In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do?
I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.
One thing I will add: while AI is getting really good at _doing_ the software building bits, I haven't yet seen it well integrated into the decision-making and political structure of organizations. Right now, it seems best in the hands of a high-agency individual empowered and able to make changes or 'ship' something, with them acting as the bridge.
This of course, is not a technical challenge, but I would expect the change in structure of organizations to make this more efficient to be slower than the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years.
I can relate, I was really looking forward to settling into mentorship roles.
However I am not quite so defeated, I think that developers will continue to find employment in tech even as AI augments the roles. Experienced developers are the obvious pick for a hire to run agentic AI development tools, and even the obvious pick for managing a no-code endgame scenario as they are just smart technologists with strong problem solving skills.
I think the devs who were only here for the paycheck and would not reasonably pick software if it didn't pay so much, will probably be happy to retrain into something else but be disappointed by the paycut.
I am also excited by the prospect of being able to take on bigger scale side projects solo as that's really where my passion lies.
I think general purpose technologists will really excel in this new ecosystem as the industry will be back to moving fast and breaking stuff for a while, for better or worse. A lot of them call themselves programmers right now but will evolve pretty quickly.
Pragmatism, small teams and fast pace will best deliver software based projects, and the bottleneck in big orgs will become (or already was) the bureaucracy and communication layers. Small team, greenfield projects have a huge advantage in getting an MVP to market, which is pretty exciting for someone excited mostly by solving problems with technology.
Time will tell though, this is not career advice and times are chaotic. At the end of the day, there are other careers, and you were smart enough to get into software. You will be smart enough to find a new career.
Maybe the act of writing code will die. I still have hope that the act of transforming ideas and vibes in to something that works remains valuable. The means might change but the end remains.
I grew up in a world that didn’t have secure corporate jobs as a thing. That’s most of the world outside the US. There, you could get secure government jobs (if you come from the right family or connections) or you had to learn how to build a business yourself. Anything else, paid barely livable wage if at all.
The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents.
The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well.
If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes.
Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some.
If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.
I don't really feel like it's a "bad" thing; I've said for a long time if a job can be automated, then it should be automated. I still do believe that, even if I am probably on the losing end of that in the not-too-distant future.
I think I am reasonably good at software, and I think I write code that's still a bit better than what Claude does. In fact, I suspect that will actually be true for quite awhile, but the problem is that "writing code 20% better" isn't exactly a selling point when my competition is $100/month and takes like 1/20th the time. Most software, even before AI, wasn't optimal and was kind of shitty, and good engineers were still always replaceable with shittier cheaper ones if it was economically viable.
I tend to land on my feet for this stuff, so I still think I'll be ok; I know how to use the tools and there will still need to be some humans who understand how this shit works, so I'm not worried about becoming homeless or anything. What I'm mostly worried about is that I won't ever have fun at work anymore. I liked solving problems, I liked thinking of clever solutions to avoid a mutex or increase concurrency, I liked figuring out how to squeeze a few percent more performance out of my given limitations. It's something I'm good at, and it's basically the only way to get decent money while doing math.
Since the ceiling for writing software has been significantly lowered, I think eventually the cushy yuppie status of software is going to shrink.
Out of curiosity I checked out the author’s resume and this is their current position. Oh the irony!!
I built significant pieces of the Copilot onboarding, purchasing, billing and settings flow. For eight months I headed up the Copilot anti-abuse effort. I then led the launch of GitHub Models, and am now working on other Copilot projects.
You have many errors and I personally find the writing style pretentious.
For example:
Software engineer role is about automating people -> often not.
That just indicates lack of rigor.
Also, if so. Who will make the ai automate people? GOD?
People think poorly understood theory and gradient descent will produce God.
I appreciate that this article is doing what few in our space do: acknowledging that software has long been the tool to put people out of work (though that process is wrapped in softer terms like "optimization" and "disruption"), and we're only the inevitable targets of the same machinery we helped build.
Building is half the battle. Knowing what to build is the other half.
Most IC6/7+ would not code anyways - in fact a friend of mine said "we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5" - which was ironic but funny.
I am curious if we would ever get a new programming language like rust or go, without this creativity.
In a way, we have different products that does more or less same things (postgres vs mysql for example). The reason is there's difference of thought in the process. I doubt this will go away.
What will go away is the "senior engineer" position filled by people making six figures that don't know how to debug a memory leak or create a database index.
I just saw a merge request created with Claude from a colleague without software engineering background. Let's just say I will have more work to do than less.
Software validation was always the interesting part vs software verification. Validation asks the question, did you build what was actually necessary?
I don't see demand dropping in the medium to long term. Businesses like to grow, and two devs with AI are better than one. And one dev with AI is better than one non-dev with AI.
The job is changing, and I don't like it in many ways, but there we go. It's not the first time new tech has nuked my dev job and I had to change.
I have personal projects that I hand-code, and personal projects I hand to Claude. Depends on how boring the project is. If it's stuff I've already solved a bunch of times, I hand it off. If I have room for good learning, I code it myself.
> In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade.
Due to a text predictor?
I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including research demonstrations, are close to a decade old already.
To me the main issue is that investors are not aware of these limitations and will keep pouring money into this way beyond everyone's breaking point. But really that's a failing of the world's economic system, which relies too much on their whims.
Yes, maybe in a decade all of the most popular LLM are dropped because lack of income. Only companies that learned how to use their own models and local optimized software using very specific hardware could still run them for very specific tasks
> I don’t think there are any genuinely new capabilities that AI agents would need in order to take my job. They’d just have to get better and more reliable at doing the things they can already do.
The "just" here is minimizing what has been the crux of the problem for the past ~5 years.
This technology has been capable of producing code all this time. The end result has been improving due to massive scaling efforts, and some relatively trivial engineering ("reasoning", "agents", etc.).
And yet reliability is still a massive problem. The tools still hallucinate, still lead the user in dead-end directions, and still do so confidently and randomly, without any discernible reason. Expert users are able to guide them to a certain extent, but whether the prompting incantation is done manually or via the trendy Markdown file of the week, it's all guesswork based on feelings and anecdata.
I'm personally not too worried about being replaced by these tools, even though my skillset is nothing remarkable. My opportunities might shrink, but this is a two-way street. Companies that use "AI" indiscriminately don't interest me either. The demand for quality human work and ingenuity will always exist, even within a sea of mediocrity.
I'm much more concerned with the societal impact of the mountains of shoddy software being produced, deployed into increasingly more critical infrastructure, and put into hands of incompetent and malicious people. There is very little thought and discussion on this topic, let alone any guardrails. "AI" companies are now attracting governments and advertisers, both full of malicious and incompetent people. The next decade is going to be interesting, that's for sure.
41 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 62.3 ms ] threadThe wheel of industry rolls forward and crushes everyone underneath it
I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.
One thing I will add: while AI is getting really good at _doing_ the software building bits, I haven't yet seen it well integrated into the decision-making and political structure of organizations. Right now, it seems best in the hands of a high-agency individual empowered and able to make changes or 'ship' something, with them acting as the bridge.
This of course, is not a technical challenge, but I would expect the change in structure of organizations to make this more efficient to be slower than the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years.
However I am not quite so defeated, I think that developers will continue to find employment in tech even as AI augments the roles. Experienced developers are the obvious pick for a hire to run agentic AI development tools, and even the obvious pick for managing a no-code endgame scenario as they are just smart technologists with strong problem solving skills.
I think the devs who were only here for the paycheck and would not reasonably pick software if it didn't pay so much, will probably be happy to retrain into something else but be disappointed by the paycut.
I am also excited by the prospect of being able to take on bigger scale side projects solo as that's really where my passion lies.
I think general purpose technologists will really excel in this new ecosystem as the industry will be back to moving fast and breaking stuff for a while, for better or worse. A lot of them call themselves programmers right now but will evolve pretty quickly.
Pragmatism, small teams and fast pace will best deliver software based projects, and the bottleneck in big orgs will become (or already was) the bureaucracy and communication layers. Small team, greenfield projects have a huge advantage in getting an MVP to market, which is pretty exciting for someone excited mostly by solving problems with technology.
Time will tell though, this is not career advice and times are chaotic. At the end of the day, there are other careers, and you were smart enough to get into software. You will be smart enough to find a new career.
The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents.
The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well.
If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes.
Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some.
If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.
I don't really feel like it's a "bad" thing; I've said for a long time if a job can be automated, then it should be automated. I still do believe that, even if I am probably on the losing end of that in the not-too-distant future.
I think I am reasonably good at software, and I think I write code that's still a bit better than what Claude does. In fact, I suspect that will actually be true for quite awhile, but the problem is that "writing code 20% better" isn't exactly a selling point when my competition is $100/month and takes like 1/20th the time. Most software, even before AI, wasn't optimal and was kind of shitty, and good engineers were still always replaceable with shittier cheaper ones if it was economically viable.
I tend to land on my feet for this stuff, so I still think I'll be ok; I know how to use the tools and there will still need to be some humans who understand how this shit works, so I'm not worried about becoming homeless or anything. What I'm mostly worried about is that I won't ever have fun at work anymore. I liked solving problems, I liked thinking of clever solutions to avoid a mutex or increase concurrency, I liked figuring out how to squeeze a few percent more performance out of my given limitations. It's something I'm good at, and it's basically the only way to get decent money while doing math.
Since the ceiling for writing software has been significantly lowered, I think eventually the cushy yuppie status of software is going to shrink.
Maybe I should learn to weld or something.
I built significant pieces of the Copilot onboarding, purchasing, billing and settings flow. For eight months I headed up the Copilot anti-abuse effort. I then led the launch of GitHub Models, and am now working on other Copilot projects.
For example: Software engineer role is about automating people -> often not.
That just indicates lack of rigor. Also, if so. Who will make the ai automate people? GOD? People think poorly understood theory and gradient descent will produce God.
I wouldnt be so sure. They'll keep the people who can do what needs to be done with new tools. Current title is irrelevant.
In addition loosing a 400k tc vs. 2x 200ktc makes more sense if they are all prooompters and AI handlers anyway.
Most IC6/7+ would not code anyways - in fact a friend of mine said "we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5" - which was ironic but funny.
I am curious if we would ever get a new programming language like rust or go, without this creativity.
In a way, we have different products that does more or less same things (postgres vs mysql for example). The reason is there's difference of thought in the process. I doubt this will go away.
Maybe companies haven't seen it yet, but most office jobs can and will be eliminated in the next decade or two.
Don't ruminate on the future too much folks, you won't die by hunger.
Software validation was always the interesting part vs software verification. Validation asks the question, did you build what was actually necessary?
The job is changing, and I don't like it in many ways, but there we go. It's not the first time new tech has nuked my dev job and I had to change.
I have personal projects that I hand-code, and personal projects I hand to Claude. Depends on how boring the project is. If it's stuff I've already solved a bunch of times, I hand it off. If I have room for good learning, I code it myself.
Due to a text predictor?
I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including research demonstrations, are close to a decade old already.
To me the main issue is that investors are not aware of these limitations and will keep pouring money into this way beyond everyone's breaking point. But really that's a failing of the world's economic system, which relies too much on their whims.
The "just" here is minimizing what has been the crux of the problem for the past ~5 years.
This technology has been capable of producing code all this time. The end result has been improving due to massive scaling efforts, and some relatively trivial engineering ("reasoning", "agents", etc.).
And yet reliability is still a massive problem. The tools still hallucinate, still lead the user in dead-end directions, and still do so confidently and randomly, without any discernible reason. Expert users are able to guide them to a certain extent, but whether the prompting incantation is done manually or via the trendy Markdown file of the week, it's all guesswork based on feelings and anecdata.
I'm personally not too worried about being replaced by these tools, even though my skillset is nothing remarkable. My opportunities might shrink, but this is a two-way street. Companies that use "AI" indiscriminately don't interest me either. The demand for quality human work and ingenuity will always exist, even within a sea of mediocrity.
I'm much more concerned with the societal impact of the mountains of shoddy software being produced, deployed into increasingly more critical infrastructure, and put into hands of incompetent and malicious people. There is very little thought and discussion on this topic, let alone any guardrails. "AI" companies are now attracting governments and advertisers, both full of malicious and incompetent people. The next decade is going to be interesting, that's for sure.