I’ll be honest, I’m confused by the ending. It says this is a series of jabs at LLM hype, and I understand that it’s intended as a series of jabs against those who would say “software engineers will be out of a job”, but I’ll be honest I think only a loud minority are saying that yet it’s treated like it’s a majority position.

All the stories listed seem interesting, but none of them seem all that relevant.

I feel like most people understand that this is a seismic shift in abstraction layer, but intelligent people will still be in demand to manage the machines at whatever level is currently highest. The motor car didn’t kill taxi drivers, unless those who drove a carriage refused to learn how to drive a motor car.

Perhaps I’m not expressing my point very well… but this feels like both an argument against something almost no one is saying seriously, and it uses examples that also aren’t that applicable to the current situation other than having the commonality that people have said before that software engineers will die out. Make me wonder… How many times did people think an invention would kill off a job incorrectly, until one day it actually did?

Intelligent and well educated people will always be in demand somewhere. Until we’re in some post money utopia, we’ll just have to roll with the punches. In the meantime, HN readers like ourselves will simultaneously upvote any article that says humans are super necessary down at lower levels of abstraction and are way better at coding than LLMs, whilst quietly also coding less and less by hand and crawling up that abstraction layer themselves. That’s just human nature.