> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes.

Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work.

When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero incentive for me to give feedback for you to give to an agent when I can give it to an agent myself.

Coding isn’t the job anymore. It’s understanding systems and architecture design, and ownership of what you work on. Being able to design solutions, understand them, deliver them and support them in production is the job now. Engineering is still engineering. End to end ownership is the job.

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glouwbug 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Is all of hackernews webdev only? I can’t imagine “coding not being a job anymore” in fields like automotive, medical, military, robotics, and HPC

	▲	shimman 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think the fear is that the "higher" paying webdev jobs will be drying up while those traditional industries you mentioned still have the need for developers but auto, medical, and weapon industries never paid well. Remember moving to New England to look for work and all the interesting embedded medical device companies paid like $80k less than a react dev job I got at an ISP.
	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Nope, whatever the customer hires us for, webdev, distributed systems, desktop, mobile, consulting on architecture, whatever makes them happy and gets us a contract.
	▲	HeyLaughingBoy 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I'm in Medical Devices and while AI is at best a small part of development right now, rest assured that we are actively investigating how to make it an approved part of our process. Then again, coding was only ever a small part of our job.
	▲	ydat 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Of course not, but consider the size of the field if the “webdev” stuff goes away. Competition for the remaining positions in other domains become more competitive and you may find the floor rising faster than you can? Or you’ll find that weak, but cheap heuristics will throw you out with the chaff.

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literallyroy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.

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throwatdem12311 3 days ago | parent [-]

We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.

When I ask an agent to do a code change for a PR, it’s because it’s not something I think the other engineer really should waste their time on. It’s on the same level as nitpicking what lines the braces go on before we had auto-formatters and lint checkers in CI.

Other staff engineers I rarely even see their code. I trust them to be able to review and deliver and support their own code and communicate breaking changes. Knowledge gets disseminated at weekly architecture reviews, in person.

Offshore developers under me have their code gone over with a fine-toothed comb. They don’t own the work. They don’t support it. They can’t even speak to me without using copy pasted Claude responses that are wrong half the time anyway. I have zero qualms with “going over them”.

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datsci_est_2015 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.

Agents don't "handle" code review. With no human in the loop, there is no difference between "generating" code and "reviewing" code. Let's not bastardize the word "review". The code is unreviewed. Now, whether that's a dealbreaker or not for your project or company is a different question.

Personally, I've found that unreviewed LLM code unnecessarily explodes in complexity and the credit / token cost per change increases in tandem as the LLM pulls more into its context window. This is especially the case when you let it go wild on test cases. We don't have an unlimited budget for AI, maybe you do, so this is a concern for us. So we've decided to continue to review code and ask LLMs to significantly reduce the complexity of their generated code - which is a task that we're finding they are extremely bad at.

They're probably extremely bad at reducing complexity because the incentive for frontier model providers might be to train models that are capable of one-shotting flappy bird, instead of models that are capable of maintaining mature code bases that already have an implementation of the ad-hoc parsing function it just generated, as well as the newly-generated 50 test cases for it.

	▲	bcrl 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Every additional level of abstraction in computers has resulted in bloat that makes software less efficient and more bloated. AI is merely continuing to accelerate the tread. The real issue at hand is that humans need to decide to start resource constraining AI before it consumes the entire world.

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fzeroracer 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.

So you already failed the first part of doing your goddamn job as an engineer which is reviewing and owning code. Code review is a vital part of that, because code ownership is a responsibility shared by your entire team. We used to say that cowboy coders were a disaster for your team and now you're saying everyone on your team is effectively a cowboy coder.

If it turns out claude or whatever LLM you're using pulled in a bad package and now your companies data has been exfiltrated are you going to be the one willing to be fired for your blunder?

	▲	HeyLaughingBoy 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Jesus, this rant is so eerily similar to one I read 25 years ago when someone explained why they stopped using C and started using C++ that I wouldn't be surprised to find that you are the same one who was complaining back then.

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pluralmonad 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then does the original author own the changes you made to their PR, e2e? Do you get their signoff on them if that's the case?

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bigstrat2003 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.

So you're producing slop that is going to blow up in your faces. That's your organization's right, but not everyone is interested in giving up on producing a quality product like you guys are.

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joshmarlow 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"End to end ownership is the job."

This is an incredibly good and concise articulation of where the role is going. Thank you.

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franciscomt 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree. Although I think that was never the job. Even without AI, the practice of subdividing work into coding tasks was not a good one.

AI just made it obvious.

	▲	bonzini 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Even if AI does the coding, I cannot understand the architecture of a change unless you split it in individual tasks that are "as small as possible but no smaller". And even if AI does the code review, the architecture review falls onto me.

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conradfr 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ownership of what then?

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ModernMech 3 days ago | parent [-]

Ownership of the delivered code. This takes authorship out of the equation -- doesn't matter who wrote it, only matters who owns it and can be blamed for it. Not having written it doesn't absolve blame when something goes bad.

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stvltvs 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Ideally, but we know that LLMs will get the blame because of course they will.

	▲	recursive 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Only if the owner thinks that's a viable strategy. Such an owner may not be employed long.

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pragmatic 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Ownership of something you have little control over is a great way to burn yourself out.

If you constantly have to push back against the eager puppy jr dev who’s 1000% sure their vibe slop is prod ready and has proudly told the admiring crowd of stake holders it’s ready to go, wtf kind of life is that? Now the senior/lead is the bad guy and is in the no win scenario.

Yuck.

	▲	bluefirebrand 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> If you constantly have to push back against the eager puppy jr dev who’s 1000% sure their vibe slop is prod ready and has proudly told the admiring crowd of stake holders it’s ready to go, wtf kind of life is that? Now the senior/lead is the bad guy and is in the no win scenario Oh. You just described my last couple of jobs I guess that partly explains why I've been miserable and exhausted all the time

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smohare 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]