LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do • Hacker News Board

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#121

Post by trilogic » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #102

trilogic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting Tony, you seen to have been working for the AI since long time. We others are catching up but eventually all of us will be working for it, as directly or indirectly we are already doing. The "robot" was figurative cause we are no different from a machine, but that is too much for humans to comprehend.

I work for myself and the world, not for Ai. It's a tool without identity, but a damn good one that multiplies my capabilities. I anticipate the first bifurcation to be wheat from chaff. Ai is going to do better at a job than say half the people, those who don't care about the effort they put in or the quality of their output. These people will have to come to terms with their mediocrity or blandness. I'm still unsur…

>I work for myself and the world, not for Ai. Yourself really? Start by defining "I", "work" or "yourself"... then we may proceed to the next LOL

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#122

Post by throwaway7783 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

aleqs wrote: post #112

dakiol wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track. But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading t…

The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (…

Even if we forget "rockstar", there are certainly different levels of engineers. More experience doesn't automatically mean better either. That is not to say experience doesn't matter. It matters quite a bit. Sure , good interns can sometimes have good feedback or spot mistakes. But not consistently enough.

All of this to say that it's not just experience that makes one a better engineer.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#123

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

deanc wrote: post #120

t34t34r43 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

I've worked on projects in the airline and health industry which are highly regulated too. The regulations can be incredibly difficult to process and implement, and make sure you adhere to everything correctly. I've been involved in multiple scenarios where people have made false assertions about compliance or lack of. I'd still place a bet that the SOA models make _far_ less mistakes than humans.

[deleted]

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#124

Post by znpy » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #18

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. 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…

You pilot LLMs all day but that might not last.

A lot of companies are investing money on “ai factories” that are join to automate a lot of software development (that is, steer LLMs) on the basis of jira tickets (or linear/trello cards or whatever).

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#125

Post by juleiie » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #14

To 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…

That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions.

AI is fundamentally an equivalent to slave economy. Cheap, plentiful workforce. This time ethically neutral. You either get Greece or Rome. I’d prefer Greece but it will probably be Rome. From the past we can predict the future.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#126

Post by gbro3n » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

AI is beat thought of as an exoskeleton, you'll be at a huge advantage if you learn how to use it properly, and you will, unfortunately fall behind if you don't. I still think we're going to need people who can reason about code, and the amount of code to reason about is exploding in volume. Think of it as doctors having access to better drugs and techniques - they can can cure more illness, but the bar and expectation of what they can do will just raise. And doctors are still well paid, because what they do is important and needs doing well.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#127

Post by sreekanth850 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

>Agents do a really bad job at keeping codebases organized. If you do a disciplined way of development with agents by keeping all Documentation in markdown format, repo structure, Decision records and architecture, they do absolutely organized. Every new module should be documented and the editor configuration and coding patterns can be given as reference. this worked well for me. and it make enhancements, extensions development without any big troubles.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#128

Post by himata4113 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

While LLM's are beyond junior level at this point, they're still just that. I don't really agree that the first two pillars have been affected.

I've shared a story before that between now and 2 years ago a developer who solely relied on AI has produced the same hot garbage instancing system within the same time period. For example back in my day in 2 years I went from writing a system that struggled with few hundred players to one that could handle thousands and far beyond that. The person using AI 2 years ago wrote a system that didn't work and wrote a system 3 months ago that doesn't work.

Everyone is saying how great AI is, but they're missing that the driver is just as important AI wouldn't be able to achieve any of this without capable (often seniors) using it and giving it guidance. It's really a difference between "it works" and "it works without flaws".

Of course AI can produce things that also "work without flaws" with solved problems and someone "recreating" something that already exists with AI is not that special, a junior developer could accomplish the same thing given the time.

But I do agree that AI becoming part of performance reviews and all that is producing more productive developers which is going to drive the cost way down. In a way AI is stealing from a developers salary and giving it to the AI companies which is pretty ironic considering how cold developers seem towards artists.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#129

Post by cmiles74 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

I’ve been using Claude Code with Opus 4.7; it’s not that the code it produces is wrong, it simply tends to write too much of it. In my opinion it’s still worth thinking about a particular feature and finding the best way to fit it into your code because Claude will often just pick a layer of the stack (maybe presentation), and jam it in there. A couple weeks later you need this data somewhere else and Claude can’t reuse the code (maybe in the service layer) so it kind of “ports” it over. Unless a person is paying attention we now have the double the amount of code and duplicate logic. I don’t see AI tools like Claude getting better at this anytime soon.

Where I work there’s already pressure to use Opus 4.7 less to save money, someone mentioned using a smaller model for “simple bug fixes”. This might work sometimes but how often do we really know it’s a simple bug fixe ahead of time? I suspect as costs go up we’ll see interest in using these tools to write “all the code” go down. As people migrate to cheaper and less effective models I suspect we’ll see the pressure to skip reviewing that code dissipate as well.

We’ll see where we land, maybe it won’t as dramatically different as the author of this post fears.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#130

Post by techblueberry » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

anygivnthursday wrote: post #86

keyle wrote: post #34

I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely. I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants. People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.

With todays LLMs, yes. But if they can ever reach a level of a contractor in a reliable way and companies offering them willing to take responsibility (because confidence is high and rest is insured), then one can just hire a cheap AI agent to fulfill a contract - design, implement, deploy, run and maintain your service/website like the engineer before. Calculators are not a replacement for accountants, online accoun…

I mean, if they can do that, then game over Terminator style.