AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder • Hacker News Board

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#231

Post by AndrewKemendo » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

saulpw wrote: post #206

rainmaking wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating- I've always loved the big picture, architecture, and I've also loved stable software but have one hell of a time fixing bugs. AI helped me a ton with that. Well if you're ever in need for a complementary mind in side projects- huh, how does one connect over HackerNews?

Sounds like they wouldn't need someone like you anymore, now that they've got AI to do the parts they're not good at =)

This is where I’m at

I stopped trying to recruit cofounders because I don’t need them anymore

I can do everything I need to do by myself plus tools at a pace no set of humans can achieve

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#232

Post by blell » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

RevEng wrote: post #178

Deegy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now there are 1% of the number of farmers that there used to be

And yet there isn't widespread unemployment. Fewer farmers were needed so fewer people became farmers. Food became cheap and plentiful. Everyone else went on to do other things that they couldn't afford to do before. Software will do the same; we will make more software with fewer people and it will become ubiquitous to the point that people will just quickly generate whatever software they need rather than do many m…

That argument does people who have invested decades of their lives into software engineering a lot of good.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#233

Post by xhrpost » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

>The engineers who thrive will be the ones who can resist the temptation to over-engineer when the marginal cost of adding complexity drops to near zero.

I think this isn't being discussed enough in the SWE world. It wasn't too long ago that engineers on HN would describe a line of code as "not an asset but a liability". Now that code is "free" though, I'm seeing more excessively verbose PRs at work. I'm trying to call it out and rein it in a bit but until engineers on average believe there is inherent risk here, the behavior will continue.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#234

Post by alex_suzuki » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

butILoveLife wrote: post #51

oytis wrote: post #12

> you are not imagining things. The job changed. The expectations changed. And nobody sent a memo. Looks like something AI would say. Regardless of how it really was written

Its really long winded. The entire thing could have been a couple bullet points. Admittedly it was so long and basic, I stopped halfway.

> The entire thing could have been a couple bullet points

It probably was

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#235

Post by cmrdporcupine » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

While I agree with the thrust of the article: It would help if the article itself wasn't clearly at least partially LLM written. It has many of the shibboleths:

"This is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental shift in professional identity. "

"That is not empowerment. That is scope creep without a corresponding increase in compensation"

Honestly, it's lazy. At least edit the bloody thing.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#236

Post by pmvpeter » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

hypfer wrote: post #211

ipaddr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.

> It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? Yes. > The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software. No. The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why n…

I can’t speak for everyone but it seems to me to be a very human drive to want to be useful to others.

If you are good at something that you enjoy doing and that is valued by others, that’s the ideal scenario. And that’s what writing software looked like for many people for a long time.

That doesn’t mean you should do things just to please others. And it also doesn’t mean you can’t do something just because you enjoy doing it. But it means that these people now have a diminished ability to employ their unique skills to help others while doing something they love doing. That can sting, understandably.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#237

Post by layer8 » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

o_m wrote: post #43

RivieraKid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.

I think we need to change our perspective of what success is. I believe there will be a ton of small companies popping up instead of a few big ones that eats everyone's lunch. Like Google, Microsoft and others giants have done until now.

The big ones are successful based on vendor lock-in, network effects, and regulatory capture. AI doesn’t change that dramatically.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#238

Post by bonoboTP » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

alex_suzuki wrote: post #225

bonoboTP wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comments as well. I won't give away the tells but HN is less and less pleasant to read. Now is the time to cherish your pockets of small scale high quality forums that's not flooded by this stuff yet.

How do you find those pockets?

I guess talking to people and making friends helps. Online, maybe seek out discords and befriend people and they may tell you. Not unlike how you find cool underground clubs.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#239

Post by yawnxyz » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

I have a similar problem - AI is making building products easier, but it's made "shipping" a product 100x harder.

I was always a mediocre engineer, and stopping out on a personal usually happened bc "feature XYZ is way too hard to build and I won't spend another three weeks on it". Nowadays anything can be built in a couple of days, scope creep plus "would be cool if it could also do XYZ" makes it harder to walk away from a project and call it done.

But ofc these are personal projects, and I use them daily (like a personal workout system and tracker which I run w/ Claude Code, which love to call Claude Co-Workout). It doesn't "work" as a standalone app. It's mostly a "display system" for whatever CC outputs to me, so I can take the daily workout to the gym.

I got into software bc I liked to put out fun products and projects; I never really liked the process of writing software itself. But either way I'm still running into the "it's harder to put projects out than ever" dilemma, even though the projects are way easier to make, and higher quality than ever.

I'm wondering if it'd be fun to have a "Ask HN: Show us what you've build with (mostly) AI" thread?

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#240

Post by rnimmer » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

My immediate reaction was, "Only 7?" but that may not be a fair thing to think, depending on what the constraints were.

The shift I've experienced is something akin to being able to finally focus on the aspects I've always enjoyed most: architecture and user experience. I review all the code, but through iteration my prompts have gotten better, and for the most part my automated codemonkey 'employee' produces good code. It's not reasonable to expect complex things to be one-shot; UX improvements always require follow-ups, and features need to be divided and conquered one at a time. Engineers who lack those higher level skills will struggle. You are leading a small team now, not just plugging away at implementing user stories.