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Comment by senfiaj | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, same thoughts. And this industry is becoming so volatile, I'm not sure what will happen tomorrow. I mean it's highly unlikely that AI will replace developers at least in the next 10 years, but I'm not sure what will "software developer" become. Certain people love to work with details. If AI is taking away this joy, I'll rather retire as early as possible from this volatile industry.

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I’m trying to get a bit away from the business stakeholders, into more technically required roles. Eventually my goal is to get into a system programming role.

The issue with roles close to business is that it doesn’t provide the right soil for good engineering . Your stakeholders have no concept of engineering and wants everything ASAP; Your manager is just a yes man who takes all tickets, and want you to use AI for everything because it’s so easy and quick; Your VP thinks your team is not moving quickly enough; Your VP puts speed before quality literally.

The thing is, I believe that some roles and some industries just don’t care about good engineering. If you want to be a good engineer, you have to stay away from them, even if they are high paying, and get yourself into a system programming role, in a company that fails you if you do not have good engineering practices. The only way to be a good engineer is to put yourself in such an environment that you will almost surely fail if you are not a good one. There is a cool-aid and many engineers drink that the most important thing is "business value", and I politely vomit that all out a while ago. The new rule is to become an engineer that they are still willing to pay you even if you spit on their faces.

Those roles and companies can die and I don’t give a fuck about those business clowns.

In my company it's a bit more complicated, but I have the spirit of your thoughts. I think business software (such as the ERP-like software I work on) is often an entropy magnet from the complexity point of view. It doesn't strive to be simple and elegant because business / finance world is messy. Whether all the complexity and messiness of the financial world is accidental or justified, this is irrelevant for me because I don't care about their business problems. It will be soul sucking anyway.

Yeah I agree. And sometimes it is not really the complexity. For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.

>> For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.

IMHO, the complexity of kernel and compilers is usually more justified and less accidental. At least non technical people are rarely the cause.

Yeah I’d rather fight with concurrency or obscure language features than fight with ever changing and ambiguous business rules.

Maybe we just aren't far enough in the vibe coding side of things and there are still too many people in the industry who still pay attention to details, so no major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding. So the people who pay attention to details are still carrying their organizations, but I do wonder how long it is going to be sustainable.

When it comes to joy killers because of AI, then it is dismal how plagiarism (going by the definition of "presenting someone else's work without attribution") suddenly became widely accepted. When I see long lists of bullet points with interspersed bold text, I know that it is something the sender did not write or bother reviewing. Absolute cherry on top when in the end of that text you see the typical LLM suggestion that you can ask for more information, which the sender didn't even bother removing.

> major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding

Didn't Azure, AWS and Cloudflare crash a few times in the second half of 2025 because of vibe coding?

Catastrophies would be we vibe coded a nuclear plant or space rocket system and we blew up thousands of people due to a vibe coding error.

Bringing most of the western world economy to a standstill isn't one? When I say AWS was down I mean AWS was down.

> Bringing most of the western world economy to a standstill

That’s a huge exaggeration.

True, it was Crowdstrike that did that, and that one wasn't AI.

The Crowdstrike outage only affected Windows machines. It probably improved the world economy.

I can confirm that nuclear power plant software has much higher quality level than normal commercial software and extremly extensive testing. In addition, lot of nuclear safety is checked below the software level on hardware level.

Developement of nuclear power plant software is very conservative, it will use LLMs maybe in 10-15 years.

They crashed yes, but not for too long and they did recover. And was it ever confirmed it was because of vibe coding? Not sure how much if any it even impacted their stock.

It was confirmed each was because of vibe coding.

Can you share some links?

Asking for myself, some friends and HN community at large.

programmers were always against "software patents" - the idea of copyrighting algorithms and implementations

implementations are already copyright

It’s not just that. Working with multiple agents and tasks switching will increase cognitive load significantly leading to both poor decision making and increased stress.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7614709/

10 years is a long time. 10 years ago the Transformer architecture didn't exist. I would call it moderately unlikely at best. At the very least, I would say it's likely that development will require an entirely different skillet 10 years from now.

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