alt Hacker News> Software Engineering as science will be largely dedicated to AI development
Which will require fewer people.
Simple software engineers who work on CRUDs and are not PhD-s and stuff will go away. Most of software is like this. The few percent who work on kernels, AI models, etc. will still have work. The rest won't, or rather much less people will be needed to simply use AI to do that work.
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But right now AI assisted development isn't really making you more productive by an order of magnitude. It's easily a game of whack-a-mole right now. I estimate that an excellent programmer equipped with Claude Code only sees a 30-40% improvement in speed right now
What you speak of may happen, but I doubt it will happen in the next 10 years.
Sometimes I feel the same but then I sit in a refinement meeting and have to handhold the stakeholders through the process of finding out what they actually want, what they don't want, which trade offs they find acceptable and which they don't. And while AI is infinitely patient, my feeling is that being good at this is a super individual people skill and I know that more often than not the people I am talking to are kind of happy they are talking to a person instead of a machine. However when it comes to actually implementing the stuff, AI reliance is now necessary with the timelines given.
Software engineering has been getting more efficient for decades and over that time there’s been a massive increase in the number of software engineers.
The Mythical Man-Month describes teams of ten engineers operating before the Internet. Today (pre-LLMs) that’s probably 1-2 people.
Yep. The CRUD-ish part of CS is gonna end up like the typewriter pools from the '60s. Claude code is already way better than most subcontractors I've worked with, and without any weird interpersonal or contractual issues usually associated with whatever sketchy agreements their employers have with my employers.
I can see the ground crumbling in a linear fashion, moving straight towards my direction. In a sense, I've already made peace with that. I know what my skill ceiling is.
I'm decent enough to work on an ecommerce, customer portal or whatever. I'm also fully aware I'm never going to be able to write a kernel module, improve some low level loop in a database runtime in C, or do some sophisticated data analytics or fluid simulation modeling.
My time as developer is nigh. I won't really miss it one bit, to be honest.
Honestly I've been thinking about moving into hospitality, tourism or any other field where AI as zero chance of being able to make a serious dent. At least until robots will be able to give an interactive guided of a museum or a national park.