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I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.
Are you hiring?
However, I can't imagine vibe-coders actually shipping anything.
I really have to ride herd on the output from the LLM. Sometimes, the error is PEBCAK, because I erred, when I prompted, and that can lead to very subtle issues.
I no longer review every line, but I also have not yet gotten to the point, where I can just "trust" the LLM. I assume there's going to be problems, and haven't been disappointed, yet. The good news is, the LLM is pretty good at figuring out where we messed up.
I'm afraid to turn on SwiftLint. The LLM code is ... prolix ...
All that said, it has enormously accelerated the project. I've been working on a rewrite (server and native client) that took a couple of years to write, the first time, and it's only been a month. I'm more than half done, already.
To be fair, the slow part is still ahead. I can work alone (at high speed) on the backend and communication stuff, but once the rest of the team (especially shudder the graphic designer) gets on board, things are going to slow to a crawl.
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> Work is freezing hiring and upping spending on tokens for everyone. Doesn't mean the two are related. Is AI just the excuse? We've got tariffs, war, uncertainty and other drama non stop.
It's what they're telling us
Management often has a perverse short-term incentive to make labor feel insecure. It’s a quick way to make people feel insecure and work harder ... for a while.
Also, “AI makes us more productive so we can cut our labor costs” sounds so much better to investors than some variation of “layoffs because we fucked up / business is down / etc”
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The dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.
In my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.
There’s some neat stuff, don’t get me wrong. But every additional tool so far has started strong but then always falls over. Always.
Right now there’s this “orchestrator” nonsense. Cool in principle, but as someone who made scripts to automate with all the time before it’s not impressive. Spent $200 to automate doing some bug finding and fixing. It found and fixed the easy stuff (still pretty neat), and then “partially verified” it fixed the other stuff.
The “partial verification” was it justifying why it was okay it was broken.
The company has mandated we use this technology. I have an “AI Native” rating. We’re being told to put out at least 28 commits a month. It’s nonsense.
They’re letting me play with an expensive, super-high-level, probabilistic language. So I’m having a lot of fun. But I’m not going to lie, I’m very disappointed. Got this job a year ago. 12 years programming experience. First big tech job. Was hoping to learn a lot. Know my use of data to prioritize work could be better. Was sold on their use of data. I’m sure some teams here use data really well, but I’m just not impressed.
And I’m not even getting into the people gaming the metrics to look good while actually making more work for everyone else.
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This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
> If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us. This assumes that the companies' business growth is a function of the amount of code written, but that would not make much sense for a software company. Many companies (including mine) are building our product with an engineering team 1/4 the size of what would have been required a few years ago. The whole idea is that w…
Even in companies that are no longer growing I've always seen the roadmap only ever get larger (at that point you get desperate to try to catch back up, or expand into new markets, while also laying people off to cut costs).
Will we finally out-write the backlog of ideas to try and of feature requests? Or will the market get more fragmented as more smaller competitors can carve out different niches in different markets, each with more-complex offerings than they could've offered 5 years ago?
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This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
> This seems unlikely. It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.
Lots going on right now in the market, but IMO that retreat is the biggest one still.
Many companies were basically on a path of infinite hiring between ~2011 and ~2022 until the rapid COVID-era whiplash really drove home "maybe we've been overhiring" and caused the reaction and slowdown that many had been predicting annually since, oh, 2015.
I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has. Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.
Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI. I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time,…
And that's the key problem, isn't it? I maintain current organizations have the "wrong shape" to fully leverage AI. Imagine instead of the scope of your current ownership, you own everything your team or your whole department owns. Consider what that would do to the meetings and dependencies and processes and tickets and blockers and other bureaucracy, something I call "Conway Overhead."
Now imagine that playing out across multiple roles, i.e. you also take on product and design. Imagine what that would do to your company org chart.
I added a much more detailed comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270142
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That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.
It sure was, but as far as I'm aware, 2026 isn't in the middle of a generation-scale economic collapse. (And if it is, what is the cause?)
How long have we been hearing about crushing affordability problems for property? And how long ago did that start moving into essentials? The COVID-era bullwhip-effect inflation waves triggered a lot of price ratcheting that has slowed but never really reversed. Asset prices are doing great, as people with money continue to need somewhere to put it, and have been very effective at capturing greater and greater shares of productivity increases. But how's the average waiter, cleaning-business sole-proprietor, uber driver, schoolteacher, or pet supply shopowner doing? How's their debt load trending? How's their savings trending?
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Same here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI. I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time,…
> ... but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist. And that's the key problem, isn't it? I maintain current organizations have the "wrong shape" to fully leverage AI. Imagine instead of the scope of your current ownership, you own everything your team or your whole department owns. Consider what that…
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It is not going to reduce your workload. It is going to remove one of your co-workers.
This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.