Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it makes software development easier, but a career as a professional software engineer harder.

I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations and layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry. Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters.

>layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry

It definitely won’t be CEOs and managers not firing their buddies

> Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters.

I'm sorry to say, but AI coding assistants paved the way to professional imposters whose only skill is prompting a model to do something. I already had the displeasure of working with a software engineer who not only introduced a bunch of regressions that by mindlessly vibe-coding things against the requirements but also complained that not having credits to use the most expensive frontier models was, and I quote, "stifling my creativity".

Nonetheless, would still trust Claude to be generally more reliably competent in a random area of software engineering than the average professional. Sure they might still be better in a particular area of their expertise, but we've all had to play the imposter before on the stuff we care less about and figure it out as we go. AIs are still inferior sometimes but usually a decent 7/10+ on most topics - which really fills the gap.

I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations that top management is going to reap the rewards of these AI capabilities we get a whole lot more comfortable with just doing the full business stack - including management, sales, branding, etc - and hierarchical structures crumble into flat collectives of do-everything true-generalist programmers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com