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Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> There's a continuum between "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination" and "hand written domain driven design development". You can absolutely use coding agents AND have maintainable code. But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to.

Yes. But I think the idea is without "hand written domain driven design development" the result trends to "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination," as developers de-skill.

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Some de-skill, but not all.

Somewhat relevant parallel..

Calculators exist, but not all is lost:

- lot of (most?) people can do basic multiplication (I’m too lazy to fetch any stats but I hope you’ll have some observations in your bubble dear reader)

- some people actually compete in mental calculations https://worldmentalcalculation.com/mental-calculations-world...

Same will be with software devs, enthusiasts will continue to exist.

Our class sizes at the university that I teach at have plummeted with the crash. What I'm hoping is that this means I'm just going to be teaching people who are actually interested in producing quality code.

> Some de-skill, but not all.

So are you agreeing with me or not? Because it's not black and white. Having a few non-deskilled developers around who do the equivalent of "compete in mental calculations" is the same as having none at all.

It's sort of like the retort "AI won't take all the jobs from humans, some will be left [at the very top and very bottom]." Even if true, fat lot of good it does most people who would be unemployed in that scenario.

Also, if you get widespread deskilling, but massive increases in code production due to AI, you're probably still going to get "organizations falling into the trap" like the OP describes and the remaining skilled people getting burned out trying to hold it all together. Modern American business culture (in aggregate) is incapable of learning to not burn people out until everyone is already burned out, only then will it pay attention to the problem (and then probably forget what they learned and start repeat it in 10 years).

> So are you agreeing with me or not? I’m disagreeing with black or white view.

You make it A bit black or white.

Llm will not take jobs, at worst it will shift jobs.

If we will allow current llm to develop code without inspecting it, we will still want to provide direction and expect certain quality level. So in “worst” case you will need at least design/QA people.

If code will be free, and it will increase 1000x, you probably will need 100x design/QA people. (Unit tests written by same llm, if not reviewed are worthless as assurance). I’m absolutely certain that humans will have plenty of software related jobs.

As to programmer deskilling, another parallel: lot of programmers have very little knowledge of how to deal with databases correctly/efficiently, because they are somewhat lazy and good tooling/orms allow to get away with it, but there are also plenty of devs who do know how db works and how to design a db schema for their app access as it improves overall system performance and correctness. Same with LLM case, having knowledge of what happens in code, gives an edge, and competitive/curious/overly-responsible people will continue reading things in depth (llms also make learning somewhat easier). And its definitely not 1%.

Furthermore, llm prices are subsidised a lot now, so it’s yet to be seen if llms are economically viable as vibe coding agents on a large scale.

All will be ok, don’t worry too much.

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