I should preface my comment with the fact that I’m ultimately neutral on the AI space right now. I’ve gone back and forth on the topic.
That said, I think this article underscores the fact that software engineering as a discipline is already unrecognizable from what it was like even a few years ago. You now have to be more into architecture and directing how the AI development tools write out your code.
I know a guy who works at Amazon, and the models at OpenAI and Anthropic are so good that he doesn’t even really write code in the classic sense anymore. However, because of his background and experience, he does know what he should expect and if an output matches the quality he wants, versus just blindly trusting the AI tool.
In our world, you have to adapt or die. It’s that simple.
What will happen when he retires? What about the generation who grew up pressing enter on claude code, though nowadays auto mode does it for you.
It’s strange for a brief moment in history humans peaked in technological literacy and it went down from there. I hope the doctor guys are still learning.
I have coworkers who report learning a lot about some system by using Claude to do things they would not be able to do on their own, and subsequently seeing more about how the system works.
I suspect that literacy will not go down, but what we become literate in will change. Just as compilers reduced literacy in assembly language, automatic code generation will reduce literacy in code syntax. But then, other forms of literacy will replace that. High level system design, etc.
I think for autodidacts this will hold true and it will be a boon. For those who want an easy way out though it will almost certainly become a mire. Great points, interested to see how it plays out.
>I think for autodidacts this will hold true and it will be a boon.
Everyone working in SW before AI was also an autodidact since you always had to learn things on your own to stay employable. I don't know many now still making a living exclusively on what they learned 30+ years ago and nothing else.
Meanwhile, Japanese monks are dismantling shinto temples piece by piece and rebuilding them piece solely so every future generation will know how it’s done.
A few of that generation will be drawn to understand the inner workings, thoroughly, from the very basics and first principles. Because they need to. For inexplicable reasons. They are the George Platen of the 2030s.
There was no economically justifiable reason for me to learn about compilers, operating systems, and even CMOS VLSI. But I couldn't be satisfied writing software without knowing how those things worked. I taped out a chip in which all the polygons drawn by deterministic software I'd eithe written or understood. No place+route. It was the 2000s version of non-AI coding in the 2030s -- standard cell placement is essentially gradient descent.
Thank you for using a reference I didn’t get :). I looked up who George Platen is/was and I’ve now a new thing for my reading list. Also, 100% agree with you
I included Joel Spolsky's The Perils of JavaSchools in anticipation of this point. His claim (among others) that Java hides so much that students aren't learning the basics and thus cannot be assessed on competency.
> AI and tbh society in general just invalidates the economic viability of learning what’s under the foundations.
It was ever thus, learning the foundations of basically anything was never economically rational. I mean, I'd have been much better off learning product marketing rather than working my way through Volume 1 of Knuth's TAOCP.
And yet, I still did the non economically rational thing.
Humans grew the species too fast. We will experience a serious die-off. Possibly extinction, but I kinda think not. People are still subsistence farming on the planet, and if the climate doesn't wipe them out they should be OK.
But our "civilization" is coming to an end. The most evident bits to me are the falling birthrates and what I would call a kind of despair among people. No one is trying anymore from what I can see. Seems like the soul-sucking was successful: the machine has our souls now.
> I know a guy who works at Amazon, and the models at OpenAI and Anthropic are so good that he doesn’t even really write code in the classic sense anymore
"I know a guy", what a weird thing to say in October 2026. I don't think I know anyone who still writes code in the classic sense.
i get paid $300k cash to write all my code by hand. and this is at an AI-pilled company with a CEO pushing AI every day.
boss doesn't know or care. i just get plus perf reviews and raises so it's chill. my perf reviews are actually trending up since opus 4.5 so i'm feeling good actually.
i think smart people crave an adult in the room in these infantile psychotic times
Biggest problem right now for me is what do I tell my children to pursue in college. Up until last year my default answer is a path towards Software Engineering. Now, I am not even sure anymore.
I can work on this "soul-sucking" job, but what of the next gen?
Is it? I knew a guy years ago who had a mechantronics degree. He was a coke dealer and worked at a grocery store. He seemed to indicate it was neat, but not very useful.
You're reading too much into that statement, by far. They could very well dictate what their children must pursue, but it's much more likely they want to do the things parents do, which is offer up guidance and recommendations, and yes, even sometimes encourage one path over another.
>Up until last year my default answer is a path towards Software Engineering
Do you at least have any self reflection on the fact that you were also part of the problem? Like what do you think happens to the job market when everyone in the last ~15 years tells their kids to go into SW engineering?
>but what of the next gen?
What jobs did previous gen did before the ZIRP and smartphone era created a once-in-a-lifetime demand boom of SW devs?
Might really be your sector. Claude is massive in my organization, with no one writing code by hand anymore. The biggest struggle is keeping up with what is being done, reviewing and understanding.
What has your code base ended up looking like? Is there a coherent abstraction hierarchy?
I keep checking back on LLMs every couple months and while they are now great for figuring out bugs in a system I don’t know much about (say in my use of a framework I’ve never used before), it’s been super helpful. But whenever I have it write a lot of code, even in a not huge project, it mostly works but it’s like a gum and popsicle stick machine gun and I’m scared of what large org code bases will look like in a few years.
As someone who makes heavy use of AI tools to write code I also find it surprising. The idea that even the latest models of Claude and Codex are capable of writing sufficiently useful and production usable code is baffling. Unless you are operating at extremely low stakes with few meaningful constraints I don't see how anyone can seriously rely fully on AI generated code. I see the code daily, it certainly can save some time when used properly but there are very hard limits to the amount of concepts that can be affirmatively managed before AI begins to tie itself in knots. The only solution AI is capable of from that point is of course generating more code to sort out any issues. "Hand" writing actual clear, concise and unbloated code is still very much a requirement.
Primarily e-commerce and finance, so interacting with a lot of APIs and pretty much everything has real money attached so if things are wrong there are pretty direct costs that can quickly become apparent. There are of course the easy to see issues where things are mispriced or fulfillment errors but there's also the trickier things where errors that cause a lack of exposure can be converted to money lost.
IME, there has definitely been a pull back in the reliance on AI in all aspects of the business, and fortunately there has mostly been caution with the AI in the related software development so not too much of a push to go all in.
I've seen some pretty drastic losses occur from AI transposing things like dates and compatible brands. Then again people have fat fingered million dollar losses before as well.
Many companies are essentially forcing the use of it via raising the bar for performance by 10x(hyperbole). Yeah it’s not great everywhere and I’m sure there firms that aren’t as pushy.
Half the people I interview seem to have those AI interview helpers that just plug into the audio directly and give you realtime responses to questions that are asked. Plus they have it running on the same screen as the webcam so it’s near impossible to tell who is cheating.
The leetcode platforms, that we use, have the candidate on camera while they work on the take home but it’s the same problem. If they have ChatGPT on an alternate laptop it’s not recorded. Recently everyone seems to be getting 100% on every take home.
> Ask them to answer with their eyes closed?
These are senior and principal engineers that we want on our team. I fear being distrusting like this is a terrible first step and might dissuade them from joining.
In my early career I used to be the former. Now I'm the latter, and truthfully, probably have become a bit burned out by all the toil and friction, especially on the ops side of things.
Getting to the end product so much faster with so little friction really pushes the boundaries of what you can actually build. It's exciting (Also kind of ominous for obvious reasons)
Telling the AI to go, say... sort out all the IAM stuff for some new feature you're building is actually incredible.
And I have always found that a little hollow, and depressingly capitalist within tech. Outside of tech, people who nearly exclusively value end-results are the same people taking pictures of their food, and the same people who can't sit in silence, or get irritable when a hike hasn't blessed them with a view yet. For me, it's almost always been the journey, and the result is just an ephemeral blip while work continues iteratively.
Sure, automating away things that would otherwise just be basically copy/pasted anyway have always been fine, but this is a very different scale.
It is interesting how people can differ in terms of disposition though.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that one disposition is better or worse than another objectively, but rather that I subjectively find impatient, superficial, consumption-driven people extremely dull, which I also tend to associate with people who mostly care about the result. Additionally, I believe that this focus on the production of more and faster is a non-trivial contribution to producing things that have no longevity or are otherwise enshittified. The less we're involved in the intimate details of a thing, the less we're inclined to care, and the less it's even acceptable to care about quality.
I think I understand your point, and it certainly is true if you get in the right mindset with the right anectadata to back it up. But I feel it's leaving a lot on the table. Result oriented people are key to linking the technical with the real world. It's a bit of a wide statement to say that everyone who likes end result is impatient superficial or consumption driver.
I agree that there's a decent overlap here, and that your point stands. But there's a lot of merit in getting real products out there, vibe coded or not. Market forces then dictate value.
Right, that's a balance that I can engage with, but I just have limited enthusiasm for wishing things into existence and then being responsible for them.
I think the primary goal is usually to sell things quickly and at bigger scales, not to make an empath feel something inside for the plight of the users. It's a lucky circumstance to be intimately working on a direct to customer product that you can see tangible gains from and the impact on someone's day. In those lucky positions I've been in where the user hasn't been obscured by business outcomes, part of the implied deal is still that I've found the mechanics of the job somewhat gratifying, otherwise it is indeed hollow in the sense that the middle part where you cut things with a metaphorical chisel goes away or changes sufficiently. It was the goal for many developers to be engaged in that way, not anyone else who didn't like that, and certainly not the product goal, but it was part of why those people did it, and it always created tension with those who exclusively care about numbers and had no technical expertise. If all you do is grind for outcome, then have at it, but I find that only minimally and rarely mentally engaging.
I find the current work extremely engaging. A customer can ask for a fairly complex feature and 25 minutes later, I’ll show it to them.
In the past, I’d have to put it on the roadmap, prioritize it, debate it. It’d take 25 days instead of 25 minutes. More often than not, we would have never done the feature because it was deemed not impactful enough for all customers.
Which is perfectly fine, and I find that somewhat gratifying as well, but if the work involved amounted to wishing it into existence, than I may as well take a helicopter to the top of a mountain instead of climbing it. It's not not fun, but it's there's no meaningful process involved, and I'd be cool doing that only once in a while. Granted the processes you describe, and I've also experienced, are horribly bureaucratic and unsatisfying as well, but those do seem like a false dichotomy; either you're involved in the mechanics of the work and have tons of bureaucracy or you're not involved at all and have none. More than likely, process always accumulates to bureaucracy, but there are sweet spots that I hope stick around.
The root of the problem here isnt ai, after all. Bosses who force people to constantly work overtime for free have always existed. And instead of philosophizing about claude the guy should just look for a job with better conditions
>the guy should just look for a job with better conditions
Indeed he should, but I think the unspoken part of the post was that when everyone is now a monkey pressing enter in claude and not reading any code, like OP self identifies, then you also have no leverage to jump to a better job.
Only programmers who can code as good or better as AI, without using AI, will have the leverage, but those are not most programmers now.
Wrong company - toxic culture. It's completely possible to use LLMs for development and loving it. Focus on innovation and quality, less on shipping. That's the execs' fault. I'd quit and go somewhere people care about what they're doing.
I don't find myself getting more work done... I'm getting more help when I get stuck, but a lot of times AI just creates a bigger mess before it solves a problem.
Who designed and built your house? Who designed and built your cars, planes, boats, etc? Who fixes your HVAC or plumbing? Yes, there's no career opportunities between unskilled labor and being a programmer.
If you're gonna break the HN rules with overused doomerist low quality reddit-level snark, at least try to make it funny or intelligent so we can have a giggle.
I was being entirely serious. Most of those jobs will be taken by AI soon enough, and I don't think most programmers have what it takes to do skilled labor.
>Most of those jobs will be taken by AI soon enough
How so? You think AI will design and build cars, boats and planes or do your plumbing? Good luck with that.
>and I don't think most programmers have what it takes to do skilled labor
Only the fakers and opportunists who lucked into the industry without any effort, and then lucked lucked some more into avoiding getting laid off.
Those who got into the industry because they actually have critical thinking will have no issues staying in the industry or pivoting into other industries.
>You think AI will design and build cars, boats and planes or do your plumbing?
AI already does all of these things except the plumbing.
>Those who got into the industry because they actually have critical thinking will have no issues staying in the industry or pivoting into other industries.
The vast majority of people got into the industry because they could make six figures right out of high school and roll the dice on retiring a billionaire before 30.
The reality of end-stage capitalism is going to hit most programmers like a brick to the face.
Designed? I'm not sure. An architect or engineer of some sort I suppose. Someone who has credentials that i can't afford to go back k and get at this point in my life.
Built? I live in a very old house right now. Not sure who may have built it then. Probably the same people often building houses now, poor immigrants who had some issue preventing them from working a better job or trade.
> Who designed and built your cars, planes, boats, etc?
Cheap workers in foreign countries? Maybe some of the plane ans boat stuff if done domestically and is a little more lucrative though. I'll give you that.
> Who fixes your HVAC or plumbing?
The guy my slumlord sent to fix my plumbing complained to me about the state of his government housing. But i suppose according to HN he must just be pocketing his six figure salary and scamming the government.
As AI advances, it is natural for development to focus on output and prioritize sprint and PR speed.
So rather than insisting that more review time is needed, teams should set success criteria and a set of reference examples to compare the outcomes against.
As long as there are clear criteria, there is no need to worry about what AI produces; ambiguous parts can simply be left to human judgment.
"ambiguous parts can simply be left to human judgment." - it does not work like that. If a human does not know how the code works, they cannot apply their judgement. And they don't know how the code works if they just press enter all day.
That said, I think this article underscores the fact that software engineering as a discipline is already unrecognizable from what it was like even a few years ago. You now have to be more into architecture and directing how the AI development tools write out your code.
I know a guy who works at Amazon, and the models at OpenAI and Anthropic are so good that he doesn’t even really write code in the classic sense anymore. However, because of his background and experience, he does know what he should expect and if an output matches the quality he wants, versus just blindly trusting the AI tool.
In our world, you have to adapt or die. It’s that simple.
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