Comment by senordevnyc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by senordevnyc | Hacker News Reader

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Eh, for myself as a middle-aged software engineer, it feels a little like the last chopper out of Saigon. I feel less and less confident that I can make as good a living in software for the next decade as I have for the last couple. Or if I want to. The job is changing so fast right now, and I’m not sure I like it. When I worked in big tech, I preferred being an IC over an EM or tech lead because I like writing code. Now it feels increasingly like you can’t be an IC in that way anymore. You’re now coding through others, either humans or AI.

Sure, I can write code manually, but in my case I’m working full time on my own SaaS and I am absolutely faster and more effective with AI. It’s not even close. And the gains are so extreme that I can’t justify writing beautiful hand-crafted artisanal code anymore. It turns out that code that’s “good enough” will do, and that’s all I can afford right now.

But long-term, I don’t know that I want to do that work, especially for some corporation. It feels like the difference between being a master furniture craftsman, and then going work in an IKEA factory.

You'll make more money than ever cleaning up AI generated messes.

I greatly respect your opinions here but I really doubt that would ever happen.

It's already happening. My buddies are in the 'late bloom' phase of their careers and they are doing quite well as of late.

AI supported coding is like four wheel drive: it will get you stuck but in harder places. The people that use these tools to reach above the level of their actual understanding are creating some very expensive problems. If you're an expert level coder and you use AI to speed up the drudgework you can get good mileage out of them, but if you're a junior pretending to be a senior you're about to cost your employer a lot of $ hiring an actual senior.

But wouldn’t the models get better at fixing complicated code eventually?

We don't know. We seem to be hitting diminishing returns, but we don't exactly know where it will stop

Is there a source for this? Scaling laws work and we have about 4 orders of magnitude in the exponential growth before we run into true bottlenecks

One thing I’ve noticed is that some folks are over-confident about the benefits of LLM’s and seemingly gloss over the implicit costs.

And for good reason - the ill disciplined human body optimises for short term benefits. The disciplined body recognises the flaw in this and thinks much broader.

I had few projects like that this year and I can say it how messy and demotivating its to cleaning up mess.

And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt.

I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at least rewrite whole module (of course still with AI with just better vibe engineering rather than vibe coding).

It's similar with house renovation - often its just cheaper and faster to tear whole building down rather than fixing it.

Would you be able to share any more details on the clean up projects you had to do? Like, wasn't front or back end, which tech stack, where were the LLM code issues etc.

I'm just very curious where we are at the moment with in this profession.

Not OP, but I’ve spent months cleaning up sqlalchemy models that were written in isolation using AI. Project was just not scalable.

the project was iOS app and vibe coded in Claude Code - it was around half year ago so maybe things improved. Client actually knew some coding so actually quite impressive how far they did manage to go along.

However it was just adding pile of feature after features without taking time to refactor it. Client most likely did some few different attempts to add some specific feature or fixing something and there was a lot of dead code that haven't been used. This dead code actually confused AI and often tried to modify part of code that have been abandoned.

There was completely no tests. No performance tests. And some part of my job was to improve performance (cv/ai model inference) and robustness (crashes, memory leaks).

I think AI is fine and useful but whats bad with such vibe coded project if somebody hand over to you is you have completely no clue what part of the code are written/designed properly with good foundation if previous developer didn't test extensively and didn't refactor continuously. Even worse if you cannot talk to previous developer responsible for the project.

First, I’m highly skeptical of that, especially over the course of the next decade.

Second, do you actually want to do that work? I don’t. I spent years working as a freelancer and I cleaned up a lot of shitty code from other freelancers. Not really what I want to spend my 50s doing.

Depends on what it pays. Follow the screaming.

What I like to say is that writing software is getting so easy that I don't know how to do it anymore.

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