9 ms·
It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.
- uncivilized 1mo agoNot everyone is a web developer bub
- badlibrarian 1mo agoMight I recommend HVAC or plumbing, it's honorable work and pays well. Trim trees if you've got the body for it. I don't recommend web work, the last ten years or the next ten. Wouldn't touch the stuff. I skipped the phone app era, too.
- wvenable 1mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923
- pixelesque 1mo agoI had DeepSeek 4 Pro do a very good job yesterday of loop-unrolling and SIMD-ifying (both SSE/AVX and ARM Neon versions) some very old scalar Col3f image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so. It also wrote some unit tests that validated the kernel sampling weights, and wrote some Jupyter notebooks to go along with the kernel algorithms as comparisons. It's not just web dev... It helps (a lot in some cases) if you ask very specific things rather than just "make this vague thing", but I'm more and more coming round to the conclusion it is now a useful dev tool (until two months ago I was a sceptic).
- gmueckl 1mo agoThis is still rather basic stuff to be absolutely honest with you.
- pixelesque 1mo agoThe tests and notebooks maybe: not the unrolling and re-architecting to use masking SIMD-ification. I used to do SIMD stuff a lot over the last 17 years, and it would have taken me probably a day to do that (convert 7 algorithms, all with support for various wrapping/mirroring/clamping extent-handling, so around 800 raw source file lines of templated C++) to use SIMD - and well. Then it probably would have taken me at least half a day to think about what tests to write and to make them. It did it in around 5 minutes. I had to check it, and it wasn't perfect, but it compiled, ran, and was very close.
- gmueckl 1mo agoSorry, but this is just not a complex or hard task in image processing. Image resizing is a staple algorithm as common as bread and butter.
- pixelesque 1mo agoYou could convert ~800 lines of scalar float processing templated C++ code that used mixins for wrapping logic and float/double to well-optimised SIMD code for two different ISAs (without using wrapper class helpers, it wrote the full intrinsics) in under 5 minutes and write tests for them at the same time? It's the time compression I'm impressed with.
- gmueckl 1mo agoThis is a sifferent point than what the thread started with (speed vs. correct output for hard problems). Yours stands, but it changed the direction of the discussion as I understand it. Hence the pushback.
- 1mo ago
- applfanboysbgon 1mo agoOh, I have those moments daily. Like, "holy shit, I can't believe it just fucked up a rote task this badly".
- api 1mo ago[flagged]
- mwcampbell 1mo agoI respect the people who still haven't tried. They held a firm line when the rest of us were drawn to the shiny new thing. They're not becoming dependent on yet another centralized service (let's be real, the big centralized models are still way better than the open-weights models that most of us can run, particularly for coding). They can still develop software with nothing but their own computer, and that computer doesn't even have to be particularly new.
- smargopulos 1mo ago[flagged]
- satvikpendem 1mo agoDon't make new accounts just to add snarky responses. If you're gonna do it, use your real account so we know who to flag.
- lukan 1mo agoNah, for what was broadly avaiable, last year it was still in the area of better custom stackoverflow answers. A good search engine for code. Helpful, but I don't remember mindblown moments. This year we have agents work with complex codebases. That was and still is mindblown to me.
- badlibrarian 1mo agoI'll worry when that stops happening. Probably means I'm getting in my own way or not thinking big enough.
- smargopulos 1mo ago[flagged]
- fryanyway_swe 1mo agoLearning is lifelong, in most trades. What are you on about? Especially in something vast as programming/SW/ops.
- smargopulos 1mo agoThat's exactly my point — by now you should have learned enough not to be surprised.
- skrebbel 1mo agoI did but it was followed by "holy shit now I gotta review this +3000 -500 LOC PR full of subtly wrong abstractions, needless diversions and incorrect assumptions". People keep repeating your sentiment here but I simply can't follow, are we even on the same planet? Or did everyone switch to just not caring about maintainability and code quality anymore? Or are your work tasks simply so mindnumbingly, stupidly simple that even an AI can oneshot them properly? I mean this honestly btw, not dismissively like some sister comments. The gap between the productivity increases people report on HN and what I experience myself is insane. In fact, if I factor in the procrastination I find myself doing on dotting the i's on a supposedly "one-shotted" AI implementation of a nontrivial feature, I think the AI actively slows me down. The only way I've found that I can actually use AI productively and sustainably is in very small tight loops and, well, at that point it's not that much faster than just typing in the code (with the occasional "Cursor Tab" complete). Am I doing something wrong?
- badlibrarian 1mo agoVery, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff. It works, promise. I was in your shoes six weeks ago.
- skrebbel 1mo agoTo be fair, a "very very senior dev" wouldn't tell me that I'm doing it wrong without telling me what I'm doing wrong.
- badlibrarian 1mo agoI've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- tom_ 1mo agoI have been doing this stupid shit for long enough that, frankly, I am only happy when it does exactly what I intended.
- d4mi3n 1mo agoI find this to be an incredibly myopic viewpoint. Software engineering is not defined by a single tool or technology, but rather how we design, implement, and maintain processes of value we want to automate or scale. LLMs will certainly be an aide, but assuming adoption of them is required across a whole _field_ ignores whole classes of problems, domains, and constraints the production of software covers. Rather, we should be wary of allowing our skills and hard-earned knowledge to atrophy by over reliance on new technology that is far from perfect, reliable, or even universally available. These tools more than any before suffer from the junk-in-junk-out problem and I’d much rather work with someone who knows their fundamentals than someone who knows their way around a the LLM of the month.
- margalabargala 1mo agoOn the contrary, taken at face value I find the GP comment to be spot on. They aren't saying LLM adoption is required across 100% of the field. They are pointing out that LLMs have reached an impressively capable state, and someone insufficiently inclined to test new tooling that they still dismiss LLMs as "just fancy autocomplete" is exactly who gets left behind when technology advances. Two things can be true at the same time, 1) that LLMs are not required across a whole field, and 2) that software engineers unwilling to acknowledge their utility have as much a place in the future as the software engineers of 50 years ago who refused to use a compiler.
- sublinear 1mo agoCan you elaborate on how someone would get "left behind"? Isn't the whole point of LLMs that they use natural language and require less effort? If they're so easy to use, wouldn't the opposite be true? i.e. people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency? Nobody gives a rat's ass if you did something in an hour or took all night. The deadline is still next week because of all the meetings. What's the point? Anyone at any point in human history can tell you that doing too much too early has extremely high odds of failure. You're much better off thinking about the business concerns at hand instead of getting lost in the weeds playing with the code. There's also zero chance of the cadence speeding up because software engineers were never the bottleneck, and LLMs don't work so well for everyone else's job. If you can't pull rabbits out of hats when the time is right without an LLM, you're already at a disadvantage compared to everyone else who can (anyone who isn't a junior dev today).
- ethin 1mo agoOkay. Please generate using an AI model code for a safety-critical system which is able to be incorporated into an aircraft and that passes the coding standards and requirements in that domain and come back and tell us all about it. Surely, if AI was so good across the entire domain of software engineering, this would be trivial to do. Edit: although you might be subject to an NDA... But this is pretty much my test for "AIs will take all the jobs": can it write truly safety-critical software yet?
- badlibrarian 1mo agoLong bet: the NTSB will require all transportation software to be submitted for independent review, and that review process will be heavily automated by AI, within 5 years. Take it?
- ethin 1mo agoIf we assume the current administration (and the following one) continues to be bullish on AI, then this is a suckers bet. Assuming the next administration isn't too busy cleaning up the messes of the current one.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 1mo agoOkay. Please write such a system yourself. Most programmers are not experienced enough to write such code themselves off-hand, but more importantly, the safety-critical systems are made safe by following a strict process, not by skills of individuals, which makes it orthogonal to involvement of LLMs. Also, weird choice of example. 99.9% of coding is not safety-critical, so whatever reservations this would imply (even if it actually doesn't imply any), don't apply anyway.
- ethin 1mo ago> Okay. Please write such a system yourself. Why? This has already done via existing processes. My point was to illustrate that if the future is LLMs then surely these processes wouldn't be needed anymore? After all, the LLM would just... Do it itself. > ... the safety-critical systems are made safe by following a strict process, not by skills of individuals, which makes it orthogonal to involvement of LLMs. And an LLM that is going to take all the jobs wouldn't be able to execute that process independently and with little oversight? If my example is, to you, not a good one, what would you rather I use? Most of the common ones can be overly trivialized/minimized (particularly by someone who is uninterested in admitting that LLMs can't do something). That is not to imply that the gp is this kind of individual, but far too many people who I ask to do this (or something similar) are exactly that kind of person: believing that LLMs are insanely great and can't admit (or see) the cons.
- 20k 1mo agoI recently asked it a series of technical physics questions about a field I used to be involved in to evaluate whether it'd be useful for doing research, and literally every single answer it gave was critically wrong - even for basic questions. Its certainly true that I went "holy shit", but not in a good way
- GlibMonkeyDeath 1mo agoCan you give an example? I've actually been pretty happy with how the latest ChatGPT answers senior-undergrad level physics questions.