YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Did you retire or do something else?

It won't be a student on $10 replacing him. Who would hire an inexperienced student when there are piles of displaced experienced devs looking for work? One of them and a couple of AI licences could try to replace several people the way things are going.

At least until the investment capital starts to be called in and use of decent AI models becomes noticeable more expensive, assuming that happens long before open free models are good enough to replace them.

Of course that will lead to there being very few experienced people in a couple of decades, as most of the remaining ones age out, but I'll be long done by the time that becomes a big problem, I'm not on the right side of the mid-life divide!

> next time op comes up for air is when he finds out their employer replaced them with a college student making $10/hour.

I mean numerous firms seem to already be doing this, and they're making HN's front page regularly for week-long downtimes, blog posts tearing them apart for shockingly shit engineering practices, and their userbase in open rebellion from the sheer STATE of the product.

My employer has absolutely no interest in cutting any engineering staff in favor of AI. But we're also not a VC-funded human misery mill, and we have a sustainable business model involving selling actual products, so these facts may be related to that.

Feels like AI is just exposing what was always glorified software-configuration

Might as well stick around until the option is no longer there, as long as they enjoy it.

> I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago.

What do you do now? I'm also looking to get out of this industry, but it's tough to voluntarily give up the pay.

Why does everyone keep framing this as if this is a decision this person is making?

This is what is happening to the industry. It's a fact of life. A new technology has disrupted the method through which software is created. There's no going back and there's no pretending we can continue not using it.

You either adopt the tools now and have trouble finding a job later or have trouble finding a job now.

How many times are we going to cycle through these same arguments instead of actually discussing the content of the blog posts?

Circling back to these replies: Ah yes! The best slacktivism is having the bots do it for you!

until 1) software is saturated or 2) llms or their creators will take accountability for any issues its code causes i think there will continuously be the next phase

Tbh i dont see software demand being saturated anytime soon (which is why im bullish SWEs, and we're seeing both demand and compensation increase as of late), we keep moving up abstractions and increasing ambition and scope for new projects.

If all the companies use {frontier model} then your competitive advantage is what you have that is not legible to the model

Enter key? Just talk to the LLM, no enter key needed ;-)

Now anyone who can talk can vibe code apps.

Personally I vibe code apps while driving. I still have to test them once no longer in motion, so im thinking maybe humans are still needed for testing but in a few years or more maybe not?

Exactly. Taken from this article:

> And yet, how also we have changed, and continue to adapt to the new ways of working.

Assuming this trajectory continues, the best case is the only adapting which we'll need is to sit in the assembly line chair: wages reduce to that of a skilled factory worker, little to no leverage in labor market, and economic precarity.

Well I mean - I don’t think it’s so much that you’re needed to hit “enter” - anybody who’s used an agent on full auto has already experienced that lack of need.

What is needed is a human at the beginning, to decide what needs to be done - and a human at the end, to decide whether it’s finished.

For a while at least, specialized knowledge will be a huge asset, if not necessarily strictly necessary, for the beginning and end.

Possibly even that might pass away - but I m a little more skeptical there, because a fully automated proceeds of choosing what to work on is really a whole different world altogether. It’s not just one where humans aren’t required to do menial tasks, it’s one where humanity isn’t required period - at which case, what’s the point of any of this.

I don’t see us getting to that point within my lifetime.

While that sounds a little doomerish and probably for good reason, there is the obvious alternative.

Dont change. Software developers do not have to change anything they control their means of production and we dont HAVE to use any of this stuff. IF you are saying that there will be non-engineers willing to step in to hit enter (as in the business/product people) and LLMs will be good enough to do with it, Im ok with that.

I encourage business people to go down that path, especially since I have no organizational responsibility to help them. So if they run into even one little issue, I wont look at their code, I wont let it into a repo and I can just walk away.

There will be people who cross over and will want to help the people using LLMs and some will be technical. But it wont be in large numbers and it will be based on extraction and not pay very well at all. It will pay less every day as the LLM usage goes up to the CTOs desk.

More power to them! At the end of the day someone WILL have to hit enter, and it wont be me in some low paid slopshop.

What Im saying is the industrys future and mine are not intertwined. The tech industry is of no interest to me as a software engineer. They have jumped their own fake shark.

> fortunately they will always need me to sit here to hit the "Enter" key.

Nothing fortunate about it. That's the part I hate the most about today's LLMs. That you still have to do QA for them regarding the design. I should be able to arrive at cool result with 5% of current steering effort, if any. I still feel like a bottleneck between nothing and cool stuff existing. Unfortunately it's unavoidable until they read my mind and know what cool means for me.

For me that turning point was 10-15 years ago.

I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.

It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.

It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.

People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".

Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.

Doing coding professionally already stripped nearly all the fun out of coding for me years before AI got good at coding, so when it comes to "how fun is it to be a software engineer", AI didn't have any negative impact for me. Being a professional software engineer was already extremely boring. Cycle after cycle, ticket after ticket, feature after feature, meeting after meeting... constant blur of meaningless shit. Not totally meaningless - it delivers actual value for customers. But meaningless for me.

If anything, AI has made it more fun simply because it means not having to think as much about the drudgery of details: syntax, API schemas, boilerplate code... And by "more fun" I mean "somewhat less unfun". Cause it's still not fun. But AI makes my burnout somewhat more tolerable.

of course there'll be a FOSS community. with everything that's been happening I've yet to see anything even suggesting xkcd 2347 is being impacted here, except the thankless maintainer can bounce ideas off an agent now.

I don't know, sometimes I feel like I've been misled, I come back to the code that was generated, I find so many bad choices, claude never subtracts, it keeps piling on new code. Some minor things get declared as unbreakable rules, regardless of context. It memorizes the tiniest exception as some big decision and all new code follows those new rules it made up. Good luck cleaning up all the nonsense to all who just vibe coded their apps. It has to be steered constantly, if you care about understanding the code that is. The LLM will happily use gibberish variable names, long functions that mix responsibilities, inconsistent code style and so on. Give it a prompt to review the code over and over again, ten times in a row, it will always find something, that one race condition that wasn't handled, or it will warn about something that is clearly not important, but it won't realize that it showed rendering code into the core logic component. It can fix it once it's pointed out, it's good for refactoring and doing sweeping changes across the codebase, but it's better to be on top of things, because it can lose its way behind your back.

As a maybe interesting contrast. I got into tech because I wanted to build things. Coding was just a necessary step. What I really liked was creating ideas for what we could build, thinking about UX, thinking about error conditions and what we do when two things disagree.

I am an OSS maintainer and I can tell you the job is terrible. Not because of the thankless work (I am sponsored by a corp for the work) but because we're still allowing public PRs. Plenty of people that "want to help" just push walls of text and code and 2 days later ask why hasn't their contribution been accepted yet. And when will it be? Because they need it ASAP!

In the old days my team leader would review our PR and every time will remind us that he can “compile the code in his head”. This was 10 years ago, I still find it corny and disturbing.

I don’t want to go back to those corny bro programmers.

I think it's heavily dependent on what type of dev role it is. There has always been a split between the startups and the corporate world.

In the case of working at startups, I'd agree that you don't (and never really needed to) hire extra devs.

Since this is HN, I know most hate corporate jobs, but that's where all the stability is and where AI is struggling to find footing. This rejection of AI puts a sorely needed spotlight on the cultural divide, and much of SV bet way too big on the wrong side of this misunderstanding.

i dont think we'll ever saturate the amount of software there is in the world unless we get some sort of scifi superintelligence scenario

Software allows us to build essentially infinite abstractions with infinite room to run. cheaper and better models released to the world means higher competition which drives up the cost for talent

however i think the value of 'hand crafted code' drops to zero unless we convince consumers to purchase software as a status symbol like rolls royces (seems unlikely, unless there is a concentrated marketing effort)

> Just like people still use typewriters, make their own clothes, or cook themselves dinner etc.

One of these things is not like the others. Your silicon valley bubble privilege is showing.

> We can still hand craft code.

We not only can, but we should. It will result in a much higher quality product, which works better, is easier to maintain, and has fewer bugs. Despite the hype, LLMs are not actually good at writing code.

This feels a bit like someone with one of the first cars thinking about how much faster they can distribute feed for all the horses.

That is, you haven't projected this forward just a bit further and are still thinking in terms of the old world where software is at all valuable and where you can have customers to sell it to.

I still feel myself falling into that trap, but haven't figured out what world replaces this.

every elevator needed an operator, how many elevators can a technician support? And what is the upskilling software developers can do? Not every software developer can be a good architect, PM or sales person (and even if they could be, there aren't going to be as many open positions anyways).

Did you look closely at what it had done? It's possible to save a lot of time on CI by omitting tests, for example...

I learned a lot of what I know by banging my head against the wall.

Knowing these things might not really be needed going forward, but it was a good workout, and I'm grateful I got a chance to go through that even if it becomes largely unnecessary.

Keep your identity small[0].

[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html