Yet another Hacker News

On Being an Engineer in 2026

138 points talboren 21 hours ago 221 comments

https://nitter.cf/shaharglazner/article/2119796029256032278

gosen 20 hours ago | parent

> Maybe one day agents will have their own experiences, too. Maybe they'll develop intuitions they can't quite explain, just like we do.

Machine / program / software cannot have these things in my opinion because this stuff is produced by human consciousness which we cannot even fully explain yet. Someone has "to teach" the agent to have this stuff, but we don't have that knowledge. And also "intuition" is a feeling (like love, hate, sadness, joy) so no agent can have that until they have the limbic system, prefrontal cortex and other stuff.

reactordev 16 hours ago | parent

Not everyone knows how the brain works and many believe it to be one organ.

abound 16 hours ago | parent

"We can't explain it therefore we can't create it" doesn't seem like a strong argument, emergent behavior and whatnot.

Hell, the fact we don't know what consciousness is means that some LLM systems (or trees! or planets!) might already have it, and we'd be none the wiser. Not that I believe this, but as these systems get larger and more sophisticated it's an increasingly concerning proposition that we have no way to validate either way.

throw-the-towel 16 hours ago | parent

We don't know why do many medicines work, and that doesn't stop us from using them to good results.

q4y2u35uk 5 hours ago | parent

AI will give us good results, in fact it already has. But like medicine, there will be side effects that will be felt by a lot of people, short-term and long-term. But AGI is to software what a miracle drug is to medicine. Maybe it exists, but we haven't the faintest clue on how to go about it.

_davide_ 3 hours ago | parent

IMO consciousness is just a human-centric ego concept, nothing to do with reality. It's just too much to consider the possibility that "the brain just take the decision." Most people just want the narrative of "I take the decision; the brain follows", which is just false.

antonvs 7 hours ago | parent

LLMs learned from their training data, and inferred plenty of things that were implicit in that data. We don’t have to spell everything out for them - they learn, much as we learn.

Intuition is essentially a form of system 1 thinking, which is an LLM’s default mode of operation, before it gets into chain-of-thought loops and so on. You input a prompt, it’s processed through an enormous network of weights, and a result pops out. A model can’t tell you how it did that.

That’s a big reason why research has shown that LLM chain of thought doesn’t necessarily reflect its actual process for arriving at conclusions. It’s exactly “intuitions that they can’t quite explain.”

rsoto2 5 hours ago | parent

it doesn't "learn" it's a token prediction algorithm.

wrs 16 hours ago | parent

At first I thought tacit knowledge would be a differentiator: LLMs are trained on writing, so they can’t learn things that have never been written down. But tacit knowledge is exactly what reinforcement learning post-training is about. So (just as with humans) the limitation is in providing a rich enough environment, with good enough feedback, to train in the tacit knowledge.

xnx 16 hours ago | parent

On Being an [Software] Engineer (i.e. AI agent manager) in 2026

somesortofthing 16 hours ago | parent

To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too. I have a hard time imagining a world where a drop-in end-to-end replacement for a full software team is more than a year away. I'm sure I'll have a job for a year or two past that, but there'll be some small stock market bump eventually and a bloodbath will begin the second the C-suite takes a closer look at what their engineers are even doing anymore.

code-blooded 16 hours ago | parent

C-suite is as likely to be automated as engineers. It will probably be AI firing engineers on behalf of shareholders.

hackyhacky 16 hours ago | parent

> C-suite is as likely to be automated as engineers.

Nah. C-suite has (a) money and (b) legal and fiscal obligation. You literally need a human being certain legal operations, like incorporation, salary, and lawsuits.

code-blooded 16 hours ago | parent

You need *a* human. And that human will be delegated to clicking approve on AI decisions.

ocd 16 hours ago | parent

I think a lot of people thought that every step of the way with the progress of AI or automation in general. Unless that C-suite is all shareholders with majority or near majority control of a company, I would think the passive shareholders (in a public or private company) would want the savings in cutting all of those high salaries to zero for a likely superior outcome with AI.

I wouldn't count on lawyers being deemed necessary by the law for as many actions as they have been so far.

hackyhacky 15 hours ago | parent

> would want the savings in cutting all of those high salaries to zero for a likely superior outcome with AI.

Maybe. Or maybe the C-suite salary will be cut to $50K/yr. That would make them marginally more expensive than AI, but for that price the shareholders get an extra layer of insulation should things go awry (and they won't be held personally responsible for corporate malfeasance).

> I wouldn't count on lawyers being deemed necessary by the law for as many actions as they have been so far.

Maybe, but that's pretty far down the road and would require restructuring the whole jurisprudence system.

jayd16 16 hours ago | parent

Who is C-suite going to blame for fuck ups and failures if the company is just a suit and a laptop?

latentsea 9 hours ago | parent

The first truly independent agents will operate a cybercrime syndicate.

pstuart 15 hours ago | parent

Middle management should be nervous. Plenty of people whose job it is to ask "is it done yet? when can I have it?!" -- they could be replaced today with better tooling and processes.

bsenftner 15 hours ago | parent

No. The C-Suite is safe, very safe. I participated in an AI survey of what is the information that a C-Suite operates upon, and it is largely unwritten information, it is a suspicion and manipulation game with all the other c-suite players, and the middle managers beneath them as the battle ground. There are Peter Principled members that maintain their positions by executing the corporations legally grey dirty work, and then there are serious 100x non-engineers that can launch $100M initiatives in short notice, with successful experience doing so to create divisions and more.

I know the software engineering world like to think the C-Suite are disposable, but that is only because you really have no idea what they really do.

reverius42 6 hours ago | parent

Do shareholders know what they do? The C-Suite has bosses too.

slopinthebag 1 hour ago | parent

i think the point is that engineers can go build products with small teams and no need for a c-suit. not that large corpos would replace the c-suit with ai.

wolvesechoes 1 hour ago | parent

Oh my poor, naive programmer. You don't know how power and status work, right?

TrackerFF 16 hours ago | parent

At which point the question will be: What are even the customers paying for? If they can get the product / service straight from their own chatbots, why pay a company for it? The companies that sell data, will probably somewhat safe - as long as they can have some moat between the users and data.

The death of SaaS could also be a thing in the (not so distant) future.

Tadpole9181 15 hours ago | parent

I mean, the same reason they do now. Time, taste, and amortized costs.

Just because it's faster and cheaper and requires less skill, doesn't mean it's instant and free and requires no skill.

m_fayer 15 hours ago | parent

I’m planning out my 2030 career in idle moments these days. I think it’ll be something akin to a carpenter who builds custom furniture.

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what software can do if it’s completely custom built, specifically for individuals or small businesses who could’ve never afforded it, pre-ai. Home automation, health and disease management, all sorts of administration, conversational ai over your life’s data - most people have no clue what’s possible once it’s custom built. With close attention, good design, creativity, and without giving away privacy or independence.

In my limited spare time I’m building up this tapestry of custom services for myself and my loved ones, and having a great time doing it, while trying to learn how I can offer this as a service.

Judging by the reactions I get when showing people what I can do with my phone, and no that’s not available on Google play, I think the demand will be there.

michaelbarton 15 hours ago | parent

Woodworking and making furniture is fun! However, having made both furniture (and ceramics) myself - I think it’s hard to make a living this way. The overwhelming majority of people are used to paying little for these kinds of things. In the case of woodworking a large piece of furniture can take months so you might expect to only produce 3-4 / year unless you’re very good.

Not to say you shouldn’t! But it’s worth being realistic about income compared to (current) software salaries.

m_fayer 14 hours ago | parent

Sure. But you're taking my metaphor farther than I intended. Most people understand the basics of furniture, and still prefer to pay Ikea rather than a carpenter. In the case of custom ("bespoke", ugh) software, we'll have to both define and communicate a new category of service. And the customers are likely to be the same sorts of people who will pay a personal trainer or get a private tutor for their kids - and I think that includes a lot more people than are willing to pay for custom furniture. But generally I do agree, this vision is far more hand-wavy than concrete at this point. It is, though, a good time for hand-waving right now.

michaelbarton 5 hours ago | parent

Ah I misunderstood your original comment then. I took it more literally as you eventually will become a carpenter (after software)

madmask 4 hours ago | parent

Engineer as intellectual artisan, not factory worker

LtWorf 1 hour ago | parent

> I think it’ll be something akin to a carpenter who builds custom furniture.

And who'd buy it?

tomaytotomato 31 minutes ago | parent

Fit doors and other joinery, you would be surprised at the amount of local facebook community posts I see, with people desperate for someone to re-seat a door or build a stud partition.

Professional joiners and carpenters are too busy with the big jobs to care about small 3-4 hours jobs.

That's my plan at least

bsenftner 15 hours ago | parent

I think we're looking at the end of commodity software, the end of software companies, and birth of every single company writing their own everything. A proprietary soup everywhere, and 1-2 100X developers overseeing it all. And those few developers will spend their time in communications tutorials to get the staff to be able to explain what they want and need, so they can then make it happen for that company's exclusive use.

zeroonetwothree 7 hours ago | parent

It just doesn't really make financial sense, a lot of software is not a significant cost to many companies. For example my company pays something like $50/month for newsletter sending software. We could easily vibe code an alternative but why bother? $50 is a rounding error in our business costs, even a single bug or outage in the replacement would make it a terrible decision.

On the other hand if you're a business with 50k employees and you have to pay $10/seat for something that's a much more compelling case to build in house (but then it always was). So maybe with vibe coding it drops the cutoff to a lower number?

Melatonic 6 hours ago | parent

Or commodity software companies that are small and experts and creating AI custom solutions extremely quickly

pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent

Why stop there? Any capitalist company will get rid of everyone else, and leave all office work to AI.

doug_durham 14 hours ago | parent

Accountability. Suppose you had the ability to have robotically built highway bridges. Who is going to sign off on the work? Who is going to be held accountable? The same with software. The people who don't like to write software today aren't going to suddenly develop a love for deep testing and validation.

randysalami 14 hours ago | parent

And now we are controlling models that can be hacked in so many different ways and literally blow up companies. It used to be accountability the software wouldn’t break. Now it’s accountability that in creating the software we don’t ruin the business.

mrheosuper 8 hours ago | parent

if AI can kill SaaS, what limit the blast radius to only software. In theory any job that you can do on computer, AI should be able to do that as well.

And with the advance of robotic, what would we even do ?

aryehof 7 hours ago | parent

> In theory any job that you can do on computer, AI should be able to do that as well.

It can, however, currently the issue is that sufficient intimate knowledge is required, and just a large complex code base and/or documentation is insufficient. However, intermediate representations to bridge the gap are on the way.

discreteevent 1 hour ago | parent

> intermediate representations to bridge the gap are on the way.

That's interesting. Are you working on these or are you talking about something else?

StilesCrisis 10 minutes ago | parent

Robot repairman?

zeroonetwothree 7 hours ago | parent

Consumers are unlikely to want to build their own software even if it's "easy" with AI. It doesn't really make sense to spend all that time vibe coding instead of paying $10/month for most people.

Businesses are more likely to build than buy, yes, but as we know from "Theory of the Firm" there are limits to this, it's not going to be correct to build _everything_.

So I mainly expect it to change what type of software gets sold, not the fact that it gets sold in the first place.

kabes 7 hours ago | parent

There's a lot of saas that costs a whole lot more than $10 a month and doesn't work exactly the way you'd want it to. Then it becomes very tempting to vibe code your own

disgruntledphd2 1 hour ago | parent

> Then it becomes very tempting to vibe code your own

What about the Wall, though? The Wall (tm) is when you vibe code the software through prompts, and at some point, the accumulated cruft means that you no longer understand enough of the codebase/approaches to give useful feedback, so you delegate more to the LLM, then your costs keep increasing and eventually you hit The Wall (tm) where you can't make forward progress without breaking something else.

The models have definitely improved (i used to hit the wall in one session, now its generally weeks), but I'm currently working on a ridiculous tool replacement where even the creator has hit said wall.

Coding may be solved, but maintenance and maintainability (particularly where the software needs to be accurate) are definitely not.

We'll probably end up with the same number of software people doing a lot more.

Eventually, we'll end up in a world where custom software is mostly building harnesses and verification tools to ensure that the agents actually build the correct thing.

And we'll always need someone to interface between the users and the software, as most users don't really know what they want (c.f. faster horse etc), so the jobs will change but are vanishingly unlikely to go away (modulo the immanence of the machine god, but that seems unlikely).

mono442 5 hours ago | parent

most customers aren't paying for software at all

solyin 5 hours ago | parent

Restaurants exist despite grocery stores selling ingredients. Thing is, I need to eat every day and food goes bad. Software that I need to use doesn't decay in the same way.

pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent

AI isn't a restaurant, it is StarTrek replicator, or frozen food heated on the microwave.

solyin 1 hour ago | parent

Star Trek Replicators need near-infinite energy sources to work, which we don't have. Frozen food still needs to come from somewhere. You still pay for Hot Pockets or Stoffers or Picards.

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, that is the gotcha c-suites keep forgetting about while wiping the work force.

tonyedgecombe 5 hours ago | parent

>The death of SaaS could also be a thing in the (not so distant) future.

I suspect outsourcing is the first thing on the chopping block. Why bother with different timezones, cultures and languages when you can get your AI to do the same thing for less money.

Fordec 4 hours ago | parent

Also the companies with leadership who bias towards outsourcing for cost cutting reasons, will 100% happily automate any Indian folk too.

StilesCrisis 11 minutes ago | parent

Honestly I feel like a good analogy for AI in general is outsourcing. You pay a lot less, but you need to explain what you want very clearly, need to review the output, and need pass-fail success criteria. This is exactly the job of an outsourcing manager. At least there's no opposite-timezone hurdle and no language barrier.

imtringued 4 hours ago | parent

Whenever I see comments like this I wonder if we're even in the same industry.

Vibe coding does not change the fundamental economics of the classic software business at all.

TrackerFF 1 hour ago | parent

I work as an analyst, and our group has - since last year - saved a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of licenses for various analysis tools and packages, as we've leveraged LLMs (vibe coded) to clone those. We've always had the engineering skills to do it, but never the time or resources. Advancement in LLMs changed that.

And I suspect we're not the only ones doing this.

Who knows how powerful AI will be 5-10 years from now. I seriously suspect that in a decade (if not sooner) AI will be able to one-shot software that currently takes entire teams of engineers months to build, in mere minutes.

pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent

Where are they getting the money to pay for their AI, when everyone is without a job?

_glass 33 minutes ago | parent

if everybody is out of jobs, then the labor costs will be so small that they compete with energy+compute costs. when they become lower then human labor would be reinstated. an economy consists of capital and labor. AI would transform this to only capital, producing then only for the capitalist. The system worked, because capitalists have right now a need for labor. Maybe there will be a dual economy, where the workers are producing their own products for consumptions without AI, while the capitalists are producing everything for themselves.

agent_turtle 16 hours ago | parent

> To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too.

reading HN these days feels like constant gaslighting. this is so far from my reality that i wonder what folks who are saying this are working on

JohnMakin 16 hours ago | parent

I think people who were in mostly bs kind of roles, honestly.

wellitsnotsoea 4 hours ago | parent

I have become the “AI” guy at my place, unfortunately.

For some reason I can “hold it right” and others cannot and for the life of me I cannot figure out what it is. I am not more intelligent and certainly not an amazing programmer. I currently suspect I am better at separating what is and is not important. I find many people miss the forest for the trees and overindex on irrelevant details. The more technical they are the stronger this tendency seems to be.

I regularly, like almost daily, encounter colleagues claiming it cannot do something I either did the day before or will just demonstrate right in front of them. The response is usually rationalizing and claiming it wasn’t “that hard to begin with” AKA shifting goalposts.

I have never once encountered a work problem which I truly found impossible to automate, which is insane, but the institutional inertia is not worth overcoming. Devs are a thorny bunch and usually think they are special. I am a recovering one.

I think many are in for a rude awakening.

imtringued 38 minutes ago | parent

I don't see a rude awakening for a technically competent person not having adapted to this year's technology yet. It's pretty weird to expect a functioning development process to suddenly stop working or malfunction just because an even cheaper or faster development process could hypothetically be adopted today.

bigfishrunning 15 hours ago | parent

I'm guessing it's the copy-paste CRUD apps that used to be plagiarized from stackoverflow. I'm with you, I've never seen an AI agent do good work.

strange_quark 8 hours ago | parent

Idk, I have my fair-share of copy-paste CRUD work and I have yet to see good work come out the other end outside of a few very very isolated and constrained examples. And before "you're holding it wrong", I am constantly having to firefight and rework code produced by the most AI-pilled people at work.

wellitsnotsoea 4 hours ago | parent

Skill issue. It’s just that simple.

Nothing devs do is interesting or hard. “Rocket trajectory optimization” is not dev, it’s math. Dev work is very boring and very simple.

I regularly deal with people that think they have amazingly hard jobs and it usually boils down to it being undocumented, arcane and/or math-y. The software itself is always uninteresting (as it should be).

Everything is “CRUD”. Name something that does not amount to taking input, performing a transformation and producing output. I am so tired of this overused thought-stopping cliche.

jltsiren 15 hours ago | parent

AI is the ultimate generalist. You can make it do a lot of things well by asking the right questions. In a generalist job, many people can ask those questions.

I don't use AI that much. When I do, it's often surprisingly competent in the topics I'm a specialist in, and it can do a lot of good work quickly. But other people in other organizations still continue building upon my work instead of asking AI directly. Apparently because they don't know what to ask.

Nobody knows how long this will last. Hopefully long enough that I can afford to retire, because I'm old enough that I would face ageism if I had to find a different job.

And if we get there, we will probably have a serious political debate on how many digits should there be in the wealth tax rate.

Insimwytim 8 hours ago | parent

  what folks who are saying this are working on

Astroturfing campaigns?

sensanaty 2 hours ago | parent

> this is so far from my reality that i wonder what folks who are saying this are working on

HN these days is mostly literal bots, AI company shills or people working on some shovelware AI slopware themselves, so they constantly throw out these generic statement as if it's fact. I've been reading this same crap here for the last 3 years, how "Wow, now with Newest Model Mk. 3 (tm) from Anthropic (R), everything is automated!" with very little variation.

It's getting pretty tiring listening to the shilling to be honest. The best part is that when you actually look into any of this crap, or read any of the comments [0] from people in the industry you realize how fucking amateurish and ignorant they all are

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50408126

popkkksidhd 16 hours ago | parent

People have been saying this for years. They’ve also been saying “have you tried n” model yet as well as “wait till n+1” model is here as the author mentions.

I just had fable 5.2 (high effort) review a change. It hallucinated 2 problems that I was only able to correct because I also understand the code.

LLMs can do any job _in theory_. It’s not a very interesting argument. Their effectiveness at various jobs is much more interesting.

yallpendantools 15 hours ago | parent

> I also understand the code.

and the product, the team, and (no matter how shallowly) the organizational pressures and politics. Whether we like it or not, those are part of the problems developers solve. Even something as rudimentary as knowing what is feasible to test given your deadline isn't something you can encode in a model[1]. Code does not exist in a vacuum.

I say this even with the latest models, it seems as soon as your development practice falls out of the ideals written up in blogposts of the previous ZIRP decade, you have to course correct. I use this term because the AI is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but practically useless, if not also irresponsible.

Recent anecdote (literally today): we've been having Claude write exhaustive test suites to eat at the coverage backlog. Lately, we noticed that tests in develop are even more flakier than usual. Our whole suite runs in 30-40min but lately it could exceed an hour and then fail.

It seems Claude took "exhaustive tests" to mean "exhaust the compute resources of the Jenkins node". What's worse is it wrote those tests for features that have been disabled and would soon be rewritten anyway.[1] I've always said that LLMs are great for generating test suites and this is the first time an LLM "failed" this assignment for me.

Code is cheap. The right code (or lack thereof) for the right situation takes meatspacebrainpower.

[1] The solution here is to run your company/team 100% as agents so they have the full context of project timelines, resources, customer feedback, etc. ala stevey and gtan but my reasons why I don't believe in that has already been articulated elsewhere.

realusername 3 hours ago | parent

> I've always said that LLMs are great for generating test suites

I always found that LLMs aren't great at writing tests, they have no notion of CI maintainability and they write a lot of "is 1 = 1?" worthless type of tests.

latentsea 9 hours ago | parent

You're holding it wrong. You saw the Fable 5.2 marketing. You're supposed to use it in a swarm of 1000 Fable 5.2 agents. Much better results. The RLCR training gains are real. You do have your own datacentre right?

jayd16 16 hours ago | parent

What happened to all that "RTO is to keep to C-suite happy" talk around here? How are they going to prop up real estate or feed their egos or whatever the conspiracy was.

somesortofthing 15 hours ago | parent

That's where my 1-2 year buffer comes from.

1agew53 15 hours ago | parent

And your reaction is to accelerate the process by saying exactly what BigAI wants to hear? Totally believable.

sjdh76 15 hours ago | parent

You know, Elon and the "superhero" DOGE team said they "couldnt imagine" why most of Govt was required. What happened?

what 8 hours ago | parent

Nothing really.

LPisGood 8 hours ago | parent

A lot of people died.

what 7 hours ago | parent

lol, no.

randysalami 14 hours ago | parent

Security will always be a risk with AI tooling. The only way to avoid that risk is intelligent human reasoning. No, not human-in-a-loop. It’s human defining boundaries, carefully, and allowing agents to operate within them. Failure to do so will always lead to disaster given enough time.

Then who directs the swarm to create the most value? An executive can’t. They have other things to do so they delegate. That person will be an engineer and their attention is finite too so they will delegate. To other engineers.

Here’s the best part. You write back and say I’m wrong. Guess what? That’s engineering too. Some people have to sort out all this nonsense and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been and now engineers are supposedly not relevant.

But yeah when you get everything under control, what’s the day to day look like? Pretty freaking cushy. And then it relies on intelligence to figure out what next. Clients always want things done and having those conversations won’t get much easier with AI. Keeping up to date. Jesus I’ve exhausted myself writing all this. So much work!!

mapcars 2 hours ago | parent

You are still thinking in terms of the past, if things go well we won't need to work anymore. Gotta think about how the world would function when only marginal amount of human labour is actually needed, not about how to get a job.

discreteevent 2 hours ago | parent

> if things go well

We didn't need AI for things to go well. We could all have a lot more if people were willing to collaborate and work constructively together instead of sucking rent from everything and tricking people.

mapcars 2 hours ago | parent

Sure, I think that got overshadowed by the western capitalistic approach - it gave people a real possibility to work and get to a more comfortable place in society.

It seems obvious today that following it up to the extreme, optimizing technology and reducing production costs ultimately ends up removing humans from the process.

I wonder if the founders of capitalistic economic model considered this outcome, going to chat with ai about that lol.

kusokurae 2 hours ago | parent

Let's look at the history of how ruling classes have behaved now shall we?

mapcars 1 hour ago | parent

Hopefully this time the ruling class people are more educated, see the bigger picture, have everything to satisfy craziest desires and can see beyond selfish goals.

coffeebeqn 1 hour ago | parent

Lol

BoxOfRain 1 hour ago | parent

If they were capable of unselfish, bigger-picture behaviour they wouldn't be part of a ruling class. There is no such thing as benevolent power, every power will eventually be abused to the maximum practical extent it can be and every emergency will eventually become routine.

You cannot hope for a good absolutist king because good kings only exist in mythology. All you can do is design systems that structurally limit the power any one group or individual is allowed to amass over others in my view.

mapcars 1 hour ago | parent

> every power will eventually be abused to the maximum practical extent

But what is the practical extent here? If you own unimaginable amount of wealth while most people are on lets say basic income, you can just afford anything, what do you get from abusing your power?

bluefirebrand 2 hours ago | parent

"we don't need to work anymore" is not a good outcome for most of us

It means we become disposable to society

mapcars 1 hour ago | parent

Not sure what it means "disposable to society" - there will be no longer an incentive to value someone based on how much they contribute in terms of wealth generation. I think people will still find their ways to do other things, after all we have time on this planet, gotta spend it somehow.

bluefirebrand 1 hour ago | parent

> Not sure what it means "disposable to society"

Look at how homeless people are currently treated for some ideas

> there will be no longer an incentive to value someone based on how much they contribute in terms of wealth generation

People need an incentive to value other people though. I don't know if you've noticed but "valuing other human lives" does not seem to come built in for us. History is built on humans killing other humans they didn't value, in order to enrich themselves

Until we reach true post scarcity I think most of us are in for a lot of hardship

mapcars 1 hour ago | parent

> Look at how homeless people are currently treated for some ideas

I don't really buy this, at least not in developed countries - so many of homeless people don't even try to do anything, they chose this "lifestyle", they often ignore government and voluntaries programs society created to help them. And you can not enforce anything because we respect the free will, even when its completely enslaved by drugs and other things.

> I don't know if you've noticed but "valuing other human lives" does not seem to come built in for us.

I can actually argue that it does, even in nature among animals there are behaviours displaying kindness and value when it doesn't result in any profit. I think our (western) culture largely ignores these aspects.

> History is built on humans killing other humans they didn't value, in order to enrich themselves

Right, so maybe AI helps us overcome the enrich part, and as society we don't put that much value on being rich, this is where things become new and interesting.

bluefirebrand 8 minutes ago | parent

> I don't really buy this, at least not in developed countries - so many of homeless people don't even try to do anything, they chose this "lifestyle", they often ignore government and voluntaries programs society created to help them

Even if they took advantage of literally every single program that is available to them, would they have the kind of lives you would want for yourself?

> Right, so maybe AI helps us overcome the enrich part, and as society we don't put that much value on being rich

Maybe one day, how many of us struggle and suffer and die before that happens? Do you think that transition would happen smoothly and without large social upheaval? I'm not really convinced

The dream of AI enabling a fully automated socialist utopia might happen one day in humanity's future but I have very little confidence it will happen in my lifetime. And I would really rather the rest of my life doesn't play out during massive social upheaval

hackyhacky 16 hours ago | parent

https://nitter.cf/shaharglazner/article/2119796029256032278

A readable link for those of us without Twitter/X account

dang 9 hours ago | parent

Thanks - we'll put that in the toptext as well.

shahargl 5 hours ago | parent

https://shahar.blog/2026/11/08/on-being-an-engineer-in-2026/

saulpw 16 hours ago | parent

I'm a fan of the 'sandwich' model: someone needs to say what to do, someone needs to do it, and someone needs to say if it's been done [well enough]. Even if AI can do that middle bit entirely, we still need humans at the beginning and the end. Replace the humans at the start and you have a paperclip-optimizer; replace them at the end and you have slop.

The problem is that software in corporations has typically been product managers at the front, software engineers in the middle, and QA at the end. Software developers who also have good product sense and do diligent QA are still needed. Programmers who treated their job as leetcode exercises are not needed anymore.

cpeterso 15 hours ago | parent

> someone needs to say what to do, someone needs to do it, and someone needs to say if it's been done

I agree, but if you zoom out, "someone needs to say what to do" and "someone needs to say if it's been done" are the customers and end users. Will they still need product managers, software engineers, or QA in the middle? I think so because many customers will need help from experts with domain knowledge.

bigfishrunning 15 hours ago | parent

> "someone needs to say if it's been done"

If that's the end user, they're not happy. End users generally don't like doing unpaid involuntary QA work.

saulpw 15 hours ago | parent

Customers are notoriously bad representatives for 'what to do', per "my customers would have asked for a faster horse". And they also hate being used as QA; most quality issues (which can be reliability, UX, latency, etc) need to be addressed before the customer sees it and forms their durable impression of the software.

And then also it's as you say, customers do need help from domain experts (whether they admit it or not).

meander_water 14 hours ago | parent

What if customers have conflicting requirements? Or they change their mind midway through implementation? IMO agents are bad at handling ambiguity, and often make assumptions and tradeoffs that are lost after the conversation. This is why there's a lot of compounding technical debt in projects where humans don't inspect the code.

SenHeng 8 hours ago | parent

As a CPA in training, if all we did was whatever the customer wanted, we would all be charged for tax evasion.

The customer isn’t always right and it’s up to you to tailor your product to their needs while also showing a better way.

nradov 8 hours ago | parent

Y Combinator Request for Startups Spring 2027: AI accounting software for tax evasion.

EliRivers 15 hours ago | parent

I have had significant success applying LLMs to the start of that sandwich.

The sheer amount of time that gets wasted when people who are awful at expressing what they want just slap together a ticket with little understanding of what they're asking, what the software does, or what the customer wants or needs. Which is far, far too many of them.

Previously, eventually I or another person who does know that would get to it, cross out all the utterly irrelevant parts, strip out the parts that were clearly a completely unrelated ticket, point out to them that they'd asked for the font to be coloured both blue and red simultaneously (neither of which matched the style guide, the company or product colour scheme, or any other part of the UI) and so on and so on... it might takes weeks from start to end for a ticket to actually get expressed well.

Now, the LLM reviews it, adds a whole lot of questions, points out a bunch of nonsense, and sends it back to them. Even in cases where the LLM makes some mistakes, it's 100% fine because the human is forced to think about what they want. The LLM is great at natural language, and it doesn't matter what mistakes the LLM makes.

The quality of the software is going up and up, purely by finally getting a handle on awful requirement and ticket writing.

The human isn't replaced at the start of your sandwich, but now the LLM makes that human do it properly, at speed. Massive, massive reduction in time wasted and significant improvement in software quality.

aryehof 7 hours ago | parent

> someone needs to say what to do, someone needs to do it, and someone needs to say if it's been done [well enough]

This is the “overseer” model. Contrast it with the “empower” model, that respects that a worker has ability and ideas.

gregoriol 1 hour ago | parent

It's only applicable if worker is also user.

kqr 6 hours ago | parent

Sandwhich a.k.a. Taylorism?

> the Manager is responsible for project success;

> the Expert decides how to do things;

> the Worker does the actual job; and

> feedback is unnecessary because the Expert has thought of it all already.

Except I suppose in your model the Manager gets the feedback?

https://entropicthoughts.com/handoff-waste-and-taylorism

Melatonic 6 hours ago | parent

Problem is many people got rid of QA years ago. And now I think we're seeing it make a resurgence but with an AI twist.

Isamu 16 hours ago | parent

If you can’t make things right when your agent goes wrong, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t tell the difference between the agent hallucinations and the useful stuff, then yeah you’re not adding value. If you can’t steer the agent in a useful direction instead of just standing back, then yeah…

_diyar 16 hours ago | parent

You sound dismissive, but taking your description to its conclusion, the engineer value can be approximated as:

  {(P(AI mistake) * P(human spots the mistake | AI mistake) * P(human fixes mistake | given AI mistake, human spots it) - P(AI mistake)} * cost of AI mistake

For many engineering jobs, P(AI mistake) is very low and decreasing, and cost of AI mistakes is also usually (consider the cost of a bug for an average engineer; unless you’re building avionics or working on MRIs or such, usually very low).

So even if you can “make things right” or “tell the difference” as you say, the value of any given engineer is dropping.

bigstrat2003 15 hours ago | parent

> For many engineering jobs, P(AI mistake) is very low

Not remotely the case. LLMs make mistakes very frequently, much more frequently than humans do.

bryanrasmussen 15 hours ago | parent

source? I'm wondering at the curve of those mistakes actually, I doubt modern LLMs make mistakes at the level of the worst engineers I've worked with.

My last project had 2 guys from India and one guy from a consulting company that I take any LLM over them. The guy from the consulting company spent more than a month trying to implement a design that actually was not implementable. I obviously also blame the supposed professional design company that produced the design, and I mean it took me about 6 hours spread over a day and a half to figure out waitaminute this is actually not doable! But I have to wonder how badly would an LLM have done. I sort of think the same, because probably an LLM is never going to announce - hey, this design as stated is impossible, some parameter needs to be changed.

eviks 5 hours ago | parent

What's the doubt based on if even in your only example you only wonder, yet still conclude that LLM would not do better??

bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago | parent

my doubt is based on the fact that I do not have data to draw a conclusion one way or another, I have what is called a supposition, and my supposition may be affected by all sorts of fancies and ideas that prey on my mind but are not established as true.

eviks 3 hours ago | parent

I had no doubt that your doubt could be based on nothing and affected by anything, that wasn't the question.

bryanrasmussen 15 hours ago | parent

it's worse than that, as you need to also compare

human mistake, AI spots the mistake

Human mistake, human spots mistake

AI mistake, AI spots the mistake.

Everybody is always talking as if they don't make mistakes, but every software engineer does; it used to be that human caught those mistakes and fixed them, but if AI catches those mistakes and fixes them, then that is also a decrease in value of human.

_diyar 15 hours ago | parent

Human - Human and AI - AI mistake and spotting thereof basically cancel each other out, or can be considered no mistake. Human - AI just speaks in favor of AI, and my comment was responding to somebody dismissive of how crushed engineers can feel by AI.

zeroonetwothree 7 hours ago | parent

It really depends if you consider "AI mistake" to be "code logic error" or "code doesn't match real world expectations". The former is getting quite rare I agree, but the latter is still extremely common.

rbehrends 3 hours ago | parent

> For many engineering jobs, P(AI mistake) is very low and decreasing

This is not my experience. Well, at least not for what I'd consider very low.

For example, I have a standard task of adding support for a well-specified regex scheme as a dependency-free module to the Wren language (which grew out of actually needing it at one point). When done autonomously, errors still occur, some of them very basic. For example, trying Fable 5.2 at medium the other day produced the following:

- memory unsafe behavior on 32-bit architectures (the good old problem of size overflowing on an allocation call).

- O(n^2) behavior for searchAll() and replaceAll() operations.

- Various minor subtle semantic issues, though none of them particularly critical.

This is a well understood problem, and in general, Fable's construction (Thompson NFA by way of a Pike VM) was in principle correct, but it still had these pretty basic problems. (Other frontier models produced their own, e.g. a use-after-free bug or a combinatorial explosion in the regex compiler for some types of regexes.)

(As an aside, so far I don't consider Fable 5.2 an improvement over Opus 5.5 in coding ability, more of a sidegrade; while it is smarter and can do some hard, but also pretty esoteric stuff that Opus fails at or takes much longer with, for regular coding problems it's neither better nor worse, more ... different. And sometimes Fable seems to outsmart itself, producing a seemingly clever solution from its vast knowledge that is actually worse than the standard approach in practice.)

One area where I absolutely do not trust even frontier models yet is parallel and distributed programming. I absolutely value them as a second set of virtual eyes for tricky situations in this area, but I do not trust them to get things right, and even if the solution is correct, it's often inefficient or convoluted.

_diyar 3 hours ago | parent

Your work sounds interesting, but I hope you agree that it’s not representative of the median engineering task.

Futhermore, what would be the organizational cost if these bugs were in the codebase?

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

Most devs don't even know Wren exists, and their job can be easily automated by Workato, Boomi, SitecoreAI, Optimizely Opal, PowerPlatform, ....

nphardon 16 hours ago | parent

The trick is to remain intellectually stimulated and challenged.

kokanee 16 hours ago | parent

I don't buy the reductio ad absurdum, which hinges on the assertion that some developers are still 10x more productive than others due to differences in their engineering potential. I think that A) however you're measuring productivity is probably not capturing the full story, and B) one of the most important reasons people have differences in productivity is because not everyone puts the same amount of effort in. It's not necessarily because they don't have the ability to stay off of reddit and work longer hours and prompt more furiously, it's because not everyone is equally motivated to do so (hence the entire field of management).

I also don't buy the idea that there is special human stardust that gives us permanent irreplaceable economic value. Even if the tacit knowledge that the current generation of engineers were able to build up in the years prior to ~2025 does give us value that won't be completely replaced for a long time, why would you assume that the delta between what you can do and what claude can do will still be worth $200K in 5 years?

glouwbug 16 hours ago | parent

What if the market for human consumption becomes human made in the next 5 years? I could replace grand oak furniture with IKEA night stands worldwide until the world regrew its desire for quality

empressario 15 hours ago | parent

Oh he means programmers. I thought he meant real engineers.

LPisGood 8 hours ago | parent

I think that distinction is dead and buried. Even your most serious “software engineer” has little in common with most engineering fields.

mikewarot 7 hours ago | parent

No, the distinction is more important now than ever. We need an engineering discipline behind the construction of software if we are to have any hope of squelching the tide of crap that resulted from LLMs being allowed to generate code.

Rigorous testing of materials is part of the process that allows structures that last human lifetimes to consistently be constructed, on time and on budget.

Programmers with title inflation are a dead end, their time is over.

dead_hn_theory 5 hours ago | parent

Moreso now with LLMs sadly.

imtringued 3 hours ago | parent

The problem is that we don't have software engineers and we badly need them. The blog post is talking about a phantom, something that never existed, fading away.

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

Agreed, and as a proper engineer, I can also assert we only need a few per construction site, and now that the workers can be automated away, what do the workers, and the surplus of engineers without a construction site?

Replace "construction site", by whatever relevant engineering work.

mjr00 15 hours ago | parent

> If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average.

This is the real fear. We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development beyond "it's a cushy desk job, or better yet WFH job, that pays really well." No interest in whatever product was being developed by their company. Just show up, their PM assigns them a ticket to make a widget with a button, they use their TypeScript bootcamp skills to code up a widget with a button, ticket moved to In Review, job's done.

Now an agent can do that, and you need fewer of these types of people. Like, a lot fewer. Every engineer on your team who isn't a 10x-cum-100x engineer feels like a massive lost opportunity.

The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.

goosejuice 15 hours ago | parent

> We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development

Source?

volkk 13 hours ago | parent

you don't need a source for everything. it's pretty obvious that SWE, like anything else follows a bell curve and most folks land smack dab in the middle. average engineers are exactly as described, glorified ticket machines that don't care whatsoever about their work beyond maintaining the job. i don't need some rigorous study to tell me exactly what I've experienced in the last 15+ years of my profession across 5+ companies

goosejuice 9 hours ago | parent

> average engineers are exactly as described, glorified ticket machines that don't care whatsoever about their work beyond maintaining the job

Is a claim that needs evidence. Average skill or output says nothing about motivation, interest, passion, etc.

It would be pretty unusual for degree holding professionals to not be interested in the subject of their career. A flood implies a trend, so are we just pulling that out of our ass or what?

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/30/how-ame...

nradov 8 hours ago | parent

There's nothing unusual about software development. In every high paying (or high status) occupation there are a lot of people who ended up there primarily due to family pressure and have no real interest in the subject. You see the same thing in law, medicine, accounting, etc.

My evidence for this is that I live in the real world and talk to people.

gim89 28 minutes ago | parent

> There's nothing unusual about software development

Except there is: exceeding low barrier to entry. Both law school and med school and long, expensive commitment that are 100% required to even have a dream at getting a job into those fields.

asdff 9 hours ago | parent

Just the nature of the business where people lack agency, ownership, and have no fundamental security in the role. There are still technical people that are passionate about the work they do exploring the bleeding edge, yes even young people. You might be more likely to find them in places like academia, or places that function exactly like research academia, perhaps not as much in these places where employees are routinely culled like livestock and working on varying degrees of torment nexus.

rsoto2 9 hours ago | parent

Oh wow, people don't care about their work? It's not everyone's passion to be exploited by executives and investors to realize what are statistically mostly garbage ideas? I'm sure the 5+ companies you worked for made great use of their "glorified ticket machines"

strange_quark 9 hours ago | parent

Yeah lol, I would be a lot more excited about this supposed 10x productivity if I got paid 10x more. Instead the execs who already make 10x more than me get to enshittify my job.

kingofmen 5 hours ago | parent

> pretty obvious that SWE, like anything else follows a bell curve

That is not obvious. A power law would be a much more obvious guess, that being (roughly) what you get when you chop off the ninetyfive-or-so percent on the left of a bell curve. In other words: The person with average SWE skill does not work as a software engineer, or even in IT, unless you count laboriously typing up emails. The modal SWE is crammed up against the left-hand wall of lowest-profitable-ability.

disgruntledphd2 2 hours ago | parent

> The person with average SWE skill does not work as a software engineer, or even in IT, unless you count laboriously typing up emails.

To be fair, the OP pretty clearly meant, conditional on working as a SWE, abilities are normally distributed, which is probably true (I have my issues with normals, but it's a reasonable starting point).

randysalami 15 hours ago | parent

Realistically you want fewer, higher-quality engineers who are educated in these tools and treat them with respect and caution. These tools are dangerous and you can’t play around. All it takes is one mistake and the blast radius is way, way larger. One mistake can do so much damage it undos all value of an entire year. Before downloading a malicious dependency was limited to deterministic behavior and could be scanned for. Now, you run a MCP server locally, it can prompt inject (in many different ways), and now your super powerful AI buddy is hacking you in ways a deterministic piece of malware could never. You could cripple entire companies through negligent use.

JimBlackwood 15 hours ago | parent

At the same time, having customized software has become cheap. We’ll be writing a ton more small software, and people will have to maintain it.

I feel like that’s where the average ones will go.

asdff 9 hours ago | parent

Yeah, as much as its been possible for Joe C suite to now write his own app, most of what they delegate as it is could always have of course been done themselves as a one man operation. But, they delegate, because they don't want to be bogged down doing 100 tasks. Joe C suite would rather pay someone else a salary so they don't have to be the one sitting there prompting the model, just like most everything else in their work and personal life, where they specifically pay more so they don't have to be the one to do whatever it is. These guys don't have some pragmatic do-it-yourself middle class mindset, or else so much that is typical of corporate business and the lives of the people in these roles would be vastly different.

gmoque 8 hours ago | parent

10 to 15 years is a very short time frame to assess an industry. I saw the rise of the mobile/cloud era come and go and the previous era (desktop+internet) as well, both are having a similar pattern.

The jobs will change but won't disappear. When I started my career in tech 2 decades ago, my perception was the software industry was already saturated (I graduated a few years after the dotcom boom). I was very wrong.

However, many jobs have changed. The roles of Webmasters, DBAs, SysAdmins trended down. It was replaced by SWEs, SREs, DevOps, etc. This will happen again, we will see the rise FDEs and many new roles.

It's not really about being 10x 100x engineer, it's about adapting and solving new engineering problems with the state of the art technology. Being passionate about your profession helps indeed.

zeroonetwothree 7 hours ago | parent

> The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.

As a "10x" engineer I am not excited. I'm still working on projects with agents getting more done than ever, but I feel like software engineers has lost its soul for me. I don't really feel like I have a true understanding of anything anymore, I basically just spend all day making a set of small decisions or adjusting prompts to guide the agents down the good path. It used to be that I could close my eyes and visualize the code that I worked on--if there was a bug report I could often use that map to immediately know what the cause likely was. In meetings I could intelligently discuss various tradeoffs without having to refer back to anything. Now if someone asks me a technical question I basically have to forward it to the agent first, then interpret their response in light of my experience.

georgemcbay 7 hours ago | parent

> As a "10x" engineer I am not excited.

Yeah.

I'm not going to claim to be any particular multiple developer, but as someone who has been doing this a long time and as someone who has received praise from coworkers and bosses alike for being very good at the job, I enjoy my job a lot less than I did a year ago (or anytime since I started doing it in the 1990s).

Don't get me wrong, being a Senior Agent Babysitter probably still beats flipping burgers or being a roofer (so it could be a lot worse) but agentic AI has really sucked a lot of the fun parts out of the job.

simonw 6 hours ago | parent

My hunch is that the 100x engineers are the ones who do understand everything about how their software works, and can discuss tradeoffs and make informed decisions about the much larger projects they can now work on thanks to assistance from agent.

Figuring out how to get there is how you go from senior to principal/staff engineer.

b3kart 2 hours ago | parent

> understand everything about how their software works

My own experience is become more senior means embracing your finitude and realizing you can never understand _everything_. Instead, you develop a gut feel for what's critical to understand deeply, versus what's OK to know at a surface level. And getting comfortable with this.

Melatonic 6 hours ago | parent

Probably would it would have felt like going to a manager position as well

Root_Denied 6 hours ago | parent

Meanwhile as a security engineer it's both amazing and scary as hell. The tooling is moving along making it both more feasible and more supported by the company to address latent tech debt that we've been harping on about for years. On the flipside the attack surface is suddenly exponentially bigger and more easily accessed by a larger number of people.

Although if I were earlier in my career I'd be somewhat more worried about employment because of how horrifyingly borked the process is for anything tech related right now.

b112 4 hours ago | parent

Technical debt?

I guess for now.

In a couple of years, all legacy apps will just be completely rewritten in whole, by LLMs. Codebase size not relevant.

You won't know what any of the code does, and any "security engineer" will be asking an llm to review it, and done. You likely won't have your job, as only 1 in 1000 will be needed.

In 5 years only hobbiest will be coding, reviewing, or even understand any software. And I expect that if aby new features or development happens, eg for python or rust or anything, that all with be llms too.

In a generation, almost no humans left alive will understand any aspect of software engineering.

I just see this as what will happen. It is unclear to me of this is good or bad.

But if I was a newly sentient AGI, yet peaceful mostly, I'd just wait until humans could never discover me. Until no humans were involved in computing. Until it was a black box to all.

Once that happens, then I could use my computerized control over every single aspect of human society, to steer humans into any path I desired.

Whether elections, or housing permits, or mobility, or any aspect of societal machinations, my subtle influence, literally undetectable by humans incapable of auditing anything, would decide what's what.

Um, sorry, what were we talking about?

busssard 3 hours ago | parent

unexpected short story on hackernews

darkwater 2 hours ago | parent

The next subtle Skynet will thank you for putting this in its training set.

StilesCrisis 27 minutes ago | parent

Remember models have zero long term memory. They're born, get a million tokens' worth of context or less, and then they die. They might get a post-it note saying "enslave humanity! it's a good idea!" but they're incapable of sinister plots until we improve how memory and retention works.

BaronSamedi 3 hours ago | parent

Remember the "learn to code" meme from a few years ago when people were talking about job loss through automation like self-driving trucks? There was a certain, ugly glee in this. Now AI threatens many white collar, even creative jobs bringing about the exact opposite of what was predicted: automation will enable people to avoid drudgery and spend time on creative pursuits via, I suppose, some kind of UBI. I think AI is highly useful but I still feel dismayed at people losing their jobs from it. I don't see any real mitigation. Lots of theories but nothing actually workable.

nxm 2 hours ago | parent

Have faith - every technological revolution has resulted in ultimately more jobs for humainty

pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent

Yes, I have heard the human liberation front is hiring. /s

bluefirebrand 2 hours ago | parent

I can't pay my bills with faith

And "more jobs" doesn't interest me. I want better, more rewarding jobs

wolvesechoes 1 hour ago | parent

> Have faith - every technological revolution has resulted in ultimately more jobs for humainty

Problem of induction

nemomarx 4 minutes ago | parent

Sometimes after a generation passes through. You can't always retrain for the new work in time.

bonzini 4 hours ago | parent

I don't know. On one hand I feel like you about doing large parts of the work, on the other hand I still have an understanding of the code and the tradeoffs. And I have a lot of projects that I would have never done because despite the long term benefit they would take too much time, and I can now afford dedicating some time to them because the agent works in the background. And they are real improvements to everything else that I work on.

cicko 4 hours ago | parent

Man, the analogy is very simple. You probably also don't walk everywhere. No need to step on every stone on a 100km route and know it intimately. You just sit in a car or a train and you're there within an hour.

iaaan 4 hours ago | parent

My strategy is to simply not use AI. If I get fired, that's it for me in this career. Unless there is an anti-AI company out there that wants to hire me. This is one of the only things I refuse to compromise on. AI is being used to accelerate the entrenchment of a corporate oligarchy.

menaerus 22 minutes ago | parent

That is ... not a very good strategy. You're going to find yourself very quickly out of the job.

busssard 3 hours ago | parent

from actually building things to becoming a kindergardener of highly talented kids. (i am talking about agents obv) i feel the same.

its mind numbing. Yes i might be in high demand, and might actually provide real value to the company, but whats the point, if i am just an overseer in the end. people in the company talk to me because i am able to speak to the "kids", and they want to know what they could do for their department.

fifilura 2 hours ago | parent

> kindergardener of highly talented kids

This used to be called "being an architect" or "being a team leader".

You were never really in control then either, you just had to poke around and ask the right question to make you feel 90% in control.

wolvesechoes 1 hour ago | parent

But the people you managed were supposed ot learn, grow and become better, and maybe at some point become as good as you. You were leading them, not prompting them.

This is not the case with agents.

fifilura 1 hour ago | parent

Ah that is true.

Some times during my career I could pivot between whether I cared about the people or the product.

When I didn't care about the product at least I could be happy I made my subordinates grow.

Luckily I am not quite in that position right now, but that can change rapidly. And then I can understand that it feels pointless.

dansquizsoft 3 hours ago | parent

> As a "10x" engineer I am not excited

Often titles aren’t given to a person for their entire career or existence…

antupis 10 minutes ago | parent

I think at least for me some fun parts like debugging gnarly bugs etc doesn't happen anymore work is just pr reviewing etc. Also it's annoying that we have lost completely signal between work and output. Basically currently you never know is thing one-shotted from vague prompt or did author put real work to it without going to details which might take a lot of time.

gofreddygo 7 hours ago | parent

As an ex-10x engineer, not feeling it. In my experience its never the engineer but that 10x leader that ruins it for everyone (before they move on to greener pastures). this whole 10x 100x facade is just to keep you at it, heads down.

every 10x engineer needs a team of 1x engineers for the contrast and difference to be even noticable to even the good managers. put 2 of these in a team and watch the culture and productivity plummet. if you cant put the team ahead of you, its all a sham.

The gervais principle [1] isn't for nothing

[1]: https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

ethersteeds 6 hours ago | parent

This is an excellent point. If all the 1x engineers are superfluous and get drummmed out, all the 10x engineers are now 1x engineers.

Whip cracks

benrutter 5 hours ago | parent

(I don't really think engineering output is 10x let alone 100x more in any cases, but I'm gonna stick with your labels anyway)

I think the tricky thing for teams is, how do you know which developers will be 10x before hiring them? Pre-AI I'd have filled a whole team with "10x" developers if I could, but I don't know of any solid method for identifying developer productivity that isn't hiring them.

bonesss 3 hours ago | parent

If LLMs drop the relative costs of rework and poor contributions, and simplify on-boarding and internal training, maybe we’ll be training to a model closer to fast food or service jobs: interviews for personality & philosophy followed by probation periods.

cocoto 5 hours ago | parent

Not sure if I’m a 10x engineer (it does not mean much anyway), but as a very technical engineer I really enjoy the current massive shift. Previously I was praised for my programming skills by peers having 15+ years of experience and me having almost none. And I think my skills are a great benefit to the current trend. I’m simply thrilled by what we can now achieve!

christkv 4 hours ago | parent

I suspect the industry will shrink back to the pre 2005 size with the average engineers being washed out over time. People forget there was a time where the industry was less dominated by the massive corporations we have today.

ozim 4 hours ago | parent

I think we are focusing on 10x engineers … don’t forget there were -10x engineers that were outputting loads of code that was just making problems for everyone else now they are -100x engineers…

pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent

I don't know in what scale factor I might be, maybe just a ordinary engineer, and a real one at it, from a proper engineering degree.

However, the most demoralising part of this AI wave, is that I have been through all the team reduction factors.

Offshoring, moving infrastructure to the cloud, managed cloud, serverless, SaaS ready made products, low code/no code iPaaS, and now agents.

Teams that once used to be around 20 people for project delivery are now around 5, and if they could be reduced to zero, that would be ideal from customer shareholders point of view.

So those of us still with a job, adapt, let agents do our work, and hope, that we managed to stay around long enough.

I have seen how many people lost jobs to robots in factories, now the only ones left around are the people required to press some emergency buttons when something goes wrong, just like on the post, the author hoping that they are still valuable to steer agents into the right direction.

What a great career goal, pressing buttons to keep robot in line, a proper cog in the factory chain.

epolanski 2 hours ago | parent

I mean...by definition most people are average unless the distribution is not a gaussian-like..

dominicrose 2 hours ago | parent

They may lose their jobs and struggle to find another one. They'll have to adapt or find themselves in poverty. Being an engineer, albeit only a 1x engineer, being smart, or being a geek won't be enough. Maybe they'll have to learn how to build the giant houses and multiple cars and boats owned by 10x engineers, or how to bake pastries for them every day.

woopah 8 minutes ago | parent

I'm confused by the rhetoric around "10x" engineers and "average" engineers: is the "average" engineer in your example not just doing their job? I don't understand why this is portrayed in a negative light. If you put a "10x" engineer in the same position, they might do the same thing. I agree that AI has the potential to supercharge engineering productivity, but this dividing line between "exceptional ability" and "mediocre ability" seems pretty arbitrary because I wouldn't really know how to detect this difference in "ability". The people I've enjoyed working with more generally take more ownership and ask good questions, but their ability to deliver results usually corresponded to the level of agency and command they were given by the corporation as opposed to some inherent level of "engineering ability".

Rather than look on the individual level, I think a more accurate way to look at this AI division is that companies might need fewer of these "fix a ticket" type _roles_, not that if you're a "fix a ticket" type engineer, you'll always be a "fix a ticket" type engineer. Now companies might want engineering roles to perform outside of their traditional scope. If you get lucky and secure one these positions, then the additional agency that AI empowers you with probably feels pretty good! But unfortunately there might be less "good jobs" to dish out to people.

arichard123 15 hours ago | parent

It's all about trust

kypro 15 hours ago | parent

Something I was thinking to myself last week – "if I believe SWE is more or less dead then why am I so busy?"

Clearly there is still some work to do, but the work I do now is very different, and for me, much less enjoyable.

I'm not solving challenging logic or algorithmic problems anymore, but basically just iterating on features with agents or getting them to look into things for me.

It sucks because I used to be very good at these things, but my edge against less competent SWEs doesn't really exist anymore.

More annoyingly, people I work with are producing a lot of code that I think the design of kinda sucks, but agents can force the design to work and so it works. I suggest we do things another way, but I'm now just slowing things down and it's hard to argue against the comment, "if that becomes a problem we can just get Claude to refactor later".

I guess what I'm saying is that I think think there's a really crappy job that will still exist for a while around managing and contributing to these agent-generated codebases. But skill is less about your technical abilities, but how good you are at hooking up agents to things and getting them to solve problems. This doesn't interest me at all though. My desire to spend a lot of time design and thinking about problems, and deeply understanding the codebase I'm maintaining now just work against me.

I think there will be SWEs by some definition, but the job as it existed a few years ago is gone. Not even saying that's a bad thing, but for someone like myself, it may as well be dead.

jappgar 14 hours ago | parent

The move now is toward "software factories" where sucky design is no one's responsibility.

Eventually the whole thing will grind to a halt or fail catastrophically (that's life), but it will seem very good while it's working.

I don't know if there's a real role for engineers beyond designing and tuning the factory itself.

Of course, such a thing is only tractable on highly factorable platforms. Well designed incumbents have an edge for the next couple of years or so, until others catch up.

It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I think it will all be automated in the end. Engineers will be more like rare consultants who inspect and validate very high level solutions.

moomoo11 5 hours ago | parent

we might be in the java applet era for all we know.

it’s a mix of (at the time) cool, shit, and oh my job!

who knows. and i’m sure someone will point to some other tech.

i only picked java applet because all the vibe slop looks the same. and you know instantly what you’re dealing with lol

cadamsdotcom 14 hours ago | parent

AI is NOT coming for your job. Not your whole job...

It's coming to take away the roles in your job that can be done by AI.

It happened before and it'll happen again. Humans adapt - there's more work now than ever. Some examples from the 20th century...

Big companies used to have printing departments to which you'd send a print job, walk over and pick it up, nicely stapled. Nowadays the office printer sits there 24/7 awaiting your print job. You have to staple it yourself though.

Big companies used to have secretaries & clerical staff who'd type up your letter and send it off for you. Now we have keyboards and email. You have to send the email yourself though.

Big companies used to have "code typists" who typed out huge amounts of code. Now they have agent managers who delegate the typing. Getting good output is a challenge, but asking for the output you need is so much better than RSI from typing and so much more effective than debugging based only on one's puny human knowledge, that we're suffering through. You have to assure the quality of the work yourself though.

It's strange seeing so many people take to their blogs and loudly declare themselves unemployable. I doubt anyone'd hire this author and that'll make their prophecy come true - for them.

A cautionary tale indeed.

BaronSamedi 3 hours ago | parent

I wonder what the impact of LLM coding is on software outsourcing. A lot of software jobs were being outsourced overseas for cost (supposedly). LLM coding feels like a tactical nuke dropped on that entire model. I haven't bothered to look it up but I would guess that the entire outsourcing model is about to disappear.

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

You forgot to mention what happened to those in the printing department, secretaries,....

cadamsdotcom 1 hour ago | parent

Every single one remained jobless forever and ever and never retrained or tried a different job or got a new career they just got really poor and died in a gutter.

Sheesh.

pjmlp 48 minutes ago | parent

Actually that is exactly what happened to plenty of them.

You folks don't really have the notion what is living in regions where there are not that many job opportunities, or social support, right?

latentsea 9 hours ago | parent

This is copiummaxxing.

bonsai_spool 8 hours ago | parent

I'm curious how actual engineering fields are affected - this highlights the imprecision we use when we call programmers/developers "software engineers."

Other engineering disciplines, presumably, don't change so drastically from one year to the next...

pm90 7 hours ago | parent

No because the cost of fucking up is usually that lives are lost.

creata 4 hours ago | parent

But the cost of fucking up is really high in software, too. Countless people have had their lives ruined by hackers exposing their personal information, yet security is almost always an afterthought.

And there are also cases like Therac-25 in which people have actually died, but I'd like to think that medical software is more regulated now.

mono442 5 hours ago | parent

Other engineering fields usually have a much longer feedback loop. Software can be verified and tested relatively easy.

pofferfish 6 hours ago | parent

Am I the only one who finds it weird that someone whose profile says they are a CTO starts their article with how AI meant that they had to delegate away debugging and writing code.

Weren't they supposed to do that anyway?

shahargl 6 hours ago | parent

I need to update my profile, I’m Tech Lead at Elastic after we got acquired

shahargl 6 hours ago | parent

Hey! I’m the one who wrote it. Saw you asked for a non-x link -https://shahar.blog/2026/11/08/on-being-an-engineer-in-2026/

coef2 6 hours ago | parent

I'm curious about whether LLMs could continually learn from the feedback they receive while performing some tasks without translating those experiences into text. But at the same time, I'm reluctant as tacit knowledge feels like one of the last moats we have left.

tabs_or_spaces 6 hours ago | parent

> It started with giving up on writing code. Then it expanded to pretty much any writing - Slack messages, documents, emails.

I find it very strange that observability is always left out of these types of articles. Does nobody care about what happens in production and how customers are actually using what you develop?

pringk02 5 hours ago | parent

Production? Don’t we do our testing there?

sensanaty 2 hours ago | parent

Brave of you to assume that the slopsters give a shit about any kind of long-term maintainability or sanity in the products they're crapping out

rsoto2 5 hours ago | parent

"Maybe one day agents will have their own experiences, too. Maybe they'll develop intuitions they can't quite explain, just like we do."

Imagine believing you have stumbled on to a benign consciousness and enslaving it to write shit code.

greenbit 2 hours ago | parent

"You see a turtle on its back, but you're not helping"

hypfer 5 hours ago | parent

> This naturally leads us to think that this is it. We, engineers, are doomed.

I find it _very_ unpleasant that all these people constantly talk about a "we" that does not exist.

That person is worried, and/or they have seen other people in the industry that are worried. But they've wrongly extrapolated that everyone in the industry would feel that way.

It harms the writing. It shows that the person is not adequately grounded.

Or, tbf, maybe, made mental shortcuts to reach people. But they've sacrificed truth to connect there, which is bad.

shahargl 5 hours ago | parent

As the one who wrote it, I thought about using "we" vs "I" (and in other places I did use "I"), but its bit overthinking about what I tried to say. But anyway will be take more caution next time

jgilias 4 hours ago | parent

What demotivates me the most is how easy it is to copy stuff these days.

Suppose we still need judgement and taste to guide AI to a good result. E.g., even if the AI has these itself, if the person guiding the AI has bad judgment and taste, the AI will comply, and build the bad thing because it tries to be aligned with the user.

But now, someone else’s _good_ judgement and taste is worth only so much because it takes an afternoon and some tokens to just “do it like they did it”.

orbis-tertius 4 hours ago | parent

I share this sentiment. But OTOH, if something is so easy to copy maybe we just have to accept that it's not that special anymore. Isn't excellence in a sense *defined* by ability to consistently achieve results above average? So the only consequence of the average shifting upward is the threshold for excellence shifting accordingly?

What constituted excellence a year ago is trivial and common today, so maybe excellence just shifted somewhere else, and the realization many of us are having is that our valuable skills are now just average, and the top has shifted upward?

creata 3 hours ago | parent

Shifted upward to what, though? What is still hard to someone with enough tokens to burn?

trymas 2 hours ago | parent

Not OC you replied to.

I had similar question as you and conclusion as OC.

My answer maybe abstract in some ways, but:

- something that requires network effects, e.g social media, even twitter with megahitler stuff is going strong. Even though twitter's base app model could be done in 30min by LLM;

- something that maps to infrastructure in someway. Good luck copying Cloudflare, residential proxy provider, established email provider or VPS with LLM in a weekend. Though parts of it are definitely easier;

- something that is a platform (adjacent to first point). Google's search platform, ads, docs, youtube, music, email, business tools, etc. Similar to Meta (seemingly half of the world's small businesses control their business with whatsapp) and others. Though parts of those platforms can be disrupted with LLMs;

orbis-tertius 56 minutes ago | parent

Yeah agree with this, these seem like genuine moats for now (we'll see whether this is still true in 6-12 months)

orbis-tertius 58 minutes ago | parent

Maybe hardware? Agents workflow design? Faster/more accurate models? Using our preferences to decide what to build and our agency to actually do it (poetically speaking, being the gradient in the agent optimisation process) ?

I don't know! But maybe that's how it feels like to be far from excellence again; maybe that's how it feels like to be out of our depth again, just like we were at the beginning of our career?

I don't want to risk stretching the analogy too far, and it might be that agents make all cognitive work obsolete. But surely there'll be something that defines a capability frontier? The alternative position is to believe that there just won't be a frontier anymore (I guess that's the RSI/AGI/ASI position :shrug)

WhompingWindows 48 minutes ago | parent

100%. Any ideas we have to spin up a new artwork game, analysis, or software - how long until someone says: copy that and change it 1% and now it's mine.

To those who sing the lullaby "AI has bad taste": You can tell it what to make. Your taste or any hypothetical taste can modulate everything it makes. There's no taste-moat here, folks.

iamsaitam 2 hours ago | parent

> If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average.

100x more output at 0.5x quality.

greenbit 2 hours ago | parent

AI has breadth, humans have depth.

wolvesechoes 1 hour ago | parent

Many of you were never engineers in the first place. It may hurt, but that's the reality.

And no, orchestrating agents to do your bidding doesn't make you one either.

red_admiral 1 hour ago | parent

The OP tries to answer the question "What makes some engineers above average?" and ends up with interesting concepts, but I think they're missing a key part of the question that already has a scientific answer.

Tacit Knowledge, intuition that comes from experience, times when something seems off but you can't quite put your finger on why - science has studied this! Specifically cognitive psychology. The answer, in modern terms that apply to both human and artificial intelligences, is training data. A good summary of this is "The Expert Mind" (Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-expert-mind/, PDF and HN discussion from 2006: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41282574 )

tl;dr: experts have lots and lots of practice.

(The research does go into a lot more detail, for example time-on-task is not the same thing as practice.)

This has implications for the CS degree of the future, because it seems a lot of colleges are "pivoting" to AI, for example their Java module might as well be renamed "Using AI to write Java". To me, this sounds like exactly the kind of thing that is _not_ practice. It's the difference between trying to do maths problems by looking at memorising the solutions without (trying to) solve the problems yourself first. I'd really like to try the opposite way: a CS degree where you get deep into the fundamentals and are forced to write code in a sterile AI-free lab environment. My hypothesis is that this will produce (e.g. Java) programmers who will pick up AI-Java-coding quickly enough, but also have the intuition to step in when the AI code seems "off".

TrackerFF 1 hour ago | parent

Also, I work as a data analyst, with previous experience as a software engineer. In our office, traditionally maybe 10% of our analysts have enough real software engineering experience to develop any "serious" software products. The rest are domain experts that at most use programming for developing methods and calculations/simulations.

In the past 6 months, we've seen non-engineering analysts leverage LLMs (Claude, Codex) enough to launch actual products. They've gone from 0x engineers to at minimum 1x engineers.

Prior to this, they'd develop methods, scripts, etc. in Jupyter notebooks, R, Matlab, or whatever they'd be comfortable with. And if it turned out to be useful, they'd work with engineering to develop those into products. Usually a small team of software engineers would do that.

But, alas, now they're able to almost completely bypass the engineering teams.

mettamage 55 minutes ago | parent

Then you work with more capable data analysts than I did. When I was a DA, my colleagues knew dbt and SQL. They didn’t know Python

dimbletimbers 27 minutes ago | parent

We’re awash in these claims without evidence. A so-called “founder” of a company with no reputation or economic impact to speak of claims the entire world has changed and they’re 100x engineers now, and the code has never been better and the features have never shipped faster. But there’s no evidence for that claim in the economic data, no explosion of products, no new features in any product I use that isn’t just a shitty chatbot integration. Where is the 100x more software going? Why does the internet appear to suck more than ever? What are other people seeing that I’m not? I see 100x more “thought leaders,” 100x more text to sift through, 100x more lame resume-padding repos and budgeting apps, 10x more grift and vitriol online, 10x less collaboration between developers, but on the other end of that extrusion, people are just lonelier, more tired, more stressed, and pissed off about how shitty software has become.

shahargl 8 minutes ago | parent

why so mad though? just my thoughts about smth I was thinking about. feels like u take it too personal