Cursor Bot on Github feels like a significant step forward, catches tons of stupid mistakes, typos, etc better than 95% of human reviewers can. The days of needing 2 reviewers on a PR are over IMHO, allows human reviewers to focus on broader architectural decisions.
Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
31–40 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#32Developer operations and architecture haven’t caught up to efficient and productive AI workflows yet. Most orgs don’t have good ways for all their employees to have agents running in parallel and closing the loop within the agent (generating results that the agent can check and iterate on, with the dev being able to jump in easily to inspect). These iterations still require too much manual and bespoke management. So management and devs don’t see the full picture yet on current genetic productivity potential and dismiss it as a wash on time savings.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#33Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage". My organization…
> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.
I wonder if we are going to pay for that, as a society. The number of times I went there, asking some tricky question about a framework, and have the actual author or one of the core contributors answer me was astonishing.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#34Morale is low because leaders think AI can do that amount of work, but it can’t actually (at least not yet). This both means that they don’t hire enough people to do the work needed, while also “drive by” insulting the intelligence of the people they are overworking.
This has been my observation as well. To add, I'm seeing leadership and stakeholders use their chats with LLMs to justify claims like "what I'm asking for is incredibly simple according to ChatGPT, and it should be done by end of today." Of course it rarely is, because the prompt is underspecified, the LLM solution is oversimplified, and it lacks context on the complexities of existing codebase, and the team's development & deployment processes.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#35The pressure to do more AI based work is certainly there.
Also from my experiences with agents, and given that I have been around computers since 1986, I can clearly see where the road is going.
Anyone involved with software engineering tasks, should see themselves becoming more of a technical architect for their coding agents, than raw coding, just like nowadays while Assembly is a required skill for some fields, others can code without ever learning anything about it.
Models will eventually become more relevant than specific programming languages, what is worth discussing X or Y is better, if I can generate any that I feel like asking for. If anything newer languages will have even harder time getting adopted, on top of everything that is expected, now they also have to be relevant for AI based workflows.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#36[dead]
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#37Worried about the next generation who - I think - will not learn normally (incl whatever it does to the brain) and may never reach the degree of engineering capability some of us have.
Tired of leadership who think productivity will raise.
Tired of AI summaries sent around unreflected as meeting minutes / action items. Tired of working and responding on these.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#38Mostly feeling like a caveman. I've been trying and failing to use it productively since the start of the hype. The amount of time wasted could've been used for actual development.
I just simply don't get it. Productivity delta is literally negative.
I've been asking to do projects where I thought "oh, maybe this project has a chance of getting an AI productivity boost". Nope. Personal projects all failed as well.
I don't get it. I guess I'm getting old. "Grandpa let me write the prompt, you write it like this".
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#39I'm just waiting for the hype-cycle to end. AI might revolutionize some industry (probably natural-language-adjacent), but not ours. COBOL has already been attempted, and far more competently (and with less energy cost). If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least , they lacked the basic competence wit…
I think of LLMs as essentially translators - taking natural language and translating it into something else. It works great with writing HTML for example. The more declarative and high-level the language is, the better it does. Which makes intuitive sense, the closer the output is to the input the better it does imo.
So generally the people getting the most use out of LLMs are people who are using these higher levels of abstractions. And I imagine we will be building more abstractions like HTML to get more use out of it.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#40Biding my time. GPT5 was a wake up call. The hype will die down and the hangover will begin.
Moving fast in the beginning always has caveats.
In the meantime I'm doubling down on math and theory behind AI.