My journey from hand-written code to agents is very similar. I think once a person exposed to agents goes through initial "I want to build anything I can think of" psychosis, it results in a much more productive workflow.
I've been spending less and less time glued to my screen, and more time thinking about concepts, as well as doing thing I like. The key for me was realizing that building with agents is very fun, but not every idea is worth building.
I am not too worried about the future of my career, as long as I stay in sync with the latest tools (agents). I think of it as elevator operators being misplaced by elevator controllers: the ones who refused to upskill into elevator technicians probably did not get a return offer. Not because nobody needed people to work with elevators, but because their skills were not economically valuable anymore.
every elevator needed an operator, how many elevators can a technician support? And what is the upskilling software developers can do? Not every software developer can be a good architect, PM or sales person (and even if they could be, there aren't going to be as many open positions anyways).
I miss the old days (which were just a few years ago?).
I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.
I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.
Doing coding professionally already stripped nearly all the fun out of coding for me years before AI got good at coding, so when it comes to "how fun is it to be a software engineer", AI didn't have any negative impact for me. Being a professional software engineer was already extremely boring. Cycle after cycle, ticket after ticket, feature after feature, meeting after meeting... constant blur of meaningless shit.
If anything, AI has made it more fun simply because it means not having to think as much about the drudgery of details: syntax, API schemas, boilerplate code... And by "more fun" I mean "somewhat less unfun". Cause it's still not fun.
I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.
It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.
It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.
People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".
Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.
of course there'll be a FOSS community. with everything that's been happening I've yet to see anything even suggesting xkcd 2347 is being impacted here, except the thankless maintainer can bounce ideas off an agent now.
My favorite part about gushing about the new age of AI development is how oblivious the authors always seem to be about the next phase.
It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.
until 1) software is saturated or 2) llms or their creators will take accountability for any issues its code causes i think there will continuously be the next phase
Tbh i dont see software demand being saturated anytime soon (which is why im bullish SWEs, and we're seeing both demand and compensation increase as of late), we keep moving up abstractions and increasing ambition and scope for new projects.
If all the companies use {frontier model} then your competitive advantage is what you have that is not legible to the model
> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.
Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.
I've actually been noticing this with a bunch of staff+ engineers at my current workplace. Previously what could be done with a TL plus 2 or 3 juniors can be done by a single person. I'm seeing some really sophisticated internal tools being built to help internal users with issues that previously required oncall engineer time.
Once cars came around, people probably ran into the streets yelling that animal husbandry is over and that horses, chickens, cows, etc. are all done for and we'll be eating car meat or perhaps, cars will fully take over and start eating our meat.
If they didn't, maybe they were smarter back then.
Enter key? Just talk to the LLM, no enter key needed ;-)
Now anyone who can talk can vibe code apps.
Personally I vibe code apps while driving. I still have to test them once no longer in motion, so im thinking maybe humans are still needed for testing but in a few years or more maybe not?
Until either the enter key wears out and breaks, or we get pervasive sandboxes that act according to the users interests. It seems like Windows Vista UAC all over again for a new generation.
We'll keep doing it for as long as those making the blog posts keep making the same sort of blog posts we have seen on this cycle several times before. Slop begets slop, human or automaton made or a mix, and always has done.
I maintain a browser extension to nuke the endless stream of boring AI noise articles: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ Sometimes it misses articles with less clear titles, like this one, and you gotta nuke 'em manually.
Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc. We can still hand craft code. There may always be a market for it too, like Rolls Royce.
However, I agree with OP, that the career in the main has changed. The cost of an engineer is probably going to fall precipitously once we hit saturation point. (I believe we're running on a backlog of software that was previously economically infeasible to make right now). IDK how long that will take (10 months? 10 years? 10 decades?)
But I do think LoC is going to fall in price to be like rice, a lot of the world just gives it away for free (to it's poor) because it's so plentiful. If AGI hits we may see many other goods follow.
i dont think we'll ever saturate the amount of software there is in the world unless we get some sort of scifi superintelligence scenario
Software allows us to build essentially infinite abstractions with infinite room to run. cheaper and better models released to the world means higher competition which drives up the cost for talent
however i think the value of 'hand crafted code' drops to zero unless we convince consumers to purchase software as a status symbol like rolls royces (seems unlikely, unless there is a concentrated marketing effort)
I think it's heavily dependent on what type of dev role it is. There has always been a split between the startups and the corporate world.
In the case of working at startups, I'd agree that you don't (and never really needed to) hire extra devs.
Since this is HN, I know most hate corporate jobs, but that's where all the stability is and where AI is struggling to find footing. This rejection of AI puts a sorely needed spotlight on the cultural divide, and much of SV bet big on this misunderstanding.
I want the UI to be snappy. I used to dictate using
observables and other optimization preferences - and
sometimes still do. But I can also merely add
constraints - the image should process within 15ms
presses <enter>. Oh shoot - I meant to write 150ms
but… oh… I guess lets simply see i the model can do
it? Wow. I realize… I need to re-evaluate what I
think of as possible and not.
this resonates with me. Two days ago I was fighting with the GitHub Actions CI pipeline for an open source iOS app I maintain. It was stalling out after an hour, not completing. Sometimes, if I was lucky, it would finish after 45-50 minutes. I told Claude Code "make the CI pass in under 10 minutes. Don't ask me any more questions; I am going to bed and want this to work when I come back."
Claude Code wished me a restful night of sleep (seriously), and when I came back in the morning it had diligently chewed through the problem and was consistently getting the results I'd asked for.
It won't be a student on $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work? One of them and a couple of AI licences could try to replace several people the way things are going.
At least until the investment capital starts to be called in and use of decent AI models becomes noticeable more expensive, assuming that happens long before open free models are good enough to replace them.
Of course that will lead to there being very few experienced people in a couple of decades, as most of the remaining ones age out, but I'll be long done by the time that becomes a big problem, I'm not on the right side of the mid-life divide!
not sure where this meme of 'ai will become very expensive any time now!' comes from
consumer subscriptions are subsidized but the companies make very healthy margins via api pricing, which is what enterprises use, and cost per intelligence is dropping rapidly
That can't go on forever, which is why the big AI companies are crying for regulation to slow things down - they need to make some of that money back before others come along and start eating what little moat they have.
That, and a lot of that investment money seems to be moving in a rather circular fashion, which usually means that when things change it will happen quickly as there is effectively one pot that will all dry up at the same time.
valuations and funding look at *growth*, not money out and money in
ai has produced some of the fastest growing companies of All Time and plotting the trend leads to very profitable businesses in the future (which is the whole point of investing)
i think it would be a more nuanced and interesting conversation to talk about 1) how growth will change and 2) how the rapidly falling cost of intelligence will affect the different players in the ecosystem
(not a bullpost for the labs, i think their situation is precarious)
> It won't be a student in $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work?
Yeah it won't be a student making $10 an hour replacing him, it will be an experienced dev making $10 an hour because hey at least that beats starving to death.
The next step after "juniors are doomed, but seniors still get work" is pretty obviously that senior salaries are going to start rapidly dropping.
> next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.
I mean numerous firms seem to already be doing this, and they're making HN's front page regularly for week-long downtimes, blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product.
My employer has absolutely no interest in cutting any engineering staff in favor of AI. But we're also not a VC-funded human misery mill, and we have a sustainable business model involving selling actual products, so these facts may be related to that.
> blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product
So far I've seen relatively little anger of that level, except perhaps aimed at MS for the state of Windows. And unfortunately for the humans most companies high on AI juice are more likely to follow the path of finding better ways to use AI (or switching to what they think is a better model) rather than re-engaging with the meat workers, is such a user revolt seems imminent.
My DayJob is riding high on AI AMT, though quality is not currently falling (in fact by some metrics there is an improvement) because people are properly reviewing everything that comes out of it. I'm still planning on not touching the stuff though, if it comes to a choice of “AI or be redundant”, I'll be redundant, but even the Luddite that I am can see there is a benefit if it is used well.
I realized recently that I no longer get stuck. I don't sit and figure something out for a few hours, trying thing after thing. "Banging my head against the wall" isn't really part of my vocab anymore.
I am transfixed watching gpt-sol-6-1 program all day non-stop. I am building a succesor to my web2.0 groupware platform and now on a low budget you can get the code built without having financial backing. Strategy is now what you need to get usage. How to grab customers who are unhappy with big players and want a more bespoke system.
This feels a bit like someone with one of the first cars thinking about how much faster they can distribute feed for all the horses.
That is, you haven't projected this forward just a bit further and are still thinking in terms of the old world where software is at all valuable and where you can have customers to sell it to.
I still feel myself falling into that trap, but haven't figured out what world replaces this.
My journey from hand-written code to agents is very similar. I think once a person exposed to agents goes through initial "I want to build anything I can think of" psychosis, it results in a much more productive workflow.
I've been spending less and less time glued to my screen, and more time thinking about concepts, as well as doing thing I like. The key for me was realizing that building with agents is very fun, but not every idea is worth building.
I am not too worried about the future of my career, as long as I stay in sync with the latest tools (agents). I think of it as elevator operators being misplaced by elevator controllers: the ones who refused to upskill into elevator technicians probably did not get a return offer. Not because nobody needed people to work with elevators, but because their skills were not economically valuable anymore.
every elevator needed an operator, how many elevators can a technician support? And what is the upskilling software developers can do? Not every software developer can be a good architect, PM or sales person (and even if they could be, there aren't going to be as many open positions anyways).
I miss the old days (which were just a few years ago?).
I was someone who got into tech because they enjoyed coding as a mental exercise, not because they wanted to get rich. I feel like the fun part of the job has been now been automated away. All that remains is the boring part that I previously tolerated as a necessary evil: aligning stakeholders, kissing management ass, obsessing over the performance review cycle.
I know that some people have the inverse relationship: they find the "boring" part to be energizing and the "fun" part to be tedious. And I've seen a couple coworkers experiment with using Claude to agentically caress their boss's derriere. That's good for them and I wish them all the best. As for me, hopefully I can last long enough to engineer an early retirement. Then maybe I'll contribute to open source, assuming that there still is a FOSS community left by then.
Doing coding professionally already stripped nearly all the fun out of coding for me years before AI got good at coding, so when it comes to "how fun is it to be a software engineer", AI didn't have any negative impact for me. Being a professional software engineer was already extremely boring. Cycle after cycle, ticket after ticket, feature after feature, meeting after meeting... constant blur of meaningless shit.
If anything, AI has made it more fun simply because it means not having to think as much about the drudgery of details: syntax, API schemas, boilerplate code... And by "more fun" I mean "somewhat less unfun". Cause it's still not fun.
For me that turning point was 10-15 years ago.
I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.
It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.
It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.
People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".
Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.
of course there'll be a FOSS community. with everything that's been happening I've yet to see anything even suggesting xkcd 2347 is being impacted here, except the thankless maintainer can bounce ideas off an agent now.
My favorite part about gushing about the new age of AI development is how oblivious the authors always seem to be about the next phase.
It's always some variation of: the LLMs are incredible and gaining logical and reasoning ability at an astounding rate, but fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.
I envy their optimism.
until 1) software is saturated or 2) llms or their creators will take accountability for any issues its code causes i think there will continuously be the next phase
Tbh i dont see software demand being saturated anytime soon (which is why im bullish SWEs, and we're seeing both demand and compensation increase as of late), we keep moving up abstractions and increasing ambition and scope for new projects.
If all the companies use {frontier model} then your competitive advantage is what you have that is not legible to the model
Exactly. Taken from this article:
> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.
Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.
feels like the opposite to me. the 'factory worker' style code monkey job is vaporized
the new era of swe will demand more and more long term business + product direction and relationship building skills
right now the meme is we all became managers of agents. the trajectory leads us to all becoming mini-ceos directing our company of agents
I've actually been noticing this with a bunch of staff+ engineers at my current workplace. Previously what could be done with a TL plus 2 or 3 juniors can be done by a single person. I'm seeing some really sophisticated internal tools being built to help internal users with issues that previously required oncall engineer time.
Once cars came around, people probably ran into the streets yelling that animal husbandry is over and that horses, chickens, cows, etc. are all done for and we'll be eating car meat or perhaps, cars will fully take over and start eating our meat.
If they didn't, maybe they were smarter back then.
Enter key? Just talk to the LLM, no enter key needed ;-)
Now anyone who can talk can vibe code apps.
Personally I vibe code apps while driving. I still have to test them once no longer in motion, so im thinking maybe humans are still needed for testing but in a few years or more maybe not?
How many times are we going to cycle through these same arguments instead of actually discussing the content of the blog posts?
As long as the daily propaganda articles to refresh the DRAM of people daily appear here.
Until either the enter key wears out and breaks, or we get pervasive sandboxes that act according to the users interests. It seems like Windows Vista UAC all over again for a new generation.
We'll keep doing it for as long as those making the blog posts keep making the same sort of blog posts we have seen on this cycle several times before. Slop begets slop, human or automaton made or a mix, and always has done.
I maintain a browser extension to nuke the endless stream of boring AI noise articles: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ Sometimes it misses articles with less clear titles, like this one, and you gotta nuke 'em manually.
Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc. We can still hand craft code. There may always be a market for it too, like Rolls Royce.
However, I agree with OP, that the career in the main has changed. The cost of an engineer is probably going to fall precipitously once we hit saturation point. (I believe we're running on a backlog of software that was previously economically infeasible to make right now). IDK how long that will take (10 months? 10 years? 10 decades?)
But I do think LoC is going to fall in price to be like rice, a lot of the world just gives it away for free (to it's poor) because it's so plentiful. If AGI hits we may see many other goods follow.
i dont think we'll ever saturate the amount of software there is in the world unless we get some sort of scifi superintelligence scenario
Software allows us to build essentially infinite abstractions with infinite room to run. cheaper and better models released to the world means higher competition which drives up the cost for talent
however i think the value of 'hand crafted code' drops to zero unless we convince consumers to purchase software as a status symbol like rolls royces (seems unlikely, unless there is a concentrated marketing effort)
> Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc.
One of these things is not like the others. Your silicon valley bubble privilege is showing.
I think it's heavily dependent on what type of dev role it is. There has always been a split between the startups and the corporate world.
In the case of working at startups, I'd agree that you don't (and never really needed to) hire extra devs.
Since this is HN, I know most hate corporate jobs, but that's where all the stability is and where AI is struggling to find footing. This rejection of AI puts a sorely needed spotlight on the cultural divide, and much of SV bet big on this misunderstanding.
> where AI is struggling to find footing
As in struggling to find acceptance by the rule makers?
or As in struggling to be capable of delivering value?
(just asking to try and understand your reply)
It's a "yes" for both cases.
Claude Code wished me a restful night of sleep (seriously), and when I came back in the morning it had diligently chewed through the problem and was consistently getting the results I'd asked for.
next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.
I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago. this guy is driving straight off a cliff and doesn’t even seem to realize.
curious, is this the default culture at tech companies now?
It won't be a student on $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work? One of them and a couple of AI licences could try to replace several people the way things are going.
At least until the investment capital starts to be called in and use of decent AI models becomes noticeable more expensive, assuming that happens long before open free models are good enough to replace them.
Of course that will lead to there being very few experienced people in a couple of decades, as most of the remaining ones age out, but I'll be long done by the time that becomes a big problem, I'm not on the right side of the mid-life divide!
not sure where this meme of 'ai will become very expensive any time now!' comes from
consumer subscriptions are subsidized but the companies make very healthy margins via api pricing, which is what enterprises use, and cost per intelligence is dropping rapidly
> not sure where this meme of 'ai will become very expensive any time now!' comes from
Money out > money in. https://isaiprofitable.com/
That can't go on forever, which is why the big AI companies are crying for regulation to slow things down - they need to make some of that money back before others come along and start eating what little moat they have.
That, and a lot of that investment money seems to be moving in a rather circular fashion, which usually means that when things change it will happen quickly as there is effectively one pot that will all dry up at the same time.
valuations and funding look at *growth*, not money out and money in
ai has produced some of the fastest growing companies of All Time and plotting the trend leads to very profitable businesses in the future (which is the whole point of investing)
i think it would be a more nuanced and interesting conversation to talk about 1) how growth will change and 2) how the rapidly falling cost of intelligence will affect the different players in the ecosystem
(not a bullpost for the labs, i think their situation is precarious)
> It won't be a student in $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work?
Yeah it won't be a student making $10 an hour replacing him, it will be an experienced dev making $10 an hour because hey at least that beats starving to death.
The next step after "juniors are doomed, but seniors still get work" is pretty obviously that senior salaries are going to start rapidly dropping.
> I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago.
What do you do now? I'm also looking to get out of this industry, but it's tough to voluntarily give up the pay.
Might as well stick around until the option is no longer there, as long as they enjoy it.
Feels like AI is just exposing what was always glorified software-configuration
Did you retire or do something else?
> next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.
I mean numerous firms seem to already be doing this, and they're making HN's front page regularly for week-long downtimes, blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product.
My employer has absolutely no interest in cutting any engineering staff in favor of AI. But we're also not a VC-funded human misery mill, and we have a sustainable business model involving selling actual products, so these facts may be related to that.
> blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product
So far I've seen relatively little anger of that level, except perhaps aimed at MS for the state of Windows. And unfortunately for the humans most companies high on AI juice are more likely to follow the path of finding better ways to use AI (or switching to what they think is a better model) rather than re-engaging with the meat workers, is such a user revolt seems imminent.
My DayJob is riding high on AI AMT, though quality is not currently falling (in fact by some metrics there is an improvement) because people are properly reviewing everything that comes out of it. I'm still planning on not touching the stuff though, if it comes to a choice of “AI or be redundant”, I'll be redundant, but even the Luddite that I am can see there is a benefit if it is used well.
I realized recently that I no longer get stuck. I don't sit and figure something out for a few hours, trying thing after thing. "Banging my head against the wall" isn't really part of my vocab anymore.
I am transfixed watching gpt-sol-6-1 program all day non-stop. I am building a succesor to my web2.0 groupware platform and now on a low budget you can get the code built without having financial backing. Strategy is now what you need to get usage. How to grab customers who are unhappy with big players and want a more bespoke system.
This feels a bit like someone with one of the first cars thinking about how much faster they can distribute feed for all the horses.
That is, you haven't projected this forward just a bit further and are still thinking in terms of the old world where software is at all valuable and where you can have customers to sell it to.
I still feel myself falling into that trap, but haven't figured out what world replaces this.
Another article of unbridled enthusiasm after finding a new religion.