alt Hacker NewsI work on all sorts as we have an IoT product offering.... embedded bare metal systems, web, backend IoT servers, Gateways, APIs, Import/Export Systems, Integrations with Manufacturing systems, accounting systems, Automatic Test Equipment. I've been coding for nearly 50 years now, so pretty experienced. What peoples comments seem to imply to me is that they haven't really gone full agentic coding, where you hone your context, your tools, and how you iterate and test with an AI agent. Where any mistakes an AI makes you make sure it can't do it again, you have it setup so your AI code reviews are honed to focus on the things you care about etc.
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gdorsi , it's not that hard to swap really, because the goal, designing systems, just got easier. I feel AI lets you be a system engineer way better as you can quickly iterate. I have the same kinds of goals in mind, just can do it a heck of a lot quicker.
hubertdinsk, can't reply directly... but yes lots of niche things, especially in the embedded side, automatic test side. We have a lot of hardware, we control a lot of things, sense a lot of things. There's nothing inherently complicated about it such that AI can't code, in fact you feed AI technical data sheets its insanely useful when writing code against that hardware. It's going to pick up on all the weird nuances. It's great for protocols, especially proprietary ones. Anything with spec sheets are good.
so not niche at all. You described a bit of everything.
Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware.
Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.
Software development is a quite vast discipline.
In my experience performance of LLMs can be surprisingly good on things that are not mainstream, like database engineering, and surprisingly bad at mainstream categories approached in an unconventional way.
That said, I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms.
As you imply, this stuff isn't simple to pick up, and is completely different on how we have done our job without AI.