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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#611

Post by avador »

a10c wrote: post #477
GolfPopper wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And before long you have a solution that is made up of a thousand pieces of spaghetti that neither you nor anyone else understands. And when your solution becomes too brittle to use, cannot be maintained, or fails catastrophically, then what? Just hope that's someone else's problem?

That's the point. Your prototype doesn't need to be pretty. It just needs to prove that the value is there for it to be made pretty.

Order of operations: Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast.[0]

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#612

Post by lanstin »

rayiner wrote: post #109
lanstin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem is not a software engineering problem nor an AI problem but a problem of the balance of power between working hard vs. investing. If the people who believe in working hard organize and slow down the tendency to rig everything for investors, then the markets should stabilize at a more generally prosperous place.

The balance of power is dictated by economic facts, not by organizing or politics. Auto workers in 1950 weren't better organized than auto workers in 2026. They just had more leverage because they weren't competing with auto workers in China. Likewise, Silicon Valley isn't paying people writing web apps $$$ because those workers are organized. They are doing it because they don't have a feasible alternative. If AI en…

Are you saying that auto labor unions can't go into other places and organize the people there for higher salaries and less wretched conditions? Or that organizing doesn't increase the power of the hard working people? Economic facts are partially determined by human factors such as the supply curve for labor and information flow amongst sellers or buyers for various goods.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#613

Post by leptons »

bel8 wrote: post #243
Aperocky wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That's where we fundamentally disagree about. Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM p…

> because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. So are humans. Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?) And I argue that current LLMs have surpassed many of my capabilities already. For example GPT/Opus can understand and document some ancient legacy project I never saw before in minutes. I would take a week+…

>Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?)

Do you have any idea how many calculations it takes for a human to put a ball through a hoop while running across a court?

It could be millions or billions in a second. Manifesting consciousness, coordinating body movements, and everything else all at the same time takes calculations.

You may not be aware that your brain is doing multiplication, or any other kinds of math, constantly, but it is.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#614

Post by careers_terria »

joduplessis wrote: post #43

I really wish seemingly intelligent people would stop using the abstraction analogy (like the article does). The key word is: determinism. Every level of abstraction (inc. power tools, C, etc.) added a deterministic layer you can rely on to more effectively do whatever it is that you're doing - same result, every time. LLM's use natural language to describe programming and the result is varied at the very best (hence…

Are other layers truly deterministic though? Do I know for sure whether that object has been garbage collected or not? How many cycles this instruction will take to run?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#615

Post by tavavex »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #508
ryandrake wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just start your own company!" - Hacker News

Yeah pretty much. Have you seen Polsia and its ilk? Maybe "trivial" would be too strong a word but... in 2026 it's not hard. That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.

This may seem like an important change that's making things different today, but it's not. Farms back in the day were constrained by supply, software today is constrained by demand.

A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survive all on their own, being your own guaranteed consumer.

A software developer can create software from nothing, but who is going to buy it? There's not enough consumers and problems in the world for everyone to have their own specialized business that is able to thrive. Someone is always going to be left out. It's not like food.

It's like as if a farmer was able to conjure up a farm for free, but there is such an abundance of farms that to sell the crops to anyone, you'd need the help of a bigger business, or try to cultivate very specialized and niche crops that are not being made by one of the mega-farms, yet.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#617

Post by timacles »

scj wrote: post #299
ge96 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like? My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly. That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.

There will be a new language created optimized for AI development

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#618

Post by avador »

roncesvalles wrote: post #581
skeeter2020 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't possibly believe this, or you and me (and many others) are doing something different. LLMs have created an entire new - huge - set of bang-your-head moments, as they go off half-cocked in a million simultaneous directions, chasing their tail, or just making shit up. And since the vast majority of work is on existing - often ancient - codebases, let's find out if you feel the same way in 18 months.

That's only if you do agentic coding. I use LLMs in the following ways: 1. Copy-pasting code into the web chat UI and asking for something (bugfix, add a feature, refactor, explain, review it etc), including entire source code files. A $20/mo Gemini subscription goes a long way (never been rate-limited). I only use the highest model. I often just copy-paste the entire source file between 3 backticks. 2. Cursor Tab. I…

I _think_ what you’ve said is “go shallow, not deep”. That is, don’t let the walk you make inside the latent space a long one. Twenty-five short and peppered steps, from de novo, is better than one long, protracted stew.

Is that accurate?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#620

Post by i_love_retros »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #585
Teknoman117 wrote: post #216

> AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy Based on my experience, I think this will prove more true than not in the long run, unfortunately. Professionally, I see people largely falling into two camps: those that augment their reasoning with AI, and those that replace their reasoning with AI. I’m not too worried about the former, it’s the latter for whom I’m worried.…

I work with people who generate solutions without really looking at what was produced (group A). They click around the app or run some tests and decide if they're content with the result, then ship it. You can see Claude's fingerprints all over the PR and it's safe to assume they didn't change much of anything. Then I have coworkers who work through the problems, build harnesses to test the changes and verify results…

Bro group B might as well write the code themselves. this is getting silly
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