Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.

When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.

Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.

Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

> What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?

Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?

The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.

Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.

Even if people assume the worst impacts of LLMs on white collar work, there is simply not enough demand for electricians and plumbers for that to work, right now these professions work only because the number of people going into them is limited.

The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough.

But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-made products that the average consumer can't distinguish from the "real" thing. But if they embrace it, they can't differentiate themselves from the cheaply-produced content! In fact, for artists, the best strategy may be to speak out very vocally against AI, reject it early on, and build a following of like-minded consumers.

You're coping. Everyone wants a remote software job. These are dead. If you want something in software, it will need to be robotics or space related and you'll drive to a location to do it.

If you want to be in a remote, small town, get into construction and become a builder with their own GC license in a few years. Then charge people 400k to build that little dream cottage with 2 guys (you and a team mate) twice a year. 150k each 100k mats for each house. Just a small warning: It's hard but real work and very rewarding.

The thing I'm seeing in people's use of LLMs is that there's still a strong contrast in technical usage of them.

I went to the local Claude Code meetup last week, and the contrast between the first two speakers really stuck with me.

The first was an old-skool tech guy who was using teams of agents to basically duplicate what an entire old-fashioned dev team would do.

The second was a "non-technical" (she must have said this at least 20 times in her talk) product manager using the LLM to prototype code and iterate on design choices.

Both are replacing dev humans with LLMs, but there's a massive difference in the technical complexity of their use. And I've heard this before talking to other people; non-technical folks are using it to write code and are amazed with how it's going, while technical folks are next-level using skills, agents, etc to replace whole teams.

I can see how this becomes a career in its own right; not writing code any more, but wrangling agents (or whatever comes after them). The same kind of mental aptitude that gets us good code can also be used to solve these problems, too.

Agreed, there would definitely be knock-on effects. If a bunch of people who were otherwise going to be software developers decide to focus their career on the trades, then the wages for trades jobs will drop.

Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution.

When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.

My thoughts exactly. I do think people tend to frame things in a developed economies sort of way when the worst fears of ai is actually more akin to a developing/emerging economy framework. And that says when where there's lump of labour available, most aren't earning that within trades.

Pipes don't care about how much you would like to spend on it. They will leak when they are ready to leak.

Are people still under the impression that testing candidates with coding challenges is in preparation of a job where real world problems are described like "invert the binary tree"?

There was never any value in simply the ability to invert a binary tree from memory. First, contrary to popular belief, this particular challenge is quite trivial, even easier imo than fizzbuzz. The value of testing candidates with easy problems is their usefulness in quickly filtering out potentially problematic coders, not necessarily to identify strong ones.

Second, another common take on coding challenges is that they're about memorization. Somewhat, but only to a point. Data structures and algorithms are a vocabulary. A big part of the challenge of using them "creatively" in real life is your ability to recognize that a particular subset of that vocabulary best matches a particular situation. In many novel contexts an LLM might be able to help you with implementation once the right algorithm has been identified, but only after you yourself have made that insightful connection.

Having said this I generally agree with the philosophy [0] that keeping things simple is enough 95+% of the time.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423647

What do you mean by “domain knowledge”? And how is it a competitive advantage?

I think this is true today, especially with complex domains, but I foresee a future where more and more walls fall. If you are in college now, go deep on a domain. If you are entering in 10 years, I have no idea.

The fact you are getting downvoted to oblivion shows how fucked HN has become.

Ain't nobody gonna hire a code monkey - you are being hired based on whether or not you can reason and enable workflows via tech.

If you're only name to grace is you can write pretty Python but cannot architect at scale or care to actually understand the bigger picture of what is being built and why, you will get offshored to someone who is also using Claude Code.

If I'm working on a fullstack for a cloud security product like Wiz, I'd rather hire an average developer who deeply understands the cloud security industry versus a NodeJS doc wiz who has zero empathy or interest in learning about cloud security. There are too many of the latter and not enough of the former in the American scene now, and especially on HN.

If HNers cry about how cut-throat the American market has become, they haven't seen it in China, India, or the CEE.

Robots are expensive, software is not. I can instantly duplicate software 1 million times and run it in parallel, I can't just produce 1 million robots. Physical world is always harder.

Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.

The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians.

That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.

It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.

Hasn't the US already minimised the cost of all the construction work that are "the parts that don't require discernment" to minimum wage who-cares-if-they're-documented-or-not day workers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255

Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2

related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"

Maybe, another possibility is the frontier providers change their pricing terms to try to capture more of the value once a sufficient number of people’s skills have atrophied. For example: 20% of the revenue of all products built with $AI_SERVICE. For someone several years out of practice they may have no other option.

It's hard to say if there's anything new under the Sun...

There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.

There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).

It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.

Anecdata, take it with a grain of salt.

I think this happened with airline pilots and they're experiencing a boom now

Essentially what happened after .com bust. For years CS departments had to sell themselves and convince people there was a future in computers.

Not that AI is the same as Websites all going broke. But no one can see the future and it’s unlikely that deep technical knowledge will be obsolete.

Software became ubiquitous because a huge majority of the population found utility and enjoyment from what software had to offer. Very quickly that number in the population is dwindling. (Good) software can only thrive in an environment where other sectors are also thriving. Who needs 99.999% uptime when your family is starving and freezing.

Assuming the AI maximalist digital god bros are wrong, there will always be some demand for programmers, the question is how much. It's not hard to see a future where programming goes the way of farming where the demand for small-scale farming still exists but at a tiny fraction of what it once was.