Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#2The first comment to the post referenced Kent Beck's:
> "The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate" [0]
At the time that felt like an exaggeration, but from my own use of Claude Code over the last month, I now entirely agree. My take on this is that we need to educate future devs from the very start as engineering managers - to be concerned a lot more with the "what", the "why" and the "is it good for our expected needs" rather than the low-level "how".
[0] https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/90-of-my-skills-are-now-wor...
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#3Probably the biggest sign of the times right now is a massive unfusion of capital into data centers and hardware and less so into programmers. It's hard to land a job right now if you're looking.
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#4Good luck trying to debug the code you've generated without knowing anything about what it does.
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#5Good luck trying to debug the code you've generated without knowing anything about what it does.
This is true. I've been using LLMs for code generation, and it does stuff I don't understand well. Also it makes mistakes, bugs.
What I do find helpful is use it to ask for suggestions for how to achieve some result, then learn from the code it gives me.
But even then, going back to this code later is difficult because I didn't go through that period of the failure research success learning loop.
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#6Often see these glowing reviews.
Where's the code?
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#7I'm doing a reasonable size project with Claude Code doing almost all of the programming, and it's quite challenging.
Vibe coding is easy and fast, but you end up not being an expert in the code base or really having any idea about it. And once it reaches a certain size, the LLM isn't an expert on it either. It is only an expert on cleanly isolated sections of it, which, by the way, it's really bad at producing without lots of good guidance.
Bespoke coding is easy and slow, and you end up an expert in the systems you make.
What I've found is once the system is beyond the size that an LLM can reasonably handle, it's faster to be an expert than to try to get the LLM to do things; in some cases infinitely faster (the LLM can't do it.)
Maybe you get a system of that size done in a week instead of 3 months with vibe coding, and this applies to subsystems as well if they're isolated. But for now you really still want someone to end up an expert in all the code that was produced.
So for now I think there's a big skill point that is still only achieved by humans -- guiding the LLM to produce systems that both the human and the LLM will be good at long term. That is, NOT vibe coding from the beginning, but doing something a bit slower than vibe coding and much faster than bespoke coding, with an eye toward clean, testable, isolated systems - something the LLM is not naturally any good at making but can be done with good guidance.
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#8It’s only a feeling, but I’d swear I’ve seen variations on this post across a half a dozen software-adjacent subreddits every day for the last month. The common denominator has always been “Paying $200 for Claude Max is a steal” with absolutely no evidence of what the author did with it.
I honestly think we’re being played.
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#9Good luck trying to debug the code you've generated without knowing anything about what it does.
This is true. I've been using LLMs for code generation, and it does stuff I don't understand well. Also it makes mistakes, bugs. What I do find helpful is use it to ask for suggestions for how to achieve some result, then learn from the code it gives me. But even then, going back to this code later is difficult because I didn't go through that period of the failure research success learning loop.
Maybe at the high end of the talent but most of us are already there. I wouldn't admit this to my manager but a lot of the time if you made me explain what actually happens at the machine level, I have no idea.
Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
#10It’s only a feeling, but I’d swear I’ve seen variations on this post across a half a dozen software-adjacent subreddits every day for the last month. The common denominator has always been “Paying $200 for Claude Max is a steal” with absolutely no evidence of what the author did with it. I honestly think we’re being played.
Agreed. Where's the code?