31–40 of 71 posts
It took me a while to get into it, but this is really good. You need to make it past the anecdote about building a property-based testing suite with Claude Code though, the real meat is in the second half.
The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…
> Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Not understanding that is something I've been seeing management repeatedly doing for decades. This article reads like all the things I discovered and the mistakes the company I worked for made learning how to outsource so…
Also in the mix: Stuff involving B2B customers and integrating systems, where "developer" blurs a bit with sales-engineer or consultant, ex:
* Be on a call to ask significant questions (grounded in reading the code) to determine what the customer's real problem is.
* Help craft diplomatic but accurate explanations of what's going wrong.
* Explain what bugs or changes you can do for them versus which parts are fully on their end, sometimes with "here's what I think your engineers should consider doing" advice.
Not always fun, but sometimes enlightened self-interest means I'd rather spend an 1 hour being "one of our developers" in a customer-meeting, as opposed to 6 hours discovering everything is actually working as-intended and the customer just misunderstood what feature they were using.
Honestly this just feels like a roundabout way of saying software development is dead (this leaves aside the validity of the point, just to point out a contradiction in the author's message where the author seems to be saying that software development is dead in substance even while denying that at the surface).
Let me rewrite this entirely just using typists, which is a profession that has definitely been killed by technology.
> You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of typists as an industry.... I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Voice transcription and/or personal computers means that anything you know how to say can be transcribed very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what words needs to be transcribed to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of some computer hardware.... for some typists, this revolution is not going to go well. Omelets are being made, which means that eggs will be broken.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to be those with higher-order skills and larger vision. Those who have really absorbed what it means to be writers first and typing guys second.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to need to accept that they are businessmen just as much as they are typists.
It still works, but only because of an extremely expansive definition of a "typist" that includes being an actual writer or businessman.
If your definition of "software developer" includes "businessman" I think that's simply too broad a definition to be useful. What the author seems to be saying is that software development will simply become another skill of an all-around businessman via the help of AI rather than a specialized role. Which sure, sounds plausible, but definitely qualifies as the death of software development as a profession in my book, in the same way that personal computers have made transcribing one's words simply another skill of an all-around businessman rather than a specialized role.
(Again leaving aside the question of whether that's going to actually happen. Just saying that the future world the author is talking about is pretty much one where software development is dead.)
Vibe coding can work if both the programming techniques and problem domain are well understood by the LLM. For the work I do, this means front end stuff.
Back end stuff is where the problem domain sits. I spend so much time explaining the problem domain to the LLM that its best I just write it all myself instead of cleaning up the piles of code the LLM will spit out. So no vibing on the back end...just crack open the AI assistant for debugging.
I don't see companies replacing $150/hour programmers with AI. Not yet. I think what we are seeing is companies spending heaps of money/attention on AI to the point of not making hiring decisions on programmers.
Just prior to the first dot com boom, companies were reinventing themselves with systems replacing those built in the 60s through 80s. These new systems were sophisticated and if done right, game changers. The dot com boom hit with very simple tech: click -> load next static page. This consumed all the attention. I think thats what we are experiencing now more so than a clear job replacement.
Here's what I don't understand. Developers who get excited by agentic development put out posts like this. (I get excited too.) Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and so on. All of which are valid. However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI…
Because writing code has always been the easy part. A senior isn't someone who's better at writing code than a junior - they might well be worse at writing code. AI can now do the easy part, sure. What grounds does that present for believing that it's soon going to be able to do the hard part?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were decidedly shitty engineering decisions behind that dumpster fire. The biggest being that the only safe way to recycle feature flag names is to put ample time separation between the last use of the previous meaning for the flag and the first application of the new use. They did not. If they had, they would have noticed that one server was not getting redeployed properly in the time gap between the two uses.…
The powerpeg feature flag had been deprecated for 9 years? In aggregate, yes, the engineering led to the disaster, but the specific engineers had been making everyone piles of money for a long time. The mistakes were fatal, but in a tiny amount of time on a system that old it's honestly surprising it didn't happen sooner. https://specbranch.com/posts/knight-capital/
The fact that they hordes old code for NINE YEARS evaporates most of the remaining sympathy I had for them. Witaf.
If I hired a software developer a few years ago, I might expect them to do roughly what Claude Code does today on some task (?). If I hired a dev today I would expect much more from them than what Claude Code can currently do.
Now there are a few things I see that affect this
1. The only way Claude knew how to do this is because there was a stack of existing code, but its probably in C, so you could regard Claude as an expert programming language translator.
2. There is no way that Claude could integrate this into my current code base
3. Claude can't create anything new
4. It's often very wrong, and the bigger/more complex the code is, the wronger it gets.
So, what are the areas that Claude excels? it seems that CRUD web app/Web front end is the sweet spot? (not really sure about this - I don't do much web front end work). I write graphics Apps and Claude is handy for those things you'd have to look up and spend some time on, but thats about all.
An example - I asked it to make me some fancy paint brush code (to draw in a painterly style), this is hard, the code that it made was pretty bad, it just used very basic brush styles, and when pressed it went into crazy land.
So my point is - if something exists and its not too hard, Claude is great, if you want something large and complex, then Claude can be a good helper. I really don't see how it can replace a good dev, there are a lot of code monkeys around gluing web sites together that could be replaced but even then they are probably the same people who are vibe coding now.
If you really want some fun ask them to draw a circuit diagram for a simple amplifier, it's almost painful watching them struggle.
> You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of software development.... I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything you know [how] to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt o…
So do you imagine that AI will reach the point that a business guy will say make me a web site to blah blah blah, and the AI will say sure boss and it will appear? Sort of what a dev/team of devs/testers/product managers/BA's would do now? the current batch is a long way from this afaik