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Comment by mromanuk | Hacker News Reader

The guy from the story, it’s just another developer starting from a different trade, pretty normal across our history, musicians, lawyers that discovered that they were good at computers. The conclusion is flawed, not anyone can endure what this person did, sit at a terminal, going back and forward until something is finished. That’s what a SW dev does. My conclusion, many more people will discover that they are good at software, not everybody, but some of them will discover this new powers, thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM.

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You are 100% correct. That guy just did not know that he has developer soul.

Let's take the metaphor of writing. Would we say this guy is just a writer who started from another trade? No. Writing is something that used to require experts (scribes) and that now anyone can do and is just a normal part of doing any work.

Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward.

> Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward.

The ability to solve problems is what’s important. Not your ability to remember things or to hold sacred knowledge.

This. Software development probably requires some of the least boilerplate memorization in all of STEM. Deductive reasoning and imagination are far more important than being flexing that you’ve committed quicksort to memory.

If that were true, industry interview processes would be very different.

Writing is a tool, a technology. Much like hammers or saws, which are also commodified. And even though anyone can go buy a saw, not everyone is a carpenter.

I am not a carpenter; I use a saw at least once a month.

> Writing is a tool, a technology.

Like paint, it can be used as a tool, to paint your house, or as a craft and artform, to paint the Rouen Cathedral.

Paint is a tool to deposit pigment on a substrate. The tool does not make the artist.

Exactly. and that's what development is becoming.

What is this “sacred knowledge?”

Is it knowing how to write a regex without a reference, or maybe implementing a distributed ec postgres cluster using bash, ooh how about writing a minimum cnn in C for edge classification ooohhh wooowee…

Ever worked construction? There’s hammer swingers that need one swing per nail and never miss. Or plasterers that make chalk look like marble. How about a high voltage lineman that can switch a 20kv oil-cooled transformer in less than 15 minutes to get the power to the school back on

No different from any tradesman - we’re not special

haha so those that succeeded - were all along engineers, they just never knew it? :D

>thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM.

New lower barrier means commodification.

Lol no it doesn't you literally have it backwards - think about the trades, specifically construction, as low barrier to entry jobs and consider that houses/buildings are all different (not commodities).

Apprentices are considered commodities here

Lol you think developers aren't already commodities? You joking?

edit: i love how this is getting downvotes but no further responses. y'all are in denial. let me ask you this: why is the most common interview loop round a generic LC round? lolol

"Lol", do you think in lols or do you ever sit and consider something more deeply? Or maybe you think adding a lol makes the other side's argument ridiculous and yours stronger?

Skipping the lols, here's the answer to your question: doesn't matter if developers "are already commodities" to some degree.

First, because that degree is small, else developers wouldn't command such high salaries relative to other trades. So they might be commoditized compared to surgeons, but not at all compared to most office or blue collar trades.

Second, even if they are commoditized to some degree, the argument is that AI will bring further commodification. Not that it will introduce the first and foremost case of commodification in the developing world.

> developers wouldn't command such high salaries relative to other trades.

lololol something can be a commodity and still expensive. to wit: have you heard of this thing called oil which is recently very expensive?

> do you think in lols or do you ever sit and consider something more deeply?

i think deeply enough to recognize when someone's reasoning is so flawed they should've almost immediately reconsidered their claim upon conceiving of it. and then i laugh out loud (at them) when they didn't. occasionally many many times.

>lololol

Go to Reddit, it would be a better fit. Or maybe 9gag.

>something can be a commodity and still expensive. to wit: have you heard of this thing called oil which is recently very expensive?

Which is irrelevant. That coding services are already a product for sale is a given.

We're not talking about commodification in the "something becoming an object that can be sold" sense. We're talking about commodification in the sense of a product being made generic and cheapened. If you didn't pick this up by now, further discussion is pointless.

I was pointing out the reference wasn't pointing at the house but the apprentice.

Lower barrier to entry means the developers are even more interchangeable than now.

Like all things it’s a spectrum. Many developers (most these days) are a commodity. The truly talented are not, and are uniquely good at their specializations.

Just like tradesman. A generic electrician journeyman for residential break/fix work is more or less a commodity these days. A specialized electrician who is known to be an expert at rehabbing 150 year old knob and tube wiring on a historical mansion is not.

It’s interesting to me how developers fought so hard to commodify themselves though? When I started my career in my early teens no one at all put jobs up for a “programmer” - it was nearly always a “C programmer” or “COBOl programmer” and most developers focused on one or two languages as experts. Then there was usually even further specialization on top of that as well!

Sometime after the dot com boom devs decided that if you were a developer worth anything at all you could pick up any language and be productive in it within weeks or months in nearly any role or industry. I’ve always thought this was insane.

Lol,no.

Houses/buildings are each isolated physical structures.

Software is trivially and instantly replicated, and the same software can serve millions.

Also, even in your example you're just the commodified roofer or construction worker. Not the non-commodified house.

> consider that houses/building are all different (not commodities)

The vast majority of US housing construction is tract housing, which is a commodity. In the EU, flats, which are also commodities.

Citation please. Certainly I'm aware of cookie cutter developments but "vast majority" seems like an exaggeration to me.

”The current market share of custom-built homes is approximately 19% of total single-family starts”

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/08/custom-home-building-grows...

New multifamily construction in the US that has to undergo design review is arguably fairly custom in that each site will have different requirements. I think it's fair to say that commoditization is a spectrum?

tract != multifamily

I was not talking about tract housing. Where I live there is no tract housing construction.

GP was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468179

Yes, to be clear I was intentionally not responding to the GP directly.

The structure of most residential construction in the US is standardized. Foundation (or slab), wood framing, etc. There are different levels of quality, but codes and standards mean that standardization is the norm.

Both can be true in homes being unique while also functionally being like commodities. Whether a home or a spec home or tract home the pricing is based similarly to sports stats and no matter how one-of-a-kind a home is a mortgage on such a home can then be packaged with a bunch of other homes into a bond where bond investors will look at the stats of the combined homes and who the borrowers are.

It's difficult to appreciate just how quickly and obviously low-barrier jobs sort people by ability and aptitude.

It means specialization. When people with no software development experience but lots of experience in some other domain have the ability to create software that fits their individual needs, that's a recipe for an explosion in highly specialized tooling.

This sounds like "no true Scotsman..."

More like the inverse. No true Scotsman seeks to remove someone from belonging to a group to keep the group pure, because no true member of that group could act in such a way. This is adding people to a group that they would otherwise be excluded from. It seeks to expand the definition of the group to include the outsiders.

so, “yes false Scotsman”?

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