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Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

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Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#201

Post by 663344 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #142
fibonachos wrote: post #19

My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now. Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately. I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-swi…

> What seems clear to me is that expectations around velocity and throughput will increase (are increasing). This is why I don’t understand why folks around here (that are employed) feel so enthusiastic about AI. We are going to be working more in a rush to produce stuff that we won’t be feeling as proud of as we did before AI. Unless you were in the profession for the money, the delights of crafting software simply…

> AI is pushing us closer to be just… well, I don’t know, but I don’t like it.

"software plumbers"

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#202

Post by denn-gubsky »

In my experience, AI solves the implementation part well - if you know explicitly what should be implemented. If your engineering understanding is fuzzy, the implementation will be fuzzy too.

Engineering and architectural skills matter more now than before. Previously, you had time for rethinking and rearchitecting while coding. That timeline is collapsing - your ideas become real in hours, the bad ones included.

Verification matters more than implementation. When you ship 20 PRs to verify in a single day, every day, all month, how can you be sure the ideas are right, and the implementation is correct? You need ways to challenge your own system: integration tests, runtime tests, and load tests that make you confident in what you're building.

Three skills become non-negotiable in this AI era (until tomorrow, when the answer probably changes again):

1. System Architecture. Build correct framing for your ideas with room for future extensions. Requirements should be complete, precise, and extensible. Project documentation grows with the code and stays current.

2. Organizing AI agentic teams into verifiable flows. Self-evolving specialized agents that verify each other's output until you're confident the code matches the requirements you actually had.

3. Verification, verification, verification. Integration tests, runtime tests, load tests, experiments. The code an AI produces has to be confirmed correct across every dimension that matters.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#204

Post by ellis0n »

daemon_9009 wrote: post #187

compare this to Electronic engineering, we are not making chips by hand, It is impossible to squeeze too many transistors in such a small space, we just create the circuit designs. I believe writing the code is heading in the same direction as well, you don't write too much code now, but you have to design the architecture and connect things. But it does not mean that you don't need to understand the code, now of all…

Exactly. Chips are incredibly expensive and extremely complex—containing billions of transistors and you can't realistically build them at home. Memory is a good example: it keeps growing in both capacity and cost.

The same thing will happen to software. Eventually, the sheer volume and diversity of code will exceed human comprehension and only massive data centers will be able to process it. We'll reach the point where software complexity and programmer capabilities hit an economically practical limit. The next-gen Moore's Law for AI?

Today, chips are designed largely through automated processes and software is increasingly being created the same way. The main difference is the timescale: software evolves billions of times faster than hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?

#205

Post by goingbananas »

karakoram wrote: post #123
pyeri wrote: post #2

I'm a Senior Freelance Programmer, I can see many of my past and present clients moving towards the exact path you described. I keep warning them during meetings that Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues and Claude will be forced to close their access to all but the most enterprisey ones with deep pockets. The mere electricity cost for that kind of high level reason…

As a Freelance Programmer, are you even getting consistent clients at decent rates? If so, how are you getting clients consistently and how do you convince businesses that you are better than AI?

Also interested in knowing this. The freelancer market has been wiped out from my experience.
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