What's gonna happen to software engineers?

They're going to be overworked.

In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier.

The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with buttons so we could type the programs into the computers. That was more efficient and now all the sudden it lowered the bar entry and more people who are employed and doing the work.

Assembly language to machine code compilers to assembly language high-level languages and LLMs.

Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life.

What's going to happen to software engineers? They're going to be overworked and they're going to be given more work and the cycle will never end.

Yeah I mean, as far as I can tell the result of the agent mania is the same amount of software, but an acceleration in the decline of performance and quality. I'm also increasingly seeing early adopters going back to a more "traditional" approach to development. So idk, maybe the result will be more jobs fixing up all the vibe code while we transition to a more mature implementation of language models into our workflows.

People take pride in wearing handmade watches

As of today, I've never heard of anyone taking pride in using a SaaS or frequenting a website or an app because it was handcrafted. Maybe some day

I’ve noticed a massive reverse in AI sentiment in the last 3 weeks here on HN.

It’s not that I don’t disagree, but I wonder what’s going on. Maybe it’s the IPO

But has software engineering really changed that much? I've barely had any regular fulltime work experience most of my career has been contracting, so I’m not sure.It seems like the perceived change varies depending on the environmen

What I don’t get is using AI agents feels basically the same as what I used to do with legacy codebases of 100k–200k lines—understanding the codebase and making partial fixes or adding features. To me, it feels like nothing has changed.

Most of my career has been about finding parts that won't break within the overall code structure—without necessarily knowing the entire detailed specification—and adding features or fixing bugs there. So I feel like it's no different from finding and fixing small issues and bugs in a large codebase written by AI.

Of course, when delivering a solution that's 70,000–80,000 lines long, there is a change things that used to rely on templates and CMS tools can now be created more diversely using AI. But aside from that, I don't think things have changed as much as people say. It might be different for those who build things entirely from scratch with AI, though.

My code writing ability has declined, but I'm not really seeing a dramatic change in workflow

Now I work with code written by AI, adding features and modifying it… Most of the codebases I’ve seen were bad anyway—there was no good code to begin with. When coding with AI, I split tasks into P0, P1, P2 based on importance. For P0, I write everything myself. For P1, I write the draft and AI implements it. For P2, AI implements everything. For P0, I only handle things that involve responsibility, like payment logic or login logic.

I don't participate in open source, so I don’t see big changes. The only thing I notice is that AI speeds things up a lot—for things I used to understand by reading documentation and examples, now I can generate them much faster. Personally, I wish open source projects had more simple, short examples in their code