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Posted by poisonfountain 12 hours ago

LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do(human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev)
771 points | 749 commentspage 7
pjd7 12 hours ago|
Engineering hasn't gone away, you're now just directing things at a higher level. You are now a architect & manager (but you're managing agents not people).

Who sometimes has to deep dive & mentor a agent on solving the right problem.

emodendroket 9 hours ago||
Do any of us? But I think it's kind of backwards the way it's presented in this article; the raw code part it has down more so than the design sense.

I also would point out that, while this thought has occurred to me about the skills being commoditized, in practice I don't see that everyone's getting the same results from the tools. Not sure what's going on but that's interesting.

gbro3n 11 hours ago||
AI is beat thought of as an exoskeleton, you'll be at a huge advantage if you learn how to use it properly, and you will, unfortunately fall behind if you don't. I still think we're going to need people who can reason about code, and the amount of code to reason about is exploding in volume. Think of it as doctors having access to better drugs and techniques - they can can cure more illness, but the bar and expectation of what they can do will just raise. And doctors are still well paid, because what they do is important and needs doing well.
hnuser 9 hours ago||
This post is sad. Hacker news is turning into /cscareerquestions as someone who's watched this for last 15 years it's going downhill.
pegasus 9 hours ago||
I don't believe agents care less about architecture than us. Badly architected code has the same effect on them as on us, namely to slow them down and degrade the quality of their output. Which translates to the same thing as well, loss of revenue.

Coding agents are driving up the value of architectural skills to the detriment of more specialized/technical skills.

amirathi 8 hours ago||
Author says Claude now one-shots distributed systems bugs that used to take him two days but most top comments here are still playing down frontier model capabilities.

Are we collectively in denial? It's understandable as the craft as we knew it is being disrupted by tools that have improved at an astonishing pace.

sreekanth850 11 hours ago||
>Agents do a really bad job at keeping codebases organized. If you do a disciplined way of development with agents by keeping all Documentation in markdown format, repo structure, Decision records and architecture, they do absolutely organized. Every new module should be documented and the editor configuration and coding patterns can be given as reference. this worked well for me. and it make enhancements, extensions development without any big troubles.
leoncos 12 hours ago||
The last sentence in the article is correct:

"Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession."

As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game.

In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People will no longer focus on utility alone, but instead on the enjoyment of the process of writing code itself.

mahogany 12 hours ago||
> As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game.

And what sort of economic system do you imagine will be in place to support billions of people being able to just play Go all day long? How do you imagine the large capitalistic global powers transitioning into that state?

juleiie 11 hours ago||
I think that huge deflation will follow for everything except land value.

If automation makes producing food so cheap that it is almost free than it is ridiculously easy to acquire it. Similarly automated construction.

The way I see it the economy will point towards outer space. That’s where most jobs and flow of economy will be.

However most people will have 10x times uplift in purchasing power compared to today so their relative poverty will be ridiculous for us to call it the poverty but they will still think they are poor and troubled.

Generally I don’t think it will be utopia for the people living in that moment but if you look from medieval times at today it looks like utopia for serfs from the past. You however wouldn’t call it an utopia because your standards grew as fast as your purchasing power.

I think that rich and poor will be separated by accessibility to anti age treatment and other bodily improvements.

The tragedy of the poors in the future will be living measly 80 year old life like a today millionaire and that will be considered lower class. Those people with wrinkles we don’t want to look at because of uncomfortable pangs of guilt.

zelphirkalt 2 hours ago||
Food is already extremely cheap to produce. So cheap, that we waste approximately 50% of it, before it even gets into households. Yet we are still forced to use money to buy it in stores, instead of getting it at no or almost no cost. I think they will find ways to keep everything costing quite a bit.
zelphirkalt 4 hours ago|||
> In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People will no longer focus on utility alone, but instead on the enjoyment of the process of writing code itself.

Great, if someone will find it in them to pay me. Real bad, if not.

nevertoolate 12 hours ago|||
So you believe that your work will be done by AI and you will enjoy life more? This is not a loaded question, just trying to understand what your future ideal day / week would look like as an "ai optimist".
zaphirplane 11 hours ago||
That’s just not economically viable. Even if it becomes viable after some singularity event the path there will be 1000 the upheaval seen during the wipe out of manufacturing and mining
godlabs 9 hours ago||
I code myself now and have given up on LLMs, no matter what, they eventually make a codebase unmaintainable. The uncertainity of LLM generated code has been screwing up with my peace and guarantee I have when I wrote code myself. LLMs are not AI they are Jack. Jack of all trades, Master of None.
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