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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?

#251

Post by florianherrengt »

tp3358 wrote: post #7
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...

Is it long term pain if a small startup in a very competitive vertical gets to market quicker with code gen and finds market fit? Whether that results in a rewrite or a refactor, that is still a huge win and one that a lot of people will gamble on.

Debt is debt. Some of it is absolutely worth taking on.

I don’t have any issue with intentional debt when you understand the trade-off and have a clear payoff plan.

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

#252

Post by soperj »

Shorel wrote: post #194
RSHEPP wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That really sounds like the kind of people who will complain in university about being forced to study calculus. Natural consequence: Then they never grasped the concept of computational complexity. O(n) Vs O(n²)? They have n, what's the difference? Python is fast enough. The only thing that matters is shipping features fast! Features! Our competitor will have this next week, we need to write code fast, everything el…

computational complexity was never part of calculus. Calculus is the math of continuous change.

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

#253

Post by SoftTalker »

Aurornis wrote: post #110
doctorwho42 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

> Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... I’m convinced the only reason there’s a Fortran crisis is because nobody wants to work on Fortran or make a career out of it. Has nothing to do with willingness to hire juniors. Good luck finding promising juniors who survey their career opportunities and decide that Fortran is a good technology for building their resume.

Pay them and they will. The problem with many people bemoaning the lack of Fortran and COBOL developers is that they are not willing to admit that the code they "need" to maintain isn't actually valuable enough to be worth paying what that maintenance costs.

It's like complaining that no mechanics work on carburetors anymore. Well some do, but they are expensive and not worth it to keep your old hoopty running. Might be worth it if you have a show-quality 1960's era muscle car.

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

#254

Post by deaton »

ryandrake wrote: post #142
mikert89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-code…

See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.

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

#255

Post by deaton »

pydry wrote: post #188
ryandrake wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-code…

In the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded. There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.

Now you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!

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

#256

Post by soperj »

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…

This has less to do with bad engineers than bad policies and procedures. You don't performance test before shipping to prod? you get what you get.

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

#257

Post by deadbabe »

A pattern I have noticed is you get way better results if you just have one skilled senior engineer coding everything with AI vs a lot of people.

Having large teams in the age of AI is pointless. It slows things down and spreads accountability too thin.

When you have one good engineer doing many things, a lot of stuff lives in their head and they know what to look for in their own PRs. Also, people tend to like their own AI slop, but not others. So overall you will have at least an engineer who is satisfied with the codebase vs a lot of people who either have some gripe about something someone else did, or just don’t care at all.

That means you have to put way more trust in a single individual, but if it’s the right individual you propel the organization further ahead than a team of mediocre engineers or senior engineers limited in what they can accomplish.

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

#258

Post by RSHEPP »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #249
ryandrake wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not o…

If your company has bad engineers cranking out 10,000 line PRs your engineering culture and product was already bad, I guarantee it.

It's not the whole culture and product, it's specific teams that do it. And trying to push back on teams that are "producing" is not a simple task.

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

#259

Post by florianherrengt »

zackmorris wrote: post #205

Wait till we realize that nobody is buying the software we vibe code anyway. We've seen this game before, with the Dot Bomb and 9/11. A lot of you have 6 figure jobs that will simply be gone next year after the election, never to return. That winter lasted about 5 years until 2007 when the iPhone and social media sites like Facebook went mainstream. This winter won't end. Or more accurately, it is the end. Maybe we s…

This is extrapolating several steps beyond anything we actually know.

Whether people will buy AI-generated software is a different question. The problem I’m describing already exists inside businesses with paying customers.

I’m talking about established teams working on products that already have users and make money, where AI lets individual engineers introduce changes faster than the rest of the team can properly understand and review them.

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