alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.