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we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's amazing the pace to which pressu
by websiteapi 9mo ago
we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's amazing the pace to which pressure against the profession is rising. 2026 will be a very happy new year indeed for those paying the salaries. :)
- zwnow 9mo agoAlso it really baffles me how many are actually in on the hype train. Its a lot more than the crypto bros back in the day. Good thing AI still cant reason and innovate stuff. Also leaking credentials is a felony in my country so I also wont ever attach it to my codebases.
- fragmede 9mo agoyour credentials shouldn't be in your codebase to begin with!
- zwnow 9mo ago.env files are a thing in tons of codebases
- iwontberude 9mo agobut thats at runtime, secrets are going to be deployed in a secure manner after the code is released
- zwnow 9mo ago.env files are used to develop as well, for some things like PayPal u dont have to change the credentials, you just enable sandbox mode. If I had some LLM attached to my codebase, it would be able to read those credentials from the .env file. This has nothing to do with deployment. I never talked about deployment.
- mkozlows 9mo agoIf your secrets are in your repo, you've probably already leaked them.
- aspenmartin 9mo agoI think the issue is folks talk past each other. People who find coding agents useful or enjoyable are labeled “on the hype train” and folks for which coding agents don’t work for them or their workflow are considered luddites. There are an incredible number of contradicting claims and predictions out there as well, and I believe what we see is folks projecting their reaction to some amalgamation of them onto others. I see a lot of “they” language, and a lot of viral articles about business leadership “shoving AI down our throats” and it becomes a divisive issue like American political scene with really no one having a real conversation
- zwnow 9mo agoIts all a hype train though. People still believe in the AI gonna bring utopia bullshit while the current infra is being built on debt. The only reason it still exists is that all these AI companies believe in some kind of revenue outside of subscriptions. So its all about: Owning the infrastructure and enshittify (ads) once enough products are based on AI. Its the same chokehold Amazon has on its Vendors.
- llmslave2 9mo agoI think the reason for the varying claims and predictions is because developers have wildly different standards for what constitutes working code. For the developers with a lower threshold, AI is like crack to them because gen ai's output is similar to what they would produce, and it really is a 10x speedup. For others, especially those who have to fix and maintain that code, it's more like a 10x slowdown. Hence why you have in the same thread, some developer who claims that Claude writes 99% of their code and another developer who finds it totally useless. And of course others who are somewhere in the middle.
- throw1235435 9mo agoThere's also the effect of different models. Until the most recent models, especially for concise algorithms, I felt it was still easier to sometimes do it myself (i.e. a good algo can be concise/more concise than a lossy prompt) and leave the "expansion/repetitive" boilerplate code to the LLM. At least for me the latest models do feel like a "step change" in that the problems can be bigger and/or require less supervision on each problem depending on the tradeoff you want.
- simonw 9mo agoWe've been giving our work away to each other for free as open source to help improve each other's productivity for 30+ years now and that's only made our profession more valuable.
- websiteapi 9mo agoI see little proof open source has resulted in higher wages and not the fact that everything is being digitized and the subsequent demand for such people to assist in such.
- simonw 9mo agoI'm not sure how I can prove it, but ~25 years ago building software without open source sucked. You had to build everything from scratch! It took months to get even the most basic things up and running. I think open source is the single most important productivity boost to our industry that's ever existed. Automated testing is a close second. Google, Facebook, many others would not have existed without open source to build on. And those giants and others like them that were enabled by open source employed a TON of people, at competitive rates that greatly increased our salaries.
- websiteapi 9mo agoeven if that's true it's clear enough AI will reduce the demand for swe
- simonw 9mo agoI don't think that's certain. I'm hoping for a Jevons paradox situation where AI drives down the cost of producing software to the point that companies that previously weren't in the market for custom software start hiring software engineers. I think we could see demand go up.
- throw1235435 9mo agoIndeed it did; I remember those times. All else being equal I still think SWE salaries on average would of been higher if we kept it like that given basic economics - there would of been a lot less people capable of doing it but the high ROI automation opportunities would of still been there. The fact that "it sucked" usually creates more scarcity on the supply side; which all being equal means higher wages and in our capitalist society - status. Other professions that are older as to the parent comment already know this and don't see SWE as very "street smart" disrupting themselves. I've seen articles recently like "at least we aren't in coding" from law, accounting, etc an an anecdote to this. With AI at least locally I'm seeing the opposite now - less hiring, less wage pressure and in social circles a lot less status when I mention I'm a SWE (almost sympathy for my lot vs respect only 5 years ago). While I don't care for the status aspect, although I do care for my ability to earn money, some do. At least locally inflation adjusted in my city SWE wages bought more and were higher in general compared to others in the 90's-2000's than on wards (ex big tech). Partly because this difficulty and low level knowledge meant only very skilled people could participate.
- cheema33 9mo ago> we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. Should we be trying to put the genie back in the bottle? If not, what exactly are you suggesting? Even if we all agreed to stop using AI tools today, what about the rest of world? Will everybody agree to stop using it? Do you think that is even a remote possibility?
- dinkumthinkum 9mo agoDoes the rest of the world want to make money in a way not involving digging ditches? I feel like people from developing countries that spend 18 hours a day studying, giving their entire childhood to some standardized test, may not want yo be rewarded with no job prospects. Maybe that’s a crazy position.
- mkoubaa 9mo agoDon't care have too much to do must automate away my today responsibilities so I can do more tomorrow trvst the plqn
- throw-12-16 9mo agoSoftware Engineers will still exist. Software Devs not so much. There is a huge difference between the two and they are not interchangeable.
- wiseowise 9mo agoGood luck convincing new overlords. Your take is this meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dig-the-fucking-hole https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dig-the-fucking-hole.
- throw-12-16 9mo agosorry i don't speak meme