> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as a result, I'll want to (and be able to) do even more.

I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Any "idiot" can build their own software tailored to how their brains think, without having to assemble gobs of money to hire expensive software people. Most of them were never going to hire a programmer anyway. Those ideas would've died in their heads.

I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding feels even more valuable now.

It was never about writing the code—anyone can do that, students in college, junior engineers…

Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well structured (and well-organized) framework… Keeping it as simple as possible that just gets the job done. Designing the code-base in a way that anticipates expansion…

I've never felt the least bit threatened by LLMs.

Now if management sees it differently and experienced engineers are losing their jobs to LLMs, that's a tragedy. (Myself, I just retired a few years ago so I confess to no longer having a dog I this race.)

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

It may look the same, but it isn't the same.

In fact if you took the time to truly learn how to do pure agentic coding (not vibe coding) you would realize as a principal engineer you have an advantage over engineers with less experience.

The more war stories, the more generalist experience, the more you can help shape the llm to make really good code and while retaining control of every line.

This is an unprecedented opportunity for experienced devs to use their hard won experience to level themselves up to the equivalence of a full team of google devs.

This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief.

My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me.

Where my concern about LLM generated software comes in is much more existential: how do we train people who know the difference between bad software and good software in the future? What I've seen is a pattern where experienced engineers are excellent at steering AI to make themselves multiples more effective, and junior engineers are replacing their previous sloppy output with ten times their previous sloppy output.

For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term, and overall, many organizations strategically think they are pointed in the right direction doing this and are happy to downsize blaming "AI." And, for places where this never really mattered (like "make my small business landing page,") this is an complete upheaval, without a doubt.

My concern is basically: what will we do long term to get people from one end to another without the organic learning process that comes from having sloppy output curated and improved with a human touch by more senior engineers, and without an economic structure which allows "junior" engineers to subsidize themselves with low-end work while they learn? I worry greatly that in 5-10 years many organizations will end up with 10x larger balls of "legacy" garbage and 10x fewer knowledgeable people to fix it. For an experienced engineer I actually think this is a great career outlook and I can't understand the rug pull take at all; I think that today's strong and experienced engineer will be command a high amount of money and prestige in five years as the bottom drops out of software. From a "global outcomes" perspective this seems terrible, though, and I'm not quite sure what the solution is.

I consider myself very good at writing software. I built and shipped many projects. I built systems from zero. Embedded, distributed, SaaS- you name it.

I'm having a lot of fun with AI. Any idiot can't prompt their way to the same software I can write. Not yet anyways.

As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff.

I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same skill. Making good technical decisions.

And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins a hair.

I’m with you here.

I grew up without a mentor and my understanding of software stalled at certain points. When I couldn’t get a particular os API to work, in Google and stack overflow didn’t exist, and I had no one around me to ask. I wrote programs for years by just working around it.

After decades writing software I have done my best to be a mentor to those new to the field. My specialty is the ability to help people understand the technology they’re using, I’ve helped juniors understand and fix linker errors, engineers understand ARP poisoning, high school kids debug their robots. I’ve really enjoyed giving back.

But today, pretty much anyone except for a middle schooler could type their problems into a ChatGPT and get a more direct answer that I would be able to give. No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly.

Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon.

What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!"

This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic but because of the way life goes he never really had opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super excited about it, used it a lot to make tons and tons of pictures for everything that his mind could think of. However, after awhile this excitement waned and he realized that he didn't actually learn anything at all. At that point he decided to find some time and spend more time practicing drawing to be able to make things by himself with his own skills, not by some chip on the other side of the world and he greatly improved in the past couple of years.

So, AI can certainly help create all the "fun!!!" projects for people who just want to see the end result, but in the end would they actually learn anything?

IMHO any idiot can create a piece of crap. It takes experience to create good software. Use your experience Luke! Now you have a team of programmers to create what ever you fancy! Its been great for me, but I have only been programming C++ for 36 years.

> As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull!

Really?

The vibe coders are running into a dark forest with a bunch of lobsters (OpenClaw) getting lost and confused in their own tech debt and you're saying they can prompt their way to the same software?

Someone just ended up wiping their entire production database with Claude and you believe that your experience is for nothing, towards companies that need stable infrastructure and predictability.

Cognitive debt is a real thing and being unable to read / write code that is broken is going to be an increasing problem which experienced engineers can solve.

Do not fall for the AI agent hype.

On the bright side, working in tech between 2006 and 2026 means you should be extremely wealthy and able to retire comfortably.

Why did you leave this as a comment on someone talking about how happy they were about their own experience?

Really? I love LLMs because I can't stand the process of taking the model in my brain and putting it in a file. Flow State is so hard for me to hit these days.

So now I spec it out, feed it to an LLM, and monitor it while having a cup of tea. If it goes off the rails (it usually does) I redirect it. Way better than banging it out by hand.

I urge you to actually try these tools. You will very quickly realize you have nothing to worry about.

In the hands of a knowledgeable engineer these tools can save a lot of drudge work because you have the experience to spot when they’re going off the rails.

Now imagine someone who doesn’t have the experience, and is not able to correct where necessary. Do you really think that’s going to end well?

No offense but you sound more like a “principle coder”, not a principle engineer. At least in many domains and orgs, Most principal engineers are already spending most their time not coding. But -engineering- still take sip much or most of their time.

I felt what you describe feeling. But it lasted like a week in December. Otherwise there’s still tons of stuff to build and my teams need me to design the systems and review their designs. And their prompt machine is not replacing my good sense. There’s plenty of engineering to do, even if the coding writes itself.

What I keep hearing is that the people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones reluctant to embrace LLMs because they are too emotionally attached to "coding" as a discipline rather than design and architecture, which are where the interesting and actually difficult work is done.