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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> Give it a couple of years and the companies will not need senior software engineers. They will need someone to steer the AI, maybe. Why would anyone need senior software engineers?

Right, companies won't need software engineers. They'll just need someone who can use tools to produce source code and maintain the generated artifacts, plus make domain-specific technical decisions like "what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time" or "how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed".

We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.

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> We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.

agent herder!

If that comes to pass, I will have to re-evaluate my career options

Exactly these people will be experts at typing this:

“ Claude! what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time, explain to me with full clarity”

or "Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".

If you think that there is no future where software engineers don’t matter then you are delusional. While the future is not set in stone the pace and trendline of AI point to this future as a MORE realistic future then the alternative.

Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it. Agents at my company already handle our infra.

> “ Claude! what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time, explain to me with full clarity”

This isn't even the right question to ask, I think you've basically proved my point. You are in charge of deciding what the system should do when two users update a record at the same time. It's extremely dependent on what you're trying to do.

> Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it.

What's the one-size-fit-all solution for concurrency management that works for every single domain and application? I'm curious.

> Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".

Who's going to make this decision? The CEO?

> This isn't even the right question to ask.

It’s your example. I simply took your example and asked Claude. If it’s not the right question then don’t give it out as an example.

> What's the one-size-fit-all solution for concurrency management that works for every single domain and application? I'm curious.

I’m curious how your brain concocted I said that. Examine the context of our conversation. What I mean there is that AI can solve those questions for every possible domain application.

> Who's going to make this decision? The CEO?

Armed with Claude any non technical person can make this decision.

> If it’s not the right question then don’t give it out as an example.

Knowing the right question to ask is what makes a person an engineer.

> What I mean there is that AI can solve those questions for every possible domain application.

Yes, if you know what to ask. You're doing an excellent job of demonstrating my point!

> Armed with Claude any non technical person can make this decision.

You just disproved that by asking the wrong question. Much like you, the CEO won't even know what to ask an AI.

>Knowing the right question to ask is what makes a person an engineer.

Yes, but this is orthogonal to the point and that is: AI can do it too.

>Yes, if you know what to ask. You're doing an excellent job of demonstrating my point!

No it's your comprehension that needs work. You are missing MY point while being repeatedly getting enamored with your own point. My point is that AI KNOWS the questions.

>You just disproved that by asking the wrong question. Much like you, the CEO won't even know what to ask an AI.

I didn't ask a single question bro. I only regurgitated your examples. Much like AI, half your statements are based off of hallucinations.

What makes you think the LLM won’t just handle that on its own, or ask the person doing the “development”?

Because there's no one correct answer and every decision involves engineering tradeoffs.

Who do you think the will be choosing whether the database uses a pessimistic or optimistic concurrency strategy? The CEO?

I honestly don't think that these people will need to think in this level. `message in the queue` is an implementation detail..

I do not know or care what my if statement turned into in x86 assembly unless it becomes a performance problem and even then, I'm not profiling or debugging in machine language. Neither do most developers these days. A message in a queue becomes something akin to that in this era.

I see that I got downvoted there. This is not something I advocate or look forward to but I feel this is where it is going.

It may not be necessary to think in those terms exactly, but if you are not even able to think in those terms, you probably will be no good at prompting the LLM either. It's quite plausible that someone can be a productive dev with claude if they don't know exactly how the message queue is processed. But if they don't know there is a message queue at all, that is much less likely.

Likewise, you don't care exactly how an if statement gets converted into machine code, but you do know precisely what an if statement is and how it should behave, and could identify if it was buggy, and that that part of the codebase contains a bug. If you can't do that, then there is an impossible-to-estimate probability that at some point you get stuck and no progress will ever be possible. I don't see that as a winning strategy, in the long run (but it may work very well in the short term).

> I honestly don't think that these people will need to think in this level. `message in the queue` is an implementation detail..

No it isn't lol. Have you worked on any real systems with customers? Good luck telling your boss at AWS that a poison pill message stopped the payment queue from processing so they lost $100 million in sales but hey, it's an implementation detail, no big deal.

> No it isn't lol. Have you worked on any real systems with customers?

I have. Those systems already fail in spectacular ways and people tell their bosses that some worker process stopped working because its transaction IDs overflowed.

I bet that sounds like `the flux capacitor stopped reticulating splines` which is already an implementation detail for the boss anyway. Nothing changes.

Right, so who's going to ask Claude to investigate the worker processes and fix the transaction ID overflow? The CEO? Someone in marketing? The sales team?

Or maaaaaybe.... an engineer?

if your boss is prompting the AI, that's what the claude output is going to sound like, if not worse.

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