Engineering hasn't gone away, you're now just directing things at a higher level. You are now a architect & manager (but you're managing agents not people).
Who sometimes has to deep dive & mentor a agent on solving the right problem.
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
91–100 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"
It's not so much about velocity or quality, both of which LLM do (or will) provide. The real question is about accountability and liability. When a major data leak is going to happen, who will they sue or fire ? That is the value engineers provide. They understand, confirm, and take ownership.
This is what I'm wondering too. We've signed a confidentiality agreement with all the big players (as I'm sure all other companies have done), which is supposed to ensure our data is both segregated and not used for training. I don't trust these companies not to do just that; their business is in taking what we have and training their models.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#93It's not just about it taking the technical competence away from our job, it's taken away the joy [1] which I wrote about.
I feel like many of my peers are beating around the bush on this topic and in denial. Even if you accept it can do a large portion of the technical part of our work, we are just supervisors at this point making sure it doesn't do any stupid shit. What is the point? Where is the fun in this? Where is the challenge? At least I have enjoyed building my career over the last 20+ years and building software, but find little joy in the work I'm doing now.
I think we're going to see a massive exodus of folks leaving the profession and a huge mental health crisis, long before the folks working in other sectors realise what's hit them.
[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#94Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…
> Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. Dunno how much longer that is going to remain true for your specific employer - all the fintech companies I deal with personally have had some sort of AI account for their devs since last year. Even places like jane street have employees posting blogs (one of which was on HN frontpage about 60m ago) saying they mo…
Sorry if I was unclear. I don't work in finance. I do work with agents. I think expert engineers in finance who are guiding agents are adding a lot of value because of their knowledge of finance. Because I lack that knowledge of finance, even given access to agents, I would not accept a role guiding agents in a finance company because I wouldn't be able to guide the agents well and my/our output would be bad.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#95To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…
> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones. Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.
The major blocker for manual labor automation in that fashion is cheap energy. China is ahead of the pack with the States' weight behind aggressive expansion of solar tech, and still can't do that.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"
It's not so much about velocity or quality, both of which LLM do (or will) provide. The real question is about accountability and liability. When a major data leak is going to happen, who will they sue or fire ? That is the value engineers provide. They understand, confirm, and take ownership.
This question has been easily answered by many companies.
You, the IC, the developer prompting the code extruder, are ultimately responsible for its outputted code and its behaviour.
You may feel pressured to push out thousands of lines of code a day. You may see those thousands of lines refactored several times over the lifespan of a merge request. You may be asked to do this continue this in the long term with all the mental fatigue that entails.
When it's too much for you to sustainably deal with and you turn to using LLMs to review the code, that will still, presumably, fall on you at the end of the day.
The output is your responsibility.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#97> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
I have a historic house with a hand carved/ uniquely shaped door. The jamb rotted and we paid a woodworker $4k to create a replacement. The door itself would easily cost $25k to replace. So, move to a major historic area with hand carved doors and you could make some decent money.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an extraordinarily rosy view of the future. I'm old enough to remember the dot-com crash, specifically the years afterwards. In 2002-2003, the unemployment rate of software engineers was something like 40%. In fact, the only reason it wasn't higher was because of the number of people who had permanently left the field to become plumbers (or other trades). I think this is going to be worse. In the dot-com crash…
> I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech. What would this future look like? Software developer salaries burrowing into the ground?
There will be a handful of people who make stratospheric compensation, a bit like we have now.
Everyone else will have extreme job uncertainty, getting laid off multiple times, losing compensation as a result (ie equity vesting) with compensation that at first stagnates and then starts to slowly decline in real terms.
A lot of the big tech companies will likely spend less effort on non-core activities. Think of all the things Google does. Anything that's purely internal will be gutted staffing-wise because it's the safest testbed for shifting the engineer-AI balance on teams before rolling it out further.
If you listen to non-tech people now you hear tales of applying for hundreds of jobs and getting no response. That will become more normal. What's worse is that AI seems to be to blame here. Companies all use the same AI ATS systems and I've seen allegations that candidate scoring gets cached for upwards of a year. So if the system happens to give you a bad score, literally nobody will see your application because you'll get filtered out before any human sees you.
I was watching a VC give a talk from some conference in France and the general sentiment is that no companies are being funded with teams greater than 5. Why? AI. So don't think you can startup your way out of this slump unless you're somebody who has the connections and CV to get funded anyway, in which case you might well have some of those stratospheric options anyway, at least for now.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#99To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…
> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones. Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.
> Nope, just knowledge workers.
Nope, just a specific kind. Those who developed and cultivated only a very specific skill set at the expense of all others.
I used to think being a generalist, and having persued technical roles with a people facing element was to my detriment, but it’s turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#100The last sentence in the article is correct: "Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession." As an AI optimist, I think all forced labor should eventually be done by AI. People can then spend their time pursuing their own hobbies. Just as many people still play Go after AlphaGo appeared, because they genuinely love the game. In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People…
That’s just not economically viable. Even if it becomes viable after some singularity event the path there will be 1000 the upheaval seen during the wipe out of manufacturing and mining