LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do • Hacker News Board

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#451

Post by epolanski » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

canadaduane wrote: post #440

I posted this elsewhere, but I think it still has a valuable insight to bring to the table: https://halecraft.org/software-engineering-is-the-new-manufa... > LLMs are regression-to-the-mean machines--they pull junior developers up, and drag senior developers down. Taming them requires trading the romance of 'code as craft' for the physics of manufacturing. The thing I don't know is: how do we decide which direction i…

I have not seen evidence that they are regression to the mean machines.

I'm lucky to work with great engineers and their productivity and code quality has become even higher. Wish that wasn't the case, but it is, and that puts also lots of pressure on myself to work more and better all the time. It's exhausting.

There are cons too, system's understanding sometimes is not as intimate, which in turn produces less "gotcha" moments that may lead to better design. There's less time to review PRs and make it a choral work.

On the other hand way more refactors and experiments can be run, so again, code quality has improved just because if you have a hunch that something could be done better, you can test it for cheap.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#452

Post by lelanthran » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

hbcdbff wrote: post #393

lelanthran wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No lelanthran, software engineering and plumbing are not the same job. No lelanthran, LLMs can't be plumbers. Who said that? More to the point, how many plumbers does society need?

> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack Direct quote

>> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack

> Direct quote

And, in your (and GP's mind), that means the same thing as "LLMs can replace plumbers"?

After all, I said:

>>>> When all human output is valued at the fractions of a penny per month of work, there is no future.

I mean, I know it's fashionable to not read the article, but are we all really responding without even reading the comments? Are two paragraphs well beyond the attention span of the readers here?

Okay, lets go with that asinine comeback: What do you think happens when the only work left for humans to do involves 100% physical labour and 0% thought?

How many plumbers does a society need? Electricians? Even in construction, you can automate almost everything away with cranes and similar.

Now imagine that all the doctors, all the office workers, all the warehouse workers, all the bankers, lawyers, teachers, ... basically any job that requires thought ... all those people are now joining the legions of plumbers.

That sort of 1000x increase in supply will drive prices to pennies.

The LLM doesn't need to replace plumbers directly; all it needs to do is replace everyone else, and the value of plumbers approach zero anyway.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#453

Post by tempest_ » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

theshackleford wrote: post #99

p-e-w wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones. Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.

> Nope, just knowledge workers. Nope, just a specific kind. Those who developed and cultivated only a very specific skill set at the expense of all others. I used to think being a generalist, and having persued technical roles with a people facing element was to my detriment, but it’s turned out to be the best decision I ever made.

I had the opposite thought.

Being a generalist was very useful to me 5 years ago. Now AI models have made everyone a generalist. That wide but not terribly deep skillset was immediately devalued by the AI models.

You can argue that the models fuck up 20 percent of the time, or that they make poor code but there is a massive part for the industry that is totally fine with that and I think people ignore it to their detriment.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#454

Post by matkoniecz » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…

> I don't know if y'all have tried it

No. I assumed that at best it will be not better than average human-made music available to listeners.

> but it now produces really good stuff.

Does it? Do you have examples?

(note: I actually do not care about all "hand-made" and have no preference for once-off over serially made products)

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#455

Post by amirathi » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

Author says Claude now one-shots distributed systems bugs that used to take him two days but most top comments here are still playing down frontier model capabilities.

Are we collectively in denial? It's understandable as the craft as we knew it is being disrupted by tools that have improved at an astonishing pace.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#456

Post by abustamam » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #18

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…

Yeah I'm constantly shocked at how simultaneously smart and dumb Opus can be. It can tell me a LOT about my codebase but it will miss very critical clarifications that I begin with. And when I call it out it obviously remembered it, it just ignored it.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#457

Post by lelanthran » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #282

rvz wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. Unfortunately those not in the depths of mission critical systems or regulated products will continue to believe that producing tons of code quickly using LLMs without humans in these systems is acceptable. Here's an example of what we will continue to see with folks fully immersed in gen AI psychosis: "The creator of claude code said that he no longer writes code for about 6 months and now has Claude doing all…

Why is it such a dramatic statement for Boris to claim that he no longer writes code? Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time? It would be like a developer in 2020 claiming that he only writes assembly because compilers can’t be trusted. No one is taking that person seriously. If you chose a career in tech you made a decision to work in one of the fastest moving fields in human his…

> Now it’s time to get over it, learn the new tools and adapt.

If the AI is producing what you tell it to, why are you needed?

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#458

Post by scott_w » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

rpicard wrote: post #230

trumpdong wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was my impression that a whole lot of products are only pretending to be compliant, and that it's much more profitable to operate like that.

In my experience this is not representative of most fintechs. Of course there are both cases of real intentional noncompliance, and accidental, but by and large it seems like everyone’s trying to innovate within the law.

This makes sense because these companies want to become large companies and contract with large companies. Large companies, by and large, try to follow the law (while trying to bend it to the limit) because they're aware they have a big target on their back and no CEO wants to be on the front page of the papers for tanking a company in such a stupid fashion.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#459

Post by epolanski » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted. > Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to…

Only if the domain is shallow and mostly digital.

Applied to real world complex businesses good luck.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#460

Post by hatsix » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

odeono wrote: post #392

ericmcer wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dynamic of agent codes human reviews does seem like the only sane one for the foreseeable future. Even Anthropic themselves still fall back to this. The problem is that sucks, even if all software engineers keep their jobs and salaries, the floor is still pulled out from under us. Imagine if a surgeons job was to supervise robot surgeons from a remote computer, or a woodworker just signs off on work before the ma…

"Soul and humanity" is doing a lot of work here. Does the woodworker who shape using a handsaw use less "soul" than the one who uses a machine? Does the musician who use a DAW and VSTs instead of analogue tape recorders create music with less "soul"? Does the painter who buys acryllic paint instead of synthesizing their own dye from plants use less "soul"? As technological innovation progresses, the barrier to creati…

Does the carpenter who used to build custom fit cabinets with hand and power tools put in the same creativity when he just carries around a scanner, scans the area, the customers use software to select the layout, approve the work, then the CNC cuts out the wood, then all that's left is to put the screws in the holes and go home.

This isn't like the step from hand saws to power saws, and it's disingenuous to pretend like it is. This is what the startup machine has been doing to every industry... finding... "inefficiencies" and "optimizing" them.