4 ms·

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than

by hibikir 5mo ago

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50. Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a 19 year old phenom, but they cannot calculate for that many hours at the same speed as before, so their experience eventually loses to the raw calculation. Maybe at 35, or at 45, but you are just not as good. Claude Code and Codex save you the computation, while every single instinct and 2 second "intuition", which is what you build with experience, is still online. It's not just that it's a more fair competition: It's now unfair in the opposite direction. The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents, and reviewing their code just as before. Hell, it's easier to get the agent to change direction than most juniors around me, which will not be easy to correct with just plain, low-judgement feedback.

bel8 5mo ago
But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?
- Schiendelman 5mo ago
  They build tractors, or sell tractors, or work in agricultural research and development...
  - bel8 5mo ago
    I highly doubt that a significant portion of farm labor became salesman or researchers. Builders? I could see that but robots already replaced a portion of those too.
    - kingleopold 5mo ago
      less jobs creation is a almost certain for tech, but some people with high IQ get wayy more things done, they already do. This will spread to robots and other areas because robots are not automous yet, maybe will take decade(s). but meanwhile few operators will lead them in a more productive way? That's my bet. It's a clear, logical process with iterations. A lot of things are getting faster with AI, except energy production in some places in the world!
      - Schiendelman 5mo ago
        Why do you think less jobs creation is certain? We have more jobs now than we did before tech...
        kingleopold 5mo ago
        if AI get advanced, it only makes certain % of the engineers and related jobs wayy more productive, not everyone. This is already happening, it will grow from here or AI and LLMs stop advancing
        Schiendelman 5mo ago
        Everyone always assumes this, and it's always wrong. There is an infinite amount of work to do, and the more complex that work gets, the MORE people get employed.
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - therepanic 5mo ago
      Well, if that's the case, then in your concept the issue isn't what will happen to the programmers, but rather to all the work in general.
    - Schiendelman 5mo ago
- jhrmnn 5mo ago
  Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.
  - ahel 5mo ago
    1. People *across generations* had to skill up. 2. software being very opaque (very differently from agriculture/mechanized labour) imo is linked to having a plethora of support roles that cannot write software but "handle the human part" and help make it readable, while spreading accountability. Hopefully with a "more readable/more standardized" software development, those [product|project|people] management roles can stop being a drag/bottleneck. (code was never the bottleneck we repeat ourselves since age immemorial)
  - siriusastrebe 5mo ago
    The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while. Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value. But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows. Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy. What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.
    - ElevenLathe 5mo ago
      Why would companies want to grow if there is no more demand by consumers? I understand that "b2b" exists, but surely all production and commerce is ultimately about satisfying (or creating) demand for consumption? Why would companies want to keep growing if there is no demand for their products?
- logicchains 5mo ago
  >what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? They need to go into business for themselves, and become capital owners, who benefit from AI, not workers who are replaced by it. AI won't be able to compete at entrepreneurship unless robots are given autonomy and property rights like humans, which is quite unlikely to happen any time soon.
- bluesnowmonkey 5mo ago
  With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.
  - forlorn_mammoth 5mo ago
    and buy their own health insurance, and find their own customers, ...
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    "Just start your own company!" - Hacker News
    - ge96 5mo ago
      It makes sense go bankrupt, start another LLC. No I watch/listen to a lot of entrepreneurial stuff since 2016 and I still haven't launched my own product. There's a YT channel "Starter Story" it's like "this person make $100K/mo, here is the template". It really is simple though, put a paypal button on a squarespace page and ask someone to pay it.
    - bluesnowmonkey 5mo ago
      Yeah pretty much. Have you seen Polsia and its ilk? Maybe "trivial" would be too strong a word but... in 2026 it's not hard. That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.
      - tavavex 5mo ago
        This may seem like an important change that's making things different today, but it's not. Farms back in the day were constrained by supply, software today is constrained by demand. A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survive all on their own, being your own guaranteed consumer. A software developer can create software from nothing, but who is going to buy it? There's not enough consumers and problems in the world for everyone to have their own specialized business that is able to thrive. Someone is always going to be left out. It's not like food. It's like as if a farmer was able to conjure up a farm for free, but there is such an abundance of farms that to sell the crops to anyone, you'd need the help of a bigger business, or try to cultivate very specialized and niche crops that are not being made by one of the mega-farms, yet.
- koonsolo 5mo ago
  There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work. Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work. For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!
  - suls 5mo ago
    Great way of putting this. I certainly feel like this in smaller companies where each action (or inaction) has a direct consequence on the profitability.
  - evenhash 5mo ago
    There will always be more work that could be done, certainly. What’s uncertain, however, is whether the work that remains to be done is valuable enough that it makes sense to pay someone an engineer’s salary to do it. In your analogy, your competitors who keep their people could just as easily end up bankrupt.
    - koonsolo 5mo ago
      If your competitor can deliver more features faster and with higher quality, I don't think it's them that will end up bankrupt.
  - insane_dreamer 5mo ago
    > For software projects, there is always more work to do. sure, but there is not more work that people will pay you to do; that's the important question
    - koonsolo 5mo ago
      Software developers get paid to crunch out as much code as possible. If you work twice as fast, do you think your employer will let you slack off a bit because they ran out of work? What really happens is that your bucket gets filled with more work, and now you are as busy as before. Or did someone else got fired because now you were working twice as fast as them?
- malfist 5mo ago
  Wake me up when a peer reviewed study finds even a 2X increase in senior developer productivity
  - suzzer99 5mo ago
    I have no idea how you could even measure that w/o influencing the outcome.
    - malfist 5mo ago
      If the claim isn't falsifiable, than you can't do science. If you can't disprove a 2X multiplier how are you going to prove a 6X? 1000X? What's stopping the next hype man from claiming a billion X multiplier?
QuercusMax 5mo ago
For me - I'm 43, and used to be an extremely productive Java/Swing developer after 15 years of experience, and I knew all my tools inside and out. But I no longer work at that company (which doesn't exist any more), and it takes me a lot longer to learn how to be effective with the new tools I'm using simply because I haven't had a decade to learn the ins and outs of the new environments I'm working with. So AI saves me immense amounts of time figuring out how to write proper syntax, remembering the ins and outs of unit testing frameworks, etc. If I stick around for a year or three I'm sure I'll get much much faster and learn these tools better.
deadbabe 5mo ago
Stop with the anthropomorphizing, stop playing house. There is no team of agents, they are just tools and processes running in a computer for Christ’s sake. Blow away that one senior engineer and you have nothing. Better to have a team of 6.
- arcanemachiner 5mo ago
  You are staring at glowing pixels at a screen, then getting angry and pressing on pieces of plastic or a slab of glass to express your emotions in response. You live in a world of ever-changing metaphors. Get used to it.
bsder 5mo ago
> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. I don't know if I agree that this is the bottleneck. What I can agree on is that as I have aged I now simply REFUSE to learn programming knowledge that has a half-life. Phone programming? Nope. Front-end web programming framework? Oh, hell, no. Build system of the month? Piss right off. etc. AI lets me fill in that kind of programming with "acceptable" (read: super crappy but I didn't have to think about it) results because that code won't exist in 5 years anyway due to its half-life.
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
> The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents you just confirmed the point that the author is making in the article: the team of 6 is no longer needed, and, logically, is therefore eliminated by the company So yes, SWE still exists as a career for some, but their numbers might be reduced by 85%.
robot-wrangler 5mo ago
> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. Fortunately SWEs have the architect path, which frequently rewards having lots of deep intuition even as the details of calculation continue to change. So one question that's urgent but unknowable until we get there is.. are we going to get good architects if they don't come up through the trenches? I'm not sure. All I know is that everyone has a war story about the least qualified ones that got the role without that experience. Since intuition is what LLMs do more than calculation, it's worth mentioning that this is true but different. They have the collective unconscious of the internet, which isn't taste that comes from good/bad experience. Besides intuition what comes to mind is "good taste".. the actual foundation of good review and really the main job of senior positions in any technical field.
- suzzer99 5mo ago
  A software architect who doesn't actually code is worse than useless imo, because they drag actual developers down, forcing them to implement their Powerpoint apps. I say that having worked in the architecture group at one of largest companies in the world. "I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them!" (because it says so on my slide)
  - robot-wrangler 5mo ago
    > I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them Sounds exactly like the kind of intuition an LLM will have.. "best practice" that's really whatever fads/marketing hype that there is a lot of noise about, never been informed by experiments or pain. There was a post complaining about AI preference for god objects earlier, but the thing about stuff like that is, you could mechanically disincentivize it purely from complexity metrics or ASTs, either in training, or at the agentic layer later. I'm really much more worried about when LLMs are flooding the internet with marketing, and LLMs are consuming the marketing to determine best practice
  - mplanchard 5mo ago
bastawhiz 5mo ago
> The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents, and reviewing their code just as before. I don't see this in practice. Senior engineers can prompt Claude just as fast as junior engineers can. Claude can debug broken code at roughly the same speed regardless of who's pressing Enter. In fact, I've basically stopped using agents for most of my work. It's far more valuable for me to help the junior engineers develop a better sense of what's good and right, than it is for me to sit and review Claude commits all day.

by hibikir 5mo ago

bel8 5mo ago

But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?

Schiendelman 5mo ago
They build tractors, or sell tractors, or work in agricultural research and development...
- bel8 5mo ago
  I highly doubt that a significant portion of farm labor became salesman or researchers. Builders? I could see that but robots already replaced a portion of those too.
  - kingleopold 5mo ago
    less jobs creation is a almost certain for tech, but some people with high IQ get wayy more things done, they already do. This will spread to robots and other areas because robots are not automous yet, maybe will take decade(s). but meanwhile few operators will lead them in a more productive way? That's my bet. It's a clear, logical process with iterations. A lot of things are getting faster with AI, except energy production in some places in the world!
    - Schiendelman 5mo ago
      Why do you think less jobs creation is certain? We have more jobs now than we did before tech...
      - kingleopold 5mo ago
        if AI get advanced, it only makes certain % of the engineers and related jobs wayy more productive, not everyone. This is already happening, it will grow from here or AI and LLMs stop advancing
        Schiendelman 5mo ago
        Everyone always assumes this, and it's always wrong. There is an infinite amount of work to do, and the more complex that work gets, the MORE people get employed.
        deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
  - therepanic 5mo ago
    Well, if that's the case, then in your concept the issue isn't what will happen to the programmers, but rather to all the work in general.
  - Schiendelman 5mo ago
jhrmnn 5mo ago
Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.
- ahel 5mo ago
  1. People *across generations* had to skill up. 2. software being very opaque (very differently from agriculture/mechanized labour) imo is linked to having a plethora of support roles that cannot write software but "handle the human part" and help make it readable, while spreading accountability. Hopefully with a "more readable/more standardized" software development, those [product|project|people] management roles can stop being a drag/bottleneck. (code was never the bottleneck we repeat ourselves since age immemorial)
- siriusastrebe 5mo ago
  The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while. Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value. But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows. Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy. What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.
  - ElevenLathe 5mo ago
    Why would companies want to grow if there is no more demand by consumers? I understand that "b2b" exists, but surely all production and commerce is ultimately about satisfying (or creating) demand for consumption? Why would companies want to keep growing if there is no demand for their products?
logicchains 5mo ago
>what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? They need to go into business for themselves, and become capital owners, who benefit from AI, not workers who are replaced by it. AI won't be able to compete at entrepreneurship unless robots are given autonomy and property rights like humans, which is quite unlikely to happen any time soon.
bluesnowmonkey 5mo ago
With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.
- forlorn_mammoth 5mo ago
  and buy their own health insurance, and find their own customers, ...
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  "Just start your own company!" - Hacker News
  - ge96 5mo ago
    It makes sense go bankrupt, start another LLC. No I watch/listen to a lot of entrepreneurial stuff since 2016 and I still haven't launched my own product. There's a YT channel "Starter Story" it's like "this person make $100K/mo, here is the template". It really is simple though, put a paypal button on a squarespace page and ask someone to pay it.
  - bluesnowmonkey 5mo ago
    Yeah pretty much. Have you seen Polsia and its ilk? Maybe "trivial" would be too strong a word but... in 2026 it's not hard. That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.
    - tavavex 5mo ago
      This may seem like an important change that's making things different today, but it's not. Farms back in the day were constrained by supply, software today is constrained by demand. A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survive all on their own, being your own guaranteed consumer. A software developer can create software from nothing, but who is going to buy it? There's not enough consumers and problems in the world for everyone to have their own specialized business that is able to thrive. Someone is always going to be left out. It's not like food. It's like as if a farmer was able to conjure up a farm for free, but there is such an abundance of farms that to sell the crops to anyone, you'd need the help of a bigger business, or try to cultivate very specialized and niche crops that are not being made by one of the mega-farms, yet.
koonsolo 5mo ago
There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work. Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work. For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!
- suls 5mo ago
  Great way of putting this. I certainly feel like this in smaller companies where each action (or inaction) has a direct consequence on the profitability.
- evenhash 5mo ago
  There will always be more work that could be done, certainly. What’s uncertain, however, is whether the work that remains to be done is valuable enough that it makes sense to pay someone an engineer’s salary to do it. In your analogy, your competitors who keep their people could just as easily end up bankrupt.
  - koonsolo 5mo ago
    If your competitor can deliver more features faster and with higher quality, I don't think it's them that will end up bankrupt.
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  > For software projects, there is always more work to do. sure, but there is not more work that people will pay you to do; that's the important question
  - koonsolo 5mo ago
    Software developers get paid to crunch out as much code as possible. If you work twice as fast, do you think your employer will let you slack off a bit because they ran out of work? What really happens is that your bucket gets filled with more work, and now you are as busy as before. Or did someone else got fired because now you were working twice as fast as them?
malfist 5mo ago
Wake me up when a peer reviewed study finds even a 2X increase in senior developer productivity
- suzzer99 5mo ago
  I have no idea how you could even measure that w/o influencing the outcome.
  - malfist 5mo ago
    If the claim isn't falsifiable, than you can't do science. If you can't disprove a 2X multiplier how are you going to prove a 6X? 1000X? What's stopping the next hype man from claiming a billion X multiplier?

QuercusMax 5mo ago

For me - I'm 43, and used to be an extremely productive Java/Swing developer after 15 years of experience, and I knew all my tools inside and out. But I no longer work at that company (which doesn't exist any more), and it takes me a lot longer to learn how to be effective with the new tools I'm using simply because I haven't had a decade to learn the ins and outs of the new environments I'm working with. So AI saves me immense amounts of time figuring out how to write proper syntax, remembering the ins and outs of unit testing frameworks, etc. If I stick around for a year or three I'm sure I'll get much much faster and learn these tools better.

deadbabe 5mo ago

Stop with the anthropomorphizing, stop playing house. There is no team of agents, they are just tools and processes running in a computer for Christ’s sake. Blow away that one senior engineer and you have nothing. Better to have a team of 6.

arcanemachiner 5mo ago
You are staring at glowing pixels at a screen, then getting angry and pressing on pieces of plastic or a slab of glass to express your emotions in response. You live in a world of ever-changing metaphors. Get used to it.

bsder 5mo ago

> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. I don't know if I agree that this is the bottleneck. What I can agree on is that as I have aged I now simply REFUSE to learn programming knowledge that has a half-life. Phone programming? Nope. Front-end web programming framework? Oh, hell, no. Build system of the month? Piss right off. etc. AI lets me fill in that kind of programming with "acceptable" (read: super crappy but I didn't have to think about it) results because that code won't exist in 5 years anyway due to its half-life.

insane_dreamer 5mo ago

> The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents you just confirmed the point that the author is making in the article: the team of 6 is no longer needed, and, logically, is therefore eliminated by the company So yes, SWE still exists as a career for some, but their numbers might be reduced by 85%.

robot-wrangler 5mo ago

> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. Fortunately SWEs have the architect path, which frequently rewards having lots of deep intuition even as the details of calculation continue to change. So one question that's urgent but unknowable until we get there is.. are we going to get good architects if they don't come up through the trenches? I'm not sure. All I know is that everyone has a war story about the least qualified ones that got the role without that experience. Since intuition is what LLMs do more than calculation, it's worth mentioning that this is true but different. They have the collective unconscious of the internet, which isn't taste that comes from good/bad experience. Besides intuition what comes to mind is "good taste".. the actual foundation of good review and really the main job of senior positions in any technical field.

suzzer99 5mo ago
A software architect who doesn't actually code is worse than useless imo, because they drag actual developers down, forcing them to implement their Powerpoint apps. I say that having worked in the architecture group at one of largest companies in the world. "I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them!" (because it says so on my slide)
- robot-wrangler 5mo ago
  > I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them Sounds exactly like the kind of intuition an LLM will have.. "best practice" that's really whatever fads/marketing hype that there is a lot of noise about, never been informed by experiments or pain. There was a post complaining about AI preference for god objects earlier, but the thing about stuff like that is, you could mechanically disincentivize it purely from complexity metrics or ASTs, either in training, or at the agentic layer later. I'm really much more worried about when LLMs are flooding the internet with marketing, and LLMs are consuming the marketing to determine best practice
- mplanchard 5mo ago

bastawhiz 5mo ago

> The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents, and reviewing their code just as before. I don't see this in practice. Senior engineers can prompt Claude just as fast as junior engineers can. Claude can debug broken code at roughly the same speed regardless of who's pressing Enter. In fact, I've basically stopped using agents for most of my work. It's far more valuable for me to help the junior engineers develop a better sense of what's good and right, than it is for me to sit and review Claude commits all day.