41–50 of 179 posts
IC is a strange relabeling of a "worker". When you analyze this as "Management loves AI" and "workers hate it" goes completely back to 'who owns the means of production?', and can be clearly seen within Marx's critique.
Ic can refer to people leading, without direct reports, making 500k+ in comp.
You must be living in a different universe if you think ICs aren't enamored by AI. Every developer I know basically can't operate now without Claude Code (or equivalent).
I hope that’s exaggeration because being unable to operate without it means you’re going to do a terrible job of reviewing the code it’s producing.
Me (and my friends similarly) inspect code indirectly now - telling agents to write reports about certain aspects of the code and architecture etc.
As someone who's both an IC and leads other developers I disagree with the explanation. As a technical lead, with people I can much better predict the quality of the outcome than with LLMs, and the "failure modes" are much more manageable. As a programmer, I am actually more impressed with AI agents but in an informed and qualified way. Their debugging ability wows me; their coding ability disappoints and frustrates…
You must be living in a different universe if you think ICs aren't enamored by AI. Every developer I know basically can't operate now without Claude Code (or equivalent).
I find people tend to omit that on HN and folks dealing with different roles end up yelling at each other because those details are missing. Being an embedded sw engineer writing straight C/ASM is, for instance, quite different from being a frontend engineer. AI will perform quite differently in each case.
People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.
The funny thing is that AI can probably replace the exec’s job before it can replace a devs job.
It’s like Marc Andressen bloviating about how AI will replace everyone except him.
To be fair, some of this is understandable. At some level, you’re just going to see some things as a bullet point in a daily/monthly/quarterly report and possibly a 10 minute presentation. You’re implicitly assuming that the folks under you have condensed this information into something meaningful.
embedded/cloud/IoT --> AI --> quantum…
When the company originally known as C3 Energy changes their name to C3.quantum, you'll know where on to the next buzzword.
Thoughts and idea as in "I will implement this in this structure, with these tradeoff, and it will work with these 4 APIs and have no extra features and here's how I'm (or LLM with tools is) going to run it and test it".
Thoughts and idea not as in "build facebook" - a lot of people think AI can do that, it won't (but might pretend to) and it will just lead to failure.
My competitive edge did not diminish, it expanded.
- You ask someone to do it
- You check their work and they made some mistakes, but it's good enough to use
- You ultimately don't know if they're doing the best at their job but you have regular performance check-ins to be safe
As ICs we can complain all we want about the quality of AI, but as far as your manager goes - you using AI is not that much different to them having an employee.
People who will get paid more if AI eliminates jobs (in theory, anyway — execs aren't necessarily owners) versus people whose jobs will be eliminated.
No, execs aren't owners, but... if an exec can deliver the same or better results with fewer employees, aren't they a better exec? And if so, aren't they worth more money? (Yeah, I know, there's lots of instances of execs who got paid huge amounts of money and delivered abysmal results...)