Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

Most companies are going to have to rebuild their business entirely or die. That’s very exciting because I really think this will usher in a new wave of companies/hiring. Everything has to be rebuilt so I really don’t buy the hiring Armageddon.

- No major change in hiring due to AI.

- A lot of our code base is very specialized and complex, AI still not good enough to replace human judgement/knowledge but can help in various ways.

- Not yet clear (to me anyways) how much of a productivity gain we're getting.

- We've always had more things we want to do than what we could get done. So if we can get more productivity there's plenty of places to use it. But again, not clear that's actually happening in any major way.

I think the jury is still out on this one. Curious what others will say here. My personal opinion is that unless AI gets smart enough to replace more experienced developer completely, and it's far from that, then I'm quite sure there's not going to be less software jobs. If AI gets to a point where it is equal to a good/senior developer we'll have to see. Even then it might be that our jobs will just turn into more managing AI but it's not a zero sum game, we'll do more things. Superintelligence is a different story, i.e. AI that is better than humans in every cognitive aspect.

Tired.

Mostly of having to try and explain to people why having an AI reduce software development workload by 30-50% doesn't reduce headcount or time taken similarly.

Turns out, lots of time is still sunk in talking about the features with PM's, stakeholders, customers etc.

Reducing the amount of time a dev NEEDS to spend doing boilerplate means they have more time to do the things that previously got ignored in a time poor state, like cleaning up tech debt or security checks or accessibility etc etc

I feel like I suddenly have a superpower.

I'm wearing glasses that tell me who all the fucking assholes and impostors are.

Morale is low because leaders think AI can do that amount of work, but it can’t actually (at least not yet). This both means that they don’t hire enough people to do the work needed, while also “drive by” insulting the intelligence of the people they are overworking.

It is now 3 years since I was told AI will replace engineers in 6 month. How come all the AI companies have not replaced engineers?

"Meh"

AI does 0% of my work and we are actively hiring. As someone mentioned on another AI thread, if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc?

AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptical of its output.

In any sufficiently complex software project, as much of the development is about domain knowledge, asking the right questions, balancing resources, guarding against risks, interfacing with a team to scope and vet and iterate on a feature, managing resources, analyzing customer feedback, thinking of new features, improving existing features, etc.

When AI is a productivity booster, it's great, but modern software is an evolving, organic product, that requires a team to maintain, expand, improve, etc. As of yet, no AI can take the place of that.

We are still hiring engineers. Everyone has a paid Cursor sub, and some people use Claude Code. We also have Claude in GitHub doing automatic PRs.

It’s mostly seen as a force multiplier. Our platform is all Java+Spring so obviously the LLMs are particularly effective because it’s so common. It hasn’t really replaced anyone though, also because it’s Java+Spring so most of our platform is an enormous incomprehensible mess lol

It’s still exciting times. Productivity up. In two years it will be different.

I used Claude Code to navigate a legacy codebase the other day, and having the ability to ask "how many of these files have helper methods that are duplicated or almost but not quite exactly duplicated?" was very much a superpower.

Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage".

My organization would still hire as many software engineers as we could afford.

- Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

- Using it for exploratory high level research and summarization into unfamiliar repos is pretty nice.

- Very rarely does AI write code that I feel would last a year without needing to be rewritten. That makes it good for things like knocking out a quick script or updating a button color.

- None of them actually follow instructions e.g. in Cursor rules. Its a serious problem. It doesn't matter how many times or where I tell it "one component per file, one component per file", all caps, threaten its children, offer it a cookie, it just does whatever it wants.

I often find myself pissed off that AI can’t properly do even the most trivial, menial coding work. And I have to spend more time guiding it than doing it myself.

On the other hand I find it super useful for debugging. I can paste 500k tokens into Gemini with logs and a chunk of the codebase and ask it what’s wrong, 80% it gets it right.

Angry because this is yet another play by the ruling class to make more money, and you, I, and everyone you know is going to pay dearly for it.

Baffled because there are too many rank-and-file tech workers who seem to think AI exciting/useful/interesting. It’s none of those things.

Just ask yourself who wants AI to succeed and what their motivations are. It is certainly not for your benefit.

The slowdown in hiring outside of AI is the bigger morale hit.

I'm just waiting for the hype-cycle to end. AI might revolutionize some industry (probably natural-language-adjacent), but not ours. COBOL has already been attempted, and far more competently (and with less energy cost).

If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least, they lacked the basic competence with tools that that any university sophomore should have.

Sometimes, however, it is instead a confession "I previously wasn't allowed to copy the preexisting solutions, but thanks to the magic of copyright laundering, now I can!"

its really fun, like learning to code again to see what all can be done, an how much more power is available at your fingertips.

what sucks though is that its super inconsistent whether the thing is gonna throw an error and ruin the flow, whether thats synchronous or async.

Once in a while I save ~10 minutes by using AI. About as often as embarrassing myself by having to admit that my primary source was an AI while researching some topic.

The main thing that changed is that the CTO is in more of a "move fast, break things"-mood now (minus the insane silicon valley funding) because he can quickly vibe-code a proof-of-concept, so development gets derailed more often.

50% of my code these days has been entirely replaced by AI, with little to no review beyond a cursory glance.

That 50% is unit tests.

Patiently looking forward for the HN front page to be about something else than generative AI.

My organization isn't a pure tech company so not much has changed. Management acknowledges AI's velocity but maintains a healthy skepticism of throwing "AI" into everything as a panacea. Writing the code has rarely been the hard part.

As a software engineer: the only impact the AI bubble has on me is the time it takes to explain what's a stake to less tech-savvy colleagues. Zero consequences on my actual job, excepet being pissed of each time a promising project "pivots to AI" and starts shoehorning it everywhere.

As a person I'm increasingly worried about the consequences of people using it, and of what happens when the bubble bursts.

It's not my biggest concern here in the US

My company is still hiring engineers like it was doing before. About the work itself I can say LLMs are good with PoC or new projects, I can't say the same about already existing codebase. For me it's a good tool, but not THE solution. Lately I'm making a lot of AWS Serverless configurations with Cloudformation and LLMs hallucinate a lot for that. At this point, I always verify if it exists in the doc or not, because it spits out stuff that doesn't exist at all.