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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

> human engineers now spend the majority of their time planning, reviewing, and orchestrating tasks

This feel like much too broad a statement to be true.

> AI coding agents are increasingly writing the world's code and human engineers now spend the majority of their time planning, reviewing, and orchestrating tasks.

This tactic is called "assuming the sale". ie, Make a statement as-if it is already true, and put the burden on the reader to negate it. Majority of us are too scared of what others think, and go-along by default. It is related to the FOMO tactic in that it could be used in conjunction with it to make it a double-whammy. for example, the statement above could have ended with: "and everyone is now using agents to increase their productivity, and if you arent using it, you are left behind"

Glad you stood up to challenge it.

I'll add - often not adding the last part is even MORE powerful: "and everyone is now using agents to increase their productivity..."

> human engineers now spend the majority of their time planning, reviewing, and orchestrating tasks

> > This feel like much too broad a statement to be true.

This is just what they wish to be true.

I wonder how demographics (specifically age) tie into this. I'm well into my 30s and I found that statement absurd, but perhaps it is basically universally true among recent grads.

Maybe it is -- the next few years are going to get really rough for them; they'll develop no skills outside of AI.

I wouldn't say it's the majority of my time but the most utility I've got out of AI is using MCP to deal with the boring shit: update my jira tickets to in progress/in review, read feedback on a PR and address the trivial shit, check the CI pipeline and make it pass if it failed, and write commits in a consistent, descriptive way.

It's a lot more hands on when you try to write code with it, which I still try out, but it's only because I know exactly what the solution is and I'm just walking the agent towards it and improving how I write my prompts. It's slower than doing it myself in many cases.

I read that too and these are the kind of statements which really tells you what happens when a profession embraces mediocrity and accepts something as crass as "Vibe-coding" which is somehow going to change "software engineering" even when adding so-called "AI agents" - which makes it worse.

All this cargo-culting is done without realizing that more code means more security issues, technical debt, more time for humans to review the mess and *especially* more testing.

Once again, Vibe-coding is not software engineering.

and I came into the industry when software was not engineering. Still think this is mostly true (you can call yourself an engineer when you insure your product)

You're right and it's sad. Instead of being more serious about the output of our work, we put everything in the trash and removed all barriers and tools to would have hardened the code. The processes to plan, write specs, and check applications went the way of the dodo too.

I'm glad I work for a regulated industry where we still have some kind of responsibility and pride for what we do. I could never work for the kind of irresponsible anarchy that AI is creating.

i feel so strongly that this will rapidly become true over the next 6 months. if you don't believe me check out Sean Grove's talk from mid June - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rABwKRsec4

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