Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#1

Post by fnoef » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

I have been mostly anti AI. I did experiment a bit with aider and free models, but my results were inconsistent, and nothing to worry about.

However, recently I have purchased the max plan from anthropic and have been vibing with Claude code since then. And wow, the results are very good. With a good enough prompt, and planning step, it could generate full features in a project with 20k LOC, with very little modifications needed by me after review.

I heard even more success stories from friends who gave Claude 3-4 different features that Claude would develop in parallel.

On top of that, everyone seems to produce side project at an astronomical rate, both among my friends, and here on HN where fully complete project that would take months to develop, seem to appear after few hours with Claude code.

So, my questions is, is programming as a profession cooked? Are most of us going to be replaced with a “supervisor” who runs coding agents all day?

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#2

Post by AlexeyBrin » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

The honest answer is that nobody really knows.

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#3

Post by everlier » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

Was it cooked when they invented high-level languages and presumably every clerk got an ability to write Software? Surely it eliminated all need in people specialising in writing it, it became so simple.

There's always a market for things that people are too lazy to do on their own.

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#4

Post by drooby » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away".

Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away"

Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky.

Programmers will become the guardians and sentinels of the codebase, and their programming knowledge and debugging skills will still be necessary when the AI corners itself into thorny situations, or is unable to properly test the product.

The profession is changing, no doubt about it. But its obsolescence is probably decades away.

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#5

Post by fnoef » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #4

It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away". Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away" Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky. Programmers will become the guardi…

Self-driving cars are a bad example, because we are talking about a heavily regulated industries, with fatal consequences of malpractice, and a tool (the car) that is not easily available to the average person. I'm pretty sure that is the cost of cars would be comparable to what a software engineer pays for claude code, government would relax on the laws, and as a society we would accept a few (tens of) thousands of casualties, self-driving cars would be already here.

You talk about programming that become guardians, but I see two issues with this: (1) you don't need ten guardians, you need 1-2 that know your codebase; and (2) a "guardian" is someone who were junior, turned into senior, if juniors are no longer needed, in X years there will be no guardians to replace the existing ones.

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#6

Post by fnoef » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:48 PM UTC

everlier wrote: post #3

Was it cooked when they invented high-level languages and presumably every clerk got an ability to write Software? Surely it eliminated all need in people specialising in writing it, it became so simple. There's always a market for things that people are too lazy to do on their own.

Never in my career I have seen coding becoming so accessible. You needed to know the language in order to write code, now you just need to know English.

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#7

Post by aristofun » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:48 PM UTC

Programming as in “monkey typing same boilerplate crap over and over again” or punching holes in cards if you prefer 60 year old analogy - yes.

Programming as in “software engineering” - no. Because it isn’t about choosing the bext most probable word or pixel. At all.

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#8

Post by aristofun » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #2

The honest answer is that nobody really knows.

The real answer that everybody can see that didn’t happen and can’t happen with current llms

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#9

Post by gniv » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

fnoef wrote: post #5

drooby wrote: post #4

It's been about a decade years since many thought full-self-driving cars were "just a couple years away". Reality is that FSD was/is a "few decades away" Same for programming. We can take our hands off the steering wheel for longer stretches of time, this is true, but if you have production apps with real users that spend real money then going to sleep at the wheel is far too risky. Programmers will become the guardi…

Self-driving cars are a bad example, because we are talking about a heavily regulated industries, with fatal consequences of malpractice, and a tool (the car) that is not easily available to the average person. I'm pretty sure that is the cost of cars would be comparable to what a software engineer pays for claude code, government would relax on the laws, and as a society we would accept a few (tens of) thousands of…

A lot of the software produced in big corps is mission-critical. Self-driving cars are an extreme example but I think the same principle applies to banking, infrastructure, even things like maps, since they are used by billions.

Re: Ask HN: Is Programming as a Profession Cooked?

#10

Post by gniv » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

I was reminded of "software is eating the world", which was basically the idea that everything needs software. It's still true. In that light, programming is not cooked. We can do things much faster, yes, but there are so many things to do that it will still take a ton of (let's call them) qualified people to build them all.