YHK - yet another hacker news clone

> Code spitters are cooked, let's be honest here and accept the fate so everyone can move on.

I'm guessing "code spitters" here means people who consider their job to be manually writing code based on requirements produced by others.

Personally, I think the role of "developer" has already expanded way beyond that. If you're a technology expert who understand what is and is not possible to build, how it can be built, how to prompt that thing into existence, verify that the implementation is good, then get that implementation safely into production, you're not "cooked" at all.

If you rely on AI to make those decisions, at least with today's capabilities, you will quickly see how sub optimal the results are.

60k fired from Microsoft

Today Cisco announcing 1 engineer using AI to try to replace/improve 98% of Cisco's code

Goog just lost $475B in value

These are not random disparate events. This is the industry changing to business as usual with less humans.

Note that people laid off are not able to find jobs for more than 9 months. This is a very serious situation.

Hopefully all these unpredictable side effects include bringing down the cost of living.

Gen AI has changed every single part of classic software development, and the impact hasn't even remotely been felt. And zero jobs are "safe" in that traditional way that we saw them.

It's actually staggering to think of how the teams I've led developed software five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago and twenty years ago. Easily 95% of that effort has been obliterated (I'm estimating on the low side, more like 99.5%). Classic wisdom like "the specification needs to be 100% up front because once we implement it stratifies" are relics of the past.

Everything has changed. I can't fully express how software development will work, but it certainly won't involve someone whose job is "human interaction".

idk how common this is in the industry though, but since the introduction of AI my role has expanded so much beyond what is just writing code, i'm now a devops/product/dev person and expected to do all of that at once for the same pay as before

i actually enjoy it myself cause you feel less like a ticket pusher

I think you can eventually set up an AI system that handles a lot of the interactions and conversations people have.

> I grew up with the distinction of "tech guy" needs a "product guy". I am not dismissing it, I am just saying that the world is entering into a phase where both roles are eventually melting into a single function.

The whole reason why Engineering exists in organizations is to take Product's ideas and turn them into reality. When Product can realize its own ideas (through AI) then Engineering is no longer necessary as a political sub-organization. Making it happen requires engineers to learn Product skills and adopt a "Product" job title. We will likely call people with both skillsets Product Engineers. People who can't adapt to learning both skillsets are at risk of losing their jobs.

The "I just manage the Gantt chart" folks are screwed, I think.

The ones that are good at translating between teams can be a huge force multiplier.

Code quality improves month by month, and by now I rarely have complaints in PR reviews, even if I read through them manually, line by line. For the most part, it's how I would write it myself, only that I would have been slower, and not as motivated to test it so thoroughly.

The key is IMHO giving the agents a way to verify their results in a feedback loop as short as possible, along with few instructions for the important guardrails, and a way to organise efficiently (a ledger, a GitHub repository with issues, Linear, Jira, whatever.) With that, you can tend to 3-5 parallel sessions to avoid waiting, and actually get stuff done fast.

I was hired as a TPdM. I unabashedly wrestled technology decisions away from them because these "senior" and "principal" engineers obviously showed they could not be trusted.