Ask HN: The death of software development as a job?

A lot of programmers I read here and elsewhere say LLM isn't going to change much, some say LLM is just going to make them more productive, and some even say not using LLM makes you some sort of relic. What is not debated is that LLM has changed our industry. Programming is a lot more accessible to a lot more people than five years ago. Someone who has never coded anything could sit in front of Claude and produce an entire app ready to be used today.

Assuming software development becomes a commodity and the job becomes something like a fast food job where practically any adult who wants it can do it, what is your next move?

Anthropic and OpenAI are working hard to redirect the salary you earn to themselves in the form of API costs, so let's assume that in the year 2030, the average yearly wage for a programmer is around the same as a McDonald's worker, because companies have the option of paying Anthropic or OpenAI for API access as an alternative. What is your move?

> software development becomes a commodity and the job becomes something like a fast food job where practically any adult who wants it can do it

That will never happen. Sure, anyone can program something, but to make it professionally there is bar of quality and competition will push most people out. Similarly anyone can write, draw or sing but only a few do it well enough to be paid for it.

And I am old enough to see many tools that allow "anyone to program". They pop up whenever certain standards (like web) become popular, then programming goes in different direction and they vanish in irrelevance. Soon there will be a large set of skill on top of "using AI" and "chat, make me an app" will go out of the window as viable way to make something others want to use and pay for.

Actually writing code was never the difficult part for the majority of software created. It required skill yes, but the really hard part was figuring out what to implement in the first place.

Which features should the software have, how should they function and interact, which tradeoffs to make given the limitations. Stuff like that.

People who were good at those things but lacked training or capabilities to actually write functioning code can now make viable software.

People who were essentially code monkeys who wrote code based off detailed descriptions of what should be done, without much thought of or influence on the higher level issues have to step up or face tough times I think.

>That is exactly where the disagreement stems from. That app is a draft version that might work for a couple people. It won't scale. It won't be secure. It won't handle edge cases. It won't be flexible enough to iterate based on customer feedback.

As if startup code doesn't have the same issues pre-AI? And still they get to billions of valuations with such code.

They can always pay some beefier consultants when they absolutely have to, for scaling it up or hardening it.

That "it won't be flexible enough to iterate based on customer feedback" is more wishful thinking. It would be code like any other code, following some patterns. In fact, the architecture can be fine tuned by the human in the loop anyway - they just wont be needed 5 more humans to assist them to code it.

>Because if all they do is: What humans do, just faster... cool, useful, but not worth all the hype.

That's literally what automation in any field is. Why should be something more, as if this huge breakthrough is already taken for granted within a few years of being available?

>That will never happen. Sure, anyone can program something, but to make it professionally there is bar of quality

Ever seen most high profile apps in the last 10-15 years? Not to mention regular average apps, which still employ millions of people. Or most enterprise software.

Trust me, the "bar of quality" wont be the issue.