It's been interesting watching HN shift in my direction on this in recent weeks...

I had been saying since around summer of this year that coding agents were getting extremely good. The base model improvements were ok, but the agentic coding wrappers were basically game changers if you were using them right. Until recently they still felt very context limited, but the context problem increasingly feels like a solved problem.

I had some arguments on here in the summer about how it was stupid to hire junior devs at this point and how in a few years you probably wouldn't need senior devs for 90% of development tasks either. This was an aggressive prediction 6 months ago, but I think it's way too conservative now.

Today we have people at our company who have never written code building and shipping bespoke products. We've also started hiring people who can simply prove they can build products for us using AI in a single day. These are not software engineers because we are paying them wages no SWEs would accept, but it's still a decent wage for a 20 something year old without any real coding skills but who is interested in building stuff.

This is something I wouldn't have never of expected to be possible 6 months ago. In 6 months we've gone from senior developers writing ~50% of their code with AI, to just a handful of senior developers who now write close to 90% of their code with AI while they support a bunch of non-developers pumping out a steady stream of shippable products and features.

Software engineers and traditional software engineer is genuinely running on borrowed time right now. It's not that there will be no jobs for knowledgable software engineers in the coming years, but companies simply won't need many hotshot SWEs anymore. The companies that are hiring significant numbers of software engineers today simply can not have realised how much things have changed over just the last few months. Apart from the top 1-2% of talent I simply see no good reason to hire a SWE for anything anymore. And honestly outside of niche areas, anyone hand-cracking code today is a dinosaur... A good SWE today should see their job as simply reviewing code and prompting.

If you think that the quality of code LLMs produce today isn't up to scratch you've either not used the latest models and tools or you're using them wrong. That's not to say it's the best code – they still have a tendency to overcomplicate things in my opinion – but it's probably better than the average senior software engineer. And that's really all that matters.

I'm writing this because if you're reading this thinking we're basically still in 2024 with slightly better models and tooling you're just wrong and you're probably not prepared for what's coming.