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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

Then the software you're writing isn't at all critical to justify keeping your job.

You're just standing in the way of business margins by being an unnecessary expense.

Or for lack of a better word, a meat proxy.

I see where you’re getting at, but AI still requires someone to prompt it to do something. It has no free will so the meat proxy, as you put it, is still relevant and necessary.

Not sure why the author is so arrogantly proud of not doing the absolute bare minimum expected of a developer (of any rank), though? Maybe a click-bait strategy? So weird.

Never thought I’d see “I’m bad at my job” used as a badge of honour.

I think what some engineers don't realize is that mostly we will all move to abstraction level of product managers. If you are not slowly moving up to that level of abstraction as the model capabilities improve, it is likely that you are in for a bad time.

There are certainly mission critical systems with a low tolerance for failure, but even there the essential work will be specification. I'm not sure how long even that is primarily human driven. Cost of formal verification of software drops dramatically.

There is no need for as many product managers as there are currently developers and the vast majority of developers are not going to become good product managers even if they embrace AI so it is likely that everyone is in for a bad time anyway. The existing product managers have access to AI too, have years of experience, and aren't going to take kindly to ex-developers trying to take their jobs.

I understand the “one more abstraction” aspect, and thoroughly agree with you, though it seems counter-productive and rather illogical to me to never read code and be proud of it. It’s one thing to leave the grunt work to the AI, but to not even review code? That sounds like a bad idea.

Prompting is being automated.

A company I am consulted at last month is working on a process to have Figma drawings and business requirements written by BA's to be translated to Angular.

Their goal is to have the software engineering steps entirely done by AI.

I can see some of the process being automated, but entirely? Sounds like a ticking time bomb to me.

I don't believe so. I am sure you've also notice that Claude is already ridiculously good these days, and becoming better for every month. That goes for other providers as well.

I don't know where they are today, but when I left they were very very enthusiastic.

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