AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

> bad engineers were always a liability

This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_.

I am still a firm believer in garbage in -> garbage out, AI is only as good as the abstractions and contracts you put in place for it. I don't subscribe to the idea that AI generated code is fundamentally bad, just that people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code.

Earlier in the year I put together a talk for my company on what the future of architecture & design means for us in the career, I'm very proud of it and will share here in case folks have their own thoughts to share on the topic: https://youtu.be/SIZrt9Rt05Q?si=W57eirniWmoSFeBu

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way. This hand off is no longer necessary as that same senior can just kick off an agent and have it handle the implementation for them.

I've heard some refer to this as a "nature is healing" scenario for the industry where if you only signed up for a high paycheck and didn't care to think critically about any of the work you're doing then this will be painful because that previously manual process has been automated. The floor of what's necessary to be considered valuable has been raised.

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job.

Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you.

I agree with most of this except this. Think there’s some rose tinted glasses here or I’ve got bad luck over time.

Life before ai was bad as well. There wasn’t any one to explain to you anything! You had to figure it out yourself. The people either already left or was busy with something else.

No one wrote tests (to my standard). Most of the ops works was skipped. Docs were just not there. Nobody linted properly. Just bad mannnn

>AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.

>There used to be a time when people sat down and talked about how they'd do something. Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR.

>The most tragic aspect of this way of working is that, to the untrained eye, it works.

>If you pull the branch and test it, you'll probably get something somewhat functional. So what do they do? They keep going. Again and again. Until the project reaches a point where no one knows how anything works.

Isn't this the opposite of failing faster, it lets people who would have never made it past the first few hurdles and give up get deep in and then the false hope that they can then prompt their way out of whatever mess resulting in deeper and deeper spaghetti.

Technology has been doing this for decades. I think a lot of our "K shaped economy" discourse is about the bifurcation of the upper middle class creating downwardly mobile educated young people. Nobody in my wife's immediate family finished college. She and all of her cousins are quite indisputably better off than their parents. My father in law drove a forklift at a soup factory. My sister in law is studying to be a nurse. It's a big step up. But the "white collar" middle class has become very winner-take-all. To use an example from my field, if your dad was a partner at a regional law firm, that path probably isn't open to you. Technology enabled consolidation and scaling, so you don't need lawyers in every city in the U.S. to be able to handle legal work there. Lawyers at national firms serving Wall Street clients are making more money than ever, but the drop below that has become pretty precipitous. The same has happened to small businesses all over the country competing with Amazon, etc. It's had a huge impact on the petit bourgeoisie.

Of course, this is economically efficient. Nobody is going to give up Amazon same-day-delivery so that some local small business owner's kids can live better than the median person.

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.

This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.

[0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...

> Fixing it would require such a colossal amount of work that it would be impossible to even start justifying it to anyone in management.

Bad news: by delegating the thinking to somebody else (Claude) you have become the management.

At the same time, it also brings very low level "vibecoder" to the pool

"You can't afford bad engineers anymore"

You never could.

It baffles me that someone can just send a PR without knowing the gist of how it works and why it’s done this way.

If you can’t answer this basic question then why tf do we even need you around?

All of this is my fault.

I decided to start learning programming about 6 years ago as a possible new career path. The universe was not going to have that so AI was created.

Look, stupid companies who use A.I. to generate their code will simply fail. Companies that use bright engineers to engineer their product and write code (and pay them accordingly) will thrive and thrash the competition.

Darwinism in action.

I don't believe A.I. will change much, but it will lead to winners and losers, that's certain. Lessons will be learned, A.I. will remain but play a minor role, just like IntelliSense and ReSharper.

People need to understand that when things break management will hold you accountable, not the A.I. If you can't fix it you'll be out of a job. So you'd better make sure that you understand the generated code and clean it up before putting it in production because you'll be maintaining it.

It wasn't that long ago that many were demanding writing code be a required subject in elementary school.

One thing this post did not discuss is the enormous effort required to explain to the management why number PRs has increased and number of lines changes, which in their view, means explosion of productivity, yet one engineer is destroying the team's momentum.

Lord, this hits close to home.

It doesn't seem to be happening everywhere, but if you are unfortunate enough to work someplace with a "LinkedIn thought leader" high up on the engineering food chain, there's a really high likelihood that your organization is currently in the throes of an "everyone must be using AI for everything" fever dream.

And boy let me tell you, it is every bit as disastrous as the OP claims. Engineering managers are asking Claude to write up entire initiatives, then they hand off these nebulous AI slop manifestos to the teams where the requirements folks are having Claude shit out tons of superficially plausible Jira tickets. It finally lands on some poor engineer's plate and since these tickets are the technical equivalent of Finnegans Wake, they just end up asking Claude to read all this shit on `ultracode` and draft up a pull request. Which is then peer-reviewed by somebody using Claude.

I wish I were exaggerating.

Probably a good thing, we need more people building major mega projects like the Line. Potentially we need AI to mass produce architecture and scale up and out city/county building departments to open the gates to massive buildings in the United States.

I saw close some companies getting completely lost with AI code

> In the story above, everyone is failing:

IMO The author fails to list the hypothetical person with 13 PRs to review is also failing.

> * The engineer who refuses to change with the times

IMO many of the old ways of software engineering were local maxima. We're still seeking how to hit a new maxima and the journey may take us through zones lower than the previous local maxima.

So, blame the engineers now? Most likely they were forced by a manager to push more PRs faster else piped.

Great idea to include a link to Hacker News on your blog!

It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You still had to have a competent developer review what they did, which was annoying, but ultimately a time saver over doing it themselves.

Now the competent developer can just run agents and do the same review process, except it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced).

So we've got a bimodal distribution going on where the bottom X% of developers have become essentially worthless while the top Y% of developers are now more valuable than ever.

AI generated code is the new "lines of code" metric used by middle management.

This is really well written. I deal with the exact same issues almost daily. Senior engineers who want to guard quality are becoming a bottleneck.

I'm not sure what skill really means, or what's considered bad anymore. AI coding ability and human coding ability are different, and different organizations need different skills. No skill is inherently bad—it just depends on what the organization needs.

I understand that AI writes better code than people like me in many cases. But an industry should still provide opportunities for those people. And sometimes those people create things that are better than AI in certain areas. The problem is when even those opportunities are taken away.

Very good article.

But it does cover the case where someone makes it to the top if he/she is junior. Who experience is gained?

Maybe I ask too much from a short article.

"There are also people who essentially make it harder for everyone else. And now anyone can produce more code in a day than they used to in a year."

That is the "democratization" that AI shills speak of:

https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2087538364580835804#m

Once a CEO with a snowboard-optimized brain gave you a board seat, there is no way back.

In the words of Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap".

Any apparent short term gain is really a prescription for long term pain.

Ignore what AI fanboys say and instead look at what they do.

https://northeasttimes.com/2026/08/07/oracle-bans-ai-code-fr...

AI gives more leverage to exceptional people, its an amplifier not an extender

Economics would have always created this downward pressure on demand for software engineers regardless, either companies would replace the number of engineers they need with AI, or with low paid offshored workers.

I don't know what kind of company has got a large codebase and it's taking 20,000 loc pr's expecting that shit to be sustainable, but I work AI first and at the most PR's are touching 12 to 15 files, with the more radical ones sitting at 30. They are still human-reviewable. They are still the kind of change you can revert back to original without breaking all the rest... there are ways of doing this stuff, dear luddites.

> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there.

So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here.

The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers back in the 1970s.

Breaking up code into small reviewable pieces is obsolete advice from legacy software engineering. We will probably be reviewing prompts or functional simulations as a form of review. Which brings me to the point that a Senior engineer in 5 years will look absolutely nothing like a Senior engineer in 2019.