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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#461

Post by simonw »

ravenstine wrote: post #449
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

This answer makes two big assumptions that haven't been proven out yet. - Understanding code without writing it is as viable as understanding code that you've worked with directly or indirectly - Businesses care that you understand code I really doubt the first one. Traditionally, understanding a code base in large part came from working with it intimately and building that muscle memory. The idea that understanding…

> The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic.

As one of those developers who has written almost no significant code by hand since November 2025, but has produced a great deal of working software, I still understand the majority of the code I've produced just as well as if I'd typed it myself.

I may not be typing it myself, but I'm manipulating it constantly. It's not as simple as "reading" it - I'm reading it, executing it, figuring out refactorings for it, having tests built for it, having documentation built for it, sometimes writing that documentation myself, spinning up example scripts that use it, then building new code that depends on that previous code.

It's that act of exercising the code that gives me confidence that I understand it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#462

Post by foobarian »

ravenstine wrote: post #449
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

This answer makes two big assumptions that haven't been proven out yet. - Understanding code without writing it is as viable as understanding code that you've worked with directly or indirectly - Businesses care that you understand code I really doubt the first one. Traditionally, understanding a code base in large part came from working with it intimately and building that muscle memory. The idea that understanding…

> understanding it from writing it

On the surface it sounds weird - why would this be?

Possibly because building a system is not a one-shot step, but a process of many iterations, each of which involves experiments in production, and gaining more learnings. So at the end of the process, you don't just have N lines of working code, but also N lessons learned along the way. So presumably with the AI process we miss out on half the value.

Now the going thesis is that this extra value is unnecessary if we take the plunge and don't look back. My gut says the answer is somewhere halfway, I guess we'll see.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#463

Post by phpnode »

udave wrote: post #345
phpnode wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this but it’s misguided imo. Yes LLMs are not deterministic, but that’s totally irrelevant. You aren’t executing the LLMs output directly, you’re using the LLM to produce an artefact once that is then executed deterministically. A spec gets turned into code once. Editing the spec can cause the code to be updated but it’s not recreating the whole program each time, so why does determinism matter?

try distributing this spec amongst your team members, ask each of them to drive it to completion. no follow up edits. deploy to individual environments and then run a rigorous test suite against all of the deployments. see if all of them behave the same way.

They won't. So what? This is not how specs are used, no one is saying that they are a replacement for source code.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#464

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

pear01 wrote: post #412
ecocentrik wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

This is temporary. What is the SKILL.md equivalent going to be in five years? In ten? You don't already see a pattern emerging around solutions to encode that "professional experience" into the tools themselves? These LLMs can already incorporate our entire cultural corpus yet your "professional experience" is the threshold they won't cross?

The word “incorporate” is doing some very heavy lifting in your assertion. These LLMs already have access to the whole corpus of architectural knowledge and software best practices, and yet they’re unable to reliably implement those best practices. Why not? Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions, even when repeatedly prompted to ask clarifying questions?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#465

Post by deadbabe »

hibikir wrote: post #237

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50. Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a…

Stop with the anthropomorphizing, stop playing house. There is no team of agents, they are just tools and processes running in a computer for Christ’s sake. Blow away that one senior engineer and you have nothing. Better to have a team of 6.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#466

Post by AllanSavageDev »

nomel wrote: post #443
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

The perspective here is "lifetime career", so you need to project out 30 years here, for a meaningful argument. I think, much sooner than that, you'll have AI pumping out practically complete implementations that meet the requirements of function , set by the people who desire that function. THOSE people will be the developers, and will be more akin to technical "creatives", more on the product side, than the develop…

Someday people are going to get tired of "programming in English" with prompts, getting inaccurate output, etc and someone is going to invent a higher level kind of CODE that allows the user to directly specify the actions the computer should take to solve the problem. Later someone will invent a kind of tooling that COMPILES these CODES into a runnable thing skipping the prompt part all together. It might be called something like Unified Prompt Language.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#467

Post by jhrmnn »

mbgerring wrote: post #455

I don’t understand why so many people are convinced that “this time is different.” New tools raise the ceiling of what’s possible. New jobs emerge at the limit of what’s possible with new tools. The jobs doing what we do today will disappear. New jobs with greater complexity and specialization will emerge. I have watched this happen in the software industry in my lifetime. I expect that it will continue to happen.

This can’t be sustainable, there must be a limit in human biology as to how complex jobs we can handle. More and more people will fall under that threshold.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#468

Post by arcanemachiner »

deadbabe wrote: post #465
hibikir wrote: post #237

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50. Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a…

Stop with the anthropomorphizing, stop playing house. There is no team of agents , they are just tools and processes running in a computer for Christ’s sake. Blow away that one senior engineer and you have nothing. Better to have a team of 6.

You are staring at glowing pixels at a screen, then getting angry and pressing on pieces of plastic or a slab of glass to express your emotions in response.

You live in a world of ever-changing metaphors. Get used to it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#469

Post by manmal »

evilduck wrote: post #307
hjort-e wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?

Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front end…

You are describing the toy projects that had us all amazed end of last year. Large, maintainable software that can serve paying customers is in a completely different galaxy.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#470

Post by dugidugout »

dominotw wrote: post #133
harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

AI cannot create art by itself.

Hopefully the capital owners care to tell the difference.
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