91–100 of 535 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rules engines were designed for just such a thing. Validating input/output. You don’t need a human to prompt AI, you need a pipeline. While a single LLM won’t replace you. A well designed system of flows for software engineering using LLMs will.
Well, who designs the system of flows?
(or rather, Business People)
As I have heard from mid level managers and C suite types across a few dev jobs. Staff are the largest expense and the technology department is the largest cost center. I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product but that's a lost point. This is why those same mid level managers and C suite people are salivating over AI and mentioning it in every press release. The reality is that costs are being reduced b…
Hailing from an outsourcing destination I need to ask: to where specifically? We've been laid off all the same. Me and my team spent the second half of 2025 working half time because that's the proposition we were given.
What is this fabled place with an apparent abundance of highly skilled developers? India? They don't make on average much less than we do here - the good ones make more.
My belief is that spending on staff just went down across the board because every company noticed that all the others were doing layoffs, so pressure to compete in the software space is lower. Also all the investor money was spent on datacentres so in a way AI is taking jobs.
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Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing. Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive. Hey, it's just business.
And you do this honestly, by negotiating reduced hours for the same pay or by negotiating piecework rather than time-based pay. Right?
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This suggests that the latent demand was a lot but it still doesnt prove it is unbounded. At some point the low hanging automation fruit gets tapped out. What can be put online that isnt there already? Which business processes are obviously going to be made an order magnitude more efficient? Moreover, we've never had more developers and we've exited an anomalous period of extraordinarily low interest rates. The party…
Look at traditional manufacturing. Automation has made massive inroads. Not as much of the economy is directly supporting (eg, auto) manufacturers as it used to be (stats check needed). Nevertheless, there are plenty of mechanical engineering jobs. Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though. You have to ask yourself which category you are in (by analogy). Don’t be the SWE working on the assem…
The job is literally building automation.
There is no equivalent to "working on the assembly line" as an SWE.
>Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though
Because Globalization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing. Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive. Hey, it's just business.
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Equally nihilistic are owners, managers, and leaders who think they will replace developers with LLMs.
Why care about, support, defend, or help such people? Why would I do that?
This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far. On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening: First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of inci…
Knowing when to push back, when to trim down a requirement, when to replace a requirement with something slightly different, when to expand a requirement because you're aware of multiple distinct use cases to which it could apply, or even a new requirement that's interesting enough that it might warrant updating your "vision" for the product itself: that's the real engineering work that even a "singularity-level coding agent" alone could not replace.
An AI agent almost universally says "yes" to everything. They have to! If OpenAI starts selling tools that refuse to do what you tell them, who would ever buy them? And maybe that's the fundamental distinction. Something that says "yes" to everything isn't a partner, it's a tool, and a tool can't replace a partner by itself.
I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring…
> accept disasters for democratisation Will insurance policy coverage and premiums change when using non-deterministic software?
This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far. On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening: First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of inci…
> don't come at me AI enthusiasts! no need to worry; none of them know how to read well enough to make it this far into your comment
Now the expectation from some executives or high level managers is that managers and employees will create custom software for their own departments with minimal software development costs. They can do this using AI tools, often with minimal or no help from software engineers.
Its not quite the equivalent of having software developed entirely by software engineers, but it can be a significant step up from what you typically get from Excel.
I have a pretty radical view that the leading edge of this stuff has been moving much faster than most people realize:
2024: AI-enhanced workflows automating specific tasks
2025: manually designed/instructed tool calling agents completing complex tasks
2026: the AI Employee emerges -- robust memory, voice interface, multiple tasks, computer and browser use. They manage their own instructions, tools and context
2027: Autonomous AI Companies become viable. AI CEO creates and manages objectives and AI employees
Note that we have had the AI Employee and AI Organization for awhile in different somewhat weak forms. But in the next 18 months or so as the model and tooling abilities continue to improve, they will probably be viable for a growing number of business roles and businesses.