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Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

164 points - last Thursday at 2:41 AM

I had been running a small (3 people) software company for about 4 years. Since closing down, I recently hung out at a friend's company to see what they were working on (15 ppl). To preface: I'm a heavy user of Claude (rarely write code by hand), but what I'm seeing in person has been rather shocking to me, and I wanted to calibrate with others.

In particular: - the code is not the source of truth anymore; it's ask claude to write, and ask claude to explain - LoC, abstractions, and all those "software development principles" does not seem to matter to people - Code review is not done by humans - Actually understanding the problem deeply seems to be offloaded to claude - Some developers are running like 5+ simultaneous claude sessions, and no code is being looked at - Explosion of llm-generated tests

First off, is this similar to what's going on at your company?

If this company is representative, it feels like software development is going from a precise occupation that requires high degree of understanding to something probabilistic and offloaded understanding (to eventually not an occupation at all honestly).

I'm interested to hear other folks' perspectives.

stradale
today at 7:52 PM
My take on what’s happening with our profession: https://medium.com/@worldtiki/when-ai-stops-replacing-work-a...
fibonachos
last Thursday at 4:27 AM
My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now.
Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately.
I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-switchy than other teams.
As others in this thread have noted, the situation is still evolving. However, I worry less each day about being replaced by AI. There has always been more work than available bandwidth in my experience.
What seems clear to me is that expectations around velocity and throughput will increase (are increasing). AI use will be required to meet those expectations. Learning to use this new tool effectively will be essential for career progression (and preservation).
pyeri
last Thursday at 3:26 AM
I'm a Senior Freelance Programmer, I can see many of my past and present clients moving towards the exact path you described. I keep warning them during meetings that Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues and Claude will be forced to close their access to all but the most enterprisey ones with deep pockets. The mere electricity cost for that kind of high level reasoning and abstraction can't be subsidized forever. However, there are other forces which pull them towards Claude and AI workflows. Most of the clients are in a "wait and watch" mode right now, using LLM assistance for code generation but not fully depending on them.
Before LLMs came, there used to be the technical debt to deal with in a project, now there is also the added cognitive debt which is way more subtle and impactful long-term. If your source of truth isn't source code but a prompt (or even a series of prompts with branches) and the executor of prompts is a non-deterministic agent, I think you've already lost the battle there.
NichoPaolucci
last Friday at 3:42 AM
I think a lot of developers probably FEEL like they are in super mode, but in reality they're just letting Claude drive the boat and they get to wear the captain's hat.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe AI Natives will be faster in the end and can build / do more, or building software really is a dead field - but I noticed that I was losing my brain and had to get back into the seat.
There are definitely great use cases for agents - but I think a lot of us aren't flexing our brains anymore and, even worse, some devs believe they are. I urge every developer to put Claude down for a day/week... see how well you can do in the "old" ways. It'll still be here when you get back, but my guess is it'll be a rude awakening.
retrac
last Thursday at 3:30 AM
I have had some truly spectacular results that still kind of stagger me in the last few months using Claude in my hobby projects -- but even though Claude insists on trying to slip its name into the git history as credit it's not Claude -- it's me. Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. A suggested axiom: there is nothing I can build with Claude that I could not build myself with my current level of CS knowledge, assuming I had infinite focus and time. In my hands it can go as far I could anyway, and no further. (But it is faster!) My experience bears that out so far.
doweneedai47
last Saturday at 7:48 AM
These are people who don't understand the job of SWE.
Look, the job of a medicine doctor, or a plane pilot, have largely been automated. The doctor could rely on google searches, or even AI, to answer your questions. The pilot can trust the auto pilot. Yet, the doctor who does advanced stuff (surgery) has no shortcut to mastering his skill : he still has to go through 10 years of studies + years of experience under the supervision of a senior with 20y of XP. Similar path for the plane pilot.
And the same reasoning applies to the SWE. AI allows to : delegate the repetitive tasks, generate the boilerplate code, fix time consuming bugs, to focus on more meaningful stuff.
AI is a tool. It's an additional layer of abstraction. The winners will be the guys who are passionate, who still put efforts to master SW, who still put efforts to remain up to date with the regular updates (new releases, new libraries, new approaches...), and who understand how to use AI the right way.
All those guys who 100% rely on AI do is help big tech cover their massive costs for the deployment of AI infrastructures. Big tech does need those guys.
Imagine the auto pilot fails for some reason, during a flight. There are 400 passengers behind. This is a minor issue for the trained and experienced pilot.
What do you do, as a SWE, when tomorrow, anthropic/google/whoever, tells you : "we can't keep running at a loss, our prices for AI have to reflect our costs. Your monthly subscription for Claude is now $500/month". Or there is a power shortage and for a couple of days you cannot rely on AI, you can only rely on your brain to deliver this feature you committed to deliver tomorrow ?
Groxx
last Thursday at 5:10 AM
Low-skill work that used to be outsourced will go to cheaper LLMs, unless wages are depressed enough / running costs are high enough to keep using humans as cogs in the machine. This will also consume a ton of small-scale things, like personal-sized automation and small-business customization of better-crafted things (stuff that normally wouldn't be paid for in the first place, or only extremely rarely). Some will obviously exist, because paying someone else to farm out a ton of mediocre output with LLMs is still worthwhile sometimes, but it's going to be gutted as a general statement.
Especially with prototyping-style work, LLMs are clearly good enough for a ton of business-oriented proof-of-concepts, and that line of work is essentially dead. Unfortunately a lot of mid-tier art falls into this category as well, particularly because execs very clearly can't tell good art from bad (on a "customers like this" scale, with functionality being the judge, which is fairly objective. not a subjective "this is good art").
High-skill work is still necessary, but it's hard to tell if it's actually going to be more important (because skill is obviously still needed for actually-good results, and I honestly see no evidence that this will change with current tech) or less (primarily due to less demand, and it being significantly harder for non-skilled to judge skill when everyone can prototype something seemingly-impressive in a weekend). Some will very obviously continue to exist though.
Whether this means "high-skill people are going to be fine, stay the course" or "<10% of high-skill people will be fine, you had better be scrambling right now or looking for a new line of work" is... much less clear.
linzhangrun
last Thursday at 6:55 AM
"Computer" use to be a job title. So no, I am not optimistic about the future of most programmers, maybe even all programmers.
One possibility is that software starts to look more like traditional manufacturing.
The machine is the company’s core asset. The engineer only needs to know how to operate the machine well. Once that happens, the barrier gets much lower, need much less people, and the job naturally become much less valuable. Some parts will still need to be done by hand, of course. But only a very small part. It is like old factories. They used to need lots of fitters, at all levels of skill. Now you only need a few of the elite ones.
AI is the CNC machine of the software industry.
The more pessimistic future is that, maybe five years from now, the best programmers will look at AI the same way the best Go or chess players look at AI today: Like KeJie said, "I don't even know what I am trying so hard against." We now have a new SOTA every two months. It just took 18 months for LLMs from reasoning models to disproving the unit distance conjecture. ChatGPT itself has not even existed for as long as a college student spends in university.
In any case, we have already passed the point where this can be rolled back.
Maybe ten years from now I will be leaving a comment saying that "programmer" used to be a job too :-/
Programming is the low-hanging fruit for AI. Open source and knowledge sharing have given it huge amount of public, high-quality training data at a level other industries can hardly imagine. And almost everything in programming can be tested and verified inside the computer quickly in a closed loop. No robot arm is needed.
The main weakness of current LLMs is still that they are static: They do not really change themselves through use. Harness tools are just elaborate ornamentation on top of prompts. LLMs are frozen at the moment training stops. Once we get models that can change their own weights through self-feedback, then maybe AGI really is on the horizon.
Thinking optimistically: I may be lucky enough to see it in my lifetime. Maybe by then, people will be able to live more like human beings, instead of organizing their whole lives around work :-)
ecshafer
last Thursday at 4:38 AM
What are you writing that Claude is actually writing all of it? Every time I get past the green field stage, I just end up throwing out what it writes half the time since its trash. Claude seems really great at fix this unit test, generate this boiler plate, take this uml and build this framework out. But when I am doing refactorings, or implementing things that are beyond monotonous, I end up writing it all by hand. My best luck is still do the design, query AI for possible choices, sketch out the framework of what I am writing, have AI critique my plan, and then have AI design individual methods, then fix what it writes.
mfalcon
today at 12:07 PM
I think SWEs will still be needed but to do higher level work. The thing is, there will be less SWEs per company.
Obviously I dont know ehat will happen, but my guess is that there will be more small companies highly specialized on specific niches.
If I switch to business mode, I think this is the best time to start a company because you have more leverage in your hands and also because the job market is and is going to be disrupted, at least for a while.
4lx87
last Friday at 8:03 PM
I think it’s becoming more and more performative. We’ve never been less focused on the actual product — the software — than we are now. The focus is increasingly on how someone generates code, despite that not having much to do with the product.
The software is not getting better. Generating code faster does not result in better software. Software continues to be slow, unreliable, complex, and counter-intuitive. AI has not improved on the metrics that matter.
AI, as amazing as it is, has not actually changed the process of software development and as a consequence, the resulting software has not changed. The job hasn’t either, except insofar as you’re judged for tokenmaxxing.
montfort
last Thursday at 4:44 AM
The profession has already changed. For the past eight months, AI has been competent enough to code like the best human programmer, but strangely, the software isn't any better yet. Everyone has lost sight of what the profession truly is. It's not just about coding; it's about software engineering. Our role is no longer that of programmers, AI has taken over that role. Our role is that of engineers who manage programming agents. Every attempt to have AI develop a medium-to-large project fails because the goal is to solve everything with a magic four-line prompt. We're forgetting the structural aspect, the engineering side. We must treat the tool as just that: a tool. The direction and responsibility remain in our hands. It's not about reviewing the code line by line; it's about ensuring that the product faithfully represents a well-planned engineering intent. That's why the concept of AI-augmented Software Engineering is so important.
aafaqzahid
today at 8:01 AM
I think of AI as an intelligent partner that took away the boring stuff and give me the real design decisions. The expectations of clients have changed but most of the code I have seen written by AI does the work but AI do ignore somethings that matter in scaling. In my company actually boss thinks he is a programmer now with claude but writes too much error prone code which I think mainly not because of claude because non technical person giving generic commands. For me in near future the need for proper engineers is still very high.
ventsys
last Friday at 12:37 PM
This is what I'm seeing at my company as well, "software development principles" are out the window. People have forgotten all about "Second System Syndrome" too, docs, tests, code, design - all LLM generated.
I don't like, I prefer to use Claude/Codex as an aide, not to let it take the wheel entirely but I don't really feel like I have much choice in the matter.
lukayork
today at 3:36 AM
Programming models will continue to improve; in the foreseeable future, enterprises will rely less and less on human programmers to write code.
If you are still interested in programming, do not waste time delving deep into the code itself; instead, spend time understanding requirements and the market. The combination of an individual and Codex will be the optimal approach to programming.
pmarella171
today at 7:09 AM
Hmm my personal experience has been that my team has been overloaded with a ton of work and expectation to run more experiments and show impact than ever before. I feel like I've been working much more now with AI than ever before.
lyu07282
last Thursday at 4:52 AM
There was a reddit thread earlier very similar some interesting comments there too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ueidyv/softwar...
> I had an interview where I was asked the obligatory “what’s your Al workflow” and I said I use it for searching documentation and writing small functions or boilerplate that are tedious. Then I was asked whether I use Cursor. I said no, and immediately was told that “I’d be a better programmer if I used Cursor”. I have 13 years of software engineering experience, and was talked down by an Al startup with no minimal viable prototype. Then I was told I did not have the experience for the role. I love this timeline so much
entropyneur
last Thursday at 5:44 AM
It's disappearing. Even if models stop evolving tomorrow, there's still enough potential in the harness improvement to reach the point where anything 99% of us know about software engineering is useless. How many humans will be involved in creating software after the dust settles is anybody's guess, but I wouldn't bet on it being anywhere near the current level.
lrsaturnino
last Thursday at 4:03 AM
I've posted a recent article about the future of software development https://saturnino.substack.com/p/out-of-the-loop?r=7eqhw&utm...
Basically, in a decade or so, we'll be completely out of the loop in software development; even this title won't exist anymore (like the 2000's webmaster). We'll still be around, but with different roles.
last Thursday at 4:38 AM
bertylicious
last Thursday at 6:13 AM
My impression is that smaller companies, that depend on rapid prototyping to gain clients, exert a lot of pressure onto their devs to use LLMs. At least that's the situation in the companies some friends of mine are working at.
I'm in a slow-moving, much bigger company. Lot's of talk about "AI" here and we can use copilot if we want to, but there is 0 pressure. I'm in a small team and one colleague uses copilot often. In the beginning there was a minor conflict between him and me, because I found the quality of the LLM code unacceptable and had to ask him to review it more carefully. I think that's settled now, but it makes me sad how a once motivated colleague now seems to try to cheat his way out of work.
I personally find it incredibly boring to write copilot prompts or read its answers full of boiler plate and sycophancy. I don't understand how anyone would want to replace the cognitive work of programming, that I find enjoyable for the most part, with the cognitive work of "talking" to an LLM.
Anyway, I think it will be like this at least for a little while longer: only vibe coding allowed in small companies and less vibe coding the bigger the company is.
But before vibe coding can take over the slow-moving big companies, all the accumulated technical debt will come back to haunt us and vibe-free software will be the new fad. That's what I hope at least.
daemon_9009
yesterday at 9:01 AM
compare this to Electronic engineering, we are not making chips by hand, It is impossible to squeeze too many transistors in such a small space, we just create the circuit designs. I believe writing the code is heading in the same direction as well, you don't write too much code now, but you have to design the architecture and connect things. But it does not mean that you don't need to understand the code, now of all the times people who understand code are more important. Many below par devs will loose jobs for sure.
CM30
last Thursday at 4:38 PM
I think it'll probably split.
At the high end, there will always (or at least for a fairly long time) be a subset of work where AI can't do everything itself. Perhaps the framework or language is too new, or its built for hardware that's only just become possible. Perhaps the company is worried about security issues resulting from letting LLMs access its systems, or needs a human in the loop to take any liability. Perhaps the tech needs a level of performance that an AI might struggle with, and which a longtime engineer with a computer science background may be better at dealing with (like stock trading systems or something).
This will pay very well, but probably only provide enough jobs for 5-10% of the current software engineering workforce.
Then there will probably be a large number of companies where AI does most of the work, but where one or two people will probably be kept on board to guide it in the right direction/take care of issues. I suspect a lot of less technical/cutting edge companies in more 'traditional' industries will be in this camp.
Finally, a lot of work will just be outright replaced by having an LLM take care of everything. This isn't viable for FAANG companies or fortune 500 level ones, but the average mum and pop business could probably just replace its entire development team with a Claude subscription. I suspect a lot of web development agencies and lower level jobs are just going to vanish.
So, yeah. High level bespoke work where every microsecond is king? Stays mostly the same, albeit with some AI usage to handle the boring stuff.
Basic brochure/shop/CMS site development? Claude and co take over almost entirely.
claytongulick
last Thursday at 5:10 AM
I think the genie gets put back in the bottle, at least partly.
I don't think the future is massive data centers running at a staggering loss to generate questionable code.
The future is rethinking IDEs to have local models work in partnership with the developer to ease tedium and catch mistakes.
A model that maintains a visual, zoomable mind-map of the entire project, with two way binding. Code can be created visually or textually, same with data flows.
Project structure and architecture are presented in high-level ways, that can be easily altered and refactored with almost zero tedium.
I think we start using AI for what it's good for: pattern matching and transformation, and stop trying to make it reason and pretend like it's a human.
Once we, as an industry, figure this out we'll unlock a massive boost in quality and productivity, but it looks like there will be some painful times ahead before everyone realizes that the token extrusion machines are only increasing the total cost of ownership, and they are being used incorrectly when we try to outsource our thinking to them.
I think there's an enormous opportunity to build these tools right now, and that whoever nails it will win.
Braini
last Thursday at 7:42 AM
Its similar for us to a certain extent. I honestly don‘t know yet where this will lead to. Personally I also don‘t really follow the arguments that the agent does the coding and the human does the understanding. In my opinion one is thinking differently about the code when not coding it by himself, on a higher level or lets even say a more superficial one. To keep the understanding on the same level you would have to limit the agent to just „typing“ but this is definitely not whats happening.
Yes, may be a skill issue[tm], may be an inherent one or it may not even be relevant anymore, we will see.
For me it currently still works well because I am working on legacy systems I more or less have a good understanding about - so I can judge the agent code. Not sure how this will be with new, green field code.
Not even starting with the discussion how it should be possible to review the sheer amounts of generated code.
themgt
last Thursday at 5:31 AM
I will just say, if you are any good at programming and have experience using agents, you're in the top 0.1% of the world in adoption of a critical new technology.
It may seem hopeless as a programmer, but imo you'd be much better off reframing your situation re: the above sentence.
bitbasher
last Thursday at 9:19 PM
For whatever it's worth -- I run my own product/company (software). I do all code by hand and don't use any AI.
wseqyrku
last Thursday at 3:48 AM
Remember you had to quit social media to keep your sanity in check? Ok, now AI. Same thing.
andyish
last Friday at 8:33 AM
It doesn't matter what you're doing, there's always a trade off to taking a shortcut and rarely does the price not need paying.
We're seeing lots of code being ~written~ generated, deployed, checked (tested manually), then shipping it as done. Fine for the simplist of things, but in a complex system unintended side effects are far more common.
I feel like the system analyst role is going to make a resurgence in the coming years. Once the domain knowledge is lost, there's going to be a need to re-discover it and understand what should be happening and what is happening.
Going against the grain - i don't think all but the most expensive (and non critical) SaaS products are going to be replaced by an in-house system. If you're company of 100 people is spending $12k a year on HR software. Building and running it yourself isn't going to save you 12k and in reality it's going to cost you headcount for someone to manage and maintain it. Mattermost exists and people still pay Slack $200 per year per user when they could just roll out Mattermost "for free".
rramadass
last Friday at 4:30 AM
Relevant:
Writing code versus shipping code: Productivity effects across generations of AI coding tools - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/writing-code-versus-shipping-...
ckalen
last Friday at 11:29 AM
I think frontend will be dead in next years. Now, my company doesn't hire frontend developer. Our programmers write frontend with claude.
Even contracts are being drafted by AI, and managers are signing them. I've seen contracts signed using emojis, and the project has already begun.
We live in an interesting era...
YZF
last Thursday at 4:28 AM
For me in large tech:
- Humans still own the code
- All code reviewed by humans
- LLM adoption varies across the org. Some are heavy users and some less. Some suspicious some less.
Where are we heading? Depends on model/harness capabilities. Likely some sort of mix where some projects will still require expert humans and others will just be vibe coded. How much we lean in that direction - we'll see.
AlanAAG
last Thursday at 7:44 AM
From my experience, Ai right now is not perfect and people still treat it as if it was, leaked secrets, create 10 bugs to solve one minor issue, whole backend a mess that won’t resist at scale. Even though it is improving and all this issues will disappear, Ai will take over most of the technical hurdle, what will be left?
Materializing and scoping down broad idea ( or just abstract vision ) into what needs to be built, it’s not the same to say.
“Hey Claude build me a fitness app”
Thank actually understanding your customer behind it, the behaviour and psychology, the journey and what is the actual problem you’re solving.
Tech in general and programming emerged as a need to create new things in a digital world to solve our problems, building them just got easier but understanding the problems and the people behind them, that’s gonna be an increasingly necessary task
frankzero
last Thursday at 10:42 PM
I must be honest, but I have started doing the same thing to some degree. Now this is for me in particular, I do know coding, but if the task at hand will take like 3 days and Claude can write and debug it in an hour, then I usually just run it by Claude. This is not to say I don't still code, because I still do, depending on the project, but I find myself relying on Claude a lot. I know this is counterintuitive to what you want to hear, but this is my reality. However, I still know a lot of people who still code with out the use of AI. So in my opinion the profession of programming will go down as AI progresses but will never die no matter how AI advances.
koliber
last Friday at 4:08 PM
Every software developer will be a manager of one or more AI agents. Managing AI agents will turn out to be surprisingly similar to managing people, except for the drama, illness, and tragedy.
pllbnk
last Thursday at 10:18 AM
Eventually the costs of running inference will catch up to us, then we will see. But LLMs are really expensive and it is possible that with the incredible amounts of code they generatr it might become too expensive for them to keep up with it. There should be some kind of equilibrium which might take a while to reach but I think knowledge work won't disappear.
However many people have rightfully been saying it for years before LLMs that many so-called software engineers had no business in this field because for a lot of them it was just a way to earn more money than peers. It's not an issue by itself, just a rational human choice but the fact that it was possible was just because of unhealthy economic conditions.

1vuio0pswjnm7

last Thursday at 7:06 PM

   151 "profession" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"
   profession
   n 1: the body of people in a learned occupation; "the news spread rapidly through the medical profession"; "they formed a community of scientists"
   2: an occupation requiring special education (especially in the liberal arts or sciences)
   3: an open avowal (true or false) of some belief or opinion; "a profession of disagreement" [syn: {profession}, {professing}]
   4: affirmation of acceptance of some religion or faith; "a profession of Christianity"

Does programming require special education

al_borland
last Thursday at 3:45 AM
> ask claude to write, and ask claude to explain
This works, until it doesn’t. I’m continuously shocked by these stories, where so many people put the future of their job/company in the hands of these agents after only a few months of existing.
I still constantly run into bad output from LLMs, from code to basic questions. I don’t understand how anyone can hand things over to something that is laughably wrong on a pretty regular basis, often in subtle ways that won’t be noticed by someone who isn’t reading closely and thinking critically.
They’ve gotten better, but I still regularly give them the old Nick Burns treatment, push it out of the way, and do it myself.
thepeoplebook
last Thursday at 5:49 AM
Same here. At our company, we've pretty much stopped writing code by hand. We hand the implementation to Claude and Codex now. Feels like the real skill is moving up a level: architecture, design choices, and knowing what should be built in the first place.
softwaredoug
last Thursday at 6:46 PM
Every AI coding project feels like working with legacy code. All the skills I actually use look more like managing a big messy, brittle black box codebase. It’s exactly how we would have inherited a big ugly codebase pre AI.
I think if you’re used to traditional green field development, and have never owned legacy code AI software engineering can be bewildering. If, however, you’ve been stuck maintaining legacy code, the skills serve you well In AI development.
You’re constantly looking how to tame this ball of mud. Test it end to end. Break apart bits to test. You’re chasing where the brittleness in the system exists, and you try to create a testing and feedback strategy to gain leverage on that class of problem. That in turn turns to modularization and gradually more careful organization.
I find starting out you may look at code less. As time goes on, you descend deeper and use AI to do targeted refactors to account for more constraints. You leave alone what's OK to be slop, and hone in on what needs deep care. All along adding guardrails to constrain the big ugly beast and help LLMs stay on track with their work.
The classic Michael Feathers book might be sneakily relevant: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fe...
austin-cheney
last Thursday at 10:44 AM
Software was never a precise occupation. It was a tool shed that obeyed the Pareto Principle: 20% of the people deliver 80% of the value.
This was the expectation because hiring was the primary goal, not product delivery. The industry could have fixed this by upgrading itself from an occupation to a profession built upon standards and credentials. That never happened because the 80% would become unemployable, which adds friction to hiring (the real business goal before COVID).
Now, that ship has sailed and there is no going back. The Pareto Principle is now a 5%/95% funnel because there is less incentive to learn to do the work. Good luck!
luckman212
last Thursday at 3:44 AM
For the last 6 decades or so, a computer was a machine assumed to operate with high levels of precision and deterministic outputs. Such precision enabled spacecraft like Voyager 1 & 2 to travel billions of miles from Earth, staying on course, semi-operational and sending telemetry- 50 years after launch.
Now we have machines that, when asked to produce a paperclip, may instead produce a butter knife, or a banana, or maybe just a "try again later".
These modern "tools" are quite a different animal. They're more akin to roulette wheels that generate massive amounts of heat and CO2.
mkozlows
last Thursday at 3:59 AM
I mean, literally the answer is that nobody knows. Maybe the robots replace us all. Maybe they shift those who remain into being some combination of Product Manager and QA. Maybe there's still a role for a technical overseer even in the medium-long run.
But it sounds like you're really asking about the state of the world today. If so, I don't think that ideal state is like your friend's company (or at least, as it appeared to be to you). It might be possible that you can make that "dark factory" pattern work (StrongDM seems to be doing it), but it would require infrastructure and discipline that I doubt they're mustering. Think about how CD didn't involve taking a sloppy build process with no testing or observability and just going straight to prod -- it required building up a lot of infra and discipline first.
But on the other hand, I don't think the ideal present involves artisan hand-crafting code either. I haven't written a line of code by hand in enough months that it would genuinely feel weird if I were to try to program that way despite decades of having done just that. That era's done with, and moderate normie practices right now today are more about supervising and guiding agents than about chiseling code into clay tablets.
_doctor_love
last Thursday at 9:22 PM
What you're describing sounds like what many people in the industry are doing, and likely what most AI-adopters are doing. It scales until it falls apart.
The responsible and professional way to actually make AI work at scale is to build a dark factory. (You can search HN for a lot of good resources, start with Simon Willison and StrongDM)
fullstackchris
last Thursday at 5:19 AM
My profession is not, and never was, _programmer_. Lines of code—the actual text, is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I'll take heat for that here for sure. But do you think a carpenter considers himself "one who screws nails" or "glues joints"? No, the small minutiae of the job was never the job itself.
last Thursday at 4:32 AM
matrix87
last Saturday at 2:41 AM
Imo this will be the future model: a company puts a gun to your head, gives you agents, and tells you to figure out how to maximize the utility output you provide as an employee. They might put a token limit which incentivizes efficient token usage.
There's a lot of "room" here for creativity, i.e. the agents don't know how to milk the agents efficiently, which is essentially your new job. The agents might not know how to structure tasks so that the agents run overnight and run the proper experiment.
The difference between mediocre and 10x will increase. The more aggressive SV performance culture is probably going to become more mainstream.
Frankly, I think this whole model is way more burnout inducing. You're not really doing software engineering anymore. You're running this mental loop in the background of trying to multiplex between agents and mapping unstructured business problems to agentic work.
It's probably going to infect other industries over time. Software is the first big wave. I don't think people with computer skills who are good at computers will be screwed out of work long term. The tech industry has a lot of concentrated technical capital in the form of tooling and automation that other parts of the economy could significantly benefit from. Short term it looks bad, but long term, computers will become more and more dominant over the economy.
I don't think companies have yet figured out how to adapt their hiring, managerial practices, or internal incentive structures to reflect this. Most of what they're doing now is extremely crude and terrible for morale.
moezd
last Thursday at 5:16 AM
That's maybe wishful thinking from my part, but more towards like other engineering fields: Project engineers design it from scratch, everyone must speak architecture, customer and compliance at once, and we will have standards and "codes" drawn up by the end of this decade.
high_byte
last Thursday at 5:48 AM
code is like assembly now.
in the olden days (pre-LLMs) we would write high-level code.
the entire layer was high-level code and rarely would we ever need to peak into the assembly:
writing, debugging, architecting, reviewing, testing - all were done in the high-level language layer.
---
welcome to present day:
since we don't write code - we write intents, we also shouldn't review code either - we should review intents.
I don't review my code anymore. I ask the agent to generate markdown docs, graphviz diagrams, changelogs, audit reports, etc. I only review that.
I also ask it to write test and evaluate by whether the tests passed or not. I don't need to peak into the tests code - I can also ask plain english, pseudocode, control flow graph, whatever it is I want.
I can ask it to find errors or missing tests and improve that too!
code is like assembly now.
rare are the cases you would need to peak into that level.
purple-leafy
last Thursday at 9:38 PM
No one knows so just embrace it :)
LLM capabilities are mind-blowing.
I’m not a super experienced engineer career-wise ~5 years, so take my view with a grain of salt - but I’ve done work in full-stack, systems, gaming, extensions (web and ide), low level languages including assembly, and a small amount of embedded.
I spend almost all my spare time coding. And have done so for the last 5 years. So I consider myself capable of bringing most projects to fruition.
I roll my eyes when people say “AI sucks” “AI isn’t better than me” “AI doesn’t speed me up” - it’s either a load of shit, delusion, cope, high-horsing, or they are a Luddite.
I’m sorry but the rate at which I can work pre-AI and post-AI is insane (when not limited by bureaucracy). Yes the outputs and code can be terrible, but I can prototype 10 ideas in the time it would take me in the past to prototype 1.
However most of the LLMs approaches are fucking terrible, it gets it working but it’s pure spaghetti and I do all the architecture and usually most of the code. But I prototype ideas with AI. Like if you actually use performance monitoring and memory monitoring tools, LLMs have no fucking clue what they are doing and make slow bloated buggy shit.
But it’s great for blueprinting.
Who’s to say it won’t also be great at implementing too? I think it will be.
But for now it requires guidance and orchestration and I mostly use it to test concepts.
I did my first purely vibe coded completely hands off project the other week and loved the results! It was just for fun.
coldstartops
last Thursday at 5:08 AM
I see nothing wrong with something probabilistic. I think it is all about offsetting the risk and reducing the odds of bad outcomes. There is this concept of Defence in Depth, thus I assume some sort of binomial formula also applies here.
okzgn
last Thursday at 6:18 PM
That’s realistic. If AI generates 100% of the expected result, the vast majority of people might think that understanding the code is useless or unnecessary.
jampa
last Thursday at 4:12 AM
From what you said: Not looking at code is bad, not because Claude can slip a few bugs (it can), but because LLMs tend to default to writing more code and features than needed, which isn't a good thing. I see a lot of people making 10+ PRs per day, but most of them are just going back to fix earlier PRs.
Claude always likes to "go big," for example, by choosing tools that can support millions of concurrent users or by adding unnecessary layers of abstraction that create more maintenance pain. I guess that's good for LLM companies, since more tokens are spent fixing the mess it caused.
Every time I enter plan mode for a huge feature, I end up cutting about 30-60% of the task scope before the LLM can actually start the work. I review the final code, and I still find things to cut. As said before "The best code is no code, or code you don’t have to maintain" [0]
0: https://www.simplethread.com/20-things-ive-learned-in-my-20-...
bloomca
last Sunday at 9:01 AM
Yes, this is the direction I am observing. Ironically, I don't think anybody is happy about it and we keep saying that it is a tool and you need to verify everything, etc, but this is not what is happening.
There are tons of people who produce questionable code at a rate which is not really compatible with a thoughtful review, we have people with little engineering background pushing their changes (although there is a large pushback against that as the results are really bad even short term), as you said, there is an explosion of LLM-generated tests.
As soon as someone writes a next-level harness which tightly iterates based on the spec/plan and/pr pioneers some sort of acceptance criteria format that works, I think at that point SWE job will completely change. We are not there yet but probably not that far off.
moribvndvs
last Thursday at 12:47 PM
Anecdotal experience amongst my small team:
- spending exorbitant amounts of time up front planning, surfacing every milestone, subtask, and individual change, burning tons of tokens in addition to man hours fixing minute but important mistakes or derivations despite explicit instructions, CLAUDE.md, memory subsystems, agent and skill instructions, etc.
- executing and reviewing results compared to the plan and finding even more mistakes and derivations from the plan often takes a lot of time - the relative rapidity produces a lot of output for the team which stresses our lifecycle and introduces feelings the whole process is on the verge of flying off the rails
- individual developers have different expectations, definitions of acceptable, skills/experience to detect and deal with problems, and patience. I might spend hours to days meticulously planning and executing a ticket and another guy might yolo it in 30 minutes. Other than bug escape rate and tracking review failures I’m struggling with how to track people who are “doing it wrong” let alone telling them the “right” way to do it.
- growing exhaustion, lack of ownership and confidence, frustration, and a generalized feeling of endlessly fighting your tools but in a weird way they never seem to really improve despite all your efforts to do so
- taking humans out of the loop and letting the agents be more autonomous in hopes that we’ll reduce the bottleneck and produce better results has not helped.
- I find even myself fighting (and sometimes failing) the urge to give in even though the proposed or implemented solution doesn’t feel right. Scale that across your team
- experience has not really changed despite changes in models and harnesses
- there’s a deep feeling that I’m doing something wrong and fomo since so many people in the industry boast of incredible results. I probably am, but everything I’ve read about and tried has not really moved the needle much and it’s introducing another dimension of exhaustion and frustration
overall, I don’t feel like we’re being much more productive when you factor in quality and accountability (which should be a given, but this industry increasingly overtaken by a reckless philosophy of speed over everything else). I do think it has helped parallelize tasks, produce higher quality PoCs to explore more options and do it faster, offload joyless but necessary tasks that are narrow in scope and measurable, do exploratory work and act as a generalized interactive knowledge base, and make shallow techniques, technologies, etc. that you don’t yet have experience with. Maybe I’m just missing a critical component or two in the process (formal specification, etc). Maybe it’s growing pains, or maybe there’s a looming rot. Either way job satisfaction and confidence in my work is much lower than I would have expected.
abby3010
last Sunday at 4:51 AM
With advent of AI, the software engineering landscape has been changed a lot. Writing code which was once a noble ("giving god like feeling") profession is not just a prompt away for vast majority of the tasks.
> "it feels like software development is going from a precise occupation that requires high degree of understanding to something probabilistic and offloaded understanding"
Well how much ever I agree with this, I believe in near future it will open more "expert" like positions who will suffice as orchestrators to not let the AI slop take over and make your systems either dumb or vulnerable or both!
vitally3643
last Thursday at 10:20 PM
Seems clear that the age of everyone and their dog getting a programming gig for easy money is coming to a close. What will be left (for the foreseeable future) is positions for very highly skilled software engineers who actually know the craft well enough to make good use of AI.
The industry is going to shift from hiring as many programmers as you can afford to hiring a small number of the best engineers you can find. AI can't replace an engineer's skill and insight, and I have yet to see signs that LLMs are fundamentally capable of such a thing. What is screamingly obvious however is that when a highly skilled engineer learns how to drive AI agents, that's when you get true effort multiplication. A real engineer can leverage AI in ways that an unskilled vibe coder simply cannot, because it turns out that building a house still requires engineering even when you have a nail gun. LLMs can write code all day but if you don't understand programming and engineering on your own, you lack fundamental tools to build software.
Sorry kids, buffet is closed. No more FAANG salaries for anyone with a pulse and a copy of VSCode. The future of the industry looks to lie with a vastly smaller number of much more highly skilled engineers.
What happens when those engineers age out and we realize we stopped training new ones? I genuinely fear for the coming generations of engineers. It's not going to be good.
I recommend you learn to weld instead.
Davidbrcz
last Thursday at 8:56 AM
This is the 2020s re-enactement of the early 2000 WYSIWYG editors.
the__alchemist
last Thursday at 1:39 PM
What sorts of things does your software company make or do?
hackingonempty
last Thursday at 4:59 AM
No mention of whether the product is actually good.
6510
last Sunday at 9:26 AM
imho programmers should jump into completely unrelated jobs (even unskilled labor) and discover how gawd awful all of the software is. Nothing gives you the user perspective like being the user. Then dogfood your way into a highly specialized product.
There is an amazing amount of complexity in even the dumbest looking job. It takes decades to see all the strange edge cases.
The people planning the work never have the full picture, if they did the job themselves the layer of management above fails to imagine it. The people doing the manual work match the offer by inability to explain how to ride a bicycle and not understanding how to plan or budget.
sublinear
last Thursday at 4:07 AM
This has always been a very different profession depending on where you work and what you're working on.
I haven't worked at a startup in over a decade, but the stories I hear now sound the same as back then. There's lots of wasted effort for mediocre to poor code destined to be rewritten or thrown away until there's enough investment to justify more work. At which point, "more work" just means more sprawling slop instead of fixing the technical debt rotting at the foundation.
AI just put a spotlight on the futility of trying to run before you can walk. Whether so many founders are going to stay in denial about it is yet to be seen. Statistics about any line of business says yes. This is how most businesses fail and most of them have to fail.
uproarchat
last Thursday at 3:47 AM
We're still running the race, but it's just not on foot anymore. You can still run it into the wall if you're not careful where you're going.
sshine
last Thursday at 8:34 AM
> it feels like software development is going from a precise occupation that requires high degree of understanding to something probabilistic and offloaded understanding
To me it felt like there were always engineers and vibers.
Vibers don't work systematically, never test, accept unknown regression, don't use git, and if they do, treat it like Dropbox, use terrible languages, have terrible habits. Vibers got a new tool, too, and it vastly increases the amount of slop. But the slop was always there.
The slop actually got better after vibers stopped writing their own slop, I have to say.
And vibers are less defensive about the particular slop they didn't write themselves.
moomoo11
last Thursday at 4:33 AM
how is that company doing?
i think that is a more important question that you shouldn't ignore.
do they have growing revenue?
Ainaguade
last Thursday at 8:58 AM
"This is exactly why we built AINAScan — we found that AI-generated code passes all tests and 'works', but consistently produces the same 15 structural bugs: save functions that never write to DB, async functions with no await, parameters that have zero effect on return values. Linters miss all of these. The code looks fine until production."
slipwalker
last Thursday at 7:41 PM
towards system design and solution architecture.
chido1203
today at 7:46 PM
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ashmil
today at 2:03 PM
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sanju3026
last Friday at 8:43 AM
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guripong
last Saturday at 2:07 PM
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R0ughn3ck
last Thursday at 9:11 PM
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chido1203
last Sunday at 2:32 AM
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qsoomro
last Friday at 12:02 AM
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iuhoay
last Thursday at 4:11 AM
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last Friday at 9:12 PM
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last Thursday at 8:31 PM
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last Thursday at 11:18 PM
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Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

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