How does a Dev's job look like in a few years? | Hacker News Reader

How does a Dev's job look like in a few years?

11 pointskorrak22 comments

I'm a experienced/senior developer which is frequently using ai, guiding coding agents, etc. I wonder, how does my job look like in a few years? Which skills might be the best ones to have? Currently, having business knowledge, development experience helps greatly with guiding coding agents, creating MVPs/PoCs in "no time", improving code, etc. But what if coding agents/ai would overtake this job?

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So based on the comments, I'm the only person who think our jobs will be diving into years-old LLM-generated code to fix it all, and laughing: "Oh my, do you all remember when the entire industry burned 5 years and b/trillions of dollars just to try to force a use case to work that wasn't even the right match for the tools?"

I'm not even trying to be snarky. I just see that LLMs already work fine in almost every other use case. Better than fine - they have been implemented and they work, and don't need much more advancement. But coders are still fighting it, coming up with more and more elaborate setups, spending more and more money, just to get to a level of coding that is passable. Not great, not better than human, just a "CRUD apps work." level of passable.

Once the exec teams stop pushing the FOMO from down on top, I think people will settle down into a much lower level of AI assistance. It will continue to be used, but we'll have it boilerplate the simple stuff out for us, while we focus on the meatier problems. And that is not all that different than pre-AI: whip the easy stuff out, then work on the hard stuff.

A parallel is crypto. There are thousands of multi-million dollars projects that are now completely abandoned. It's the web otherwise this thing will look like a Chinese ghost city. AI will have a similar fate except that it seems like they are about spend orders of magnitude more money.

AI is useful as a retrieval device but not for planning/writing foundational code. Maybe UI/UX in React but for most other things it's a time bomb.

How long ago did you use the tooling? I've seen this take a lot, and I can understand it if you're looking at the output of Sonnet 3.5 copy and pasted. But models like Opus 4.8, that just is not the case. Sure, you can't just whack it into the codebase, it needs review. But lets not pretend that 85% of programming jobs are CRUD with some async messaging. And the newer models are perfectly serviceable for that sort of work.

Things that I reckon will become a lot more important from a developer's perspective over the next year:

- Shaping work so it is more decomposable, legible, verifiable and understandable

- Property testing, formal verification (exhaustive proofs, and bounded model checking), and test verification (e.g. mutation testing)

- Understanding product market fit and opportunity space

- Application of product management techniques (e.g., constraint, risk, and management by exception)

- Hypothesis forming, validation and falsification

- Evaluation of systems (agentic systems and toolsets used by agents)

- Effectively shaping domain knowledge into agent context in a way that stays current

- A greater awareness of o11y and cost recovery

- User experience, developer experience and agent experience

I'm not suggesting that developers should replace UX engineers or product managers (in fact, I think that demand for experts in these fields will grow with the volume of software). I am also not suggesting that these growth areas are not things developers need to be mindful of now, but that the need for by default application of automated development rigor will grow.

I see this as more or less analogous to the DevOps shift of the mid 2010s. Developers will grow their horizons, become comfortable with achieving more and moving faster safely, and ultimately put more trust in observable and legible delegated systems rather than doing things by hand.

> I see this as more or less analogous to the DevOps shift of the mid 2010s.

Ugh, I desperately need to find an exit soon.

I think the majority of dev work will be gone. We already demonstrated just throwing more compute at it is leading to better and better results. We'll likely have advancements that make it so regular people that ask the right questions and are diligent can do end-to-end app creation and management. I think it's also likely that standardizations for security and account management and compliance will just become skills or other types of automations that the drastically more competent agents of 2027-2028 can simply utilize.

It is seeming less and less unlikely for this to happen.

So many businesses right now online you can simply have Claude Fable copy and implement in an hour. That'll probably scale up as well in the future. I just cloned Piano Marvel earlier today in an hour and added missing features that I really wanted on the site that aren't there.

I think society will be a lot crappier for people that don't already have assets and investments that outpace inflation.

It wont be implementing current tech using AI for sure. Everyone and their mothers will be using AI at OS or browser level. For example, What if users block ads using AI? Companies will have figure out a way to stay ahead and continue to serve ads.

this is a rosy view; the AI will have the ads, just like good search had the ads.

The only way you're opting out of ads is local AI.

To be relevant in the software industry, we need to get upgraded all the time similar to an app. According to me, with the more development in AI side, it will be more like managerial job instead of proper dev job. You will be managing your agents, assigning them tasks so your technical knowledge should be up to the par so you can review them properly and keep yourself relevant. The development will be quick but still needs to be manually tested and manually approved like it is right now because the models will never be deterministic so they will require reviewers and managers.

I agree but with the recent developments, what if the agents are able to manage as well like the orchestration agents then how would the scenario change?

Even if the LLMs are able to do managerial work, still they will need supervisors on top of them. According to me, it will more like team leads and managers with LLMs as their developers or maybe planners. Another thing, it also depends on LLM costs as a lot of companies are exceeding their budgets and with more dependency on LLMs, the costs will be even more which can eventually reduce the company profits.

Totally agreed

Reading and understanding documentation and producing clear, written requirements will be more critical than it is today. We've always known documentation is important but it's frequently glossed over in many projects and not taken as seriously as code reviews. With AI though, it's going to be much more important that all requirements are written down clearly and captured.

I think that teams will get smaller but their will be more products.

Yes we can vibe code, but they all look the same and have no users.

The edge will be well thought through designs and experiences that keep users sticky.

We are yet to fully embrace wearables such as glasses and robotics. These will both create whole industries.

I am not worried about my job as long as I keep learning.

Developers at Mistral AI in France are already no longer writing lines of code. The future of developer work lies in understanding the client's business in order to create a custom application tailored to their needs.

To me, that seems the rough description of a product manager! Also something that requires heavy social skills. What will we, the vast nerd majority do?

Nerds? We are not in the 90s anymore. The stereotype of software engineers has changed dramatically (for better or worse). All my current and past colleagues are the opposite of the “nerd”: talkative, married, with kids, investing… none of them like starwars and the like

That is what my job as a developer has always been.

That is that commitstrip cartoon... "we'll be able to write a comprehensive spec and bam we don't need programmers anymore"

"and do you know what you call that?" "code, it's called code"

Programmers will spend most of their time turning LLM vibecoded prototypes into real programs with structural integrity.

For a time this skill will be highly valued, until the snake oil takes over again.

I feel like I am rather a quality assurance guy, who controls what AI is producing.

I mean many developers are already out of job and most will follow. I mean we are going from being skilled workers to unskilled workers just in a few years.

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