I wouldn't say collapse. But given that we started in November 2025 (with wide adoption of Claude Code), we probably have 3 to 15 months before we see widespread impact on quality.
Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
451–460 of 575 posts
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. Nor even €50k/year. Two things are true: 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*. 2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the…
> The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to write . Remember we used to spend enormous amount of time in school and in our spare time studying computer science? Algorithms, operating systems, compilers, and etc. All kinds of insights. All kinds of fun. All kinds of hard engineering. Yet, how much time do we really need to spend in our day-to-day work implementin…
Yeah, but actually implementing those algorithms was extremely key to really grokking them. Testing those edge cases, seeing them fail, fixing them, learning "oh, that didn't fix it", repeat. Yeah, you can do it on paper (which I did), but the whole idea of going through the motions of writing yet another binary search algorithm was to lock in those concepts.
But that isn't the real problem here. Computer Science was always a theoretical concept, really. The meat of the issue is the rug being pulled out from the juniors and mids.
Reading code and writing it are two different skills. I believe that both are needed to maintain a codebase. It is much, much easier to understand what a service is doing when you're actually writing code that supports it, just like it's easier to remember the contents of a report that you wrote versus one that you read.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#453I see a lot of parallels with how people were worried for decades that kids who learned with calculators wouldn't be able to do math. Instead, studies show the opposite that kids who learned with calculators do better in math even when the calculators are later removed. The reason is our learning bandwidth is limited and if you're learning multiplication and division tables you aren't learning the far more important higher level concepts.
There is something similar happening with AI and most people don't understand it and we don't have enough long term studies for data to make conclusions on this yet. Engineers sounding an alarm here but they also don't have the data to support their worry. Certainly some of the lower level understanding of coding languages aren't being acquired and maintained as much as before. Whether that underlying knowledge actually needs to take up the learning bandwidth that it was taking is the real question. My hunch is that it doesn't and that dropping it makes room for higher level concepts and understanding that are actually more important given modern tooling, the same way we don't actually need to know binary and assembly to be effective engineers, but time will tell.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#454Honestly I'm not sure this is true. We may be at a point where coding is simultaneously going to stabilise and standardise more.
Maybe it's time we have a new or more universal coding language we teach in schools that is strong on concepts and standardisation. Something that enforces the math, logic and mechanisms that underpin modern software. It could be designed so that any common liguisric language could apply (as in English, Japanese, French, whatever) for the broadest appeal.
LLM could then translate architecture and concepts into the specific actual coding language of choice for the best fit. Of course you could also read that code and write it yourself.
The whole process could be redesigned with this concept being sort of like a "super compiler". Or hell - if you really wanted to there could be dedicated ASICs with the supercompiler LLM burned in (like Talaas) that could do this on the fly or very quickly for different applications.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#455I fall into the category of senior engineers who benefit from LLMs for all the reasons mentioned in this post. I find it's possible to agree completely with sentiments like this and still feel as if this is all written in the sand below the high tide line, and ten years from now nobody will care about this. Horsemanship and sailing were both specialized skills of high value to society, and now they're not. But in eac…
Uhhhh sailing is still an extremely valuable skill? Think piloting cargo ships, cruise lines (for non-American pilots), marine equipment...
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#456I do most of my coding with a model called MyselfGPT.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. Nor even €50k/year. Two things are true: 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*. 2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the…
FWIW: The highest paid devs I know excel at 2, and aren't even that good at 1.
Complement: I know many devs who are exceptional at 1 (writing code), and 2 (contextual thinking) never even occurs to them. They will happily implement whatever they are told, without ever thinking to ask "why am I being asked to implement this?" or "is this actually solving the problem?"
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#458Writing code was never the job. It was a small part of the job that can now be delegated to AI. Eliciting the right requirements and user needs. Creating a sound architecture and design. Validating final product meets the requirements. Ensuring there is good test coverage. You know `Engineering`. Mechanical and Electrical engineers didn't go away because of CAD.
Incomplete analogy; CAD architects the things that mechanical engineers will build (or prototype before handing off to a factory to assemble at scale)
Agents ideate, architect, build, test, and ship the thing.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#459Forcing friction the way this post describes won't work because the genie is out of the bottle. A much easier way to force friction is to expect everyone to read the code they are producing. Yes read all of it and understand what it's doing. A lofty bar sadly.
I'd like to see posts on the front of HN from companies who instituted PR LOC maximums, i.e. "Anything over 500-1k SLOC needs _n+1_ reviewers" (where _n_ increases every 10k SLOC. PRs needing like seven people to sign off of it might block the pipeline enough to discourage the slop flinging.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
"LLMs can't write code worth a damn" I think it depends on the - ahem - context. In my experience they usually can, sometimes they can't. But generally their sense of software architecture remains abysmal, so even if their writing is ok, you need to have architectural authority the very least to guide them.
The fact that they sometimes can't means you can't have someone who is not a software engineer. Otherwise there is no way to verify whether the LLM wrote correct code or not.
I feel like this depends on the kind of project/work to some degree. Lots of software engineering time is spent on very simple websites, apps and other projects that LLMs have been well trained on. I suspect if you want a static site with a contact form or a CMS theme/plugin, you could probably get a usable result by having some non-technical person plug some prompts into an AI.
They wouldn't be able to verify if the code is correct, but based on my testing, if the work is simple enough, it probably wouldn't matter much.
There are a lot of companies whose modus operandi is basically "build the same basic site 300 times, except with a different colour scheme and logo".