The bit about Knight Capital implies that the software engineers were bad, which is notably untrue.
"A bad [software engineer] can easily destroy that much value even faster (A developer at Knight Capital destroyed $440 million in 45 minutes with a deployment error and some bad configuration logic, instantly bankrupting the firm by reusing a flag variable). "
Developers who get excited by agentic development put out posts like this. (I get excited too.)
Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and so on. All of which are valid.
However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI systems for software development, to the point where software developers who stick with the old paradigm will indeed be eroded in time? I'm genuinely curious because clearly the speed of advancement is significant.
"You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of software development. That I would start on how the strange new angels of agentic AI are simply going to replace us wholesale in order to feast on that $150/hour, and that it's time to consider alternative careers. I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The trouble comes in that most people don't know what code needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems. Who does know what code would be needed to solve complex problems? Currently that's only known by software developers, development managers and product managers, three job classifications that are going to be merging rapidly."
If I hired a software developer a few years ago, I might expect them to do roughly what Claude Code does today on some task (?). If I hired a dev today I would expect much more from them than what Claude Code can currently do.
The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis.
Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustainable long term and they don't have any viable path to reducing costs. If anything the cost of operations for the big company are going to get worse. They're in the "get 'em hooked" stage of the drug deal.
Open source AI is getting cheaper and cheaper. Model companies run inference at a profit, the lack of profitability from AI companies is just due to them putting all their capital into training the next generation of models.
Yeah this is rough... so assuming this blog post is mostly true:
Why would the ai model makers charge less than $149/hr ?
Why hasn't outsourcing attacked equal chunks of that $150/hr all these years now?
If companies dont realize that if an employee is required 1 hour per week, they still need a full salary that covers all the rising costs of housing/food/health/necessity... then most knowledge workers just die. Even more so in up and coming countries, its just massive world war and suffering if we dont change capitalism somehow. Why would AI employees keep working toward such destruction and death?
What if the 80/20 problem is more reality, machine learning and LLMs can never get that last 20 percent working right, but now nobody knows how to finish the last chunks? Seems more like the last 10% of coders that dont die, should be charging hundreds of times more $/hr. Even this doesnt fix the problem because the knowledgeable will die off and nobody hired juniors for years.
You think housing prices can sustain their value in this nonsense? Old people who are still in charge of everything and own everything will destroy all of this before it starts affecting their assets
> They're in the "get 'em hooked" stage of the drug deal.
You're implying that people are selling inference at below cost right now. That's certainly not true for most third-party inference providers. I doubt API pricing at Anthropic or OpenAI is being solid below cost either.
The only place where you get what you're talking about are the fixed price plans OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc. sell.
OpenAI is claiming they'll post 74 billion in loses through 2028. Anthropic is on course to lose 3 billion by the end of this year, they lost 5 billion last year.
As far as I can tell the inference provider landscape is a fucking mess, and I can't find any decent financial information on any of the ones I tried. So unless you have something showing those companies are profitable I'm not buy it.
It took me a while to get into it, but this is really good. You need to make it past the anecdote about building a property-based testing suite with Claude Code though, the real meat is in the second half.
> Coding, the backbone and justification for the entire economic model of software development, went from something that could only be done slowly by an expensive few to something anyone could turn on like tap water.
The multitude of freely self taught programmers would suggest otherwise.
> You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of software development.... I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything you know [how] to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two.... for some developers, this revolution is not going to go well. Omelets are being made, which means that eggs will be broken.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to be those with higher-order skills and larger vision. Those who have really absorbed what it means to be engineers first and computer guys second.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to need to accept that they are businessmen just as much as they are engineers.
Honestly this just feels like a roundabout way of saying software development is dead (this leaves aside the validity of the point, just to point out a contradiction in the author's message where the author seems to be saying that software development is dead in substance even while denying that at the surface).
Let me rewrite this entirely just using typists, which is a profession that has definitely been killed by technology.
> You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of typists as an industry.... I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Voice transcription and/or personal computers means that anything you know how to say can be transcribed very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what words needs to be transcribed to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of some computer hardware.... for some typists, this revolution is not going to go well. Omelets are being made, which means that eggs will be broken.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to be those with higher-order skills and larger vision. Those who have really absorbed what it means to be writers first and typing guys second.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to need to accept that they are businessmen just as much as they are typists.
It still works, but only because of an extremely expansive definition of a "typist" that includes being an actual writer or businessman.
If your definition of "software developer" includes "businessman" I think that's simply too broad a definition to be useful. What the author seems to be saying is that software development will simply become another skill of an all-around businessman via the help of AI rather than a specialized role. Which sure, sounds plausible, but definitely qualifies as the death of software development as a profession in my book, in the same way that personal computers have made transcribing one's words simply another skill of an all-around businessman rather than a specialized role.
(Again leaving aside the question of whether that's going to actually happen. Just saying that the future world the author is talking about is pretty much one where software development is dead.)
Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I've been using AI tools most days the past 2+ years. Occasionally I get good results. I spend heaps of time rewriting/reviewing.
Vibe coding can work if both the programming techniques and problem domain are well understood by the LLM. For the work I do, this means front end stuff.
Back end stuff is where the problem domain sits. I spend so much time explaining the problem domain to the LLM that its best I just write it all myself instead of cleaning up the piles of code the LLM will spit out. So no vibing on the back end...just crack open the AI assistant for debugging.
I don't see companies replacing $150/hour programmers with AI. Not yet.
I think what we are seeing is companies spending heaps of money/attention on AI to the point of not making hiring decisions on programmers.
Just prior to the first dot com boom, companies were reinventing themselves with systems replacing those built in the 60s through 80s. These new systems were sophisticated and if done right, game changers. The dot com boom hit with very simple tech: click -> load next static page. This consumed all the attention. I think thats what we are experiencing now more so than a clear job replacement.
I think ultimately agents are a tool. They are a very powerful tool, but they require expertise to use effectively.
It is encumbant on us as devs to use this tool and understand it.
The invention of the chainsaw did not eliminate the lumberjack as a profession. Lumberjacks learned how to become more productive with this dangerous new tool.
>Those that succeed in making this transition are going to need to accept that they are businessmen just as much as they are engineers.
Assuming this essay is prophetic: I'm glad I am no longer a professional programmer. I never wanted to be a businessman (which brings up visions of suits and midday bourbons).
Yes, this does come across as a lengthy quasi-philosophical piece by a developer. Many words, simple truth: Software development does not need -only- human software developers trained in computer science anymore. Thanks.
25 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 54.3 ms ] thread"A bad [software engineer] can easily destroy that much value even faster (A developer at Knight Capital destroyed $440 million in 45 minutes with a deployment error and some bad configuration logic, instantly bankrupting the firm by reusing a flag variable). "
Developers who get excited by agentic development put out posts like this. (I get excited too.)
Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and so on. All of which are valid.
However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI systems for software development, to the point where software developers who stick with the old paradigm will indeed be eroded in time? I'm genuinely curious because clearly the speed of advancement is significant.
"You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of software development. That I would start on how the strange new angels of agentic AI are simply going to replace us wholesale in order to feast on that $150/hour, and that it's time to consider alternative careers. I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The trouble comes in that most people don't know what code needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems. Who does know what code would be needed to solve complex problems? Currently that's only known by software developers, development managers and product managers, three job classifications that are going to be merging rapidly."
Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustainable long term and they don't have any viable path to reducing costs. If anything the cost of operations for the big company are going to get worse. They're in the "get 'em hooked" stage of the drug deal.
Why would the ai model makers charge less than $149/hr ?
Why hasn't outsourcing attacked equal chunks of that $150/hr all these years now?
If companies dont realize that if an employee is required 1 hour per week, they still need a full salary that covers all the rising costs of housing/food/health/necessity... then most knowledge workers just die. Even more so in up and coming countries, its just massive world war and suffering if we dont change capitalism somehow. Why would AI employees keep working toward such destruction and death?
What if the 80/20 problem is more reality, machine learning and LLMs can never get that last 20 percent working right, but now nobody knows how to finish the last chunks? Seems more like the last 10% of coders that dont die, should be charging hundreds of times more $/hr. Even this doesnt fix the problem because the knowledgeable will die off and nobody hired juniors for years.
You think housing prices can sustain their value in this nonsense? Old people who are still in charge of everything and own everything will destroy all of this before it starts affecting their assets
You're implying that people are selling inference at below cost right now. That's certainly not true for most third-party inference providers. I doubt API pricing at Anthropic or OpenAI is being solid below cost either.
The only place where you get what you're talking about are the fixed price plans OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc. sell.
As far as I can tell the inference provider landscape is a fucking mess, and I can't find any decent financial information on any of the ones I tried. So unless you have something showing those companies are profitable I'm not buy it.
Not willing to accept ex-US devs can do a comparable job at half the price
The multitude of freely self taught programmers would suggest otherwise.
Honestly this just feels like a roundabout way of saying software development is dead (this leaves aside the validity of the point, just to point out a contradiction in the author's message where the author seems to be saying that software development is dead in substance even while denying that at the surface).
Let me rewrite this entirely just using typists, which is a profession that has definitely been killed by technology.
> You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of typists as an industry.... I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Voice transcription and/or personal computers means that anything you know how to say can be transcribed very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what words needs to be transcribed to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of some computer hardware.... for some typists, this revolution is not going to go well. Omelets are being made, which means that eggs will be broken.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to be those with higher-order skills and larger vision. Those who have really absorbed what it means to be writers first and typing guys second.... Those that succeed in making this transition are going to need to accept that they are businessmen just as much as they are typists.
It still works, but only because of an extremely expansive definition of a "typist" that includes being an actual writer or businessman.
If your definition of "software developer" includes "businessman" I think that's simply too broad a definition to be useful. What the author seems to be saying is that software development will simply become another skill of an all-around businessman via the help of AI rather than a specialized role. Which sure, sounds plausible, but definitely qualifies as the death of software development as a profession in my book, in the same way that personal computers have made transcribing one's words simply another skill of an all-around businessman rather than a specialized role.
(Again leaving aside the question of whether that's going to actually happen. Just saying that the future world the author is talking about is pretty much one where software development is dead.)
Vibe coding can work if both the programming techniques and problem domain are well understood by the LLM. For the work I do, this means front end stuff.
Back end stuff is where the problem domain sits. I spend so much time explaining the problem domain to the LLM that its best I just write it all myself instead of cleaning up the piles of code the LLM will spit out. So no vibing on the back end...just crack open the AI assistant for debugging.
I don't see companies replacing $150/hour programmers with AI. Not yet. I think what we are seeing is companies spending heaps of money/attention on AI to the point of not making hiring decisions on programmers.
Just prior to the first dot com boom, companies were reinventing themselves with systems replacing those built in the 60s through 80s. These new systems were sophisticated and if done right, game changers. The dot com boom hit with very simple tech: click -> load next static page. This consumed all the attention. I think thats what we are experiencing now more so than a clear job replacement.
It is encumbant on us as devs to use this tool and understand it.
The invention of the chainsaw did not eliminate the lumberjack as a profession. Lumberjacks learned how to become more productive with this dangerous new tool.
Assuming this essay is prophetic: I'm glad I am no longer a professional programmer. I never wanted to be a businessman (which brings up visions of suits and midday bourbons).