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

#401

Post by mexicocitinluez » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

simon84 wrote: post #62

jalev wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

Just having this discussion with someone about AI in healthcare and how issues are going to be handled.

If a nurse does something incorrectly, they can lose their license. Ensuring that nurse will never be a nurse again. There is a very clear path of accountability and very clear ways to mitigate it.

For instance, if a nurse is drunk and you recognize there is a pattern of people showing up drunk, you institute drug tests and breathalyzers and move on.

While we probably won't have LLM's autonomously performing procedures, they are 100% parsing documentation, reading lab results, making suggestions, etc. And right now, the burden has been placed squarely on the clinicians themselves. It'll feed them them the data, ask if they approve/agree, and then essentially wash their hands of accountability. Let's say an LLM starts incorrectly reading lab results, how is that fixed/remedied? A prompt update? Additional safeguards? Adjusting the temperature? Changing a model?

This is a far different type of engineering that still feels pretty new. Granted, I'm still an amateur in this space (I use Claude Code a decent bit), but it feels really opaque to me right.

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

#402

Post by csallen » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #305

csallen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, tons of people seem to be in camps at both extremes. It's either "AI sucks don't trust it!" or "AI is so much better than humans!" But the most reasonable take, which I'm happy to see reflected in so many comments in this thread, is… use both. Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI. Then the unique shortcomings of each party can be covered by the other's st…

> Do an AI pass, and have humans verify, and vice versa. Let the humans drive the AI. You can do that, sure. But doing so negates any improvements in speed the LLM brought. And at that point, you may as well just do it yourself to begin with.

I feel like you're missing the point that it's more thorough to use both. Speed isn't the only factor that matters.

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

#403

Post by causal » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #56

My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently. LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is…

I can't even get Claude or GPT-5 to consistently produce good flows for common use cases, much less domain-specific shit. They have deep vocabulary though, which makes them sound better informed than they are.

They are very good at writing code and debugging visible errors- but that's like 50% the harness.

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

#404

Post by odeono » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #333

hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…

> Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff I played with it a bit, and no, it doesn't! And I am talking as someone with limited music culture, musicians are likely to be even more critical. For the first few tries, it sounds impressive and the tunes are catchy. It used to sound wrong in the background but they mostly (but not completely) fixed that. However,…

I think this is a question of how much control the user is able to have over the end product. Music creation in particular is very difficult... I've produced music for 4-5 years, and the granularity with which one has to control the finest pieces is often mindblowingly frustrating. It takes years to develope a decent ear for mixing.

By giving up that control, you do get to a quality end result sooner, but that end result can only be an approximation to your original vision, since you're giving up the control required to shape the sound to that granular level.

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

#405

Post by ethagnawl » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

mariopt wrote: post #322

dasil003 wrote: post #283

It's odd to me how quickly the author devalues their own experience just because AI can do certain things well. There's a huge chasm between what AI can do when prompted by an expert software engineer vs a non-technical person. Sure the models and the tooling will get better, but it still needs to be driven by someone with an intuition for how software works and able to dig in when necessary to unpack and correct the…

I think the core issue is not AI itself, it's people. Right now non-tech people just think AI will do anything they want and are the one in charge of hiring/firing, managing, etc. It's horrible to be a software dev right now, you've to deal with AI and lunatics. Of course Domain Knowledge is important but, right now it's very hard to have reasonable conversation because... you know... AI this, AI that. I had a custom…

> It's horrible to be a software dev right now, you've to deal with AI and lunatics.

Yes, yes, 1000x yes.

As a bit of an aside, I have been toying with the idea of adding some sort of second pass/security auditing/scaling offering to my consultancy for people vibe coding projects which wind up generating interest. (Not sure what the fuck else I'm going to do!) I have a few non-technical friends who have found themselves in this situation and there's a real need for it.

The aspects of it which I find daunting are the ones you've referenced, though. I imagine many people -- especially the ones who've built mobile apps for $300 in tokens -- are going to balk at the costs I'd have to charge for such a service. We're also now living in an era where everyone is an "expert" (lunatic) ... with just a little help from Claude/Gemini/Grok/whatever. I can already foresee people second guessing every suggestion, decision, line item, etc. I'd also be taking on a liability that'd be tricky to completely work around via legal language for any bugs or security issues which might/would inevitably slip through review. Ironic because nobody blinks when LLMs excrete those things.

But, anyways, circling back around. Yeah, trying to find work in this market has been a new exercise in frustration. AI is all anyone wants to talk about, it's driven hourly rates through the floor and most of the open gigs revolve around model training and carry an implicit expiration window for the trainer. It sucks and I really don't know what I'm going to do to keep my consultancy open going forward. (As signs of how desperate I'm getting, I recently signed up for Task Rabbit and am seriously considering applying for a job at Tractor Supply.)

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

#406

Post by causal » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

worldthruword wrote: post #294

torben-friis wrote: post #56

My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently. LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is…

> LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. Would a skill which forces you and LLM to reach a shared understanding of the product features and the regulations those features are supposed to capture be of help here? The main idea is we provide documents to the LLM and it asks lot of questions which clear amb…

Sure but finding their shortcomings and patching them with skills takes real trial and error. They are incapable of identifying their own shortcomings for you.

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

#407

Post by cmrdporcupine » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted. > Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to…

This is exactly opposite my experience in my 25 year career.

The best people I've worked with were the people who learned the ins and outs of the business they were making software for, not the people who learned how to write code really well or read logs or learn software architecture patterns. Those people (and I've been one of those people) often go around looking for nails for their hammers rather than really focusing on the customer need.

It takes a really sharp brain to pick up and learn an area of expertise that has nothing to do with software development, and figure out how software development makes that domain better.

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

#408

Post by eranation » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

My prediction is that the review / human in the loop part will become much bigger and more discussed.

Current transformer technology will either plateau or eventually we will get to that singularity bracket. (I was a skeptic once but all signs point there)

And this means models will eventually get better.

The main human value will be

- intent (we call the shots of why and what, AI will take care of the how)

- taste (everyone now immediately identifies Claude designed landing pages, they all look the same, taste changes with time, and can’t be predicted)

- supervision, both before and after AGI, to ensure no accidental damage, no misaligned decision drift, or in the unlikely but still statistically possible case of AI going rouge

Anything else (if we don’t plateau) can be eventually achieved.

Having that said, the fact AI can do it, doesn’t mean we’ll want AI to do it.

If there will be enough demand for handmade creations (with the current anti AI sentiment I can see it having an impact at least as similar to organic food) then we have some hope.

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

#409

Post by PunchyHamster » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

I think the author missed the forest for the trees - the domain knowledge is what allowed him to successfully use the AI because he instantly knew what was correct or not.

Constant use of AI will probably erode that knowledge over time just because of not practising it, but successful use in complex domain needs the domain knowledge to steer it away from icebergs or hallucination or model flaws.

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

#410

Post by troupo » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #282

rvz wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. Unfortunately those not in the depths of mission critical systems or regulated products will continue to believe that producing tons of code quickly using LLMs without humans in these systems is acceptable. Here's an example of what we will continue to see with folks fully immersed in gen AI psychosis: "The creator of claude code said that he no longer writes code for about 6 months and now has Claude doing all…

Why is it such a dramatic statement for Boris to claim that he no longer writes code? Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time? It would be like a developer in 2020 claiming that he only writes assembly because compilers can’t be trusted. No one is taking that person seriously. If you chose a career in tech you made a decision to work in one of the fastest moving fields in human his…

> Why is it such a dramatic statement for Boris to claim that he no longer writes code?

Because we can actually see the disjointed slop that Anthropic produces. And when issues happen, they can't fix them for weeks on end because no one understands what code does anymore, and all of their "hard problems causing issues" they blog about are literally "if we had actual engineers this wouldn't even be an issue to begin with". Like this bullshit they had in spring: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

> It would be like a developer in 2020 claiming that he only writes assembly because compilers can’t be trusted.

LLMs are not compilers. For a few very obvious reasons I'll leave as an exercise to figure out