This is far more true for junior and perhaps mid-career engineers, unless you're working in an extremely well-defined problem space (* see below).

When working as a SWE, the longer I did it (~30 years) more of my time was spent understanding the problem, the edge cases, how to handle the edge cases, how to do all of it affordable, on time, and within budget.

That's engineering.

What you're describing is "writing code". That's lower value than "solving the problem".

I imagine a response, "But agile development, etc."

Yep. Part of solving the often sometimes involves creating prototypes to determine the essential viability of the solution. But that's only part of it. Which prototypes do you write? How much time do you allocate to same before accepting it's a dead end (at least for now) and punting on it?

That's engineering.

Me probably coming across as a dick today? Well, I was diagnosed autistic a year ago, and I'm on extended sabbatical/unemployment due to autistic burnout. And masking is part of how I got the burnout.

* Why would someone be paying for that when there is likely someone else already doing it? Unless you're the rare person who hopes to "disrupt" the competition).

Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no Senior Developers are banging their heads for hours over typos.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

Let's also not forget a lot of the market edge of SWEs comes in knowing how to navigate these parts. The fact you needed to be reasonably fluent in a language was already a barrier to entry which meant in better times new grads could earn six figures at their first job just for putting in that effort.

Maybe you will still be needed. That is one question. How well you will be paid and treated when the barrier to entry is now "I can think" is another. As the parent indicates, most people doing software are not doing things akin to pure math. I don't think most SWEs want that lifestyle anyway.

It's ok. You shouldn't fight the coming change. Instead use the time we still have to fight for more equal outcomes (vote for politicians that support UBI, Medicare for all). The longer you delude yourself that you are uniquely needed in an increasingly mechanized world the worse all our outcomes will be.

Are you, perchance, assuming that since you spend most of your time struggling with actual code, this is so for everyone else?

Or are you saying that I'm lying. That I am secretly hammering away at my keyboard while pretending not to?

No, writing code hasn't been how I spend most of my time for many decades now.

>OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to get the drill string put together.

Those two formulations represent different developers' approaches to the same task. The former being developers who are much better at planning than the latter.

Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing.

One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability.

Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends and other copy/paste junk. But as per industry classification they are just part of same Coder/Developer/IT Engineer group. And their bleak prospects is not some future scenario, it is playing out right now with tons of them getting laid off. And whole lot of people with IT degrees, certifications are not finding any jobs in this field.

> The AI is coming for that too.

Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker.

> People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away.

I'm not sure anyone is actually working on those. People talk about spending all day writing CRUD apps here, but if you suggest there are already low code tools to build those, they will promptly tell you it's too complex for that to work.

There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities.

However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"?

AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work:

- Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback

There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.

> The AI is coming for that too.

That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

> The AI is coming for that too.

If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. I'm still not convinced by that. But I am convinced that the part of software development that involves typing code manually into an IDE all day is likely gone forever.

I swear to God, it's like majority of IT workers are spineless worms without an iota of self-respect. What are the reasons for this? Is it because most are nerds who were bullied in school, or some form weird elitism-inferiority complex?

Only in tech I see people hating and not taking any pride in their work. Ask a lawyer or a doctor and they'll fight you to the death if you threaten their status. But here it is not only acceptable, but also for some reason encouraged to feel inferior. You're earning shitton of money? Well, you're just a lucky insect who taps on a keyboard while X does real job, about time AI has put you on the street. Disgusting. If some AI reckoning does come, I hope it will hit you first.

> The AI is coming for that too.

Current AI tech giants prove over and over and over again that this is not the case

Even if AI advances continue, for quite a while there's likely still going to be the 'Steve Jobs' role. That is, even if AI coding agents can, in the future, replace entire teams of SWEs, competently making all implementation decisions with no guidance from a tech-savvy human, the best software will likely still involve a human deciding what should be built and being very picky about how, exactly, it should externally behave.

I don't know if it makes sense to call that person an SWE, and some people currently employed as SWEs either won't be good at this or aren't interested in doing it. But the existing pool of SWEs is probably the largest concentration of people who'll end up doing this job, because it's the largest concentration of people who've thought a lot about, and developed taste with respect to, how software should work.

> The AI is coming for that too.

That's where we fundamentally disagree about.

Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit.

Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM parameter count.

> The AI is coming for that too.

To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need.

This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs and suchlike. He spent 6 months working in the company. On the factory floor, in the logistics department, in procurement, in accounting and even shadowing the board. Then he delivered a proposal for how to restructure the parts of the company, change manufacturing processes, and show how logistics and procurement could be optimized if you saw them as two parts in a bigger dance.

He redesigned the company so that it could a) be automated, and b) leverage automation to increase the efficiency of several parts of the business. THEN, he started planning how to write the software (this was the 80s after all), and then we started implementing it.

Now think about what went into this. For instance we changed a lot of what happened on the factory floor. Because my boss had actually worked it. So he knew what pain points existed. Pain points even the factory workers didn't know how to address because they didn't know that they could be addressed.

I was naive. I thought this was how everyone approached "software projects". People generally don't. But it did teach me that the job isn't writing code. It is reasoning about complex systems that often are not even known to those who are parts of it.

And this is for _boring_ software that requires very little creativity and mostly zero novelty. Now imagine how you do novel things.

> People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.

You make it sound like it is a bad thing that certain tasks become easier.

I spent a lot of time writing CRUD stuff. Because the things i really want to work on depend on them. I don't enjoy what is essentially boilerplate. Who does? If you can do the same job in 1/20 the time, then how is this a bad thing?

It is only a bad thing if writing CRUD webapps is the limit of your ability. We don't argue for banning excavators because it puts people with shovels out of work. We find more meaningful things for them to do and become more productive. New classes of work becomes low-skilled jobs.

If you have been doing software for a while, you are probably doing some subset of this. But these things are hard to articulate. It is hard to articulate because it is not something we think about. Like walking: easy for us to do, hard to program a robot to do it.

>bosses

The AI is coming for those too.

>> Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.

Anecdotal evidence to support this.

I work with both dev and design teams. Upper management has already gone through several layoffs and offshoring of the two dev teams I work with. The devs they did keep were exactly what you said. The capable ones who reliably closed their Jira tickets. Never missed a deadline for building their features or components. And now? Their work has tripled and now the only help they get from management? "Start to figure out how to leverage AI, we're going to be a in hiring freeze for the next 10 months."

The double whammy of losing onshore team members and not getting any help from management to fix the problem they just created and essentially just telling them to figure out how to use AI to keep up is pretty staggering.

I would echo what one of the devs told me, "If this is the new "AI era" than you can count me right the fuck out of it."

>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

> The AI is coming for that too.

In that case all [1] non manual work is doomed, until robotics has an LLM moment.

[1] With the exception of all fields protected by politics or nepotism.

Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good.

I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.

I know a an accomplished CS professor, ACM fellow, cited in Knuth's TAOCP (as well as being an easter egg!), who still hunt-and-pecks. In fact, hunt-an-pecks incredibly slowly.

Seeing him type really reinforced this idea.

I've always told my Jr Engineers to "think twice, code once".

If I gave them a task and they immediately started typing it out, I would tell them to stop typing and ask them to explain to me what they were doing; they'd often just spit out what they thought the code should do, and I'd often point out edge cases they missed and would have missed had they just spit out code and a PR, wasting everyone's time. I would also insulate them from upper management to give them time to actually think (e.g. I wouldn't be coding so they could think then code).

To your point and to the GP's point, and one point I keep raising with LLM's: "typing is not where my time sinks are"

That's very true, which is why I find it insulting that so many AI proponents use the word "typing" to refer to writing code. It carries an implication that if you enjoy writing code by hand, you enjoy a mindless activity.

If company A is Amazon, company B is Ubisoft, and company C is Oracle, then I think it's very likely there isn't any pattern or "loop" here and it's just legitimately 3 different companies in 3 different situations doing layoffs for 3 different reasons but all 3 reaching for the same PR playbook. "We're leveraging AI to increase productivity" is the new "we're streamlining our business and focusing on our core products".

It sounds plausible to me since this is pretty en par with most other engineering disciplines. I’m a civil engineer. My responsibility is ultimately mostly to produce a constructable plan set. I spend far less than 5% of my time drafting or modeling.

In no particular order

    - Meetings
    - Reading papers
    - Understanding legacy code
    - Reading internal news
    - Ad hoc chats with coworkers
    - Writing docs
    - Editing configs
    - Thinking about solutions
    - Slacking off
    - Analyzing results
    - Testing code
    - Reviewing PRs
    - Understanding others' ongoing projects

Sneering at "kids these days"

The least experienced developer writes the most code. Juniors would be spending whole day in the IDE, typing, testing, typing etc. Senior developers will go to a park for a few hours, think, then come back spent an hour or less typing code that just works or write nothing at all, maybe even delete code. Instead they might update documents, ask clarifications about found edge cases or errors in planning that were not considered.

Commenting on Hacker News?

[dead]

In 2000 I learned about this old technology called "neural networks".

AI really depends on long winters and rare breakthroughs. Deep neural network was the most recent breakthrough.

The iterations you currently see it just adding more storage, but the fundamental neural network structure doesn't change.

I'm confident AGI will not be achieved by the LLM architecture, and when the next AI breakthrough is, is anyones guess. But if you take history into account, it will take a while.

I think it’s more nuanced. Even a “coder” spends the majority of their time, not coding.

It will be interesting for governments using workers as proxy for taxing corporations.

Weird. I call myself a developer because I don't have an engineering degree from an abet certified engineering program.

I recognize, in some capacity, that this isn't the norm and in the US "professional engineer" is protected and not simply "engineer", but it feels akin to stolen valor to me.

In removing junior developers, leaving only senior developers, wouldn't that reduce supply, making the price go up, not down? It's been a while since Econ 101 for me though.

It is indeed exciting (for you at least). The problem is for most people is not that AI is spewing out code and reading documentation while developer do more interesting things. It is that companies are handing over the job of those developers to AI itself.

So those ex-developers are free to do most interesting things in the world with little change of not relying on nice, steady paychecks every month.

100% this.

I'll also add another factor: it's become increasingly clear at our company that AI-enabled humans are getting to the bottom of the backlog of feature ideas much quicker. This makes the 'good ideas' part of the business the rate limiting step. And those are definitely not increasing with AI, beyond that generated by the AI churn itself ("let's bolt on a chat experience or an MCP!")

So maybe the coding assistants don't get a 10x improvement any time soon, but we see engineering job market contraction because there aren't really enough good ideas to turn into code.

You are supposing that AI is achieving human level expertise and capability is a given. I am not so sure. Right now that's much further from the truth than one might think at first glance.

Do you think the latter can be achieved with the LLM neural network architecture? I highly doubt it. Neural networks are very old tech, and it took us that long to get us here.

I'm sure we'll reach AGI at some point, but looking at AI history, I don't see that coming any time soon.

> max out at "knowing everything"

LLMs know nothing but are great at giving the illusion that they know stuff. (It's "mansplaining as a service"; it is easier to give confident answers every time, even if they are wrong, than to program actual knowledge.) Even your first case seems wildly optimistic. The second case is a lot of "maybes" and "we don't know how but we might figure it out" that seems like a lot to bet an entire farm on, much less an entire industry of farms.

We sure are looking at a shift in the job market, but I don't think it is a fork in the road so much as a Slow/Yield sign. Companies are signalling they are willing to take promises/hope to cut labor costs whether or not the results are real. I don't think anything about current AI can kill the software development industry, but I sure do think it can do a lot to make it a lot more miserable, lower wages, and artificially reduce job demand. I don't think this has anything to do with the real capabilities of today's AI and everything to do with the perception is enough of an excuse and companies were always looking for that excuse. (Just as ageism has always existed. AI is also just a fresh excuse for companies to carry on aging out experience from their staff, especially people with long enough memories/well schooled enough memories to remember previous AI booms and busts.)

But also, yeah if some magic breakthrough makes this a real "buggy whip manufacturer moment" and not just an illusion of one, I don't mind being the engineer on that side of it. There's nothing wrong about lamenting the coming death of an industry that employs a lot of good people and tries to make good products. This is HN, you celebrate the failures, learn from them, and then you pivot or you try something new. If evidence tells me to pivot then I will pivot, I'm already debating trying something entirely new, but learning from the failures can also mean respecting "what went right?" and acknowledging how many people did a lot of good, hard work despite the outcome.

> How will Sr Devs in the future be created?

As an extreme example, maybe we’ll see long-running internships and trainings like doctors experience. Doctors don’t start their career until ~12+ years of prep and training.

Pragmatically, software development has a lot of examples of teenagers making apps and college students building software companies. In the 12 years it takes for training, low-knowledge workers could be vibe coding continuously replacements of most commercial software products they’d be hired to build. So I doubt we’ll treat software development as a rarified high skill job.