My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now.

Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load. I’m doing a lot more of that lately.

I’m more productive, but also more tired. This may be due in part to the breadth of what my team owns, which makes my day a bit more context-switchy than other teams.

As others in this thread have noted, the situation is still evolving. However, I worry less each day about being replaced by AI. There has always been more work than available bandwidth in my experience.

What seems clear to me is that expectations around velocity and throughput will increase (are increasing). AI use will be required to meet those expectations. Learning to use this new tool effectively will be essential for career progression (and preservation).

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lelanthran 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now.

The only reason dev jobs paid more (by a factor of two or more) than pure solution modeling was because "writing code" was the hard part.

If you wanted to get paid just modeling the solution and handing it off to a coding team, those jobs were available for decades, typically called Business Analysts but few devs moved from dev to BA.

> Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load.

I've found that the act of physically writing refines my understanding a lot more than simply reading.

We don't typically expect a person to read a trigonometry textbook and then perform well on an exam. They have to drill problems to surface their misunderstandings to themselves.

My fear is that, with developers adopting your approach, they're "designing" systems in much the same way that a read-the-book-only trigonometry student solves trigonometry problems.

	▲	fibonachos 12 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Perhaps solution was the wrong word for me to use here. It was intended to encompass the implementation details (abstractions, architecture, observability, etc)… All the decisions the engineers would normally make during planning and execution. Once I have that nailed down, the act of writing the code is largely mechanical. That’s the source of my “easy” framing. It has always had the lower cognitive load in my experience. Now that I can offload the mechanical part to AI, I spend more time on the hard parts. I still read plenty of code along the way, maybe less of it now because it’s easier to surface which parts of the code I need to read.
	▲	dietcokeflowers 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		thank you for putting into words that which has been hard for me to describe — I’ve noticed the worse a dev was at their job the more high their opinions of AI seem to be. The subject textbook analogy (trig book in your ex.) is a perfect frame of reference for why that might be the case… to further that example, many people with the help of AI are ostensibly copy pasting trig problems from the book without understanding the mechanics running through them and labouring under the impressions they’ve become closer to skilled mathematicians
	▲	Izkata 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		GP's "design the right solution" is a role between "programmer" and "business analyst" that got merged with "programmer" to become "developer" decades ago. That's where the high salary came from. It's been reemerging as "architect" now that "developer" has been watered down to include "programmer".
	▲	AnimalMuppet an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There was a time back in the 1980s (and probably before) when "analyst" paid better than "programmer". The programmer wrote the code; the analyst figured out what the code was supposed to do to meet the business need. In my view, "programmer" merged with "analyst" to become "software engineer".
	▲	titanomachy 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Who hires “pure solution modelers”? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone like that.
	▲	ex-aws-dude 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It’s still lower level than a business analysis though so it’s not the same

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vanh4lt a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agree. Also, there is a lot fog at the moment. AI generates more code, we need a lot of markdowns now to teach it how to write "good code"... and <insert here a lot of AI processes>. But at the end... a programmer has to take ownership of that code and responsibility, meaning: reading A LOT of code and/or coding more code.

	▲	a day ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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fibonachos a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Responding to my own comment to add that I think this moment favors the curious and passionate. None of what I wrote above is a complaint. I’m having more fun now than I have in a long time.

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ryanisnan a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Spot on, in my experience.