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Comment by a2ff6eeb0 | Hacker News Reader

It's the management desired direction, if the place is anything like my workplace. Everyone is all in on AI, and if you're not using it for everything possible, you're on the chopping block.

And, really, it works. You can copy and paste between tickets and Claude, and then do manual testing. Then you tell Claude to self-review for clarity and minimalism, and stop worrying. Sure, today it's not as good as a human, but for almost all the code out there, it gets the job done. There's no skill needed any more, and if the boss doesn't care about quality, I don't see why I should.

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Your boss can get Claude to make unreadable, noisy, confusing code just as well as you can.

There may not be a career left in software development with these monstrosities, but if there is, it's in using decades of experience to get the abominations to produce something other than unreadable dreck.

If the code itself truly doesn't matter any more, programmers will no longer be paid.

Oh, yeah, the amount of skill needed for programming is quite low these days, the people paying just haven't figured it out quite yet. There's still some needed, but it's closer to line cook than nuclear physicist.

But the managers won't do it, because you still need manual testing to make sure that the AI models got things right. Managers will want to hire someone to do the manual testing.

The amount of skill required is still pretty high, IMO - if we set a requirement that a programmer thoroughly understand what they're shipping.

If we remove that requirement (as most around me seem to be doing), then yeah, not much skill required, but the system is going to steadily trend towards being a buggy, unmaintainable pile of sloppypasta.

Maybe the models get good enough they can handle maintaining that, but anecdotal reports so far seem to indicate we aren't there yet.

I guess we'll see if AI 2027 pans out.

Seems like a sad way to spend the limited hours of your life

For now, it's less sad than working retail.

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