| ▲ | CharlieDigital 2 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In my 30's I really hit my stride as a developer and system architect. Enough experience, seniority, and autonomy to own and build out large complex systems. Many, many mid career devs, I fear, will miss this window. They will become reliant on the LLMs more and more. 2 months back, I was asked to backtest an interview question and 2 out of our 3 most senior engineers (both in their 30's) could no longer write a generic method. I liken this experience to learning cursive as a kid. It wasn't about writing cursive; it was about developing dexterity and hand-eye coordination. Getting the reps in, so to speak. Even if the future is all AI, that window of expanding one's knowledge and understanding of system design and architecture through hands-on experience (and failure!) facilitates the formation of "taste" through reps: why A over B or C. When B over A or C? Many, many devs will end up "going nowhere". They will be able to prompt and push code with the façade of productivity, but I think building stable, scalable, complex systems requires knowing which angles to probe and which questions to ask; things learned via reps of trying, failing, learning, failing some more, thinking hard, drawing it out, and finally hitting the breakthrough. I recently published a series of blog posts that focuses on the underlying architecture decisions that I think can help teams set a solid foundation for building with AI [0]. I think the guidance and patterns in it are unlikely to be emergent from an LLM without very explicit prompting. The goal is to share the thought process and intent for each technical decision. I think this type of thinking may become more rare as folks surrender their reps to LLM defaults. [0] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/08/the-unexpected-ai-stack-cs... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | gladiatr72 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Then you will be like one of those old COBOL programmers circa 1997-2000. The only catch is that you will need to keep your skills sharp despite an ever decreasing pool of practitioners to share the ride to that inflection point. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | tempodox 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The LLM providers will be delighted. Everyone and their grandmother donating their means of production to them so they can sell it back at a price must be a wet dream come true. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | dude250711 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
There is an overabundance of developers. Otherwise LeetCode interviews would not be a thing. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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