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The next two years of software engineering

addyosmani.com

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Re: The next two years of software engineering

#91

Post by falloutx »

lovich wrote: post #87
babblingfish wrote: post #20

My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but with…

All I know is that firing half my employees and never hiring entry level people again nets me a bonus next quarter. Not really sure why this article is talking about what happens 2 years from now since that’s 8 times longer than anything anyone with money or power cares about.

What a benevolent bossman here, keeping 50% of the jockeys around this quarter. He is probably sacrificing one of his yachts for this.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#92

Post by latexr »

Aurornis wrote: post #25
babblingfish wrote: post #20

My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but with…

> My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs. The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.

> It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.

What’s “the vibecoding strawman”? There are plenty of people on HN (and elsewhere) repeatedly saying they use LLMs by asking them to “produce full apps in hours instead of weeks” and confirming they don’t read the code.

Just because everyone you personally know does it one way, it doesn’t mean everyone else does it like that.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#93

Post by falloutx »

amelius wrote: post #79
tigrezno wrote: post #72

The next two years of software engineering will be the last two years of software engineering (probably).

I don't see the market flooded yet with software that was "so easy to build using LLMs". Last year was, as it seems, just a normal year in terms of global software output.

You are not looking at right places. Github repo counts have been high since 2020 because there are companies & individuals who run fork scripts. So AI cant match the numbers.

But on product hunt, the amount of projects is First week of Jan: 5000+, Entire Jan 2018: 4000 approx.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#94

Post by falloutx »

kubb wrote: post #75
tigrezno wrote: post #72

The next two years of software engineering will be the last two years of software engineering (probably).

Please don’t get my hopes up. Adaptable people like me will outcompete hard in the post-engineering world. Alas, I don’t believe it’s coming. The tech just doesn’t seem to have what it takes to do the job.

Some related fields will be gone too. And the jobs which will remain will be impossible to get.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#95

Post by spacebanana7 »

falloutx wrote: post #86
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs. The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.

> The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?

Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.

If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can absolutely consume twice as much CSS, try to play call of duty on our smart fridge or use a new SaaS to pay our taxes.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#96

Post by falloutx »

tommica wrote: post #54

One thing that fucks with juniors is the expecration of paying for subscriptions for AI models. If you need to know how the AI tools work, you need to learn them with your own money. Not everyone can afford it, and then we are at the point of changing the field that was so proud about just needing a computer and access to internet to teach oneself into a subscription service.

This is why opencode is giving free access to one or two models, unlimited access.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#97

Post by falloutx »

gassi wrote: post #21

> Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and Gemini Ah, there it is.

Ahhhh, this is like that guy who works at Claude Code and runs 100 agents at the same time to replace 100 juniors. Everyone is convinced he will be the last software engineer on earth.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#98

Post by falloutx »

mawadev wrote: post #74

I mean it's pretty simple: management will take bad quality (because they don't understand the field) over having and paying more employees any day. Software engineer positions will shrink and be unrecognizable: one person expected to be doing the work of multiple departments to stay employed. People may leave the field or won't bother learning it. When the critical mass is reached, AI will be paywalled and rug pulle…

This is truly the problem: You either get fired or you get to work 10x more to survive. Only question is how many of us will be in 1st group and how many in the 2nd group, its a lose lose situation.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#99

Post by falloutx »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #13

The outlook on CS credentials is wrong. You'll never be worse off than someone without those credentials, all other things equal. Buried in this text is some assumption that the relatively studious people who get degrees are going to fall behind the non-degreed, because the ones who didn't go to school will out-study them. What is really going to happen generally is that the non-degreed will continue to not study, an…

The fundamentals of CS dont change and are more valuable to learn for the long term. Vibe coders think they can just bypass everything because they can ask a machine to write them a todo list.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#100

Post by Ekaros »

doug_durham wrote: post #7

The author has a bizarre idea of what a computer science degree is about. Why would it teach cloud computing or dev ops? The idea is you learn those on your own.

I am not sure abot devops. But Cloud Computing likely has lot of science behind it. When done properly. They are not any less complex systems to reason about than just code. And I mean it as understanding and designing cloud platforms. Not as deploying code to them.
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