Over the past 30 years, computers and software have dramatically transformed our world. Yet many sectors remain heavily influenced by their analog history. My understanding is that the HN community has always recognized that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed across work environments, administration, and general processes. Didn't many of us believe that numerous jobs could be replaced by a few lines of code if inputs and outputs were properly standardized? The fact that this hasn't happened or has occurred very slowly due to institutional inertia is another story altogether.
Whether software development will become a "bullshit job" or how the world will look in a few years remains unknown. But those who constantly praise their work as software developers while simultaneously acknowledging that other non-physical jobs and processes could be fundamentally overhauled are living in a cognitive bubble—something I wouldn't have expected in this community.
The Post-Developer Era
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#32Funny how a foreign country got America to compromise on its core value of free speech that we used to lecture Europeans on.
With great worry I observe recent developments in the U.S., but I do not catch what event are you referring to exactly. Would you kindly hint?
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#33Truth is we've been post-developer for a while; powerful machines and high level abstractions has made good developers into managers, translating business objectives into software products and managing the outcomes with much less typing of code -- they're still called software engineers for legacy and cultural reasons, of course.
Sadly most shops greatly overlook this reality, stuck in 1991, and continue to add redundant layers and staff thinking it makes them 'agile'.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#34Big part of coding is understanding the code and making decisions on what needs to be added/removed/changed. LLMs can code, even if they generate perfect code every single time, someone still needs to read the code and make decisions. Others speak about understanding business logic, interfacing with clients and stakeholders,etc... I get that, but even without that, someone will always need to decide how things should…
It's funny how we'd like to chop off the head of that junior developer who's behind that pull request of a perfectly working but not enough clean code, but we happily welcome spaghetti and buggy LLM code because sisterhood and brotherhood claim it's trendy. Herd mentality.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#35This whole post-developer idea is a red herring fueled by investor optics. The reality is AI will change how software is built, but it's still just a tool that requires the same type of precise thinking that software developers do. You can remove all need to understand syntax, but the need for translating vague desires from laypeople into a precise specification will remain—there's nothing on the AI horizon that will…
> a red herring fueled by investor optics
Exactly. Plus we kind of want to believe it. The "extrapolate to infinity" bias writ large. It's seductive. Step 1: AI that genuinely does some amazing things. Step 2: handwave, but look out Step 3: Super Intelligence and AI that does it all. "This changes everything" etc. And there are just enough green shoots to go all in on this idea (and I mean cult-level all in).
In practice it plays out much closer to the author's sentiment. A useful tool. Perhaps even paradigm defining.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#36Funny how a foreign country got America to compromise on its core value of free speech that we used to lecture Europeans on.
With great worry I observe recent developments in the U.S., but I do not catch what event are you referring to exactly. Would you kindly hint?
ahh wrong thread. I meant to comment here LOL
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#37This whole post-developer idea is a red herring fueled by investor optics. The reality is AI will change how software is built, but it's still just a tool that requires the same type of precise thinking that software developers do. You can remove all need to understand syntax, but the need for translating vague desires from laypeople into a precise specification will remain—there's nothing on the AI horizon that will…
> The reality is AI will change how software is built
Yup, now instead of blindly using tab to autocomplete I have to check the "AI" is not fucking up before pressing the key.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#38Big part of coding is understanding the code and making decisions on what needs to be added/removed/changed. LLMs can code, even if they generate perfect code every single time, someone still needs to read the code and make decisions. Others speak about understanding business logic, interfacing with clients and stakeholders,etc... I get that, but even without that, someone will always need to decide how things should…
It's funny how we'd like to chop off the head of that junior developer who's behind that pull request of a perfectly working but not enough clean code, but we happily welcome spaghetti and buggy LLM code because sisterhood and brotherhood claim it's trendy. Herd mentality.
There's an uncomfortable truth backing this, at least for me: revising the code of a LLM and changing my cursorrules is easier than fixing up a junior's code and teaching them _why_ I'd want to do something a particular way. After all, it's a tool, not a person, and you can be much rougher with your tools.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#39The other day I was reviewing the work of a peer on a relatively easy task (using a SDK to manage some remote resources given a static configuration). At several times I was like « why did you do that this way? This is so contrived ». And I should have known better but of course the answer started with « … I know but Copilot did this or that… ». Of course no test to validate properly the implementation. The sentiment…
Its actually amazing news, worse software quality means more oportunities for hackers and better tools
Or people just become satisfied with lower quality. Hand-crafted chairs from a woodworker used to be the only way to get a chair. You'd get an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws. Now that chairs are cheaply made in factories, we can have multiple different chairs with many flaws. And just toss them out and go on to the next one when needed. But... those sturdy beautiful fine-wordworker-made chairs are still being built. They are just more rare, expensive, and special than ever before.
Re: The Post-Developer Era
#40Anyone who thinks AI will replace programmers isn’t doing much AI assisted coding. AI is at best very helpful. It’s a very very long way from making programmers obsolete.
The developer is not going to become obsolete.
However, LLMs might already be good enough to replace teams of 10 software developers with a domain expert and an expert developer armed with good LLMs.
That's enough for a fundamental, very violent change to the software industry.