Posted by napolux 1/11/2026
This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.
Either way, there is very little to no path toward "family + place to live + stable job" model.
Where I am I’m alone. Don’t underestimate the value of community.
It paid off for me, but who knows if I would have taken that leap later in life.
>> My actual accomplishments in the world of computing ... are the stuff of legends
We agree on the legends part
I suspect the problem is elsewhere and you are unwilling or uncomfortable to discuss it.
It's small consolation if sitting in a classroom is something you truly hate, but the guys who are programming pros before they go into a CS program are very often the ones who do really well and get the most out of it.
Tinkering is great but (good) school teaches you all the things and not just the things you obviously, and then you don't have any knowledge gaps.
Any fool can probably weld metal but how do you learn to do it properly if you don't learn properly?
This response, along with your OP, it’s so pretentious and condescending. It seems you feel that you’re superior to everyone intellectually. I assume that you hold the same attitude in person and this is not helping your situation.
The irony is that I’ve done exactly this. I tried to start a business in my early 20’s and failed dramatically. I stopped developing altogether for a decade while I did minimum wage jobs and struggled to find a career. I started developing again in my early 30’s and half a decade later I’m running a software business.
You may well be intelligent but severely lacking in other necessary areas. It seems it is you who has much to learn.
It's been entirely worth it for me and I cannot imagine my life without kids. But it's a deeply personal choice and I am not buying or selling the idea. I would just say nobody is ever ready and the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational. But not wanting them because of how it might change your own life is a completely valid reason to not have kids.
> the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational
My $0.02 is that if anything, the fears people have about how much their lives would be transformed are significantly lacking, and a lot of the "it's not so bad" advice is post-hoc rationalization. I mean, it's evolutionarily excellent that we humans choose to have kids, but it's very rational to be afraid and to postpone or even fully reject this on an individual basis. And as an industry and as a society, we should probably do a lot more to support parents of young children.
I found this smbc comic about a "happiness spigot" to be the most poignant metaphor - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/happiness-spigot?utm_sourc...
Skills like Legacy Code Anthropology and Reverse Engineering will grow into higher demand. Like the worst legacy apps built by junior developers and non-developers (Access/Excel VBA and VB6 alone had a lot of "low code" legacy by non-developers), LLMs are great at "documenting" What was built, but almost never Why or How, so skills like "Past Developer Mind Reading" and "Code Seances" will also be in high demand.
There will be plenty of work still to do "when" everything is vibe coded. It's going to resemble a lot more the dark matter work a lot of software engineering is in big enterprise: fixing other people's mistakes and trying to figure out the best way you can why they made those mistakes so you can in theory prevent the next mistake.
It's a very dark, cursed hope to believe that the future of software engineering is the darkest parts of its present/past. As a software developer who has spent too large of an amount of my career in the VB6 IDE and who often joked that my "retirement plan" was probably going to be falling into an overly-highly-paid COBOL Consultancy somewhere down the line, I'm more depressed that there will be a lot more legacy work than ever, not that there won't be enough work to go around, and it will be some of the ugliest, most boring, least fun parts of my career, forever, and will have even less "cushiness" to make up for it. (That "dream" of a highly paid COBOL Consultancy disappears when good Legacy Code becomes too common and thus the commodity job. Hard to demand slicker, higher salaries when supply is tainted and full.)
Maybe eventually you'll want to trust your corporate credit card to the LLMs too, but that's gonna be one of the last things where humans get taken out of the loop. And once the AI is that general what even is the CEO, salesperson, or entrepreneur's role either?
That "programmer/archeologist" idea of Vernor Vinge's books is likely to grow as the piles of generated code get bigger and the feasibility of tossing increasingly-large piles into a single context window at once might not keep up (or probably won't be the best or most cost-effective).
You can have hope even if a positive outcome isn't guaranteed. In fact that is when hope is the most valuable (and maybe also difficult to find).
Unless you're a plumber.
(eventually properties collapse, but if they keep the values inflated this way, that won't matter to them)
If you want to know more, look into RCMP reports on high property prices in Vancouver BC/Canada circa 2010s+, for example.
The prices will adapt, but the equilibrium will always be elite-oriented economy where accommodation of the masses is a second-tier goal.
They are promising CEOs they can eliminate their workforce to increase profits. For people working for a wage it’s all downside, no upside.
It's fine to have that opinion, but please frame as an opinion or else give me the lotto numbers for next week if you can predict the future that accurately.
Why are you certain of this?
We've had 50+ years of deteriotating worker conditions and a massive concentration of wealth to like 10,000 people. The 1980s crushed the labor movement, to all of our detriment.
The GFC destroyed the career prospects of many millenials who discovered their entry-level positions no longer existed so we created a generation that we're loaded with student debt, working as baristas.
A lot of people on HN ignored this because the 2010s were good for tech people but many of us didn't realize this post-GFC wave would eventually come for us. And that's what's happening now.
So on top of the millenaisl we now have Gen Z who have correctly realized they'll never have security, never buy a house and will never retire. They'll live paycheck to paycheck, barely surviving until they die. Why? All so Jeff Bezos can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion.
I'm reminded of the quote "only nine meals separates mankind from anarchy".
I believe we've passed the point where we can solve this problem with electoral politics. Western democracies are being overtaken by fascists because of increasing desperation and the total destruction of any kind of leftism since WW2. At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.
This is, in a twisted way, an expression of hope. The expectation of a grand collapse is one that's shared by many, but can you explain what gives you that complete certainty that it's near or that it's coming at all?
The far bleaker possibility that I think is totally realistic is that things continue getting worse, but they never cross over the final line. Things are mismanaged, everyone is worse off, but that nine-meal gap is never allowed to happen, and any real threats are squashed at the roots. There's no singular collapse, instead of one definitive societal stab wound that's followed by long hospital recovery, we're inflicted with a thousand minor cuts to near-death.
The people who benefit from all this have been refining their knowledge and growing their power and influence. They're near-gods at this point. They may make a mistake, but what if they don't and the current situation is maintained for decades to come?
Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia. Interestingly, this is a (super) rare win for the first Trump administration: forcing Europe to build an LNG port in 2018 [1] and warning against the dangers of dependence on Russian natural gas. This warning has been completely vindicated.
Europe has stagnant wages, a declining social safety net (eg raising the retirement age in France), a housing affordability crisis in most places (notably exlucding Vienna and there needs to more attention on why this is), inflation problems and skyrocketing energy costs. It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Europe has the same rising anti-immigrant rise in response to declining material conditions that the US hass. In Europe's case it's against Syrians and North Africans. In the UK this also included Polish people.
France is really a perfect example here. Despite all the economic problems you have Macro siding with Le Pen to keep Melenchon and the left out of power.
All of this is neoliberalism run amok and it comes from decisions in WW1, WW2 and post-WW2, most notably that Europe (and the US) decided the biggest threat was socialism and communism. And who's really good at killing communists? Nazis. Just look at the resume of Adolf Heusinger, an early NATO chair [2].
Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO. And NATO is on the verge of collapse. There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO, as many in his administration want to do, but NATO could well splinter if Trump takes Greenland.
What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare? It was rumored that parts of the administration wanted the UK to privatize the NHS as part of a post-Brexit trade deal. 15 years of austerity has primed the population to accept this kind of thing.
Many Europeans (rightly) look down on the insanity that's currently going on in the US but at the same time they don't realize just how dire the situation is in Europe.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/germany-to-build-ln...
While European military strength isn't in its prime right now, their capabilities without the US are often way underestimated. Not that most of the other issues aren't applicable - everyone appears to be more or less fucked in multiple ways - but losing a conventional war to Russia isn't on the table, barring unthinkable mismanagement or a world-changing event (preemptive use of nukes, etc). Russia has stalemated a war against a singular country that has a fraction of Russia's wealth, loads of antiquated equipment and a small sample of Western tech. The Russian economy has a massive hole in it largely thanks to said war, and is only propped up by existing savings - they're not in danger right now, they're rapidly approaching that point with no way of stopping. Even if the war never happened, they'd still be far weaker than the whole of Europe and likely some individual European countries.
It wasn't "given", Russia did it on purpose. There are SO MANY cases of politicians advocating for Russian natural gas or oil as an energy source who were later revealed to be 100% paid for with Russian money.
I wonder how that is supposed to work when the Executive branch has proven they can do whatever they want regardless of the other two branches. The rules are worthless if there are no consequences for breaking them.
> At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
And NATO [2]:
> The most senior officers of the latter group were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who on Oct. 10 and Nov. 12, 1955, respectively, were sworn in as the Bundeswehr’s first two lieutenant generals... Heusinger, a POW until 1948, ...
> That spring Heusinger succeeded Speidel as chief of Combined Forces when the latter was appointed commander in chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe becoming the first German officer to hold a NATO commander in chief position
And it goes on.
Nazi links are well-established to Operation Paperclip [3] under Werner von braun.
And there are many others [4].
I didn't say all the non-communists were Nazi. I said the neoliberal and imperialist projects of the US and Western Europe post-WW2 sided with and gave haven to Nazis to fight communism, which is true.
Fascism in the US didn't begin with the Nazis however. You can trace back the roots to the white supremacy the US was founded on, the slave trade, the Civil War, Reconstruction and even the Business Plot [5] that sought to overthrow FDR in 1933, probably labelling him a communist.
But the Nazis were very popular in the US, culminating with the German American Bund rally in Madison Square Gardens in 1939 [6].
Oh and let's not forget Henry Ford's contribution to all this, notably The International Jew [7], so much so that Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf.
Personally, I'm of the view that a lot of this can be traced back to simply not stringing up all the former slave owners after the Civil War.
[2]: https://www.historynet.com/these-nato-generals-had-unusual-b...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
[4]: https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...
[7]: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
> This warning has been completely vindicated.
That's funny. The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion). It's almost like the US wanted to push Europe and Russia against each other, so that it could sell its way more expensive natural gas in Europe!? Perhaps they did not anticipate the Russians would be bold enough to go to war on that, but they were certainly willing to accept the risk.
> It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Please. Europe may have some issues , but it's not nearly as bleak as you try to make it... I live here, I go around a lot. Europe is as affluent as ever. People are having a good time, in general. In the 1930's some countries had hyperinflation... you're comparing that to 5% yearly inflation these days?
> Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO.
On that we agree. It was a really bad decision, but understandable given how much the US soft power after WWII was absorbed by Europeans. Some Europeans act like European countries are US states. They take to the streets to join movements that are 100% American, like BLM. It's bizarre.
> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe, rather than just Ukraine (and maybe Moldova and Georgia if you push it). How can you justify that view? Russia has not drawn any red lines about anything related to the rest of Europe like it had with Ukraine and Georgia (which was thoroughly ignored by Europe, with the strong support and should I say it, advice of the USA), it has not said anything as threatening as Trump saying Greenland will be part of America the nice way or the hard way, yet you believe the US is not a threat, but Russia is. There's some serious dissonance in this line of thought.
> Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare?
Americans have been saying this for 50 years... they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time (though not as much for companies, as you can clearly notice it's much harder to make behemoths like FAANG in Europe, no doubt because without exploiting workers you can't really do that).
I think there's a certain amount of historical revisionism going on with this. It is complicated however.
You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.
Another noteworthy event is the 2014 revolution that ousted Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych as the president of Ukraine, culminating in the Minsk Agreement (and Minsk II) to settle disputes in the Dombas and elsewhere.
Russia does have legitimate security concerns int he region such as access to the Black Sea and not having NATO on their border. And by "legitimate" here I simply mean that Europe and the EU do the exact same thing, most notably when the US almost started World War 3 over Soviet influence in Cuba (which itself was a response to the US installing nuclear MRBMs in Turkey). Also, in terms of the threat of a conventional land war, Ukraine is basically a massive highway into Russia, previously used by both Hitler and Napoleon. Not that it worked out well for either.
Whatever the case, having another Belarus in Ukraine was ideal for Russia and I think their designs on this long predated any talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was DOA anyway. Germany, in particular, were always going to veto expanding NATO to share a border with Russia.
My point here is I'm not convinced that any promises of neutrality by Ukraine would've saved Ukraine from Russian designs.
> Europe is as affluent as ever
Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
> It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe,
It is a serious threat. Not in the conventional land-war a la WW2 sense but we're dealing with the world's other nuclear superpower (China doesn't have the nuclear arsenal Russia does, by choice). But Putin's playbook is oddly reminiscent to Hitler's playbook leading up to the war. That is, Hitler argued he was unifying Germans in Austria, the Sudetenland, etc. Similarly, Putin is using ethnically Russian populations in a similar way: as an excuse to intervene and take territory.
There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
American security and energy guarantees are really the only things holding Europe together right now. If NATO splinters, what's to stop Russia from seizing parts of Latvia?
This situation is precarious.
> they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time
No, they don't care that it works. In fact, they've been doing everything they can to make it not work. We now have a generation of people in many European countries (and I include the UK here) who have never not known austerity and constant government cutbacks. Satisfaction with the NHS deteriorates as it's been deliberately starved for 15+ years.
This is a well-worn and successful playbook called starving the beast [3]. It's laying the groundwork for a push for privatization. It'll be partial privatization to start with and just creep from there.
I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/01/nato.georgia
[2]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/housing-crisis/
The 1990's Russia was a hugely struggling nation that could barely feed its population, but even then they opposed NATO expansion strongly!
> The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.
Source: (Gorbachev in interview from 2014) https://www.rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbac...
> Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
The housing crisis is mostly limited to inflated prices in large cities and is itself evidence that people have a good purchasing power, since it's not being driven by foreign capital (at least where I live, in the Nordics).
Which statistics show the EU is NOT affluent?? If we look at GDP (+1.35% yearly in the last 10 years [1], not too bad for developed economies) and unemployment (currently around 6% for the whole EU [2]), it's not bad, especially if you consider the huge number of recent immigrants (unemployment among the native population is much lower than the total figures show, in Sweden, for example, native Swedes have near full employment).
But yeah, I think personal anedoctes are also helpful to establish whether a country looks like it's going down... and everywhere I go, I see only good signs: shops expanding, lots of new buildings, full bars and restaurants, people are driving the latest electric cars... what I don't see is things like businesses closing down, struggling local shops etc. which are normally very visible (I know, I've seen that) in economies that are in dire straits.
> There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
Yes, I've been to Latvia and Russian is clearly spoken by a large percentage of the population (to my surprise, including the young generation). As long as they are not suppressed from speaking their language (as is happening in Ukraine right now and even before the war, and in some areas in the Baltic countries) and they're not made second-class citizens (as is happening in Estonia, where they can no long vote [3]), Putin will not have any excuse to do that, and those countries would be wise to not provide such excuses! Anyway, I think that regardless of that, NATO will survive even without the USA (as something else, perhaps, but the union between European states is extremely important to maintain) and I really belive Article 5 will exist even if NATO evolves into a Europe-only alliance.
> I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
Not sure what you're referring to... I think I do appreciate it. The interview [4] Trump had with the American oil companies after the partial "annexation" of Venezuela couldn't be a better example of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...
[3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/russia/article/2025/03/26/estonia-...
The only way to prevent this is to guarantee that people without jobs will still have a roof over their heads and enough calories and micronutrients every day to survive - and some entertainment.
I guess the next turning of the wheel will be similar too.
Or maybe we all just have poor imaginations.
i would say that we firmly live in the American Empire with techno-feudalistic tendencies, but a historical event of such magnitude as the complete dissolution of the American state will probably see a reversal to a more traditional feudal system. Think Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates buying up and becoming the Dukes of the PNW.
personally though i don't think we are at this stage yet or even close to it. until the federal government becomes COMPLETELY inept and the average citizen cannot buy food, this won't happen. yes market conditions are currently not the best but we are nowhere near starvation.
I need about 4.5 years until basic financial independence, I wonder how does it feel to be at that point.
Will people still buy and sell houses?
Will house prices go down because no one can afford them?
Will house prices go up because so few will sell their assets?
I would like to buy a small farm today without debt and cheap energy (upfront investment in solar and storage) but I need a few years more.
Does the world can really change that fast? I don't know but the progress in AI is fast, very fast.
I feel for the mid-career people with families to support. Can't imagine how stressful that would be
Of course labor jobs will always exist, and a 25 year old would (on average) be much more physically able for that than someone older, so it goes both ways.
A mortgage: if you were assuming a strong income that would continue, you very likely could be forced to sell your house and take a huge loss
A family, kids: people relying on you
Time: at this point you have retirement plans and financial deadlines you need to hit if it's to ever become a reality
God forbid you have any health issues that cost $$$ which tend to come as you age. Can you afford to lose health insurance?
If you think about re-skilling and starting off at entry level.. people don't really want to hire older beginners.
Of course that's absolute worst case scenario, but I guarantee there are a lot of people there.
I'd 100% choose living out of my car for a while. In your 20s you can upend everything and completely reinvent yourself. Time, minimal responsibilities and energy are priceless
> could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now
There's a reason that's really vague, right? Because who knows if it'll be available
I don't think AI is gunna reach this point but who knows. It's not off the table
At this point I’ve realized I need to cast all other ambitions aside and work on getting some out of the way land that I own.
Honestly? It does and I feel completely hopeless. I'm very, very angry with the world/life at this point to put it mildly.
This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs.
The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
You're maintaining a large, professional codebase? You definitely shouldn't be vibe coding. The fact that some people are is a genuine problem. You want a simple app that you and your friends will use for a few weeks and throw away? Sure, you can probably vibe code something in 2 hours instead of paying for a SaaS. Both have their place.
I think the next step is to realize that this kind of product manager role is one that more "engineers" should be willing to take on themselves. It's pretty clear why user interviews and research and product requirement docs are not obviously within the wheelhouse of technical people, but building lots of prototypes and getting feedback is a much better fit!
Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?
If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can absolutely consume twice as much CSS, try to play call of duty on our smart fridge or use a new SaaS to pay our taxes.
Actually, most software either is garbage or goes to waste at some point too. Maybe that's too negative. Maybe one could call it rot or becoming obsolete or obscure.
It’s copium to think that with the combination of AI and oversupply of “good enough” developers, that it won’t be harder for developers to get jobs. We are seeing it now.
It wasn’t this bad after the dot com bust. Then if you were just an ordinary enterprise developer working “in the enterprise” in a 2nd tier city (raises hand), jobs were plentiful.
I saw this coming on the enterprise dev side where most people work back in 2015. Not AI of course, but the commoditization of development.
I started moving closer to the “business”, got experience in leading projects, soft skills, requirements gathering, AWS architecture etc.
I’m not saying the answer is to “learn cloud”. I am saying that it’s important to learn people skills and be the person trusted with strategy and don’t just be a code monkey pulling well defined tickets off the board.
I see this fallacy all the time but I don't know if there is a name for it.
I mean, we make used fun of MBAs for saying the same thing, but now we should be more receptive to the "Line Always Goes Up" argument?
I was referring specifically to this point, which, IMHO, is a fallacy:
>>> There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.
There is no way to use the word "infinite" in this context, even if qualified, that is representative of reality.
The demand for paid software is decreasing cause these AI companies are saying "Oh dont buy that SAAS product because you can build it yourself now"
Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...
Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over.
Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my restaur1ant" kind, or the "I need to agregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind. Anything where you'd accept cheap and disposable. Perhaps even the traditional startup, if POCs are vibecoded and engineers are only introducer later.
Those are huge businesses, even if they are not present in the HN bubble.
I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015. There are no code website makers available since then and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point, its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that. If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website. This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects. Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store.
Note that I own an agency that does a lot of what you say is “solved”, and I assure you that it’s not (at least in terms of being an efficient market).
SMBs with ARR up to $100m (or even many times more that in ag) struggle to find anyone good to do technical work for them either internally or externally on a consistent basis.
> I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015.
Conceptually, maybe. In practice, definitely not.
> There are no code website makers available since then
… that mostly make shit websites.
> and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point,
Also almost certainly a shit website at that price point, probably using the no-code tools mentioned above.
These websites have so many things wrong with them that demonstrably decrease engagement or lose revenue.
> its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that.
AI will be better very soon, as the best derivative AI tools will be trained on well-developed websites.
That said, AI will never have taste, and it will never have empathy for the end user. These things can only be emulated (at least for the time being).
> If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website
You can get an ok “brochure” website built for that. Maintaining it, if you have an agency that actually stays in business, will be about $100 minimum for the lowest effort touch, $200 for an actually one line change (like business hours), and up from there from anything substantial.
If you work with a decent, reputable agency, a $10k customer is the lowest on the totem pole amongst the agency’s customer list. The work is usually delegated to the least experienced devs, and these clients are usually merely tolerated rather than embraced.
It sucks to be the smallest customer of an agency, but it’s a common phenomenon amongst certain classes of SMBs.
> This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects.
This is actually true. Mainly because any decent small agency either turns into one that does larger contracts, or it gets absorbed by one.
That said, there is a growing market for mid-sized agencies (“lifestyle agencies”?).
> Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store
As mentioned above, you absolutely do not want to be a mom and pop store working with a web agency that works with any large, international brand like Adidas.
I appreciate your points from a conceptual level, but the human element of tech, software, and websites will continue to be a huge business for many decades, imho.
If the prototype can be just dropped in and clear a PR and comply with all the standards, you're just doing software engineering for less money!
What’s “the vibecoding strawman”? There are plenty of people on HN (and elsewhere) repeatedly saying they use LLMs by asking them to “produce full apps in hours instead of weeks” and confirming they don’t read the code.
Just because everyone you personally know does it one way, it doesn’t mean everyone else does it like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
Though I get that these days people tend to use “strawman” for anything they see as a bad argument, so you could be right in your assessment. Would be nice to have clarification on what they mean.
Good point.
> I think an accusation of straw-manning is in part a accusation of another's intent (or bad faith - not engaging with the argument).
There I partially disagree. Straw-manning is not engaging with the argument but it can be done accidentally. As in, one may genuinely misunderstand the nuance in an argument and respond to a straw man by mistake. Bad faith does require bad intent.
"Writing code is no longer needed for the most part."
It was a great post and I don't disagree with him. But it's an example of why it isn't necessarily a strawman anymore, because it is being claimed/realized by more than just vibecoders and hobbyists.
> Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.
* the README was clearly not written by an LLM nor aided
* he still uses GPLv2 (not 3) as the license for his works
You might think that everyone has FOMO or is an anti-AI Luddite when of course there are a LOT of us somewhere in the middle, just trying to get our work done and trying to figure out what our careers will look like in 5-10 years.
One big thing that no one seems to talk about - GenAI is unlocking many new (and oftentimes "small") business ideas that were not practical just a few years ago. I have witnessed this firsthand. . . however, it will also take away jobs. How many, who knows?
tl;dr everyone is full of shit or selling something or terrified to the point where they can't think straight. And no one has a crystal ball.
In part, I think what people are responding to is the trajectory of the tools. I would agree that they seem to be on an asymptote toward being able to do a lot more things on their own, with a lot less direction. But I also feel like the improvements in that direction are incremental at this point, and it's hard to predict when or if there will be a step change.
But yeah, I'm really not sure I buy this whole thing about orchestrating a symphony of agents or whatever. That isn't what my usage of AI is like, and I'm struggling to see how it would become like that.
But what I am starting to see, is "non-programmers" beginning to realize that they can use these tools to do things for their own work and interests, which they would have previously hired a programmer to do for them, or more likely, just decided it wasn't worth the effort. I think for those people, it does feel like a novel automation tool. It's just that we all already knew how to do this, by writing code. But most people didn't know how to do that. And now they can do a lot more.
And I think this is a genuine step change that will have a big effect on our industry. Personally, I think this is ultimately a very good thing! This is how computers should work, that anybody can use them to automate stuff they want to do. It is not a given that "automating tasks" is something that must be its own distinct (and high paying) career. But like any disruption, it is very reasonable to feel concerned and uncertain about the future when you're right in the thick of it.
Dunno why the author thinks an AI-enhanced junior can match the "output"of a whole team unless he means in generating lines of code, which is to say tech debt.
Being able to put a lot of words on screen is not the accomplishment in programming. It usually means you've gone completely out of your depth.
Because the author has a vested interest in peddling this bullshit given he works on Gemini at Google.
Many times, bad code is sufficient. Actually too many times: IMHO that is the reason why the software industry produces lower quality software every year. Bad products are often more profitable than good products. But it's not always for making bad products: sometimes it's totally fine to vibe code a proof or concept or prototype, I would say.
Other times, we really need stable and maintainable code. I don't think we can or want to vibe code that.
LLMs make low-quality coding more accessible, but I don't think they remove the need for high-quality coding. Before LLMs, the fraction of low-quality code was growing already, just because it was already profitable.
An analogy could be buildings: everybody can build a bench that "does the job". Maybe that bench will be broken in 2 months, but right now it works; people can sit on it. But not everybody can build a dam. And if you risk going to jail if your dam collapses, that's a good incentive for not vibe coding it.
I've built a few things end to end where I can verify the tool or app does what I want and I haven't seen a single line of the code the LLM wrote. It was a creepy feeling the first time it happened but it's not a workflow I can really use in a lot of my day to day work.
Not really sure why this article is talking about what happens 2 years from now since that’s 8 times longer than anything anyone with money or power cares about.
The street cred doesn't come from managing more resources, the street cred comes from delivering more.
Then I have some non-trivial side projects where I don’t really care about the code quality, and I’m just letting it run. If I dare look at the code, there’s a bunch of repetition. It rarely gets stuff right the first time, but that’s fine, because it’ll correct it when I tell it it doesn’t work right. Probably full of security holes, code is nasty, but it doesn’t matter for the use-cases I want. I have produced pieces of software here that are actively making my life better, and it’s been mostly unsupervised.
The next step was for me to write a cron job that would reapply the chattr +1 and rewrite the file once in 5 minutes. Sort of an enforcer. I used Claude (web) to write this and cut/pasted it just because I didn't want to bother with bash syntax that I learned and forgot several times.
I then wanted something stronger and looked at publicly available things like pluckeye but they didn't really work the way I wanted. So I tried to write a quick version using Claude (web) and started running it (October 2025). It solved my problem for me.
I wanted a program to use aider on and I started with this. Every time, I needed a feature (e.g. temporary unblocks, prevent tampering and uninstalling, blocking in the browser, violation tracking etc.), I wrote out what I wanted and had the agent do it. OVer the months, it grew to around 4k lines (single file).
Around December, I moved to Claude code from aider and continued doing this. The big task I gave it was to refactor the code into smaller files so that I could manage context better. IT did this well and added tests too. (late December 2025).
I added a helper script to update URLs to block from various sources. Vibe-coded too. Worked fine.
Then, I found it hogging memory because of some crude mistakes I vibe-coded early on fixed that. Cost me around $2 to do so. (Jan 2026).
Then I added support to lock the screen when I crossed a violation threshold. This required some Xlib code to be written. I'm sure I could have written it but it's not really worth it. I know what to do and doing it by hand wouldn't really teach me anything except the innards of a few libraries. I added that.
So, in short, this is something that's 98% AI coded but it genuinely solves a problem for me and has helped me change my behaviour in front of a computer. There are no companies that my research revealed that offer this as a service for Linux. I know what to do but don't have the time write and debug it. With AI, my problem was solved and I have something which is quite valuable to me.
So, while I agree with you that it isn't an "automation tool", the speed and depth which it brings to the environment has opened up possibilities that didn't previously exist. That's the real value and the window through which I'm exploring the whole thing.
It trims the time requirement of a bit of functionality that you might have searched for 4 examples down by the time requirement of 3 of those searches.
It does however remove the benefit of having done the search which might be that you see the various results, and find that a secondary result is better. You no longer get that benefit. Tradeoffs.
What has worked for me is treating it like an enthusiastic intern with his foot always on the accelerator pedal. I need to steer and manage the brakes otherwise, it'll code itself off a cliff and take my software with it. The most workable thing is a pair programmer. For trivial changes and repeatedly "trying stuff out", you don't need to babysit. For larger pieces, it's good to make each change small and review what it's trying.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
It seems it only took until about 2023 or so
The question is, how much faster is verification only vs writing the code by hand? You gain a lot of understanding when you write the code yourself, and understanding is a prerequisite for verification. The idea seems to be a quick review is all that should be needed "LGTM". That's fine as long as you understand the tradeoffs you are making.
With today's AI you either trade speed for correctness or you have to accept a more modest (and highly project specific) productivity boost.
The perverse incentives being that tech debt is non-obvious & therefore really easy to avoid responsibility for.
Meanwhile, velocity is highly obvious & usually tired directly to personal & team performance metrics.
The only way I see to resolve this is strict enforcement of a comprehensive QA process during both the planning & iteration of an AI-assisted development cycle.
But when even people working at Anthropic are talking about running multiple agents in parallel, I get the idea that CTO's are not taking this seriously.
> enforcement of a comprehensive QA process during both the planning & iteration of an AI-assisted development cycle
(i don't disagree with this take though, qa should be done from start to finish and integral every step of the way)
But when I don't have expertise, it's the same speed or even slower. The better I am at something, the faster the LLM coding goes.
I'm still trying to get better at Rust, and I'm past break-even now. So I could use LLMs for a speed boost. But I still hand-write all my code because I'm still gaining expertise. (Here I lean into LLMs in a student capacity, which is different.)
Related to this, I often ask LLMs for code reviews. The number of suggestions it makes that I think are good is inversely proportional to the experience I have with the particular tech used. The ability to discard bad suggestions is valuable.
This is why I think bring an excellent dev with the fundamentals is still important—critical, even—when coding with LLMs. If I were still in a hiring role, I'd hire people with good dev skills over people with poor dev skills every time, regardless of how adept they were at prompting.
If AI automated entry-level tasks from today, that just means "entry-level" means something different now. It doesn't mean entry-level ceases to exist. Entey-level as we know it, but not entry-level in general.
I have eight years of software engineering experience but am only one rung up from the bottom of our SWE ladder, and we don't even hire the bottom rung anymore at my org. Seems like there's crushing pressure from above to limit hiring at every stage.
I used to work on teams which were 50% entry level. Then just one. Then all senior teams became the norm.
This all happened after I became senior but before AI came along.
I think AI is a convenient scapegoat for other macro trends.
The usual trade-off of a well paid software development job is lack of job security and always learning - the skill set is always changing in contrast with other jobs.
My suggestion, stop chase trends and start to hear from mature software developers to get better perspective on what's best to invest on.
And why the mantra is always true?
You can find stable job (slow moving company) doing basic software development and just learn something new every 4 years and then change companies.
Or never change company and be the default expert, because everyone else is changing jobs, get job security, work less hours and have time within your job to uplift your skills.
Keep chasing latest high paid jobs/trends by sacrificing off time.
What's the best option for you? Only you know, it's depends on your own goals.
If you didn't like working with computers, then you (and another gazillion people who choose it for the $$$) probably made the wrong choice.
But totally depends on what you wanted to get out of it. If you wanted to make $$$ and you are making it, what is the problem? That is assuming you have fun outside of work.
But if you wanted to be the best at what you do, then you gotta love what you are doing. May be there are people who have super human discipline. But for normal people, loving what they goes a long way towards that end.
This doesn't match what I have seen in other industries. Many auto mechanics I know drive old Buicks or Ford's with the 4.6l v8 because the cars are reliable and the last thing they want to do on a day off is have to work on their own car. I know a few people in other trades like plumbers, electricians, and chefs and the pattern holds pretty well for them as well.
You can enjoy working with computers and also enjoy not working in your personal time.
The problem is the field is changing, fast. I love writing code... I'm not so sure I love prompting Claude, coordinating agents and reviewing +30k vibe-coded PRs.
This type of argument can hold for any profession and yet we aren't seeing this pattern much in other white-collar professions. Professors, doctors, economists, mechanical engineers, ... it seems like pretty much everybody made the wrong choice then?
I think this is a wrong way to look at it. OP says that he invested a lot of time into becoming proficient in something that today appears to be very close to part extinction.
I think that the question is legit, and he's likely not the only person asking oneself this question.
My take on the question is ability to adapt and learn new skills. Some will succeed some will fail but staying in status-quo position will certainly more likely lead to a failure rather than the success.
There are plenty of such examples but both of these imply that you're ready to devote a lot of your extra time, before or after the job, only that you can show you're relevant in the eyes of those who are the decision makers. This normally means that you're single, that you have no kids, family, no other hobbies but programming etc. This works when you're in your 20's and only up to the certain point unless you become a weirdo in your 30's and 40's etc. without any of these.
However, in the age where we are met with the uncertainty, it may become a new normal to devote extra effort in order to be able to remain not competitive but a mere candidate for the job. Some will find the incentive for this extra pain, some will not but I think it won't be easy. Perhaps in 5 years time we will only have "AI applied" engineers developing or specializing their own models for given domains. Writing code as we have it today I think it's already a thing of a past.
I think the reason is quite simple. Software is endlessly configurable. And thus a lot higher chance to get the configuration wrong.
This is what makes it attractive, and makes it hard to get right.
You cannot get good at it without making a ton of mistakes. When companies look for people with a lot of side projects, they are looking at people who already have made such mistakes and learned from them, preferably on their own time and not on paid, companies time.
I ll list some attributes of software development that makes it unique.
* No hard rules, textbooks to follow, industry as a whole still make costly mistakes and recovery cycles.
* No easy way to gauge the requirement-fit of the thing you made. Only time will tell.
* Cheap (financially) to practice, make mistakes and learn.
Actually that applies to doctors. A doctor who is not curious and is not willing to do learn/research on their own initiative is only a marketing hand of pharma.
But it is quite hard for doctors to do any real research independently. They can't really do experiments on real people...
Software is really special.
Don't get me wrong. I am that guy, who probably over-invested into the development of his skills but I don't think it's a normal thing to expect.
That does not apply here. Because more often than not, we don't prescribe products/services that our clients must go out and buy, without exception.
>it's a normal thing to expect.
It is not a normal thing to expect because in other fields there are few people who can afford to do that. So an employer cannot really pick someone from that pool.
But in software, it is possible if one choose to do it. So the pool is a lot bigger, so it becomes feasible for an employer to pick someone from there, instead of picking from I-am-only-as-good-as-I-am-paid-to-be pool..
You know that treating patients is not only about picking the right medicament and writing prescriptions? It's about diagnosing, testing the hypotheses, optimizing for the particular patient case, learning about all the specific factors of their environment including the genetics, then we have surgeons, etc.
And yet I don't quite see doctors being on a time spending spree to become exquisite in all of those things. Nor do I see hospitals or clinics doing such knowledge and ability harness tests over their potential employees. Stakes are much higher in medicine than they are in software so it makes no sense at all to make an argument that doctors cannot "afford" it. They can, they have books and practice the same way we do. I don't get to modify the production system every day but yet I am learning constantly of how not to make those same production system go down when I do.
> It is not a normal thing to expect because in other fields there are few people who can afford to do that.
It's not a normal thing in software too, you know? Let's please stop normalizing things which are not normal. If there is one thing that makes me happy in this new era of AI-assisted development is that all this bs is coming to its end.
I am just describing the logical behavior of an employer who wants to get the best person for the job.
About the other thing, I think I will let you have the last word since I feel that we are speaking past each other.
It never had time to develop into a truly professional field like medicine, law or engineering.
As AI allows more and more people to accomplish tasks without a deep understanding of computers, “working with computers“ will be as much of a marketable job skill as “working with pencils” 50 or 100 years ago.
Given how quickly models, tools and frameworks rise and fall, betting your career on a single technology stack is risky.
This was something I dealt with a lot when JS frameworks became the newest shiny thing and suddenly the entire industry shifted in a few years from being a front-end developer to being a full stack developer.
This happened to a lot of my friends who went all in on Angular. Then everybody switched to React.
The issue then became, "What should I learn?" because at my company (a large fortune 200 company) they were all in on Angular, and weren't looking for React developers, but I knew companies were moving away from Angular. So do I work to get better and more indispensable with Angular, and risk not knowing React? Or do I learn the new shiny framework betting at some point my company will adopt it or I will be laid off and need to know it?
It feels like half my life as a dev was spent being a degenerate gambler, always trying to hedge my bets in one way or another, constantly thinking about where everything was going. It was the same thing with dozens of other tools as well. It just became so exhausting trying to figure out where to put your effort into to make sure you always knew enough to get that next job.
As senior, if you choose, you can coast. By coast I mean you do justice to your job and the salary you are paid. Its a perfectly acceptable choice for someone to be senior for as long as they want.
The biggest bottleneck is going to be what other seniors and higher think of you.
I wonder what the best decision would have been. What job is AI immune and has a stable 40 hour week, no overtime, with decent pay. Teacher? Nursing?
Definitely something that requires social/interpersonal skills though will be the thing that winds up being AI immune. Humans are social creatures so I assume there will always be some need for it.
I feel you. It's a societal question you're posing. Your employer (most employers) deal in dollars. A business is evaluated by its ability to generate revenue. That is the purpose of a business and the fiduciary duty of the CEO's in charge.
> Am I supposed to want to code all the time?
Yes.
> When can I pursue hobbies,
Your hobby should be coding fun apps for yourself
> a social life, etc.
You social life should be hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things.
And the most successful people I know basically did exactly that.
I'm not saying y'all should be doing that now, I'm just saying, that is in fact how it used to be.
If all they did was code all the time, write code for fun and interacted mostly with other similar people, they probably wouldn't be the first choice for these projects.
The ones who ace their careers are for the most people that are fun, driven, or psychos, all social traits that make you good in a political game.
Spending lots of time with other socially awkward types talking about hard math problems or whatever will get you nowhere outside of some SF fantasy startup movie.
I'd say it's especially important for the more nerdy (myself included) to be more outgoing, and do other stuff like sales or presentations, design/marketing og workshops - that will make you exceptional because you then got the "whole package" and undestand the process and other people.
Well that depends heavily on how you define successful. Successful in life? I would tend to disagree, unless you believe that career is the only thing that counts. But even when career is concerned: the most successful people I know went on from being developer to some high end management role. The skills that brought them there definitely did not come from hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things.
Fuck. That.
I worked at a faang, successful people weren't people that did engineering, it was people who did politics.
The most successful people were the ones that joined at the same time as the current VP.
Your hobbies need to be fun, to you. Not support your career. If its just there to support your career, its unpaid career development, not a hobby. Should people not code in their free time? thats not for me to decide. If they enjoy it, and its not hurting anyone, then be my guest.
Engineers are generally useless at understanding whats going on in the real world, they are also quite bad at communicating.
do. fun. things.
My career has been fun, thats why I still do the thing I'm doing. I've worked with the very best in their respective fields for ~20 years.
I have done many and varied fun things through work, and continue to do so.
But.
Work stops at contracted time. After that it's me time.
I'm sorry for you as well.
I’m more concerned that it is the highlight of someone’s life being in front of a computer all day.
I did not do side projects. I really enjoyed most of my 20s as a single person. I was a part time fitness instructor, I dated, hung out with friends, did some traveling.
The other developers at my job also had plenty of outside hobbies.
They're still doing it.
the only real contender in this regard is the win32 api, and actually that did get used in enterprise for a long time too before the major shift to cloud and linux in the mid 2010s.
ultimately the proof is in the real-world use, even if its ugly to look at... id say, even as someone who is a big fan of linux, if i were given a 30 year old obscure software stack that did nothing but work, i would be very hesitant to touch it too!
I would like to add the business core functions of SAP R/3 (1992). Much of the code created for it in the early 90s still lives in the current SAP S/4HANA software.
This study showing 9-10% drop is odd[1] and I'm not sure about their identification critria.
> We identify GenAI adoption by detecting job postings that explicitly seek workers to implement or integrate GenAI technologies into firm workflows.
Based on that MIT study it seems like 90+% of these projects fail. So we could easily be seeing an effect where firms posting these GenAI roles are burning money on the projects in a way that displaces investment in headcount.
The point about "BigTech" hiring 50% fewer grads is almost orthogonal. All of these companies are shifting hiring towards things where new grads are unlikely to add value, building data centers and frontier work.
Moreover the TCJA of 2017 caused software developers to not count for R&D tax write offs (I'm oversimplifying) starting in 2022. This surely has more of an effect than whatever "GenAI integrator roles" postings correlates to.
I find this one hard to believe. Software is already massively present in all these industries and has already replaced jobs. The last step is complete automation (ie drone tractors that can load up at a hub, go to the field and spray all by themselves) but the bottleneck for this isn't "we need more code", it's real-world issues that I don't see AI help solving (political, notably)
Given projections of AI abilities over time AI necessarily creates downward pressure on new job creation. AI is for reducing and/or eliminating jobs (by way of increasing efficiency).
AI isn't creating 'new' things, it's reducing the time needed to do what was already being done. Unlike the automobile revolution new job categories aren't being created with AI.
We are going to need to de-risk our software dependencies, and Germany is going to need to use computers.
Germany is going to be crazy, I think.
The Gewerkschaft tactics to resist AI is what I’m really interested in seeing.
It is a new and exciting tool but immediately limited with medium complex tasks. Also we will see a lot more code with tricky bugs coming out of AI assistants and all of that needs to be maintained. If software development gets cheaper per line of code then there will be more demand. And someone has to clean up the mess created by people who have no clue whatsoever of SWE.
Once upon a time people developed software with punch hole cards. Even without AI a developer today is orders of magnitude more proficient than that.
The only thing I hope I am not going to see in my lifetime is real artificial intelligence.
I don't understand the take that a junior with AI is able to replace a small team. Maybe a horribly performing small team? Even then, wouldn't it just be logical to outfit the small team with AI and then have a small team of small teams?
The alleged increased AI output of developers has yet to be realized. Individuals perceive themselves as having greatly increased output, but the market has not yet demonstrated that with more products (or competitors to existing products) and/or improved products.