Remix.run Logo
mikert89 2 hours ago

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad.

Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

ryandrake an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> It will become very easy to build most software

We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse?

Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?

threatofrain an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.

mrbombastic 12 minutes ago | parent [-]

because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software"

photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_

some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.

mikert89 2 minutes ago | parent [-]

You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap

deaton 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.

mikert89 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed

pydry an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded.

There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.

deaton 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

Now you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!

ex-aws-dude 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money?

If its so good why aren't you rich?

SoftTalker a minute ago | parent [-]

Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?

weatherlite 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent [-]

no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years

weatherlite an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Is it really that simple ? A programming function that has set inputs and determinstic outputs is rather verifyable. A ten million lines code base is not easily verifyable. Knowing whether an agent is improving when it's working on a huge codebase is not that easy - it could easily start hurting code quality without it being clear in any output.

IsTom an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you believe that I've got a halting problem oracle to sell to you.

nanapipirara 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think this is true.

A lot of AI believers (me too fwiw) seem to forget it’s a lot harder to ‘close the loop’ on non-code projects. I think this is because they are usually coders.

owebmaster an hour ago | parent [-]

That's what all AI believers get it wrong about programming. Code doesn't create products, humans do.

palmotea 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years

Which is kinda proof they're populated by sociopaths with extremely little empathy. The people who are building that stuff are programmers, and if they had a bit of functioning empathy they'd stop or slow down or at least be unenthusiastic.

And we're not talking about very high level empathy here, but the very basic kind of thinking about the effects on someone like yourself.

esafak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

ryandvm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

My backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever

reactordev 2 hours ago | parent [-]

they won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i think this is farther off, much sooner is just the subjugation of technical workers to be low skill drivers of LLMs

mrbombastic 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

color me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.

Tangurena2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.

falcor84 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

ok123456 an hour ago | parent [-]

People just need to add/subtract an input box and update the tax rates. They don't need an ontology of taxes and goods.

nwatson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm hopeful that software will be applied in new areas where it was too costly before, with AI help it will be possible. Software will be cheaper, even more prevalent, lower quality in since respects, but SW engineering will still be a viable career.

skinfaxi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.

esafak 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?

pjmlp an hour ago | parent [-]

Because most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center.

There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.

Manfrednotfunny 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In a few years, it just might.

If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

mjr00 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> In a few years, it just might.

If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.

edukite 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro

I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

pjmlp an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Because selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.

Applejinx an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait.

pjmlp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, when the project budget runs out and contractor team has to leave.