Hacker News Reader

Comment by channel_t | Hacker News Reader

Yes, can confirm that as a senior developer who has needed to spend huge amounts of time reviewing junior code from off-shore contractors with very detailed and explicit instructions, dabbling in agentic LLM coding tools like Claude Code has felt like like a gift from heaven.

I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and being able to understand the difference between a good solution and a bad solution, they will produce tons of awful, but technically working code.

View on HN

Totally agree with the off-shore component of this. I'm already going to have to break a task down into clear detail and resolve any anticipated blocker myself upfront to avoid multi-timezone multi-day back and forth.

Now that I'm practiced at that, the off-shored part is no longer valuable

The unemployment in India is going to be catastrophic. Geopolitical.

You know senior developers can also be off-shored, right?

Blowing away the junior -> senior pipeline would, on average, hit every country the same.

Though it raises an interesting point: if a country like India or China did make the investment in hiring, paying, and mentoring junior people but e.g. the US didn't, then you could see a massive shift in the global center of gravity around software expertise in 10 years (plus or minus).

Someone is going to be the best at planning for and investing in the future on this, and someone is going to maximally wishful thinking / short-term thinking this, and seductive-but-not-really-there vibe coding is probably going to be a major pivot point there.

This is such an important point. Not sure about India, which is still very market forces driven, but china can just force its employers to do whatever is of strategic importance. That’s long gone in the US. Market forces here will only ever optimize for short term game, shooting ourselves in the chest.

Unlikely. Microsoft had layoffs everywhere except India. There they keep hiring more. As song as the can keep upskilling themselves while still being much cheaper than US workers they won't fear unemployment.

Just yesterday I saw on X a video of a Miami hotel where the check-in procedure was via a video call to a receptionist in India.

Six months from now, that singular worker if they are still employed, will manage a high number of receptionist avatars. And then they themselves will be replaced. It will still lead to a massive collapse in the labor market and with all of that excess labor, existing jobs while being overworked will still see flat to decreasing wages.

You overestimate how chatbots can replace people.

Most people underestimate how strongly capital wants to displace labor, even if the outcomes are demonstrably worse. Esp in a captured scenario like hotel reception, you have already booked, you aren't going anywhere else.

If that were true, automatic coffee vending machines would have made baristas unemployed a long time age.

Many companies that see themselves as non-technical at the core prefer building solutions with an army of intermediate developers that are hot swappable. Having highly skilled developers is a risk for them.

This.

I've got myself in a PILE of trouble when trying to use LLMs with languages/technologies I am unfamiliar with (React, don't judge me).

But with something that I am familiar with (say Go, or Python) LLMs have improved my velocity massively, with the caveat that I have had to explicitly tell the LLM when it is producing something that I know that I don't want (me arguing with an LLM was an experience too!)

Ah mate I can’t relate more to the offshore component. I had a very sad experience where I recently had to let go of an offshore team due to them providing devs that essentially ‘junior with copilot’ but labelled as a ‘senior’.

Time and time again I would find telltale signs of dumping LLM output into PRs n then claiming it as their own. Not a problem, but the code didn’t do what the detailed ticket asked and introduced other bugs as a result.

It ultimately became a choice of ‘go through the hassle of making a detailed brief for it to just be put in copilot verbatim and then go through the hassle of reviewing it and explaining the issues back to the offshore dev’ or ‘brief Claude directly’

I hate to say it but from a business perspective the latter won outright. It tears me up as it goes against my morality.

Why does it go against your morality? Sounds like a totally rational business decision, only affecting a sub-par partner

I know what you mean it just feels a bit inhumane to me. Sort of like defining a value for a living being and then determining that they fell beneath said value.

Yeah well, at some point some one higher up without scruples about such moral issues will make that decision for you...

Then why did you do it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com