271–280 of 403 posts
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That doesn’t mean industry output is high, it means people are starting new products. Has the output of existing companies/products increased substantially? Have more products proven successful and started companies? hard to say but maybe a little
>Has the output of existing companies/products increased substantially? Would be impossible to tell.
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Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
Not sure that is warranted. AI will create exciting changes to society for the better. These times are uncertain but certainly not depressing .
It's fine to have that opinion, but please frame as an opinion or else give me the lotto numbers for next week if you can predict the future that accurately.
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If that's "the idea", then clearly we need a more holistic, useful degree to replace CS as "the" software degree.
Despite what completely uninformed people may think, the field "computer science" is not about software development. It's a branch of mathematics. If you want an education in software development, those are offered by trade schools.
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Work on becoming Financially Independent. The best time to start was when you started your career, the second best time to start is now.
Yeah really seems like the only way to win (or rather not lose) is simply not to play. At this point I’ve realized I need to cast all other ambitions aside and work on getting some out of the way land that I own.
> The flip scenario: AI unlocks massive demand for developers across every industry, not just tech. Healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and finance all start embedding software and automation. Rather than replacing developers, AI becomes a force multiplier that spreads development work into domains that never employed coders. We’d see more entry-level roles, just different ones: “AI-native” developers who quickly…
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> My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs. The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
> The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?
> Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plate I'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.
My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but with…
In part, I think what people are responding to is the trajectory of the tools. I would agree that they seem to be on an asymptote toward being able to do a lot more things on their own, with a lot less direction. But I also feel like the improvements in that direction are incremental at this point, and it's hard to predict when or if there will be a step change.
But yeah, I'm really not sure I buy this whole thing about orchestrating a symphony of agents or whatever. That isn't what my usage of AI is like, and I'm struggling to see how it would become like that.
But what I am starting to see, is "non-programmers" beginning to realize that they can use these tools to do things for their own work and interests, which they would have previously hired a programmer to do for them, or more likely, just decided it wasn't worth the effort. I think for those people, it does feel like a novel automation tool. It's just that we all already knew how to do this, by writing code. But most people didn't know how to do that. And now they can do a lot more.
And I think this is a genuine step change that will have a big effect on our industry. Personally, I think this is ultimately a very good thing! This is how computers should work, that anybody can use them to automate stuff they want to do. It is not a given that "automating tasks" is something that must be its own distinct (and high paying) career. But like any disruption, it is very reasonable to feel concerned and uncertain about the future when you're right in the thick of it.
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Your first point hits the nail on the head. We are expected to have side projects and to keep up with new things (outside of work) but most other jobs don't have that. I would be okay with my work sending me off for additional training, on company time, but I don't want it to consume the time I have left after work.
I don't know why but our profession for some reason is different than the others in this respect and people often like to think that this is a norm and if you're not doing it you're not worthwhile. I think it has to do with some interesting psychological effects of people who are generally attracted to this profession but also due to the companies who implemented those mental hacks as a means to attract people who ar…
I think the reason is quite simple. Software is endlessly configurable. And thus a lot higher chance to get the configuration wrong.
This is what makes it attractive, and makes it hard to get right.
You cannot get good at it without making a ton of mistakes. When companies look for people with a lot of side projects, they are looking at people who already have made such mistakes and learned from them, preferably on their own time and not on paid, companies time.