> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes.
Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work.
When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero incentive for me to give feedback for you to give to an agent when I can give it to an agent myself.
Coding isn’t the job anymore. It’s understanding systems and architecture design, and ownership of what you work on. Being able to design solutions, understand them, deliver them and support them in production is the job now. Engineering is still engineering. End to end ownership is the job.
Is all of hackernews webdev only? I can’t imagine “coding not being a job anymore” in fields like automotive, medical, military, robotics, and HPC
Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.
I agree. Although I think that was never the job. Even without AI, the practice of subdividing work into coding tasks was not a good one.
AI just made it obvious.
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"End to end ownership is the job."
This is an incredibly good and concise articulation of where the role is going. Thank you.