AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

Post by florianherrengt » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #299

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…

> 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 think i fall into this bucket. our "leaders" and executives have told us they dont care about 'shipping good' . we are simply responding to incentives.

Post by mrbombastic » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #272

mrbombastic wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because this comment is responding to: "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" photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the c…

You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap

Post by moregrist » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

soperj wrote: post #252

Shorel wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by butlike » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #206

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software. The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with soft…

In retrospect, the golden age was the pre-internet era. Some rose-colored glasses maybe, but as I remember it: Paying for software was the norm, so it was more clear what the "product" was, and software writers had a direct incentive to write better software. Updates could not be pushed out so you had to be pretty sure your code worked before you shipped it. Having to ship physical media to all your customers for a b…

Post by orphereus » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

notakio wrote: post #269

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…

When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on. He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 min…