alt Hacker NewsThis is where I’m at as well. A friend recently showed me what opus 5.5 is capable of and it was both awe inspiring and disturbing.
I’ve been using AI as a great pair programming partner for about a year now, but every time I prompt it to write code agentically, it just makes a pile of crap that I end up spending more time fixing. This is so very quickly becoming not the case anymore.
I think core engineering skills are never going away (I’ve been doing this for 25 years and come from a background doing C++ for video games), that you will always need to have a mental model of the code and if you’re going to call yourself “professional” you need to be able to go in and fix/build by hand. But you’re going to get left behind if you aren’t at least willing to eat some humble pie and re-evaluate your views on agentic coding every few months as these tools get better.
Grieve, I know I have, but there is joy on the other side. I used to love getting lost in flow state with Soma.fm playing and the phone unplugged, that is still there, but what that looks like is changing fast and table stakes in this industry has been “adapt or die” for as long as I’ve been in it.
I'm using Opus 5.5 at work extensively, have also used Kimi 3 and Deepseek 4.1 for stuff outside of work, and I can't deny that the tools aren't capable. They solve problems, surface issues I wouldn't have considered, and largely do write better code than I do.
The one exception is for stuff that I care very deeply about. For a very small subset of projects where I'm willing to spend hundreds of hours ensuring that what I build is the best possible thing, AI still hasn't been able to match my work unless I micromanage it, but at that point just writing the code myself is actually faster.
For almost all jobs though AI is probably the future, most software developers never cared that much about their company's code anyway.