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Comment by ako | Hacker News Reader

But does anybody really care about what you like? What about all those other professions that got replaced by technology, did anybody care what they liked? The big question is how is software going to be build most efficiently and most effectively in the future and how do you prepare yourself for this new world. Otherwise you’ll end up with all those other professions that got replaced, like the mineworkers, hoping that the good old days will someday return.

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Its reasonable to stay away from something one considers dystopian considering the industry is not even sure about the usefulness of coding agents in professional environments. When the tractors replaced the horses, everyone could agree they outperform horses. The result was easily measurable. Its not that simple with LLM agents owned by big corporations.

Sure, it's not yet clear what impact LLMs will have on software development, but the impact it will have will not depend on if developers like to use it or not. If it is going to make software development 10x faster, companies will adopt it, whether devs like it or not.

Yup absolutely, and its a shame because it takes the joy out of it for a lot of people. I'll have a lot more paid leave if I dont like my job is all im going to say to this.

Sadly true. Most companies don’t even care if the software is sloppy, slow, and ridden with errors that cause data loss or privacy breaches. They care about exploiting workers and extracting value.

Is it ethical? Probably not. It took a few bridges falling and buildings caving in before traditional engineering became a profession.

In this post-Reagan world I’m not sure software has the right context to make that happen. I’m pretty sure we’ll stay the course where the big tech companies like it: very little regulation, loose liability, and terrible software for everyone.

Everything is getting industrialized. We buy most products made in China (tv,laptop, mobile phone etc), furniture is mostly cheap IKEA furniture. Many craftsmen lost their profession to industrialized automation. If we don´t care our furniture is subpar, our products are cheap plastic china products, why do we expect anybody to care about software craftsmanship?

Because the cost of faults is much higher than getting a new bookshelf from IKEA.

When talking about craftsmanship I’m not talking about artisanal, hand crafted source code that is aesthetically pleasing. Nobody but programmers care.

I’m talking about CVEs that allow RCE on your phone so that authoritarian governments can exfiltrate your contact lists and arrest all of the people they suspect of participating in protests that you were involved in.

When companies don’t care about quality and they’re not forced to we end up with slow, surveillance bloatware that is full of security holes and useless features designed to keep us engaged and paying.

I don´t see why industrialized software development with AI Agents could not be better at quality. Medical equipment or airplane safety requirements validations are also done in an industrialized manner. We don't really care if engineers working on these products like what they are doing or they feel like a craftsman.

These have standards, software is the wild west?

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