.
    • laughing_man 5mo ago
      How many Steve Jobses do we need as a percentage of people developing software?
  • at-fates-hands 5mo ago
    >> Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up. Anecdotal evidence to support this. I work with both dev and design teams. Upper management has already gone through several layoffs and offshoring of the two dev teams I work with. The devs they did keep were exactly what you said. The capable ones who reliably closed their Jira tickets. Never missed a deadline for building their features or components. And now? Their work has tripled and now the only help they get from management? "Start to figure out how to leverage AI, we're going to be a in hiring freeze for the next 10 months." The double whammy of losing onshore team members and not getting any help from management to fix the problem they just created and essentially just telling them to figure out how to use AI to keep up is pretty staggering. I would echo what one of the devs told me, "If this is the new "AI era" than you can count me right the fuck out of it."
  • nitwit005 5mo ago
    > The AI is coming for that too. Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. I'm not sure anyone is actually working on those. People talk about spending all day writing CRUD apps here, but if you suggest there are already low code tools to build those, they will promptly tell you it's too complex for that to work.
    • laughing_man 5mo ago
      >Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. Yes. Yes, that's exactly what we're going to see, and more swiftly than people are generally comfortable with. What are we going to do with all those cubicle dwellers?
      • dvsfish 5mo ago
        a new paradigm of 3 day work weeks. share the salary of the days off with those less automatable, and work to automate everyone. I wish some sort of dicussion like this could happen where the workers of the world get to see some of the gains of a new technology more immediately. If "the state" wants to maintain legitimacy and protect its citizenry (one of the primary promises of a state) to avoid a period of social unrest, the likes of which has been unheard of for several generations, I think something like this should at least be a part of the discussion.
        • laughing_man 5mo ago
          I don't think it will happen. For one thing, it hasn't in the US since the introduction of the forty hour work week in 1940. But beyond that, I don't think most people want a three day work week. They would rather work five days and get the extra money. I worked at a company that did government contracting. We had a couple quarters without much in the way of orders, so instead of laying people off like you'd normally see in that situation, the company decided to go to a four day week, with a commensurate cut in pay. I was thrilled, as a young single guy, to get Fridays off. I rented a room in someone's house and hit my monthly nut in about two weeks. But most of the people I worked with hated it. Some of them quit. A lot of them both needed the money and also had no idea what to do with themselves on that extra day.
  • wiseowise 5mo ago
    [flagged]
• ryandvm 5mo ago
  I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities. The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everything" and maybe agentic coding is just another massive paradigm shift in a long line of technological paradigm shifts and the tooling has changed but total job market collapse is unlikely. The other possibility is that we're going to continue to see escalating AI capability with regard to context, information retrieval, and most importantly "cognition" (whatever that means). Maybe we overcome the challenges of model collapse. Maybe we figure out better methodologies for training that don't end up just producing a chatbot version of Stack Overflow + Wikipedia + Reddit. Maybe we actually start seeing AI create and not just recreate. If it's the latter, then I think engineers who think they are going to stay ahead of AI sound an awful lot like saddle makers who said "pffft, these new cars can only go 5 miles per hour."
  • golddust-gecko 5mo ago
    100% this. I'll also add another factor: it's become increasingly clear at our company that AI-enabled humans are getting to the bottom of the backlog of feature ideas much quicker. This makes the 'good ideas' part of the business the rate limiting step. And those are definitely not increasing with AI, beyond that generated by the AI churn itself ("let's bolt on a chat experience or an MCP!") So maybe the coding assistants don't get a 10x improvement any time soon, but we see engineering job market contraction because there aren't really enough good ideas to turn into code.
    • hibikir 5mo ago
      Yes, but as the price of getting work done goes down, a lot of companies that were priced out of custom software before now can hire devs, as the value hiring a few can provide just goes up. Fewer people per product, absolutely. No more teams of 10 or 20 working on the same thing. But there's so much out there that doesn't get done at all because you'd never be able to afford it. Simple marginal thinking: When you lower the price of something, it gets more use cases. A rich person might not take even more flights because they are cheaper, but more people will consider flying when they wouldn't have at old prices
• surgical_fire 5mo ago
  I normally say that I have zero concerns regarding AI in terms of employment. At most I am concerned in learning the best practices on AI usage to stay on top of things. It's ability to write code is alright. Sometimes it impresses me, sometimes it leaves me underwhelmed. It certainly can't be left to do things autonomously if you are responsible for its output. Moderately useful tool, but hellishly expensive when not being subsidized by imbeciles that dream of it undrrmining labor. A fool and his money should be separated anyway. What I am really concerned about the incoming economic disaster being brewed. I suspect things will get very ugly pretty soon.
• keybored 5mo ago
  Pure wage workers should consider dropping the attitude about how tech progress will just make their inferiors in the same line of work be out of a job (hrmph good riddance etc.). Because this pseudo-progress could creep up on them as well. Then you won’t have this just world of the deserving workers at all. Just formerly deserving workers and idiot billionaires like Musk (while the robots do all of the work).
• hateful 5mo ago
  Not sure where I first heard this, but I say it to my team all the time: "Programming is thinking, not typing"
  • the_hoffa 5mo ago
    I've always told my Jr Engineers to "think twice, code once". If I gave them a task and they immediately started typing it out, I would tell them to stop typing and ask them to explain to me what they were doing; they'd often just spit out what they thought the code should do, and I'd often point out edge cases they missed and would have missed had they just spit out code and a PR, wasting everyone's time. I would also insulate them from upper management to give them time to actually think (e.g. I wouldn't be coding so they could think then code). To your point and to the GP's point, and one point I keep raising with LLM's: "typing is not where my time sinks are"
  • CodeMage 5mo ago
    That's very true, which is why I find it insulting that so many AI proponents use the word "typing" to refer to writing code. It carries an implication that if you enjoy writing code by hand, you enjoy a mindless activity.
  • strbean 5mo ago
    I know a an accomplished CS professor, ACM fellow, cited in Knuth's TAOCP (as well as being an easter egg!), who still hunt-and-pecks. In fact, hunt-an-pecks incredibly slowly. Seeing him type really reinforced this idea.
    • throwaway2037 5mo ago
      While this is a witty reply, most people are working on corporate CRUD apps. For us, I still follow Jeff Atwood's advice from a 2008 blog post: "We Are Typists First, Programmers Second" Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programmers-second/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programme...
  • bborud 5mo ago
• insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  What you described are senior developers and system architects. Junior developers spend most of their time writing code (when they're not forced to attend pointless standups, because Agile/blah/blah) > The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future. So you're saying the same thing everyone else is saying. SWEs won't go away, but they will be greatly reduced, because those whose job is about writing code -- junior devs -- will be replaced. (How will Sr Devs in the future be created? That's the question, isn't it.)
  • vineyardmike 5mo ago
    > How will Sr Devs in the future be created? As an extreme example, maybe we’ll see long-running internships and trainings like doctors experience. Doctors don’t start their career until ~12+ years of prep and training. Pragmatically, software development has a lot of examples of teenagers making apps and college students building software companies. In the 12 years it takes for training, low-knowledge workers could be vibe coding continuously replacements of most commercial software products they’d be hired to build. So I doubt we’ll treat software development as a rarified high skill job.
    • throwaway74628 5mo ago
      [flagged]
• sefrost 5mo ago
  Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with. May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?
  • davidw 5mo ago
    Commenting on Hacker News?
    • icedchai 5mo ago
      In all seriousness, communications consumes a lot of time. Meetings, emails, Slack messages, pestering stake holders and other developers...
      • hjort-e 5mo ago
        If you spend 95% of your time on that stuff, you better be working on like critical infrastructure where nothing can go wrong, otherwise you are in an incredibly dysfunctional company.
        • icedchai 5mo ago
          I agree it would be absurd for it to take 95% of your time. I have, however, seen that it takes a lot more time than one would think. I did some contracting work for a severely dysfunctional meeting heavy organization and it was about 2 hours of meetings for every hour of real technical work!
          • skydhash 5mo ago
            Even when it’s not dysfunctional, you spend a lot of time on communication and reading stuff other people wrote (including code). It’s very rare to work in isolation.
            • hjort-e 5mo ago
• atoav 5mo ago
  Saying being a programmer is about writing code is a bit like saying being an artist is about drawing lines on a canvas. Yeah technically drawing lines on canvases may be an very important part of being a painter, but it is hardly the core of what makes or breaks great art.
• madduci 5mo ago
  Because that classifies in "developers" and "software engineers". And software engineering isn't going to disappear anytime soon
  • hellojesus 5mo ago
    Weird. I call myself a developer because I don't have an engineering degree from an abet certified engineering program. I recognize, in some capacity, that this isn't the norm and in the US "professional engineer" is protected and not simply "engineer", but it feels akin to stolen valor to me.
    • borski 5mo ago
      If there were a license in the US for it, I’d agree with you. But as is, if you are “doing” engineering, you’re an engineer. If you are a licensed engineer of some kind, you’d state that outright. The equivalent of stolen valor would be claiming to be a licensed software engineer; except there is no such license so it would also be fraud, misrepresentation, etc. (I know this is different elsewhere)
      • VonGallifrey 5mo ago
        > If there were a license in the US for it, I’d agree with you. Yeah, that is basically the thing in my country. You can't call yourself an engineer without passing a test, but I can't take it because there isn't one for software engineering. Same thing for freelancing. Freelance jobs are defined in a list, and other jobs cannot benefit from the simplified tax rules that freelancers enjoy, but that list was written before software development was a thing.
    • bilbo0s 5mo ago
      I'm a software dev in the US and I never call myself "engineer" in that capacity. Always "programmer" or "developer". I agree. Engineers have to clear a much higher bar. Even though my career was spent in medical diagnostic software where we had to get 510k clearance, I was still keenly aware that this was a fundamentally different activity from actual engineering.
• doug_durham 5mo ago
  This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API. OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to get the drill string put together. They went in with a plan, but the reality didn't agree and they are on a tight schedule.
  • estebank 5mo ago
    Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.
    • powvans 5mo ago
      Feels like lately most of the time is spent arguing about or at least worrying about whether or not AI is going to replace all software developers.
      • pydry 5mo ago
        Or dealing with the idiotic fallout of somebody who sucks at coding or even has never coded in their life trying to make that happen.
    • 7e 5mo ago
      If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.
      • 5mo ago
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• coldtea 5mo ago
  >- I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - Well, and AI can do part of that too, maybe more of it soon. - ... - Besides, you don't need 10 guys in a team to do that. A couple of them will do, then AI will do the coding. What will happen to the rest? - ...
• AlexCoventry 5mo ago
  You don't think AI is going to be able to understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions better than you, in the near future?
  • koonsolo 5mo ago
    In 2000 I learned about this old technology called "neural networks". AI really depends on long winters and rare breakthroughs. Deep neural network was the most recent breakthrough. The iterations you currently see it just adding more storage, but the fundamental neural network structure doesn't change. I'm confident AGI will not be achieved by the LLM architecture, and when the next AI breakthrough is, is anyones guess. But if you take history into account, it will take a while.
    • jghn 5mo ago
      Yes, same. In the late 90s through early aughts then I was taught over and over and over again that neural networks were a dead end concept and would never amount to anything. Just like all the preceding AI booms, this one will hit its maximal point, the hype train will fizzle, the best parts will just become "normal", and then a couple of decades later something new will come to push the boundary again.
  • bborud 5mo ago
    No, I don't. Do you? If so, why? Extrapolation from guesswork?
• izacus 5mo ago
  Note that just because you know the job is understanding things, the manager who'll boot you and leave you without income probably doesn't. They'll just get their political cookie points for saving money by replacing you with AI.
• foldr 5mo ago
  I think the future is pretty up in the air in this respect, but my guess is that AI will just lead to another shift in the set of knowledge that a 'real programmer' is expected to have. I'm old enough to remember when people would make fun of web developers for 'programming' using HTML and JavaScript. And of course, back in the day, you couldn't be a real programmer unless you wrote assembly language. In a few years' time, being able to write (as opposed to read) source code in any specific programming language will probably become a niche skill. The next generation will be able to read Python to about the same extent that I can read x86 assembly. Perceptions of what knowledge counts as 'low level' are constantly shifting. These days, if you write C, you're a low-level, close to the metal programmer. In the 70s, a lot of people made fun of Unix for being implemented in a high-level programming language (i.e. C) rather than assembly.
  • pjmlp 5mo ago
    Kind of ironic, given than OS implemented in high-level programming language trace back to 1958, with JOVIAL being one of the first systems programming languages.
• hyperjeff 5mo ago
  You’re a ”developer“, i guess, but not a coder (anymore), which is what your interlocutors are probably asking about. You’ve migrated to a middle manager job, not something they probably can just start doing competently. Essentially you’re agreeing with their initial sentiment, that coders will be made irrelevant.
  • onethought 5mo ago
    I think it’s more nuanced. Even a “coder” spends the majority of their time, not coding.
• boring-human 5mo ago
  The true argument is about quantity - of people, not code. All qualitative arguments are missing the point.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• m463 5mo ago
  - Compilers will make developers irrelevant ... - Compilers can write assembly language code - Compilers have -O3 now etc... Maybe we should rejoice. I remember dreading writing documentation, and now I would happily hand that off to AI.
  • geodel 5mo ago
    It is indeed exciting (for you at least). The problem is for most people is not that AI is spewing out code and reading documentation while developer do more interesting things. It is that companies are handing over the job of those developers to AI itself. So those ex-developers are free to do most interesting things in the world with little change of not relying on nice, steady paychecks every month.
• jchonphoenix 5mo ago
  You miss the major factor in your compensation: pricing pressure due to supply/demand. By removing all the junior engineers, you've fundamentally changed the market forces longer term and most people expect that to negatively impact you in the supply demand curve regardless of whether or not the statements you've made above are true, which they most likely are for senior engineers.
  • fragmede 5mo ago
    In removing junior developers, leaving only senior developers, wouldn't that reduce supply, making the price go up, not down? It's been a while since Econ 101 for me though.
• czhu12 5mo ago
  Isn't the long term trend just that we don't need as many engineers, not that there will no more software engineers? Theres another, different loop I keep seeing which is: - Company A lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies - People say its because of over hiring during 2020 - Company B lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies - People say its because it was never a good business - Company C lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies - People say its because theres a recession I guess to cite a counter example, unemployment is still super low, software jobs are still holding up, but the bear case is that eventually 5% of people will be able to do what people do today, and the demand for software won't grow at the same pace.
  • Xirdus 5mo ago
    If company A is Amazon, company B is Ubisoft, and company C is Oracle, then I think it's very likely there isn't any pattern or "loop" here and it's legitimately just 3 different companies in 3 different situations doing layoffs for 3 different reasons but all 3 reaching for the same PR playbook. "We're leveraging AI to increase productivity" is the new "we're streamlining our business and focusing on our core products".
• dev_l1x_be 5mo ago
  And most of the time the statistical aspect of LLMs result in a less creative solution that is more expensive to run and harder to maintain. LLMs at this stage are good at scaffolding, generating the boilerplate you do not want to write and glue things together quickly. It just makes engineers faster.
• dakiol 5mo ago
  That doesn't hold because the goal for executives is to increase revenue and the main sales pitch of Anthropic et al is to pay for agents instead of paying for engineers. That means 80% of the workforce is out no matter what. Whether or not one belongs to the remaining 20% is a different story, but obviously not all of us will be there. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions AI is coming for that too. Don't be naive
  • varispeed 5mo ago
    It will be interesting for governments using workers as proxy for taxing corporations.
• brandensilva 5mo ago
  I remember being that kid in high school who ran math and logical problems hard which contributed to me being very technical and to learn to push through painful mental challenges on the regular. Out of most of my graduating class there were not many of us that went on to become engineers for a reason because it isn't easy work by any means and I'm guessing is quite draining for people who don't use their brain like we do. So while AI will change the industry I don't see any reputable company firing the smartest ones in the room for junior level intelligence. Even with it advancing someone has to be responsible for when it screws up which we know it will.
• fnordpiglet 5mo ago
  Something missed in that computer science was a highly theory driven discipline where people were taught how to think critically about solving complex problems. Industry complained they weren’t teaching enough programming skills, so they dumbed down the thinking part and emphasized the vocational part. Now the vocational part is virtually useless, and the grounding of theory applied to complex problems is suddenly really relevant again. Schools will take time to retool their programs, teaching staff, and two generations if not three graduates will have entered into a work environment that doesn’t need what they learned. As someone 35 years into my career I agree this is the most exciting part of my career. I love programming and I do it all the time but I do it by reading code and course correction and explaining how to think about the problems and herding cats - just like working with a team of 100 engineers. But the engineers I’m working with now by and large listen, don’t snipe me on perf reviews, aren’t hallucinating intent based on hallway conversations with someone else, etc. This team of AI engineers I have can explain to me their work, mistakes, drift, etc without ego and it’s if not always 100% correct it’s at least not maliciously so. It understands me no matter how complex the domain I reach into, in fact it understands the domain better than I do, so instead of spending a few months convincing people with little knowledge or experience that X is a good idea, I can actually discuss X and explore if it’s a good idea or not and make a better informed decision. I’ve learned more in these discussions than I’ve learned in decades of convincing overly egoistic juniors and managers to listen to me about something I’m an industry authority on. However I see very clearly we will need very few of the team of 100 human engineers I can leave behind in my work. Some of will be there in a decade, but maybe less than 1:10. This is going to be a more brutal time than the Dotcom bust for CS grads, and I don’t think it will ever improve. Mostly because we simply won’t need the “my parents told me this makes money” people, just the passionate folks remain. But even then, we face a situation where the value of any software developed is very low because so much software is being developed. It’s going to turn into YouTube where software that is paid for is very small relative to the quantity of software developed. We already see this in the last few months with the rate of GitHub projects created. If the value of any software created is low, the compensation of the creator will be low unless they’re very rare talents.
  • pjmlp 5mo ago
    This is kind of country specific, in many European countries the kind of university various in years and content required for a degree, depending if they focus on vocational or more generic high education. Example, university versus polytechnic.
• timedude 5mo ago
  > Business owners who think they can do without developers because they think LLMs replace developers are fine by me too. Natural selection will take care of them in due course. Thing is, natural selection will take care of you at the same time. Because you'll also come to rely on products they make, or services they offer, either directly or indirectly. So eventually, you too, will suffer the consequences of the enshloppification.
• rpdillon 5mo ago
  This is exactly it. The speed of light has not changed: we're limited by our ability to understand the system, and make decisions about what to do next. AI will speed that up, but the core work is the understanding and decision-making. Saying otherwise is sort of like reducing the task of writing a novel to typing.
• xhevahir 5mo ago
  The "apply my ability" is doing a lot of work, so to speak, in the above exchange. Work that might eventually well be automated away.
• bluegatty 5mo ago
  This is maybe a bit myopic. Dude - look what happened in the last 2 years on software. Now project out another 10. I totally agree with you 'as of now, in the current paradigm'. But that could very well change.
• bdangubic 5mo ago
  > Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. I spent 2nd half of my 30y career fixing organizations and process where this was the case. so many things are wrong in places where this is the case (or alternatively you need a different job title :) )
• jstummbillig 5mo ago
  > Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. Really? I mean, good on you if it's true and you like the attention but that's sounds like an implausible amount of interest in someone and their relatively mundane profession.
• dawnerd 5mo ago
  The problem is people think AI can replace the 95-95% that isn't code too. That's where we end up with massive unusable codebases that no one understands.
• doctorpangloss 5mo ago
  In my community almost all problems are political. "Problem solving ability" matters if you are HFT, but everything else? Math can't tell you the best way to use land, educate a kid, what to pay for healthcare and how, how to prioritize biotech research, set a minimum wage, decide congressional maps, all sorts of stuff that actually I pay for or care a lot about. in fact I think you are totally misinterpreting what people are saying to you, you are 200% wrong: the 2-3% of your time spent coding was the valuable part, and your so called problem solving ability rarely solved any real problems.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• vagab0nd 5mo ago
  This is a valid perspective, but I don't think a useful one. Being able to produce code is a huge unlock for many non-programmers. So in a way, it doesn't matter how much time existing developers spend on coding. It's about helping anyone become a developer.
• nomel 5mo ago
  The perspective here is "lifetime career", so you need to project out 30 years here, for a meaningful argument. I think, much sooner than that, you'll have AI pumping out practically complete implementations that meet the requirements of function, set by the people who desire that function. THOSE people will be the developers, and will be more akin to technical "creatives", more on the product side, than the developer side.
  • AllanSavageDev 5mo ago
    Someday people are going to get tired of "programming in English" with prompts, getting inaccurate output, etc and someone is going to invent a higher level kind of CODE that allows the user to directly specify the actions the computer should take to solve the problem. Later someone will invent a kind of tooling that COMPILES these CODES into a runnable thing skipping the prompt part all together. It might be called something like Unified Prompt Language.
    • mawadev 5mo ago
      I think we can call it Claude++ or short C++
    • nomel 5mo ago
      Programming is moving to programming by stated and understood intent, rather than syntax. Maybe contracts/legalese, but definitely not compilable code. Sure, some people will compile code, and more than some will be reading generated code, but that will be increasingly exceptional.
      • AllanSavageDev 5mo ago
        For some time now I've had some loose abstraction swimming around my head sort of between code and prompt, and maybe its the OUTPUT of the prompt. Im assuming going forward that developers will be no better at reading generated C code than I am at reading assembly today. I'm imagining some "AI Native Intermediate Representation" where the prompt says "Give me a function that takes an array of strings and returns that array sorted", the real code that runs in the end is the actual C code, and the representation might be something low complexity but still human readable: func sortArray(<String> input) -> input.order.asc; Not quite a prompt, certainly not runnable code but a higher level hybrid that is human readable AND can be compiled into actual C code. At some point someone is going to have to debug something and nobody will be able to read assembly/real code anymore. It just seems to me in the whole "AI WRITES MY CODE" world that nobody is really thinking about debugging and maintenance. What do we just commit the prompt we built the program with to Git and call it a day? What about when we need to modify the system? Do we make a prompt to modify? Do we modify the original prompt? AI so far is probabilistic, and that can certainly be dealt with via various workarounds, and theres currently no reason to think todays stuff would even generate the same code twice. I can't shake the idea theres a step missing in everyone saying "AI will write all our code now". Its all a hack until a PHD writes a paper, then it becomes a technique. Edit: Funny story - this morning Im up early to write a program of low complexity but still somewhat rigorous. Let me see if I can think up a prompt that I might use: I need a program invoked with a main. We'll use this as a scaffolding to extend as the requirements materialize and constraints emerge. It will generate valid trading days for ES index futures where contract months are HMUZ. For each contract it will start with the last day of trading as defined by the contract specification located at (www.cmegroup.com/contracts/ES) and build and build an array consisting of 4 calendar months of those dates starting back from the last day of the contract. This collection will be sorted in ascending order by date where by the 0 element in the array is the earliest trading date. ^^ So this here is just my intermediate step. Im not even sure this is how I want to go forward with it but this approach is just the first way I can conceive of to get the job started. From here I'll read the output and figure how to add in the useful things I need to make it actually perform the intended function beyond what this prompt tells it to do. I cant even imagine how I might specify the final product I need in English. Id be writing a giant prompt for everything I need built and code would be so much faster to write and think in. Describing my stated intent in all this in English sounds like ... murder. And we all know that prompt I just made up sitting here is both a decent start at a prompt AND wholly inadequate and will produce absolutely useless garbage.
• rhubarbtree 5mo ago
  If you’re a developer and you’re writing code 2% of your time pre-Claude, that’s 9 minutes a day, you will and should be fired.
  • wan23 5mo ago
    Things besides writing code that you might be doing: - Meetings - Code reviews - Manual testing - Deployments and more testing - Triaging issues - WTF how did this bug happen? - JIRA in general - Whiteboarding sessions / Design docs - Interviews - 1:1s (mandatory ones) - 1:1s (networking / problem solving / political alignment) - Whatever your company's version of corporate extracurriculars is
    • rhubarbtree 5mo ago
      If you’re spending 98% of your time on the above, you’re still fired.
• ravenstine 5mo ago
  This answer makes two big assumptions that haven't been proven out yet. - Understanding code without writing it is as viable as understanding code that you've worked with directly or indirectly - Businesses care that you understand code I really doubt the first one. Traditionally, understanding a code base in large part came from working with it intimately and building that muscle memory. The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic. Whether businesses care that their engineers (which they are increasingly viewing as monkeys at LLM typewriters) to understand the code remains to be seen. I don't think they particularly care whether their code runs slow and is buggy so long as it works just enough to churn out features and continue to pull income.
  • simonw 5mo ago
    > The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic. As one of those developers who has written almost no significant code by hand since November 2025, but has produced a great deal of working software, I still understand the majority of the code I've produced just as well as if I'd typed it myself. I may not be typing it myself, but I'm manipulating it constantly. It's not as simple as "reading" it - I'm reading it, executing it, figuring out refactorings for it, having tests built for it, having documentation built for it, sometimes writing that documentation myself, spinning up example scripts that use it, then building new code that depends on that previous code. It's that act of exercising the code that gives me confidence that I understand it.
  • foobarian 5mo ago
    > understanding it from writing it On the surface it sounds weird - why would this be? Possibly because building a system is not a one-shot step, but a process of many iterations, each of which involves experiments in production, and gaining more learnings. So at the end of the process, you don't just have N lines of working code, but also N lessons learned along the way. So presumably with the AI process we miss out on half the value. Now the going thesis is that this extra value is unnecessary if we take the plunge and don't look back. My gut says the answer is somewhere halfway, I guess we'll see.
• jmyeet 5mo ago
  This an example of survivor bias dressed up as general advice that doesn't consider the entire ecosystem. And we need look no further than what's happened in Hollywood with writing in particular. The general progression of a Hollywood writing career is from PA (production assistant), which often starts off as a volunteer "intern" position, to writer's assistant. Assistant here usually means doing any meanial task anyone wants from fetching drycleaning to taking a dog for a grooming appointment. When you're a writer's assistant, you will oten spend time in a writer's room. You will see how the process works. You probably won't contribute anything but you may get feedback on tehings you've written from whomever you're working for. The next step is as a staff writer. You will be paid to produce scripts and stories for a TV show, for example. That writer's room will have a head writer. On a TV show the head writer is almost always the showrunner. The showrunner is effectively the leader of the entire project and is responsible for breaking up a season intoo storylines and making sure those scripts make sense as a collective. They might one or more of those scripts or maybe not. The showrunner will hire directors for each episode. The path from staff writer to showrunner often goes through being a producer. Producers are responsible for a lot of the logistics of filming a show. Hiring extras, finding locations, coordinating stunts and costumes and making sure the director has everything they need. As part of all this, in the 22 episode TV era, writers would often end up spending time on set while the show is being filmed. They'd learn from the process. Every part of this was necessary. Those writers on set are your future producers and showrunners. So what's happened in the streaming era is that writer's rooms got smaller (so-called "mini writer's rooms"), maybe only the showrunner is ever on set, the writers have stopped working by the time filming even begins and you might only be doing 8-12 episodes. On a 22 eipside season, that one job could support you. 8-12 episodes can't. But you see how this all breaks down when writers can no longer support themselves, they're no longer being trained to be future producers and showrunners, there's no feedback from set back to the writer's room and you end up with 3 year gaps between seasons. The only reason for all of this is because it's cheaper. So, you may be a staff engineer who tech leads dozens of other engineers. You're not formally a manager or director but you have a lot of influence about the entire project. But how did you get there? You started as a junior engineer being told what to do. You got to see how other leaders operated. You became responsible for more and more things. You might start fixing bugs under supervision to managing a feature then an entire project and so on. So what's going to happen here is (IMHO) we will have years of the software engineer space shrinking. There'll be very little entry-level hiring. Layoffs will reduce the entire workforce and there'll be a few tech leaders who hang on because they still produce value. Some of them will probably discover they don't produce enough value and they'll go too. But where do the future tech leaders come from in this scenario? AI is being used as an excuse to kill the entry-level pipeline and if you go around and say "git gud" [sic] then I'm sorry but you just don't understand the impact of what's happening or you don't care because, at least for now, you're simply not affected. You see the same thing with people who espouse the myth of meritocracy. Well, if a given workforce shrinks by 50%, half those people are, by definition, not going to survive. An individual may be about to reskill or skill up to survive but not everyone can. And that's how people end up in Amazon warehouses. At least until they're no longer needed there ether.
• amw-zero 5mo ago
  I agree in principle, but I think the 2-5% estimate is extremely low. I could be sold on most developers spending ~25%, up to 40% of their time on code. But very few people are spending 2% of their time on it. Unless you're some sort of super senior staff / advisor to the CTO at a gigantic company, which has already placed you on rare terrain.
  • d3rockk 5mo ago
    might be closer to accurate if the 2-5% is his estimate of the physical time spent making key-strokes
    • siren2026 5mo ago
      Nope. I would bet most people really only do 2-10%. But we would like to convince ourselves we don't.
    • bee_rider 5mo ago
      Surely we should only count the time actuating the key. Apple keyboard users are in shambles.
      • layer8 5mo ago
        Only the keydown, not the keyup.
    • mh- 5mo ago
      That's <24 minutes per 8 hour day. If you're reading this and that matches your experience as an IC SWE whose job is ostensibly developing software.. you're either trapped in a very atypical org, or you're heading for a PIP.
  • siren2026 5mo ago
    Most people overestimate how much time they spend "writing code". I interviewed a ton of people in my career and when I ask "how much time writing code on your last job?". The more junior the person the more they would overestimate the time writing code (Some would say 90%!). Once they joined I was able to see how much time they really wrote code and it is almost never more than 30%. Mostly because the code is only the final output. You spend most of your time doing research, talking to people. Working on Quarterly OKRs, going to meetings etc. If you just write code you are either an extremely junior person that works on things trivial enough to not have to research or your are disillusioned and you don't realize you spend most of your time doing other things
• pjmlp 5mo ago
  Usually that means you're already a senior developer, understanding things and formulating solutions is part of work delegation. Now those juniors whose job is to implement those solutions, they will have a hard time. On my 50s, I also don't write as much code as I used to, even less nowadays with serverless, managed services, low code/no code tools, agent orchestration workflows, and with it I keep seeing development teams getting smaller.
• Insanity 5mo ago
  Yeah coding speed was almost never the bottleneck I found. AI now does the typing and (some) of the thinking. It doesn’t figure out what needs to be built and how it all plays together (yet).
• codemog 5mo ago
  Anyone read posts like this and picture someone who doesn’t actually do anything all day besides posture in meetings? Probably with a super inflated title and salary. I doubt this is what the OP does, but there’s tons of developers like what I described and they seem actively proud at not actually building anything and playing politics all day.
• beej71 5mo ago
  > I'm getting old and I value my remaining time on the planet. It's an interesting sentiment. I, too, am getting old and value my remaining time on the planet, and so I code by hand every chance I get. :) Luckily I'm in a position to be able to do that.
• xracy 5mo ago
  There's an old Chemistry joke, that I've reapplied to Software Engineering, and it goes something like: A New Engineer (NE) shows up on their first day on the job, notebook in hand ready to learn. They get assigned to shadow an Experienced Engineer (EE) for their first day. EE: Now, the thing is, for any project on our team, you only need to change about 3 lines of code. NE, preparing to write down notes: Which 3? EE: Well, it depends. (Originally about Material Safety Data Sheets, and there only being 3 relevant lines on them). I think this is what people miss about Software Development.
• ljm 5mo ago
  We switched to 'software engineer' to encapsulate that, I think. You can receive requirements and churn out code or you can go up a level and think about the solution. Go another level up and think about the problem. Another level and it's the context of the problem. Further than that and it's the priority of it. And even higher up is how it fits in the product roadmap and the architectural decisions. At some point you stop developing and start weighing up the requirement against your understanding of the system and the environment it works in.
• kasey_junk 5mo ago
  On one of my very first jobs in around 2000 I got paired with a much more experienced software engineer. He’d been a pro since the early 70s. I was stoked to learn from him. On like my fourth day he said “now I’m going to teach you the thing that helped me the most in my career…” I waited, ready for the received wisdom. And he said “always number your punch cards so if you drop them they will be easy to put back into order”. I was upset. We were long past the point where punch cards were in use. And then he said “I said what would help _me_ the most, not what would help _you_. Software is always changing”. I’ve thought about that a lot lately.
  • snvzz 5mo ago
    That conversation seems like he was covertly teaching you about linked lists.
    • mecHacker 5mo ago
      Or perhaps a peek into how fast the Software-engineering is changing that what works for you now may be irrelevant in future, and hence be prepared to be adaptive!
  • gbro3n 5mo ago
    I think it's going to be a shift in skill set, like the constant change that has gone before. I've always primarily considered by self an application developer, but of late I've become more software architect, more devops, more tester. Software engineering skills always leaked into these domains before AI, I think it's just a shift in the time spent there now we're not manually writing so much code. And shipping is STILL hard. I've moved my focus to retooling - consolidating much of my workflow in a tool I'm working on https://www.agentkanban.io https://www.agentkanban.io - A remote kanban board with agent harness integration (Github CoPilot currently) and context management.
• atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  LLMs also can “understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions”. There is nothing that will inherently limit AI from doing all knowledge work (and all physical work once robotics is good enough). Of course developers could just move up the “next level of abstraction” and become managers of agents who write the code, but eventually AI becomes a better manager of agents than even the best humans, at which point there is no contribution a human can make that an AI model or system of models couldn’t do better.
  • lambdas 5mo ago
    > There is nothing that will inherently limit AI from doing all knowledge work Resources is one. Energy, water, cost. There seems to be diminishing returns in intelligence at the moment, whilst power and memory usage continues to go up.
  • bborud 5mo ago
    Let me ground this a bit: at the core, LLMs are systems trained to predict the next token in a sequence. They can learn extremely rich statistical structure from language and become surprisingly capable, but extrapolating from that to something akin to a robust general intelligence is a much stronger claim. The open question is not “can next-token prediction produce impressive behavior?” Clearly it can. The question is whether scaling that mechanism is enough to produce stable world models, grounded understanding, long-horizon agency, self-correction, and reliable reasoning across novel situations. That has not been demonstrated. In the past few years I've repeated the same thing: I'm not afraid of AIs that are hallucinating. They do that by design. It is expected. What scares me is people who hallucinate something into existence which isn't there.
• FpUser 5mo ago
  I think similarly. To me value of the "programmer" is not "I love Rust", "I am React expert" etc. That "love" is for sure replaceable.
• engineer_22 5mo ago
  Engineering in a nut shell... What did we do before computers??? Halls full of draftsmen...
• davnicwil 5mo ago
  > Natural selection will take care of them in due course Wonderful articulation. There's a plethora of prognostication about how AI will change everything in software and beyond and the thing I keep thinking is, well, when will the talk stop and the demonstration of results commence. It doesn't seem to have as yet. If it works, it'll work. The methods will spread and quickly be accessible to everyone, and progress will go on. That's great. If it doesn't work, we'll also see that in the absence of real results. And simply stating you are seeing it doesn't qualify. It must be something we can all see and use that is unavoidably, undeniably real.
• th1sisoldnews 5mo ago
  [dead]
• pasquinelli 5mo ago
  > Natural selection will take care of them in due course. or you.
• intelVISA 5mo ago
  Well said, the only flaw is the unfortunate realization that "I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions" is rarely required, how many zombie corps are still roaming these days? Judging by how many day to day tech products in my life are buggy, slow or user-hostile there can't be more than 50-100 tech companies actually innovating, right?
• sirnicolaz 5mo ago
  I had a professor at my CS university (one of the greatest I had) who used to say (in 2008): "a developer should write no more than 5 lines of code a day"
• DeusExMachina 5mo ago
  > Natural selection will take care of them in due course. While you are seemingly not at the moment, some day you might be at the receiving end of that "natural selection" in ways that seriously impact your remainint time on the planet. In that case you might reconsider your stance, and especially question how natural is the selection of a few powerful rich people depriving others of their way to earn a living and their way to draw meaning from their lives. The AI revolution keeps getting compared to the industrial revolution, but people keep forgetting the consequences of that one.
  • bborud 5mo ago
    I'm not terribly worried. The reason I am not worried is that software isn't my only marketable skillset. That is deliberate. Even though I see myself as primarily a software engineer, in the past decade I've worked in areas that tend to be viewed as wildly different strata and domains. And if the apocalypse comes, I'm actually not that bad at a handful of skilled blue collar jobs. The people who should be worried are the ones with narrow skill-sets and no capacity for dealing with rapid change. Especially if those skills are shallow too. But I wasn't talking about people. I was talking about companies. And the reason I'm not worried about companies going under is that they have gone all the time since the start of the industrial revolution. Yes, it happens faster and more violently today than before but neither the churn nor the reasons are all that new. They just need to be understood so you can deal with change rationally and without panicking. It is a good idea to read up on historic innovation/disruption cycles and realize that they are nothing new. The only reason people think this is a new problem is that 50-100 years ago they used to take about as much time as your productive career. So people wouldn't need to understand how to deal with it. And every generation would be convinced that this is some unexpected and unique upheaval that only their generation has to deal with. My stance is the only one that works well during disruption: you make sure you have more legs to stand on and you don't waste time fretting over things you can't change. If you find yourself out of options, you can only blame yourself.
• ChrisRR 5mo ago
  10% writing code. 90% reading and understanding code
• agnishom 5mo ago
  This is a bit of a strawman. When people say "writing code", they don't necessarily mean [pressing the keys on the keyboard that produces the necessary bytes in a text file].
• therealpygon 5mo ago
  I agree in some ways, but I think this also overlooks that your job might be like that, but most decidedly “developer” jobs are not all like what you say which is more Engineering. Many people are able to have a career making basic HTML website changes. Are they not developers? Will their job not potentially be replaced by an AI that can make that change in seconds? It’s weird that people always seem to argue the extremes when reality is jumbled mess in the middle. Will developers lose jobs to AI? Without question. Will many “developer” jobs be eliminated because of that? Without question. Is it probably a really bad time to think you can go from your retail job to fixing people’s website as a lifetime career move? Yeah, probably not the best idea. Would it be smarter to focus on becoming a “Software Engineer” instead of a “Developer”? Yes usually. Does that mean it is a bad idea for EVERYONE to choose to become of developer? No, and that would be a dumb thing to argue. We’re still going to need developers and definitely engineers, we are just going to need less of them in their current form, just like we needed less saddle makers, farriers and blacksmiths. We didn’t stop needing Horse Mechanics, we just needed less of them because we needed Car Mechanics. Some of those skills transferred, some didn’t.
• bossyTeacher 5mo ago
  > The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future. The Jira ticket munchers represent a good chunk (if not, most) of the workforce in case you haven't noticed. Also, just because you will still have a job somewhere not too far from a codebase, it doesn't mean that it will be a worth job having. Think how awful human made legacy codebases can be. Now imagine a codebase 100x bigger without the human friction of generating code (think of all the execution paths that will never be hit but will neverthless be there in big quantities increasing the time you need to understand the codebase). Now imagine that most jobs involve dealing with such codebases. Good look, keeping your dev job and spending the rest of your career trying to understand AI generated codebases.