Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

Your comment makes sense. Today's DGX Spark can easily run qwen-3.6-35B, which is indeed much stronger than the gpt-o1 two years ago. The future is hard to predict, perhaps the bigger issue is that while production capacity exists, where the demand will come from.

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I don't really get stuck, but when I do the answer is usually in documentation or a man page. I probably read documentation and man pages more than the average developer.

You could argue that is slower than asking an LLM, but I am willing to do things a little slower if it means building up my knowledge and getting stuck less in the future.

Imo this will be the future model: a company puts a gun to your head, gives you agents, and tells you to figure out how to maximize the utility output you provide as an employee. They might put a token limit which incentivizes efficient token usage.

There's a lot of "room" here for creativity, i.e. the agents don't know how to milk the agents efficiently, which is essentially your new job. The agents might not know how to structure tasks so that the agents run overnight and run the proper experiment.

The difference between mediocre and 10x will increase. The more aggressive SV performance culture is probably going to become more mainstream.

Frankly, I think this whole model is way more burnout inducing. You're not really doing software engineering anymore. You're running this mental loop in the background of trying to multiplex between agents and mapping unstructured business problems to agentic work.

It's probably going to infect other industries over time. Software is the first big wave. I don't think people with computer skills who are good at computers will be screwed out of work long term. The tech industry has a lot of concentrated technical capital in the form of tooling and automation that other parts of the economy could significantly benefit from. Short term it looks bad, but long term, computers will become more and more dominant over the economy.

I don't think companies have yet figured out how to adapt their hiring, managerial practices, or internal incentive structures to reflect this. Most of what they're doing now is extremely crude and terrible for morale.

I fully agree with that. Well said.

You're standing on the shore, and your clients are having fun in the water. The tide is going up, and you're screaming at your clients "come back! it's not safe". And so, they show you the face. You appear to them like the boring guy who's not fun to hang out with. Eventually the tide is high, there is strong current, and they are being swept away further and further from the shore and they are panicking : "pyeri! help us! please!"

People (the non tech people, the MBA people) don't want to hear what you, the tech guy has to say. You're the not fun guy. Stay in touch until they do need you and say : you were right. That's the day you charge them a dear price for the service.

AI is still at the bait stage of rollout. They subsidize it, they want you to get hooked onto it to the point where you cannot do without it. Then only, they start to charge. I used google code assist for around 9 months. It was free. I would ask it questions from time to time, to help to fix bugs, and to avoid to spend an hour browsing SO. Now, it's around $30 per month. They are losing too much too fast atm, they have reached the stage where they have to start to charge. Another one of their strategies is : IPO. Once they (openai/anthropic) are listed on the nasdaq, you will pay whether you want it or not (via your exposure to the nasdaq/S&p500 with your etfs).