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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

blog.florianherrengt.com

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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#11

Post by gfhhnki »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

In the words of Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap". Any apparent short term gain is really a prescription for long term pain. Ignore what AI fanboys say and instead look at what they do. https://northeasttimes.com/2026/08/07/oracle-bans-ai-code-fr...

Just look at how they bragged for a year now about how AI built entire apps with a single prompt.

And now that code is being watermarked by AI, suddenly they’re artists, painstakingly prompting, crafting, to get just the right code; the watermark is unethical even!

AI psychosis is real, and even some of the smartest people I know how succumbed to it.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#15

Post by mikert89 »

declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad.

Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#17

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

tantalor wrote: post #9

> Fixing it would require such a colossal amount of work that it would be impossible to even start justifying it to anyone in management. Bad news: by delegating the thinking to somebody else (Claude) you have become the management.

Nooo. But seriously, that does appear to be the end result on most of my recent sessions. The time I spend is on correcting, adjusting.. dare I say managing the process as opposed to actively editing every aspect of it.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#18

Post by trey-jones »

tantalor wrote: post #9

> Fixing it would require such a colossal amount of work that it would be impossible to even start justifying it to anyone in management. Bad news: by delegating the thinking to somebody else (Claude) you have become the management.

This is exactly how I feel about my job now. I'm the new manager. But honestly claude is better than any team of developers I've ever had working under me. It does exactly what I ask it to, in 10 minutes instead of 3 weeks. And apparently we can't afford a development team now anyway...

I'm not working at massive scale. I've not built any public-facing projects from scratch. But I have done years-worth of cleanup and improvement on projects that I'm very familiar with and have been in my backlog. It's not 100% success, but it's better than I could have done on my own, in the last few months anyway.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#19

Post by stonefoot »

packetlost wrote: post #5
jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

In the words of Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap". Any apparent short term gain is really a prescription for long term pain. Ignore what AI fanboys say and instead look at what they do. https://northeasttimes.com/2026/08/07/oracle-bans-ai-code-fr...

Oracle banned AI code for copyright reasons, you cannot interpret that as a assessment of the practical output of the models.

That's only one of the three reasons in the article: 1) Reviewer burden - LLMs can produce a deluge plausible but incorrect code which can overwhelm human reviewers. 2) Safety and Security - Many corporations depend on the JDK so stability is a high priority. 3) Copyright/IP about who owns submissions generated by AI is not settled in law.

The article also goes on to compare the JDK teams policy to GraalVM, also in Oracle which is more similar to the Linux kernel policy, where AI submissions are allowed, but the human submitter is accountable to them, which is reasonable too.

It's not unreasonable, in my opinion, for the JDK team to limit AI contributions based on their stated priorities, just like how other teams might not require those same restrictions.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#20

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

happytoexplain wrote: post #16
mikert89 wrote: post #13

AI gives more leverage to exceptional people, its an amplifier not an extender

Right, it's a multiplier only if we define bad engineers as negative numbers, and "bad" as "most".

I know what you mean, but the amplifier could genuinely work both ways ( magnify bad and good outcomes ).
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