alt Hacker NewsI'm understanding my role as a developer in the AI era through the lens of the company hierarchy at my first job. In 2018 I began my career at a management consulting firm which also did tech consulting for a very specific industry.
The hierarchy was as such - associates at the bottom who did all the manual coding work and got into the weeds with the tech, consultants on top of them who orchestrated the work and kept the wheels moving, and managers on top of them who had a more higher level view of the system and knew why decisions were being made (partners were involved with future deals and driving the business forward). The managers who knew how the system worked had no idea about the actual code underneath it all because it was abstracted away from them through multiple layers of hierarchy. The actual code which was mostly written by 21 or 22 year olds who largely had no idea what was going on other than the fact they had to make it work or risk the ire of higher ups was a mess, unless the consultant orchestrating it all had real technical and system design chops.
I was an associate then and more often than not I had no idea what i was doing but i was fortunate to work with consultants and team leads who did. Right now, I'm a software developer akin to a consultant, with more ownership of the code but no associates to guide because all of that work has been pawned off to AI agents. I see my role gradually morphing into what the manager role was at the consultancy, where i have a bird's eye view of the system and know where the project is moving and why decisions are being made, but with a very limited knowledge of what is actually in the code.
I've noted a similar shift, but I think it's a short-sighted path.
My experience (both in and out of management, and as a very high level IC at a mix of companies) is that while the management layers generally didn't understand what was going on in the code - the decent managers tended to have a "gut check" person they trusted to go and ask technical questions, and bounce ideas around with.
This was their "expert" who they trusted to be close enough to ground truth to tell them if a thing will work, how hard it will be, if there are shortcuts, etc... Often times, it wasn't even strictly technical questions that would get answered, it will be things like "how much of this project is technically in my sphere of control, and how much do I need to go align other teams? How many teams? Which teams? Which projects? etc..."
My problem is that AI SUCKS at this job. So yes - we're getting pushed into management roles as ICs... but instead of a decent subject matter expert who still understands ground truth... you get an LLM blabbering on about seams and load-bearing joints, and clickbait style headline summaries, but completely non-nonsensical judgement calls about how to interact with the people who make up the company.
Ultimately, work is also politics - and it's not just "writing code" that matters. It's knowing what code is worth writing, and when you should write it. And an AI will happily tell you that a single change-set in a single repo is "substantially larger then expected" and put a timeline of "two weeks" on the completion (especially if anything Jira related happens to be in context... blegh), and then knock it out in 5 minutes time... While also spouting off about how easily it can add "new feature X" it just needs to get PRs in across 5 different repos, owned by different parts of the org with non-aligned managers.