alt Hacker NewsI cannot but agree. It's a massive skill leveling where software development is transforming from high skilled coding to low skilled prompting.
For an old dog like myself it feels an unjust rug pull.
Replies
I don't think it's a psychologically positive self identification to see yourself merely as a gatekeeper and toll extractor rent seeker who only makes a living by withholding agency and skill from others.
I know many jobs are about giving partial access to secrets or insider knowledge etc but I simply can't see myself accepting that this is my value proposition.
No, let the pie grow. Let more people be able to do more things. Use the new capabilities to do even more. See how you can provide genuine value in the new environment. I know it isn't easy. There are many unknowns. But at least aspirationally I see that as the only positive way forward.
The same thing has happened to many jobs. 100 years ago being a photographer was a difficult skill. They must have felt a rug pull when compact cameras became mainstream and they were no longer called to take all family pictures. Surely the codex writers felt a rug pull when printing became widespread. Typesetters when people could use word processors on their PC with font settings. Prop designers and practical effects people when movies switched to vfx. Etc etc.
I think looking at what the web did to the journalism industry as a model to what's happening to the software dev industry is worth while. Journalism didn't go away but it did completely change. Many old school journalists just couldn't adapt and left the industry, many papers died too.
Why unjust? Who promised you that the way software is made will stay static?
Our software industry has specialized, for decades, in "rug pulling" / changing / "disrupting" other industries on a massive scale.
I find it pretty ironic when engineers make these statements in that context.
LLMs have lowered the bar for the unskilled person to create shit software. I have used Opus 4.6 on a number of projects, and it still spits out buggy, and sometimes, flat out broken code. I was actually surprised when it completely hallucinated the names of query params for an HTTP request in my code, when in the prompt I had explicitly given it the exact names it needed to use. I thought these frontier models were supposed to be game changing.
I doubt software development will stay as "low skilled prompting", or that it is even low skilled prompting right now. Productive LLM usage goes beyond typing in better prompts and involves things like improving guardrails (eg type definitions and tests), context (docs and "skills" and MCP servers), and management strategy (instructing specialized agents together). It seems natural that there will be high skill AI coding to differentiate engineers, at least until superintelligent AGI emerges and kills us all.