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Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

> But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd.

Unfortunately (?) this seems to be the ground truth for the majority of people I speak to. What's not clear to me yet, is whether we'll stop reading code. I suspect that reading is going away as well. There's a push at $WORK to expedite 50-files/20,000 line PRs via agentic reviews..

If this continues, then language readability and "pleasure" of hand coding will likely diminish. I'm still not clear where we're going to land with libraries and re-use. Non-technical pressures are forcing functionality to be re-vibe coded instead.

I've always loved Rails for its pragmatic approach; I've delivered many projects with it. I'll be sad when it disappears but it seems inevitable.

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If it gets to the point that developers no longer need to write or read code, just manage agentic swarms, then what is the reason for developers?

I've been thinking about this too, since my livelihood depends heavily on this answer.

As far as I can tell, agentic software development (aka vibe coding) simply doesn't scale for lay people. At $WORK, I'm seeing the 5th version of the same small project being rewritten by execs. The 5th version is marginally better than the previous 4, but it still has major problems. 5th version has no CI and accesses 6 databases directly. These VPs are slowly becoming software engineers. It's hilarious to watch, but seems rather inefficient.

I've been asked this question by non-software people and the best answer I've come up so far is this. You can go to the hardware store and purchase a chainsaw. You can now prune small trees. This does not make you an arborist though. For reference check out YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=arborist+fails+...

Thoughts?

> These VPs are slowly becoming software engineers. It's hilarious to watch, but seems rather inefficient.

Tell me you weren't around for the dot com bubble without telling me.

At that point in time if you told any one you could build on the web they spent an hour pitching you their bad idea and then wanted you to build it for nothing. They thought the value was in the idea, not the implementation.

Now, if you have an idea, then go use AI to prototype, to validate, to iterate.

IF that results in a viable product then you need an engineer to go in and do the needed work to operationalize it. To attach testing, monitoring, deployment and more over cost metrics (something we have not really done in the last 30 years) - because a good idea that costs more to run than it makes is not a good idea.

The nuance is here - the "tweak this and we can save $0.50 a user a month" is how you move the needle at scale.

Programing is dead, Software development has a narrow place - engineering for sustainability, reliability and cost are what the field is going to become. Someone has to be responsible, or be on the hook for the 3am on a holiday weekend phone call.

Yes the job of the software engineering professional is now strictly non-functional requirements.

Cost, latency, security, auditing, monitoring, operating.

LLMs can handle the functional requirements of “give me this output for these inputs” very well.

> Now, if you have an idea, then go use AI to prototype, to validate, to iterate.

That's another huge gap. Folks without software background cannot seem to grasp incremental improvement. This is why we're on v5. The solution to product's shortcomings is to start a brand new project.

I'm waiting to see if people start dropping massive trees on their houses, or if we're all arborists now.

When I was becoming a self-taught software engineer it also was hilarious, no doubt about it - and very inefficient. I did enjoy it and did build some stuff, and not all of it was bad.

So, if anything, if the intent is "I can do it all myself and I will fire you now" - I love to see them stumble, if the intent is "I want to get my hands dirty and let's work together" - I will be happy to assist. It's not a pipe dream: it does happen.

Does the journey have value? When you started learning to code to become a software engineer, you probably reasoned that the journey was important.

If you are an exec building an app then the journey is likely to be uninteresting and an impediment to getting to a product. I don't think we'll uncover anything new here that we couldn't reason about before. When execs, or other non-programmers, do get decide to get involved, there is a probability that they will learn something more about software engineering inside their organization. That is the thing that software engineers need to be concerned about because depending on the circumstances, the execs will uncover things which shorten the tenure of SWEs or their management.

The journey always has value, in retrospect (if you manage to get through in one piece). But - to be honest - if I could have prompted my way to the software I built back then instead of grinding through the bits and bobs - I would have done it.

I can appreciate the internal beauty but getting "a thing that does thing and does it well", and seeing others enjoy using it has way more value for me than "what type system could work more elegantly here".

So your company is taking many 10s of code generated by proprietary software whose own creators tell us cannot be fully trusted, and putting it straight into production?

What could possibly go wrong?

I'm very much against this. I love agentic coding, because I get where I'm going much faster, but I retain at least a high level understanding of architecture and trade offs that have been made. But that's in my personal projects. For work, there's a huge push to deliver much faster. The quality is an afterthought.

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