171–180 of 206 posts
Seems clear that the age of everyone and their dog getting a programming gig for easy money is coming to a close. What will be left (for the foreseeable future) is positions for very highly skilled software engineers who actually know the craft well enough to make good use of AI. The industry is going to shift from hiring as many programmers as you can afford to hiring a small number of the best engineers you can fin…
My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…
I'm a Senior Freelance Programmer, I can see many of my past and present clients moving towards the exact path you described. I keep warning them during meetings that Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues and Claude will be forced to close their access to all but the most enterprisey ones with deep pockets. The mere electricity cost for that kind of high level reason…
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…
That assumes OP will still be in business if that day even happens. Odds are that cheap AI access will be around for longer than freelancers can remain solvent.
"Computer" use to be a job title. So no, I am not optimistic about the future of most programmers, maybe even all programmers. One possibility is that software starts to look more like traditional manufacturing. The machine is the company’s core asset. The engineer only needs to know how to operate the machine well. Once that happens, the barrier gets much lower, need much less people, and the job naturally become mu…
CNC and other factory automation have eliminated innumerable jobs.
These are people who don't understand the job of SWE. Look, the job of a medicine doctor, or a plane pilot, have largely been automated. The doctor could rely on google searches, or even AI, to answer your questions. The pilot can trust the auto pilot. Yet, the doctor who does advanced stuff (surgery) has no shortcut to mastering his skill : he still has to go through 10 years of studies + years of experience under t…
And clearly you are not someone who understands the job of a physician.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What are you writing that Claude is actually writing all of it? Every time I get past the green field stage, I just end up throwing out what it writes half the time since its trash. For the current state of frontier models, you need to break the steps down so that the LLM understands a process like what you might go through as you expect it (which is often different for everyone). i.e., get it to agree to a spec, t…
What role do you serve in this process? I can take all of those steps, turn them into separate skills, then give them to a product manager or business analyst who makes half your salary, but has far more knowledge about the customers needs than you do.
The business analyst use to hand off details to another person who would define detail technical specs like database fields names, type and size. Then the programmer would implement it.
> "it feels like software development is going from a precise occupation that requires high degree of understanding to something probabilistic and offloaded understanding"
Well how much ever I agree with this, I believe in near future it will open more "expert" like positions who will suffice as orchestrators to not let the AI slop take over and make your systems either dumb or vulnerable or both!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We still review everything. And we guide by planning, prompting, speccing. So we're not actually much faster at the core code, because reviews still take time. Ultimately, we're on the finance markets and we have regulatory pressures and I, as the human, am responsible for putting the code out there. But we're freeing up a lot of time to get other things correct. We have n x more metrics now because plumbing in basic…
When you review everything, do you understand every line of code before approving? Do you make it rewrite code that is too abstract or unclear for future humans to understand? Does AI write the tests and do you review those with the same diligence? I don't disagree that it's revolutionary in many ways, but I am seeing lots of companies make very costly mistakes by relying too heavily on AI without fully understanding…
My hunch however is that in a few years we're not going to be reviewing as heavily as we improve guardrails and can trust the AI code and review cycle more. I'm not sure what to expect for my career at that point.