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Comment by not_the_fda | Hacker News Reader

Writing code was never the job. It was a small part of the job that can now be delegated to AI.

Eliciting the right requirements and user needs. Creating a sound architecture and design. Validating final product meets the requirements. Ensuring there is good test coverage. You know `Engineering`. Mechanical and Electrical engineers didn't go away because of CAD.

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Literally all those skills are the result of decades of friction, challenge, and deep domain knowledge...all of which are circumvented when LLMs are utilized early in the process.

CAD is also useless to Mechanical and Electrical engineers who didn't learn fundamental the skills that it streamlines.

> Mechanical and Electrical engineers didn't go away because of CAD.

that is a very good point! I'm going to use it in the future.

> Eliciting the right requirements and user needs. Creating a sound architecture and design. Validating final product meets the requirements. Ensuring there is good test coverage.

Besides your first point, the rest can be delegated to AI as well. And you don't need to be a "software engineer" to spec out requirements and user needs.

This is happening at my company: all of these software phases are being delegated to AI. And the people without any understanding of software have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Features no one needs are being made in minutes. It hasn't been long enough to really tell how that's turning out. Everything seems to be in endless development.

Incomplete analogy; CAD architects the things that mechanical engineers will build (or prototype before handing off to a factory to assemble at scale)

Agents ideate, architect, build, test, and ship the thing.

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