Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

- A lot of our code base is very specialized and complex, AI still not good enough to replace human judgement/knowledge but can help in various ways.

- Not yet clear (to me anyways) how much of a productivity gain we're getting.

- We've always had more things we want to do than what we could get done. So if we can get more productivity there's plenty of places to use it. But again, not clear that's actually happening in any major way.

I think the jury is still out on this one. Curious what others will say here. My personal opinion is that unless AI gets smart enough to replace more experienced developer completely, and it's far from that, then I'm quite sure there's not going to be less software jobs. If AI gets to a point where it is equal to a good/senior developer we'll have to see. Even then it might be that our jobs will just turn into more managing AI but it's not a zero sum game, we'll do more things. Superintelligence is a different story, i.e. AI that is better than humans in every cognitive aspect.

I'm wearing glasses that tell me who all the fucking assholes and impostors are.

AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptical of its output.

In any sufficiently complex software project, as much of the development is about domain knowledge, asking the right questions, balancing resources, guarding against risks, interfacing with a team to scope and vet and iterate on a feature, managing resources, analyzing customer feedback, thinking of new features, improving existing features, etc.

When AI is a productivity booster, it's great, but modern software is an evolving, organic product, that requires a team to maintain, expand, improve, etc. As of yet, no AI can take the place of that.