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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?

#141

Post by florianherrengt »

tvbusy wrote: post #129

One thing this post did not discuss is the enormous effort required to explain to the management why number PRs has increased and number of lines changes, which in their view, means explosion of productivity, yet one engineer is destroying the team's momentum.

I tried to touch on that with this part:

> Fixing it would require such a colossal amount of work that it would be impossible to even start justifying it to anyone in management. > And what are you even thinking about? It would end up in the exact same state again in just a few months anyway.

The management side of this probably deserves a whole post of its own. There’s only so far I can take each tangent before the original post becomes too long for anyone to finish.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#142

Post by ryandrake »

mikert89 wrote: post #15
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

> It will become very easy to build most software

We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse?

Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#143

Post by pjmlp »

esafak wrote: post #50
skinfaxi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.

If the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?

Because most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center.

There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#145

Post by throwitaway222 »

Probably a good thing, we need more people building major mega projects like the Line. Potentially we need AI to mass produce architecture and scale up and out city/county building departments to open the gates to massive buildings in the United States.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#146

Post by eatsyourtacos »

trey-jones wrote: post #18
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…

Exactly this for me too. I don't know how to feel about this overall honestly, I'm able to do so much more but now I barely get to write any code. It's weird.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#147

Post by pjmlp »

edukite wrote: post #69
Manfrednotfunny wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few years, it just might. If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

Because selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#148

Post by cube00 »

RSHEPP wrote: post #97
Syntaf wrote: post #35

> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…

This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…

> We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences.

Sometimes this can be a death by a thousand cuts. Any individual change may not impact performance to a noticeable degree but when they're pumping out a 10x increase in commits it can be a slow decline.

Just look at how they're merging ~300 commits a week into bun.

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/graphs/commit-activity

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#149

Post by oceanplexian »

> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there.

So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here.

The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers back in the 1970s.

Breaking up code into small reviewable pieces is obsolete advice from legacy software engineering. We will probably be reviewing prompts or functional simulations as a form of review. Which brings me to the point that a Senior engineer in 5 years will look absolutely nothing like a Senior engineer in 2019.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#150

Post by ddj231 »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #78
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs... So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....

also who knows if prolonged ai development for years actually doesn't atrophy your coding muscles so to speak such that you are fully reliant on ai programming to get things done
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