11 ms·

I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills

I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet. I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what this means for software engineering, but I don't think that's going to change anything at this point. If developers just don't want to participate in this new world, for whatever reason, I'm not judging them, but also I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle. There will be no movement to organize labor to protect us and there be no deus ex machina that is going to reverse course on this stuff.

_dwt 6mo ago
Well, no, not with that attitude there won’t! I am not trying to insinuate that there is a conspiracy, or that posts like yours are part of it, but there has been a huge wave of posts and comments since February which narrow the Overton window to the distance between “it’s here and it’s great” and “I’m sad but it’s inevitable”. Humanity has possessed nuclear weapons for 80 years and has used them exactly twice in anger, at the very beginning of that span. We can in fact just NOT do things! Not every world-beating technology takes off, for one reason or another. Supersonic airliners. Eugenics. Betamax. The best time to air concerns was yesterday. The next best time is today. I think we technologists wildly overestimate public understand and underestimate public distrust of our work and of “AI” specifically. We’ve got CEOs stating that LLMs are a bigger deal than nuclear weapons or fire(!) and yet getting upset that the government wants control of their use. We’ve got giddy thinkpieces from people (real example from LinkedIn!) who believe we’ll hit 100% white collar unemployment in 5 years and wrap up by saying they’re “5% nervous and 95% excited”. If that’s what they really think, and how they really feel, it’s psychopathic! Those numbers get you a social scene that’ll make the French Revolution look like a tea party. (“And honestly? I’m here for it.”) So no, while I _think_ you’re correct, I don’t accept the inevitability of it all. There are possibilities I don’t want to see closed off (maybe data finally really is the new oil, and that’s the basis for a planetary sovereign wealth fund. Maybe every man, woman, and child who ever wrote a book or a program or an internet comment deserves a royalty check in the mail each month!) just yet.
- prescriptivist 6mo ago
  > We can in fact just NOT do things! I agree with you on that. Not just on AI but a lot of things that suck about this world, and in particular the United States. But capital is too powerful. And these tools are legitimately transformative for business. And business pays our bills and, more importantly, provides the healthcare insurance for our families. The wheel is a real fucking drag isn't it? I don't see anything short of a larger revolution against capital stopping or even stemming this. For that to really happen we would need a lot more people and interests than just those of software practitioners. Which may come yet when trucking jobs collapse and customer service jobs disappear. I don't know. I do know that I'm taking part in something that will potentially (likely?) seed the end of my career as I know it but it's just one of many contradictions that I live with. In the meantime the tools are impressive and I'm just figuring out how to live with them and do good work with them and as you can probably tell, I'm pretty convinced that's the best we can make of the situation right now.
  - solaire_oa 6mo ago
    If it helps, I would consider learning about and deploying local LLMs (llama.cpp etc), if you have the hardware (and it doesn't take all that much hardware at all). They're nowhere near as fast as LLM providers, but they come fairly close in overall quality (including agentic workflows). The reason that I suggest this is that not only does running locally democratize AI (while AI democratizes software), it solves a lot of the discomfort surrounding the new reliance, dependence, data, and trust given to LLM providers. Basically it removes a lot of the "ick" surrounding LLMs, while also hedging any bets that the investment schemes of LLM providers are unsustainable. You may also hedge bets surrounding "owning" the maintenance of the machines that replace you. I don't know, it's a small thing that makes me feel a little better during this tumultuous time.
- overgard 6mo ago
  > We can in fact just NOT do things! 100% this. I don't know why we think that pouring trillions of dollars into something we barely understand to create an economic revolution that is almost certainly awful is at all "inevitable". We just need leaders that aren't complete idiots. I'm generally cynical, but I do see that normies (ie not in tech) are waking up a bit. I don't think the technology is inherently a bad thing, but the people that think that we should just do this as fast as possible to win "the race" should be shot into space as far as I'm concerned. To start with, we need a working SEC that can actually punish the grifting CEO's that are using fear to manipulate markets.
archagon 6mo ago
A new technology comes out — admittedly one that’s extraordinarily capable at some things — and suddenly conventional software engineering is “more or less obviated at this point”? I’m sorry, but that’s really fucking dumb. Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think their capabilities exceed the quality of their training corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? After all, what’s code but a bunch of boring glue and other crap that’s used to prop up a product idea until a few bucks can be extracted from it? Of course, there’s nothing wiser than tying the entirety of your career to a $20/month subscription (that will jump 10x in price as soon as the market is captured). Is writing solved because LLMs can make something decently readable? Why say anything at all when LLMs can glob your ideas into a glitzy article in a couple of seconds? I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work — like they’ve been dying to be product managers their entire lives. It is honestly baffling to me. All I see is a future full of horrifying security holes, heisenbugs, and performance regressions that absolutely no one understands. The Idiocracy of software. Fuck!
- prescriptivist 6mo ago
  > Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new studies in computer science -- they still exist, it's just that they are going to focus on how to mitigate heisenbugs, performance regressions and security holes in agent written code. Who knows.. in five years most of the code written may not even be readable. I'm not saying it's going to be like that, but it's entirely possible. In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself. And right now there is a category of engineers that exclusively use agents to create quality software and they are more efficient at it than anybody that just does it themselves. And that category is growing and growing every day. I may be out a job in five years because all of this. But I am seeing where this is going and it's clear and so I'm going to have to change with it.
overgard 6mo ago
I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I'm also able to give it a lot of very specific instructions and correct a lot of mistakes quickly because I look at the code and understand what it's doing; and I'm also asking it to write code in domains I understand. So I don't think these skills are obsolete at all. If anything, keeping them sharp is the only differentiator we have. "Agentic Engineering" is as much as joke as "Vibe Coding" is in my mind. The tools are powerful, but they don't make up for knowing how to code, and if you're just blindly trusting it it's going to end badly.
- bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  >I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I see a lot of posts about this, and I see a lot studies, also on HN, that show that this isn't the case. Now of the course the "this isn't the case" stuff is statistically, thus there can be individual developers whom are faster, but there can also be that an individual developer sometimes is faster and sometimes not but the times that they are faster are just so clearly faster that it sort of hides the times that they're not. Statistics of performance over a number of developers can flatten things out. But I don't know that is the case. So my question for you, and everyone that claims it makes them so perceptively and clearly faster - how do you know? Given all the studies showing that it doesn't make you faster, how are you so sure it does?
  - sameerds 6mo ago
    > everyone that claims it makes them so perceptively and clearly faster - how do you know? For me, AI tools act like supercharged code search and auto complete. I have been able to make changes in complex components that I have rarely worked on. It saved me a week of effort to find the exact API calls that will do what I needed. The AI tool wrote the code and I only had to act as a reviewer. Of course I am familiar with the entire project and I knew the shape of the code to expect. But it saved me from digging out the exact details.
    - SquibblesRedux 6mo ago
bandrami 6mo ago
I'm still going to need at least one of my vendors to speed up their release pace before I'll believe that. I'm seeing a ton of churn and no actual new product.
lll-o-lll 6mo ago
> I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Yes. We are this generations highly skilled artisans, facing our own industrial revolution. Just as the skilled textile workers and weavers of early 19’th century Britain were correct when they argued this new automated product was vastly inferior, it matters not at all. And just as they were also correct, that the government of the day was doing nothing to protect the lives and livelihoods of those who had spent decades mastering a difficult set of professional skills (the middle class of the day), the government of this day will also do nothing. And it doesn’t end with “IT”; anything that can be turned into a factory process with our new “thinking engines” will be. Perhaps we can do better in society this time around. I am not hopeful.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- dasil003 6mo ago
  I think the analogy is directionally good, but it short changes the abstract and recursive nature of software. We were already writing code that was automating not only manual work but also simpler programs. LLMs essentially just move us one more (large) hop up the abstraction ladder. And yes I get that it’s a different type of hop (non-deterministic, extremely leaky, etc), but it’s still a hop. So if the only thing you want to do is manually write code in the traditional way (perhaps with vim instead of IntelliJ) then yeah I think you’re cooked. On the other hand, if you are willing to work with LLM-assisted tooling and learn how to compensate for its shortcomings then I think you’ll have a bright future.

_dwt 6mo ago

Well, no, not with that attitude there won’t! I am not trying to insinuate that there is a conspiracy, or that posts like yours are part of it, but there has been a huge wave of posts and comments since February which narrow the Overton window to the distance between “it’s here and it’s great” and “I’m sad but it’s inevitable”. Humanity has possessed nuclear weapons for 80 years and has used them exactly twice in anger, at the very beginning of that span. We can in fact just NOT do things! Not every world-beating technology takes off, for one reason or another. Supersonic airliners. Eugenics. Betamax. The best time to air concerns was yesterday. The next best time is today. I think we technologists wildly overestimate public understand and underestimate public distrust of our work and of “AI” specifically. We’ve got CEOs stating that LLMs are a bigger deal than nuclear weapons or fire(!) and yet getting upset that the government wants control of their use. We’ve got giddy thinkpieces from people (real example from LinkedIn!) who believe we’ll hit 100% white collar unemployment in 5 years and wrap up by saying they’re “5% nervous and 95% excited”. If that’s what they really think, and how they really feel, it’s psychopathic! Those numbers get you a social scene that’ll make the French Revolution look like a tea party. (“And honestly? I’m here for it.”) So no, while I _think_ you’re correct, I don’t accept the inevitability of it all. There are possibilities I don’t want to see closed off (maybe data finally really is the new oil, and that’s the basis for a planetary sovereign wealth fund. Maybe every man, woman, and child who ever wrote a book or a program or an internet comment deserves a royalty check in the mail each month!) just yet.

prescriptivist 6mo ago
> We can in fact just NOT do things! I agree with you on that. Not just on AI but a lot of things that suck about this world, and in particular the United States. But capital is too powerful. And these tools are legitimately transformative for business. And business pays our bills and, more importantly, provides the healthcare insurance for our families. The wheel is a real fucking drag isn't it? I don't see anything short of a larger revolution against capital stopping or even stemming this. For that to really happen we would need a lot more people and interests than just those of software practitioners. Which may come yet when trucking jobs collapse and customer service jobs disappear. I don't know. I do know that I'm taking part in something that will potentially (likely?) seed the end of my career as I know it but it's just one of many contradictions that I live with. In the meantime the tools are impressive and I'm just figuring out how to live with them and do good work with them and as you can probably tell, I'm pretty convinced that's the best we can make of the situation right now.
- solaire_oa 6mo ago
  If it helps, I would consider learning about and deploying local LLMs (llama.cpp etc), if you have the hardware (and it doesn't take all that much hardware at all). They're nowhere near as fast as LLM providers, but they come fairly close in overall quality (including agentic workflows). The reason that I suggest this is that not only does running locally democratize AI (while AI democratizes software), it solves a lot of the discomfort surrounding the new reliance, dependence, data, and trust given to LLM providers. Basically it removes a lot of the "ick" surrounding LLMs, while also hedging any bets that the investment schemes of LLM providers are unsustainable. You may also hedge bets surrounding "owning" the maintenance of the machines that replace you. I don't know, it's a small thing that makes me feel a little better during this tumultuous time.
overgard 6mo ago
> We can in fact just NOT do things! 100% this. I don't know why we think that pouring trillions of dollars into something we barely understand to create an economic revolution that is almost certainly awful is at all "inevitable". We just need leaders that aren't complete idiots. I'm generally cynical, but I do see that normies (ie not in tech) are waking up a bit. I don't think the technology is inherently a bad thing, but the people that think that we should just do this as fast as possible to win "the race" should be shot into space as far as I'm concerned. To start with, we need a working SEC that can actually punish the grifting CEO's that are using fear to manipulate markets.

archagon 6mo ago

A new technology comes out — admittedly one that’s extraordinarily capable at some things — and suddenly conventional software engineering is “more or less obviated at this point”? I’m sorry, but that’s really fucking dumb. Do you think LLMs are actually intelligent? Do you think their capabilities exceed the quality of their training corpus? Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? After all, what’s code but a bunch of boring glue and other crap that’s used to prop up a product idea until a few bucks can be extracted from it? Of course, there’s nothing wiser than tying the entirety of your career to a $20/month subscription (that will jump 10x in price as soon as the market is captured). Is writing solved because LLMs can make something decently readable? Why say anything at all when LLMs can glob your ideas into a glitzy article in a couple of seconds? I swear, some people in this field see no value in their programming work — like they’ve been dying to be product managers their entire lives. It is honestly baffling to me. All I see is a future full of horrifying security holes, heisenbugs, and performance regressions that absolutely no one understands. The Idiocracy of software. Fuck!

prescriptivist 6mo ago
> Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough? All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new studies in computer science -- they still exist, it's just that they are going to focus on how to mitigate heisenbugs, performance regressions and security holes in agent written code. Who knows.. in five years most of the code written may not even be readable. I'm not saying it's going to be like that, but it's entirely possible. In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself. And right now there is a category of engineers that exclusively use agents to create quality software and they are more efficient at it than anybody that just does it themselves. And that category is growing and growing every day. I may be out a job in five years because all of this. But I am seeing where this is going and it's clear and so I'm going to have to change with it.

overgard 6mo ago

I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I'm also able to give it a lot of very specific instructions and correct a lot of mistakes quickly because I look at the code and understand what it's doing; and I'm also asking it to write code in domains I understand. So I don't think these skills are obsolete at all. If anything, keeping them sharp is the only differentiator we have. "Agentic Engineering" is as much as joke as "Vibe Coding" is in my mind. The tools are powerful, but they don't make up for knowing how to code, and if you're just blindly trusting it it's going to end badly.

bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
>I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I see a lot of posts about this, and I see a lot studies, also on HN, that show that this isn't the case. Now of the course the "this isn't the case" stuff is statistically, thus there can be individual developers whom are faster, but there can also be that an individual developer sometimes is faster and sometimes not but the times that they are faster are just so clearly faster that it sort of hides the times that they're not. Statistics of performance over a number of developers can flatten things out. But I don't know that is the case. So my question for you, and everyone that claims it makes them so perceptively and clearly faster - how do you know? Given all the studies showing that it doesn't make you faster, how are you so sure it does?
- sameerds 6mo ago
  > everyone that claims it makes them so perceptively and clearly faster - how do you know? For me, AI tools act like supercharged code search and auto complete. I have been able to make changes in complex components that I have rarely worked on. It saved me a week of effort to find the exact API calls that will do what I needed. The AI tool wrote the code and I only had to act as a reviewer. Of course I am familiar with the entire project and I knew the shape of the code to expect. But it saved me from digging out the exact details.
  - SquibblesRedux 6mo ago

bandrami 6mo ago

I'm still going to need at least one of my vendors to speed up their release pace before I'll believe that. I'm seeing a ton of churn and no actual new product.

lll-o-lll 6mo ago

> I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Yes. We are this generations highly skilled artisans, facing our own industrial revolution. Just as the skilled textile workers and weavers of early 19’th century Britain were correct when they argued this new automated product was vastly inferior, it matters not at all. And just as they were also correct, that the government of the day was doing nothing to protect the lives and livelihoods of those who had spent decades mastering a difficult set of professional skills (the middle class of the day), the government of this day will also do nothing. And it doesn’t end with “IT”; anything that can be turned into a factory process with our new “thinking engines” will be. Perhaps we can do better in society this time around. I am not hopeful.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
dasil003 6mo ago
I think the analogy is directionally good, but it short changes the abstract and recursive nature of software. We were already writing code that was automating not only manual work but also simpler programs. LLMs essentially just move us one more (large) hop up the abstraction ladder. And yes I get that it’s a different type of hop (non-deterministic, extremely leaky, etc), but it’s still a hop. So if the only thing you want to do is manually write code in the traditional way (perhaps with vim instead of IntelliJ) then yeah I think you’re cooked. On the other hand, if you are willing to work with LLM-assisted tooling and learn how to compensate for its shortcomings then I think you’ll have a bright future.