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Comment by zuzululu | Hacker News Reader

This moment is coming for software developers too

Yeah almost certainly, especially the ones who made a career out of "copypaste from StackOverflow", which is most engineers.

But even the good engineers should likely be a little worried.

why would it be different for other people if you already said senior level is not writing code but planning things out?

is there something about planning that LLMs cannot do being your crux of the argument?

what do you believe about your jobs or function that you think will be immune from AI replacing you?

If anything it seems your role is not that dissimilar to those translating languages or business requirements.

I am struggling to see what it is about this planning you do that cannot be done by AI because it seems to me thats not where the moat is rather I find the middle man jobs to be the most vulnerable to AI immediately much more than people writing code.

Because at least someone is watching the outputs from AI and understands the code and can communicate it easily back to the stakeholders without the middle man gate keeping and applying their "taste".

I have a feeling that anyone in your shoes is going to be working with code soon or they won't have much to offer anymore to the business. A stakeholder could easily replace the middle layer with AI and even as a business owner myself I do not see any need to add any more humans at the layer anymore unless they write code.

More specifically, it is coming for coders. If you make your living by banging out lines of code all day, then you may want to be looking at adjusting your career trajectory. But if that is your job, you are either very junior, or a bit foolish for getting into that situation.

so what is software developer doing if writing code is not part of their job

I don't see how not writing code is being offered as a moat, it seems like that is just translating business/stakeholder requirements to architecture/biz processes which is exactly the type of low hanging fruit that AI will capture first

or was it your point that the position sits closer to the stakeholders (relatively compared to those lifting) thus immune from replacement by AI

or is your argument that your taste is exquisite that no AI will be able to match it like it already has with software so far and it will not improve beyond the current state

So what a lab researcher doing if typing articles is not part of the job?

Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/uy1ot1/w...

If you get to senior level then most of your job probably is not writing code, but planning things out. The code is largely an implementation detail.

At least that's how it was for me, maybe other peoples' careers are different.

Yes, my career has been different. At my workplaces seniors still have to code because they dont want to hire juniors

The "planning things out" has moved to another layer, called "architects"

> If you get to senior level then most of your job probably is not writing code, but planning things out.

If they're so good at banging out code now, they're coming for that too, you know.

I don't necessarily disagree, but there's gotta be a name for some kind of "infinite extrapolation" fallacy, where you assume that the current rate of progress will continue indefinitely.

That might happen, but I don't think it's implied, at least given literally every other bit of technology that has ever happened in history ever.

> I don't necessarily disagree, but there's gotta be a name for some kind of "infinite extrapolation" fallacy, where you assume that the current rate of progress will continue indefinitely.

I am not assuming they'll continue indefinitely, but it's a small step from writing code to planning out the code to write, and another small step from planning a coding project to planning a software project, etc.

These are all small steps, and because the act of specification + planning paid less than specification + planning + programming, what reason do you have for thinking that specification + planning is valuable enough to keep the salaries the same as specification + planning + programming?

I think with a fixed size problem, no we wouldn't be able to demand the same salaries that we get now.

I dispute that the problem is fixed size. The people who are senior engineers now will learn how to think at a higher level with the AI models.

> The people who are senior engineers now will learn how to think at a higher level with the AI models.

I think my argument is that, if they were going to do that, they would have done so by now - they already say that actual coding was only a small percentage of their work anyway.

Same thing architects do if drawing lines gets automated: architecture.

Would you trust living in a high rise designed by AI?

Designing a system that survives production is the job.

I kind of view it this way. Yes, non-technical people can prompt and write code. But technical people can certainly also do the job of product people. So then, who would you want to do the end-to-end? A SWE, or a product person? Probably a SWE.

As software engineers, our job will expand horizontally. We will shift left, and right. But that’s really fine, because I’ve found SWE can be really good at that.

They’re good at requirements engineering. They’re good at quality assurance. They’re good at technical support. So, why not pay a SWE to be that person?

Or, at least, some SWEs are good at that. The ones that aren’t will struggle I think.

I think this collapses a global, complex heirarchy of software engineering workers into a single monolith and serves only to advertise for frontier LLM providers. the point where you no longer need engineers is not going to be reached by making LLMs better and better.

I think there is going to be a long time before all of the obscure knowledge of a decent software developer can be completely replaced by AI. Though the job is going to change beyond recognition. It already has in many ways.

But not before a huge crash in optimism about their capabilities. Specifically wrt accuracy, reliability, efficiency, and organization/architecture.

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