Exploring five critical questions shaping software engineering through 2026, with contrasting scenarios for each. These lenses help prepare for the evolving ...
The software industry sits at a strange inflection point. AI coding has evolved from autocomplete on steroids to agents that can autonomously execute development tasks. The economic boom that fueled tech’s hiring spree has given way to an efficiency mandate: companies now often favor profitability over growth, experienced hires over fresh graduates, and smaller teams armed with better tools.
Meanwhile, a new generation of developers is entering the workforce with a different calculus: pragmatic about career stability, skeptical of hustle culture, and raised on AI assistance from day one.
What happens next is genuinely uncertain. Below are five critical questions that may shape software engineering through 2026, with two contrasting scenarios for each. These aren’t really predictions, but lenses for preparation. The goal is a clear roadmap for handling what comes next, grounded in current data and tempered by the healthy skepticism this community is known for.
1. The Junior developer question
The bottom line: Junior developer hiring could collapse as AI automates entry-level tasks, or rebound as software spreads into every industry. Both futures require different survival strategies.
The traditional pathway of “learn to code, get junior job, grow into senior” is wobbling. A Harvard study of 62 million workers found that when companies adopt generative AI, junior developer employment drops by about 9-10% within six quarters, while senior employment barely budges. Big tech hired 50% fewer fresh graduates over the past three years. As one engineer cynically put it: ~”Why hire a junior for $90K when an AI coding agent costs less?”
This isn’t just AI. Macro factors like rising interest rates and post-pandemic corrections hit around 2022, before AI tools became widespread. But AI has accelerated the trend. A single senior engineer with AI assistance can now produce what used to require a small team. Companies are quietly not hiring juniors more than they’re firing anyone.
The flip scenario: AI unlocks massive demand for developers across every industry, not just tech. Healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and finance all start embedding software and automation. Rather than replacing developers, AI becomes a force multiplier that spreads development work into domains that never employed coders. We’d see more entry-level roles, just different ones: “AI-native” developers who quickly build automations and integrations for specific niches.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics still projects ~15% growth in software jobs from 2024 to 2034. If businesses use AI to expand output rather than strictly cut headcount, they’ll need humans to seize the opportunities AI creates.
The long-term risk of the pessimistic scenario is often overlooked: today’s juniors are tomorrow’s senior engineers and tech leaders. Cut off the talent pipeline entirely and you create a leadership vacuum in 5-10 years. Industry veterans call this the “slow decay”: an ecosystem that stops training its replacements.
What to do about it:
Junior developers: Make yourself AI-proficient and versatile. Demonstrate that one junior plus AI can match a small team’s output. Use AI coding agents (Cursor/Antigravity/Claude Code/Gemini CLI) to build bigger features, but understand and explain every line if not most. Focus on skills AI can’t easily replace: communication, problem decomposition, domain knowledge. Look at adjacent roles (QA, DevRel, data analytics) as entry points. Build a portfolio, especially projects integrating AI APIs. Consider apprenticeships, internships, contracting, or open source. Don’t be “just another new grad who needs training”; be an immediately useful engineer who learns quickly.
Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plate. Lean on automation for routine tasks, but don’t do everything yourself. Set up CI/CD, linters, and AI-assisted testing to catch basic issues. Mentor unofficially through open source or coaching colleagues in other departments. Be frank with management about the risks of all-senior teams. If junior demand rebounds, be ready to onboard effectively and delegate in ways that use AI. Your value is in multiplying the whole team’s output, not just your own code.
2. The Skills question
The bottom line: Core programming skills could atrophy as AI writes most code, or become more critical than ever as human developers focus on oversight. The coming years determine whether we trade understanding for speed.
84% of developers now use AI assistance regularly. For many, the first instinct when facing a bug or new feature isn’t to write code from scratch, but to compose a prompt and stitch together AI-generated pieces. Entry-level coders are skipping the “hard way”: they might never build a binary search tree from scratch or debug a memory leak on their own.
The skillset is shifting from implementing algorithms to knowing how to ask the AI the right questions and verify its output. The first rung of the ladder now demands prompting and validating AI rather than demonstrating raw coding ability. Some senior engineers worry this produces a generation who can’t code well independently, a kind of deskilling. AI-generated code introduces subtle bugs and security vulnerabilities that less-experienced developers might miss.
The counter-scenario: as AI handles the routine 80%, humans focus on the hardest 20%. Architecture, tricky integrations, creative design, edge cases: the problems machines alone can’t solve. Rather than making deep knowledge obsolete, AI’s ubiquity makes human expertise more important than ever. This is the “high-leverage engineer” who uses AI as a force multiplier but must deeply understand the system to wield it effectively.
If everyone has AI coding agent access, what distinguishes great developers is knowing when the AI is wrong or suboptimal. As one senior engineer put it: “The best software engineers won’t be the fastest coders, but those who know when to distrust AI.”
Programming shifts: less typing boilerplate, more reviewing AI output for logical errors, security flaws, and mismatches with requirements. Critical skills become software architecture, system design, performance tuning, and security analysis. AI can produce a web app quickly, but an expert engineer ensures the AI followed security best practices and didn’t introduce race conditions.
Developer discourse in 2025 was split. Some admitted they hardly ever write code “by hand” and think coding interviews should evolve. Others argued that skipping fundamentals leads to more firefighting when AI’s output breaks. The industry is starting to expect engineers to bring both: AI speed and foundational wisdom for quality.
What to do about it:
Junior developers: Use AI as a learning tool, not a crutch. When AI coding agents (Cursor/Antigravity/Claude Code/Gemini CLI) suggest code review why it works, identify weaknesses. Occasionally disable your AI helper and write key algorithms from scratch. Prioritize CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, complexity, memory management. Implement projects twice, once with AI, once without, and compare. Learn prompt engineering and tool mastery. Train yourself in rigorous testing: write unit tests, read stack traces without immediately asking AI, get comfortable with debuggers. Deepen complementary skills AI can’t replicate: system design, user experience intuition, concurrency reasoning. Show you can both crank out solutions with AI and tackle thorny issues when it fails.
Senior developers: Position yourself as the guardian of quality and complexity. Sharpen your core expertise: architecture, security, scaling, domain knowledge. Practice modeling systems with AI components and think through failure modes. Stay current on vulnerabilities in AI-generated code. Embrace your role as mentor and reviewer: define where AI use is acceptable and where manual review is mandatory (payment or safety code). Lean into creative and strategic work; let the junior+AI combo handle routine API hookups while you decide which APIs to build. Invest in soft skills and cross-domain knowledge. Stay current on new tools and best practices. Double down on what makes a human developer indispensable: sound judgment, system-level thinking, and mentorship.
3. The Role question
The bottom line: The developer role could shrink into limited auditing (overseeing AI-generated code) or expand into a pivotal orchestrator position designing and governing AI-driven systems. Either way, adding value means more than just coding.
The extremes here are stark. In one vision, developers see their creative responsibilities diminished. Rather than building software, they mostly audit and babysit AI outputs. AI systems (or “citizen developers” using no-code platforms) handle production; human developers review auto-generated code, check for errors, bias, or security issues, and approve deployments. Maker becomes checker. The joy of code creation replaced by the anxiety of risk management.
There are reports of engineers spending more time evaluating AI-generated pull requests and managing automated pipelines, less time crafting code from scratch. Programming feels less like creative problem-solving and more like compliance. As one engineer lamented: “I don’t want to end up as a code janitor, cleaning up what the AI throws over the wall.”
The alternative future is far more interesting: developers evolve into high-level orchestrators, combining technical, strategic, and ethical responsibilities. AI “workers” mean human developers take on an architect or general contractor role, designing the overall system, deciding which tasks go to which AI or software component, weaving solutions from many moving parts.
A CEO of a low-code platform articulated this vision: in an “agentic” development environment, engineers become “composers,” orchestrating ensembles of AI agents and software services. They won’t write every note themselves, but they define the melody: architecture, interfaces, how agents interact. This role is interdisciplinary and creative: part software engineer, part system architect, part product strategist.
The optimistic take: as AI handles rote work, developer roles shift toward higher-value activities by necessity. Jobs may become more interesting. Someone has to decide what the AI should build, verify the product makes sense, and continuously improve it.
Which way it goes may depend on how organizations choose to integrate AI. Companies that see AI as labor replacement might trim dev teams and ask remaining engineers to keep automations running. Companies that see AI as a way to amplify their teams might keep headcounts similar but have each engineer deliver more ambitious projects.
What to do about it:
Junior developers: Seek opportunities beyond just writing code. Volunteer for test case writing, CI pipeline setup, or application monitoring: skills aligned with an auditor/custodian role. Keep your creative coding alive through personal projects so you don’t lose the joy of building. Develop a systems mindset: learn how components communicate, what makes APIs well-designed. Read engineering blogs and case studies of system designs. Familiarize yourself with AI and automation tools beyond code generation: orchestration frameworks, AI APIs. Improve communication skills, written and verbal. Write documentation as if explaining to someone else. Ask senior colleagues not just “Does my code work?” but “Did I consider the right things?” Prepare to be verifier, designer, and communicator, not just coder.
Senior developers: Lean into leadership and architectural responsibilities. Shape the standards and frameworks that AI and junior team members follow. Define code quality checklists and ethical AI usage policies. Stay current on compliance and security topics for AI-produced software. Focus on system design and integration expertise; volunteer to map data flows across services and identify failure points. Get comfortable with orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, Airflow, serverless frameworks, agent orchestration tools). Double down on your role as technical mentor: more code reviews, design discussions, technical guidelines. Hone your ability to quickly assess someone else’s (or something’s) code and give high-level feedback. Develop product and business sense; understand why features get built and what customers care about. Shadow a product manager or join customer feedback sessions. Protect your creative passion through prototypes, hackathons, or emerging tech research. Evolve from coder to conductor.
4. The Specialist vs. Generalist question
The bottom line: Narrow specialists risk finding their niche automated or obsolete. The fast-changing, AI-infused landscape rewards T-shaped engineers: broad adaptability with one or two deep skills.
Given how quickly models, tools and frameworks rise and fall, betting your career on a single technology stack is risky. A guru in a legacy framework might suddenly find themselves in less demand when a new AI tool handles that tech with minimal human intervention. Developers who specialize narrowly in “a single stack, framework or product area” might wake up to find that area declining or redundant.
Think of COBOL developers, Flash developers, or mobile game engine specialists who didn’t pivot when the industry moved. What’s different now is the pace of change. AI automation can make certain programming tasks trivial, undercutting roles that revolved around those tasks. A specialist who only knows one thing (fine-tuning SQL queries, slicing Photoshop designs into HTML) could find AI handling 90% of that work.
Hiring managers chase the newest niche. A few years ago everyone wanted cloud infrastructure specialists; now there’s a surge in AI/ML engineers. Those who specialized narrowly in yesterday’s technology feel stalled as that niche loses luster.
The opposite outcome is specialization in a new form: the “versatile specialist” or T-shaped developer. Deep expertise in one or two areas (the vertical stroke), broad familiarity with many others (the horizontal stroke). These engineers become the “glue” in multidisciplinary teams; they communicate with specialists of other stripes and fill gaps when needed.
Companies no longer want developers who are either too shallow or too narrowly focused; they want a strong core competency plus ability to work across the stack. Part of the reason is efficiency: a T-shaped engineer can often solve problems end-to-end without waiting on handoffs. Part is innovation: cross-pollination of knowledge leads to better solutions.
AI tools actually augment generalists more, making it easier for one person to handle multiple components. A back-end engineer can rely on AI help to create a reasonable UI; a front-end specialist can have AI generate server boilerplate. An AI-rich environment lets people operate more broadly. Meanwhile, deep specialists might find their niche partly automated with no easy way to branch out.
Nearly 45% of engineering roles now expect proficiency in multiple domains: programming plus cloud infrastructure knowledge, or front-end plus some ML familiarity.
What to do about it:
Junior developers: Establish a broad foundation early. Even if hired for a specific role, peek outside that silo. If you’re doing mobile, learn backend basics; if you’re doing front-end, try writing a simple server. Learn the deployment process and tools like Docker or GitHub Actions. Identify one or two areas that genuinely excite you and go deeper: this becomes your vertical expertise. Brand yourself as a hybrid: “full-stack developer with cloud security focus” or “frontend developer with UX expertise.” Use AI tools to learn new domains quickly; when you’re a novice in backend, have ChatGPT generate starter API code and study it. Build the habit of continuous re-skilling. Participate in hackathons or cross-functional projects to force yourself into generalist mode. Tell your manager you want exposure to different parts of the project. Adaptability is a superpower early in your career.
Senior developers: Map your skill graph: what are you expert in, what related domains have you only touched superficially? Pick one or two adjacent domains and commit to becoming conversant. If you’re a back-end database specialist, get comfortable with a modern front-end framework or learn ML pipeline basics. Do a small project in your weak area with AI assistance. Integrate your deep expertise with new contexts; if you specialize in web app performance, explore how those skills apply to ML inference optimization. Advocate for or design your role to be more cross-functional. Volunteer to be the “integration champion” for projects touching multiple areas. Mentor others to spread skills around while picking up something from them in return. Update your resume to reflect versatility. Use your experience to identify patterns and transferable knowledge. Become the T-shaped role model: deep in your specialty (giving authority and confidence) but actively stretching horizontally.
5. The Education question
The bottom line: Will a CS degree remain the gold standard, or will faster learning paths (bootcamps, online platforms, employer training) overtake it? Universities may struggle to keep up with an industry that changes every few months.
A four-year computer science degree has long been the primary ticket into software roles. But that tradition is being questioned.
One future: universities remain important but struggle to stay relevant. Degrees stay the default credential, but programs lag behind rapidly evolving needs, hampered by slow curriculum update cycles and bureaucratic approval processes. Students and employers feel academia is disconnected from industry, teaching theory or outdated practice that doesn’t translate to job skills.
Recent grads report never learning about cloud computing, modern DevOps, or AI tooling during their degree. If universities demand high time and financial investment while delivering low-relevance education, they risk being seen as expensive gatekeepers. But many companies still require a bachelor’s degree out of inertia, so the burden shifts to students to fill the gap with bootcamps, online courses, and self-taught projects.
Student loan debt is enormous, and companies spend billions training new grads because those grads lack skills needed in the workplace. Universities might add an AI ethics class here, a cloud computing elective there, but by the time they implement something, industry tools have moved on.
The disruptive scenario: traditional education gets increasingly replaced by new systems. Coding bootcamps, online certifications, self-taught portfolios, employer-created training academies. Many high-profile employers (Google, IBM) have dropped degree requirements for certain technical roles. In 2024, nearly 45% of companies planned to eliminate bachelor’s degree requirements for at least some positions.
Bootcamps have matured. They produce grads who get hired at top companies alongside CS grads. These programs are shorter (12-week intensive) and focus on practical skills: current frameworks, cloud services, teamwork. The hiring currency is shifting toward live portfolios, micro-credentials, and verified skills. A strong GitHub portfolio or recognized certification can bypass degree requirements.
Employer-driven education is emerging: companies creating their own training pipelines or partnering with bootcamps. Some big tech companies have started internal “universities” for non-traditional candidates. AI itself offers new ways to learn: AI tutors, interactive coding sandboxes, personalized instruction outside university settings.
A modular ecosystem of learning is far more accessible than an expensive four-year degree. A kid in a country without strong CS universities can take the same Coursera courses and build the same portfolio as someone in Silicon Valley.
What to do about it:
Aspiring/junior developers: If in a traditional CS program, don’t rely on it exclusively. Augment coursework with real-world projects: build a web app, contribute to open source. Seek internships or co-ops. If your curriculum misses hot topics, learn them through online platforms. Earn industry-recognized certifications (GCP, AWS, Azure) to signal practical knowledge. If self-teaching or in a bootcamp, focus on a compelling portfolio: at least one substantial project with good documentation. Be active in the developer community: contribute to open source, write technical posts. Network through LinkedIn, meetups, dev events. Get an experienced developer to vouch for you. Keep learning continuously; the half-life of technical skills is short. Use AI as your personal tutor. Prove your skills in concrete ways: portfolio, certification, and ability to talk intelligently about your work will open doors.
Senior developers and leaders: Your credential alone won’t carry you forever. Invest in continuous education: online courses, workshops, conferences, certifications. Validate your skills in new ways; be prepared for interviews that assess current competency through real problems. Maintain side projects with new tech. Reassess job requirements: do you really need a new hire to have a CS degree, or do you need certain skills and learning ability? Push for skills-first hiring to widen your talent pool. Support internal training programs or apprenticeship-style roles. Champion mentorship circles for junior devs without formal backgrounds. Engage with academia and alternatives: advisory boards, guest lectures, feedback on curriculum gaps. Reflect this in your own career growth: real-world achievements and continuous learning matter more than additional degrees.
The Through-Line
These scenarios aren’t mutually exclusive. Reality will draw elements from all of them. Some companies will reduce junior hiring while others expand it in new domains. AI will automate routine coding while raising standards for the code humans touch. Developers might spend mornings reviewing AI outputs and afternoons crafting high-level architecture.
The consistent thread: change is the only constant. By keeping a finger on technology trends (and skepticism around them), you avoid being caught off-guard by hype or doom. By updating skills, diversifying abilities, and focusing on uniquely human aspects (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration) you remain in the loop.
Whether the future brings a coding renaissance or a world where code writes itself, there will always be demand for engineers who think holistically, learn continuously, and drive technology toward solving real problems.
The best way to predict the future is to actively engineer it.
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Comments
TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life.
This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.
By schnitzelstoat 2026-01-1211:595 reply I felt a lot safer when I was a young grad than now that I have kids to support and I can't just up and move to wherever the best job opportunity is or live off lentils to save money or whatever.
Yeah, kids change the landscape a lot. On the other hand, if you don't have any personal ties, its easier to grab opportunities, but you are unlikely to build any kind of social network when chasing jobs all over the country/world.
Either way, there is very little to no path toward "family + place to live + stable job" model.
By reactordev 2026-01-1213:48 This. At 43 I have friends that are all over the country now.
Where I am I’m alone. Don’t underestimate the value of community.
By didgetmaster 2026-01-1217:30 When I was single with no kids, I felt pretty comfortable leaving a good job to join a startup. I took a 50% pay cut to join when the risk seemed high, but the reward also seemed high.
It paid off for me, but who knows if I would have taken that leap later in life.
There must be "dozens of us" with this fear right now. I'm kinda surprised there isn't a rapid growing place for us to discuss this... (Youtube, X account, Discord place..)
By shimman 2026-01-1216:30 There is, it happens locally in political organizations. Mostly in services and hospital work.
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1215:078 reply [flagged]
By Archonical 2026-01-1215:141 reply May I suggest that it may be your attitude about that piece of paper that is holding you back rather than the paper itself?
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1215:201 reply [flagged]
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1215:39 [flagged]
By skeeter2020 2026-01-1216:351 reply I'm confused as to why someone who freely admits they have been broke & unemployed for 15 years feels they are qualified to provide "advice", make critical judgement calls about others and brag about their awesomeness.
>> My actual accomplishments in the world of computing ... are the stuff of legends
We agree on the legends part
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1219:02 [flagged]
I don't have a college degree either. I am about 50. I have never been unemployed and have had high paying software dev jobs my entire adult life. Your claim that the lack of degree is the only thing holding you back is very much incorrect.
I suspect the problem is elsewhere and you are unwilling or uncomfortable to discuss it.
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1218:46 [flagged]
Protip: When you consistently present yourself as somebody with a massively inflated ego who will be a constant pain to interact with, nobody's going to hire you, skills or not.
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1216:00 [flagged]
> "going back to school" to learn what I already know pretty damn well already, given that I've been programming since I was 8
It's small consolation if sitting in a classroom is something you truly hate, but the guys who are programming pros before they go into a CS program are very often the ones who do really well and get the most out of it.
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1219:541 reply [dead]
Did you already understand complexity theory (the most obvious example of this phenomenon) by the time you went to an actual school?
Tinkering is great but (good) school teaches you all the things and not just the things you obviously, and then you don't have any knowledge gaps.
Any fool can probably weld metal but how do you learn to do it properly if you don't learn properly?
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1414:39 [flagged]
I left high school with average results and immediately got a job as a junior web developer, and I’m nothing special. I feel there must be more to this story… You don’t come off very well in your post, I imagine it could be the same in person and perhaps therein lies the issue?
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1219:261 reply [dead]
> There is MUCH you still have to learn about life.
This response, along with your OP, it’s so pretentious and condescending. It seems you feel that you’re superior to everyone intellectually. I assume that you hold the same attitude in person and this is not helping your situation.
The irony is that I’ve done exactly this. I tried to start a business in my early 20’s and failed dramatically. I stopped developing altogether for a decade while I did minimum wage jobs and struggled to find a career. I started developing again in my early 30’s and half a decade later I’m running a software business.
You may well be intelligent but severely lacking in other necessary areas. It seems it is you who has much to learn.
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1414:16 [flagged]
So you’re freeloading dumpster food from a corporation. You show them buddy!
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1215:591 reply [dead]
By skeeter2020 2026-01-1216:37 programming since you were 8 and created a HN account 16 days ago... seems legit
I created my first Linux from scratch when I was a freshman in college in a third world country (not India). Fast forward few years later, I now write Linux kernel code for a living. Not sure what you did wrong, bud, to end up miserable like this.
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1216:031 reply [flagged]
By smeeagain2 2026-01-1216:27 [dead]
By Havoc 2026-01-1223:47 I'm on the flip side of this - not exactly young but no dependants which is making me a little bit less nervous. Seems like the next 20 years will be a wild ride & it doesn't seem optional so lets go I guess
By abc123abc123 2026-01-1213:491 reply True. This is one of the best arguments for not having kids. I could never imagine putting myself in that uncertain situation. Much better to reduce those risks, and focus on yourself.
By SecretDreams 2026-01-1213:562 reply Having kids is a personal choice. The stress of having to support them is real and it might mean, at times, you sacrifice more than you would have without kids.
It's been entirely worth it for me and I cannot imagine my life without kids. But it's a deeply personal choice and I am not buying or selling the idea. I would just say nobody is ever ready and the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational. But not wanting them because of how it might change your own life is a completely valid reason to not have kids.
By s1mplicissimus 2026-01-1311:30 I'm happy for you that you are in a situation where you can afford it. Many can't.
I agree with everything you said except for
> the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational
My $0.02 is that if anything, the fears people have about how much their lives would be transformed are significantly lacking, and a lot of the "it's not so bad" advice is post-hoc rationalization. I mean, it's evolutionarily excellent that we humans choose to have kids, but it's very rational to be afraid and to postpone or even fully reject this on an individual basis. And as an industry and as a society, we should probably do a lot more to support parents of young children.
I found this smbc comic about a "happiness spigot" to be the most poignant metaphor - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/happiness-spigot?utm_sourc...
By SecretDreams 2026-01-1412:41 Ya, this is a fair callout. I moreso meant fears around being a bad parent. If anything, people experiencing those fears will be fine parents because they've got the consideration to already be thinking about doing a good job for their newly born.
By chankstein38 2026-01-1215:065 reply Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
By WorldMaker 2026-01-1222:091 reply If you are looking for any sort of hope, even a cursed one: there is the perspective that LLM generated code is legacy code as a service. LLMs were trained on a lot other people's legacy code. A lot of "vibe coding" is for what de facto are "day one legacy code apps". If my career has taught me anything, companies will always sunk cost fallacy throw new money at "fixing"/"expanding" legacy apps or the endless "rewrite cycle" of always trying to rewrite legacy apps but never quite succeeding.
Skills like Legacy Code Anthropology and Reverse Engineering will grow into higher demand. Like the worst legacy apps built by junior developers and non-developers (Access/Excel VBA and VB6 alone had a lot of "low code" legacy by non-developers), LLMs are great at "documenting" What was built, but almost never Why or How, so skills like "Past Developer Mind Reading" and "Code Seances" will also be in high demand.
There will be plenty of work still to do "when" everything is vibe coded. It's going to resemble a lot more the dark matter work a lot of software engineering is in big enterprise: fixing other people's mistakes and trying to figure out the best way you can why they made those mistakes so you can in theory prevent the next mistake.
It's a very dark, cursed hope to believe that the future of software engineering is the darkest parts of its present/past. As a software developer who has spent too large of an amount of my career in the VB6 IDE and who often joked that my "retirement plan" was probably going to be falling into an overly-highly-paid COBOL Consultancy somewhere down the line, I'm more depressed that there will be a lot more legacy work than ever, not that there won't be enough work to go around, and it will be some of the ugliest, most boring, least fun parts of my career, forever, and will have even less "cushiness" to make up for it. (That "dream" of a highly paid COBOL Consultancy disappears when good Legacy Code becomes too common and thus the commodity job. Hard to demand slicker, higher salaries when supply is tainted and full.)
By majormajor 2026-01-166:06 Along those lines, one of the biggest areas completely left out of this article - and many I've seen like it - is operations, cost, incident response, etc.
Maybe eventually you'll want to trust your corporate credit card to the LLMs too, but that's gonna be one of the last things where humans get taken out of the loop. And once the AI is that general what even is the CEO, salesperson, or entrepreneur's role either?
That "programmer/archeologist" idea of Vernor Vinge's books is likely to grow as the piles of generated code get bigger and the feasibility of tossing increasingly-large piles into a single context window at once might not keep up (or probably won't be the best or most cost-effective).
By throwaway920102 2026-01-1217:57 I think what we're missing is certainty, not hope. You used to have more certainty that if you checked all the correct boxes your financial future would be guaranteed. Hope for the future is sort of separate and the most optimistic person could hold on to hope even now, and the most pessimistic person could lack hope even graduating with a CS degree in 2015.
You can have hope even if a positive outcome isn't guaranteed. In fact that is when hope is the most valuable (and maybe also difficult to find).
> Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
Unless you're a plumber.
By maciejzj 2026-01-1221:08 BTW the whole plumber/electrician/whatever thing is ridiculous. I studied industrial automation before I joined tech. I checked the salaries for manufacturing maintenance engineer last month. The wages are a sad joke compared to the costs of living.
Also don’t forget the part where we’re told housing will never be affordable again in many areas, and don’t expect to be able to remote work to move to LCOL areas any more.
By passthejoe 2026-01-1221:002 reply If the economy is profoundly affected by employment conditions going forward, how can housing costs not drop?
By teunispeters 2026-01-1317:27 Don't forget large scale purchasers using property for tax evasion, money laundering or other such uses. They largely don't even care if the property is maintained.
(eventually properties collapse, but if they keep the values inflated this way, that won't matter to them)
If you want to know more, look into RCMP reports on high property prices in Vancouver BC/Canada circa 2010s+, for example.
By maciejzj 2026-01-138:23 If majority of housing is owned for profit by REITs or landlords they have such a leverage over ordinary person, that they can indefinitely hold the prices/rents at a level where they extract maximum of available resources from owning land while making sure people have enough processed food and cheap internet-provided entertainment that they don't rebel.
The prices will adapt, but the equilibrium will always be elite-oriented economy where accommodation of the masses is a second-tier goal.
Not sure that is warranted. AI will create exciting changes to society for the better. These times are uncertain but certainly not depressing.
By plastic-enjoyer 2026-01-1216:251 reply I don't doubt this, however, the question is if AI will do this in our life-time. The industrialization has led to prosperity in the long term, but initially it led primarily to the proletarianization of the people. Are you willing to accept a devaluation of your skills and a decline in your prosperity so that in 50 to 100 years there is a chance that AI will lead to a better future?
No one is going to ask if you're willing to accept this - it's simply going to happen whether we like it or not.
By klibertp 2026-01-1319:58 Some people will answer without being asked. The most we will get out of that is that the word "saboteur" will get a more modern synonym (not sure what it will be, but the inventor of cheap EMP granades will have the biggest say in that). The future will, of course, steamroll over such answers, as it always did, but we'll all feel the bumps on the way.
By SCdF 2026-01-1215:40 I don't think with any confidence we can say it will be for the better. Or at least, not on balance for the better.
By jimbokun 2026-01-133:07 AI companies are not even pretending they will improve society.
They are promising CEOs they can eliminate their workforce to increase profits. For people working for a wage it’s all downside, no upside.
By thtmnisamnstr 2026-01-1218:03 Uncertainty is frequently a contributor to depression. Uncertainty is one of the most reliable stress triggers, which, over prolonged periods of time, especially when paired with low perceived control, is a direct path to increased depression. So if something is uncertain, it is often depressing as well.
By skeeter2020 2026-01-1216:321 reply I think we can assume it will create disruption, but by definition this is both positive and negative for different individuals & dimensions, and it is small solace if society improves while your life languishes or declines - this is just what's happened to a generation of young males in the US and is having huge repercussions. I think you're right to suggest the goal is to avoid letting the uncertainity make you depressed, but that does not automatically make it so of everyone.
By jimbokun 2026-01-133:09 It’s positive if you are already wealthy, negative if you have to work for a living.
By Towaway69 2026-01-1216:36 Is that AI generated by any chance? Seems like an AI crystal ball that you're looking into.
It's fine to have that opinion, but please frame as an opinion or else give me the lotto numbers for next week if you can predict the future that accurately.
By cess11 2026-01-1215:52 "AI will create exciting changes to society for the better"
Why are you certain of this?
By bovermyer 2026-01-1216:21 Prove your assertion.
By vrighter 2026-01-1216:01 it is depressing to me for exactly the same reason
I say this without hyperbole: we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse.
We've had 50+ years of deteriotating worker conditions and a massive concentration of wealth to like 10,000 people. The 1980s crushed the labor movement, to all of our detriment.
The GFC destroyed the career prospects of many millenials who discovered their entry-level positions no longer existed so we created a generation that we're loaded with student debt, working as baristas.
A lot of people on HN ignored this because the 2010s were good for tech people but many of us didn't realize this post-GFC wave would eventually come for us. And that's what's happening now.
So on top of the millenaisl we now have Gen Z who have correctly realized they'll never have security, never buy a house and will never retire. They'll live paycheck to paycheck, barely surviving until they die. Why? All so Jeff Bezos can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion.
I'm reminded of the quote "only nine meals separates mankind from anarchy".
I believe we've passed the point where we can solve this problem with electoral politics. Western democracies are being overtaken by fascists because of increasing desperation and the total destruction of any kind of leftism since WW2. At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.
By tavavex 2026-01-137:12 > we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse. (...) At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.
This is, in a twisted way, an expression of hope. The expectation of a grand collapse is one that's shared by many, but can you explain what gives you that complete certainty that it's near or that it's coming at all?
The far bleaker possibility that I think is totally realistic is that things continue getting worse, but they never cross over the final line. Things are mismanaged, everyone is worse off, but that nine-meal gap is never allowed to happen, and any real threats are squashed at the roots. There's no singular collapse, instead of one definitive societal stab wound that's followed by long hospital recovery, we're inflicted with a thousand minor cuts to near-death.
The people who benefit from all this have been refining their knowledge and growing their power and influence. They're near-gods at this point. They may make a mistake, but what if they don't and the current situation is maintained for decades to come?
You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that caused such collapse in the US , which seems to be the result of prioritizing profit and greed above everything else, including people wellbeing.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-01-1222:16 Worker protection doesn’t do you any good if companies refuse to hire people abd the government can’t afford the social safety net.
Oh I couldn't disagree more. Europe is on the verge of full-blown fascism. Europe has Reform (UK), AfD (Germany) and National Front (France) as well as Hungary.
Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia. Interestingly, this is a (super) rare win for the first Trump administration: forcing Europe to build an LNG port in 2018 [1] and warning against the dangers of dependence on Russian natural gas. This warning has been completely vindicated.
Europe has stagnant wages, a declining social safety net (eg raising the retirement age in France), a housing affordability crisis in most places (notably exlucding Vienna and there needs to more attention on why this is), inflation problems and skyrocketing energy costs. It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Europe has the same rising anti-immigrant rise in response to declining material conditions that the US hass. In Europe's case it's against Syrians and North Africans. In the UK this also included Polish people.
France is really a perfect example here. Despite all the economic problems you have Macro siding with Le Pen to keep Melenchon and the left out of power.
All of this is neoliberalism run amok and it comes from decisions in WW1, WW2 and post-WW2, most notably that Europe (and the US) decided the biggest threat was socialism and communism. And who's really good at killing communists? Nazis. Just look at the resume of Adolf Heusinger, an early NATO chair [2].
Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO. And NATO is on the verge of collapse. There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO, as many in his administration want to do, but NATO could well splinter if Trump takes Greenland.
What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare? It was rumored that parts of the administration wanted the UK to privatize the NHS as part of a post-Brexit trade deal. 15 years of austerity has primed the population to accept this kind of thing.
Many Europeans (rightly) look down on the insanity that's currently going on in the US but at the same time they don't realize just how dire the situation is in Europe.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/germany-to-build-ln...
By tavavex 2026-01-137:35 > What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
While European military strength isn't in its prime right now, their capabilities without the US are often way underestimated. Not that most of the other issues aren't applicable - everyone appears to be more or less fucked in multiple ways - but losing a conventional war to Russia isn't on the table, barring unthinkable mismanagement or a world-changing event (preemptive use of nukes, etc). Russia has stalemated a war against a singular country that has a fraction of Russia's wealth, loads of antiquated equipment and a small sample of Western tech. The Russian economy has a massive hole in it largely thanks to said war, and is only propped up by existing savings - they're not in danger right now, they're rapidly approaching that point with no way of stopping. Even if the war never happened, they'd still be far weaker than the whole of Europe and likely some individual European countries.
By theshrike79 2026-01-1311:27 > Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia.
It wasn't "given", Russia did it on purpose. There are SO MANY cases of politicians advocating for Russian natural gas or oil as an energy source who were later revealed to be 100% paid for with Russian money.
By rightbyte 2026-01-1222:06 This is so depressing to read but I can't help feeling you are right. The feeling is quite surreal becouse if I turn off my computer I can't notice the difference locally in my county. It is like lunatics from "the internet" runs alot of things now irl.
By CodeMage 2026-01-1223:16 > There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO
I wonder how that is supposed to work when the Executive branch has proven they can do whatever they want regardless of the other two branches. The rules are worthless if there are no consequences for breaking them.
I was following you until you implied everyone who’s not a communist is a Nazi.
By jmyeet 2026-01-135:57 Yeah, they don't really teach this part in history [1]:
> At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
And NATO [2]:
> The most senior officers of the latter group were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who on Oct. 10 and Nov. 12, 1955, respectively, were sworn in as the Bundeswehr’s first two lieutenant generals... Heusinger, a POW until 1948, ...
> That spring Heusinger succeeded Speidel as chief of Combined Forces when the latter was appointed commander in chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe becoming the first German officer to hold a NATO commander in chief position
And it goes on.
Nazi links are well-established to Operation Paperclip [3] under Werner von braun.
And there are many others [4].
I didn't say all the non-communists were Nazi. I said the neoliberal and imperialist projects of the US and Western Europe post-WW2 sided with and gave haven to Nazis to fight communism, which is true.
Fascism in the US didn't begin with the Nazis however. You can trace back the roots to the white supremacy the US was founded on, the slave trade, the Civil War, Reconstruction and even the Business Plot [5] that sought to overthrow FDR in 1933, probably labelling him a communist.
But the Nazis were very popular in the US, culminating with the German American Bund rally in Madison Square Gardens in 1939 [6].
Oh and let's not forget Henry Ford's contribution to all this, notably The International Jew [7], so much so that Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf.
Personally, I'm of the view that a lot of this can be traced back to simply not stringing up all the former slave owners after the Civil War.
[2]: https://www.historynet.com/these-nato-generals-had-unusual-b...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
[4]: https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...
[7]: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
> Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia.
> This warning has been completely vindicated.
That's funny. The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion). It's almost like the US wanted to push Europe and Russia against each other, so that it could sell its way more expensive natural gas in Europe!? Perhaps they did not anticipate the Russians would be bold enough to go to war on that, but they were certainly willing to accept the risk.
> It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Please. Europe may have some issues , but it's not nearly as bleak as you try to make it... I live here, I go around a lot. Europe is as affluent as ever. People are having a good time, in general. In the 1930's some countries had hyperinflation... you're comparing that to 5% yearly inflation these days?
> Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO.
On that we agree. It was a really bad decision, but understandable given how much the US soft power after WWII was absorbed by Europeans. Some Europeans act like European countries are US states. They take to the streets to join movements that are 100% American, like BLM. It's bizarre.
> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe, rather than just Ukraine (and maybe Moldova and Georgia if you push it). How can you justify that view? Russia has not drawn any red lines about anything related to the rest of Europe like it had with Ukraine and Georgia (which was thoroughly ignored by Europe, with the strong support and should I say it, advice of the USA), it has not said anything as threatening as Trump saying Greenland will be part of America the nice way or the hard way, yet you believe the US is not a threat, but Russia is. There's some serious dissonance in this line of thought.
> Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare?
Americans have been saying this for 50 years... they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time (though not as much for companies, as you can clearly notice it's much harder to make behemoths like FAANG in Europe, no doubt because without exploiting workers you can't really do that).
> The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion)
I think there's a certain amount of historical revisionism going on with this. It is complicated however.
You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.
Another noteworthy event is the 2014 revolution that ousted Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych as the president of Ukraine, culminating in the Minsk Agreement (and Minsk II) to settle disputes in the Dombas and elsewhere.
Russia does have legitimate security concerns int he region such as access to the Black Sea and not having NATO on their border. And by "legitimate" here I simply mean that Europe and the EU do the exact same thing, most notably when the US almost started World War 3 over Soviet influence in Cuba (which itself was a response to the US installing nuclear MRBMs in Turkey). Also, in terms of the threat of a conventional land war, Ukraine is basically a massive highway into Russia, previously used by both Hitler and Napoleon. Not that it worked out well for either.
Whatever the case, having another Belarus in Ukraine was ideal for Russia and I think their designs on this long predated any talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was DOA anyway. Germany, in particular, were always going to veto expanding NATO to share a border with Russia.
My point here is I'm not convinced that any promises of neutrality by Ukraine would've saved Ukraine from Russian designs.
> Europe is as affluent as ever
Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
> It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe,
It is a serious threat. Not in the conventional land-war a la WW2 sense but we're dealing with the world's other nuclear superpower (China doesn't have the nuclear arsenal Russia does, by choice). But Putin's playbook is oddly reminiscent to Hitler's playbook leading up to the war. That is, Hitler argued he was unifying Germans in Austria, the Sudetenland, etc. Similarly, Putin is using ethnically Russian populations in a similar way: as an excuse to intervene and take territory.
There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
American security and energy guarantees are really the only things holding Europe together right now. If NATO splinters, what's to stop Russia from seizing parts of Latvia?
This situation is precarious.
> they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time
No, they don't care that it works. In fact, they've been doing everything they can to make it not work. We now have a generation of people in many European countries (and I include the UK here) who have never not known austerity and constant government cutbacks. Satisfaction with the NHS deteriorates as it's been deliberately starved for 15+ years.
This is a well-worn and successful playbook called starving the beast [3]. It's laying the groundwork for a push for privatization. It'll be partial privatization to start with and just creep from there.
I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/01/nato.georgia
[2]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/housing-crisis/
By brabel 2026-01-1322:53 > You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.
The 1990's Russia was a hugely struggling nation that could barely feed its population, but even then they opposed NATO expansion strongly!
> The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.
Source: (Gorbachev in interview from 2014) https://www.rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbac...
> Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
The housing crisis is mostly limited to inflated prices in large cities and is itself evidence that people have a good purchasing power, since it's not being driven by foreign capital (at least where I live, in the Nordics).
Which statistics show the EU is NOT affluent?? If we look at GDP (+1.35% yearly in the last 10 years [1], not too bad for developed economies) and unemployment (currently around 6% for the whole EU [2]), it's not bad, especially if you consider the huge number of recent immigrants (unemployment among the native population is much lower than the total figures show, in Sweden, for example, native Swedes have near full employment).
But yeah, I think personal anedoctes are also helpful to establish whether a country looks like it's going down... and everywhere I go, I see only good signs: shops expanding, lots of new buildings, full bars and restaurants, people are driving the latest electric cars... what I don't see is things like businesses closing down, struggling local shops etc. which are normally very visible (I know, I've seen that) in economies that are in dire straits.
> There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
Yes, I've been to Latvia and Russian is clearly spoken by a large percentage of the population (to my surprise, including the young generation). As long as they are not suppressed from speaking their language (as is happening in Ukraine right now and even before the war, and in some areas in the Baltic countries) and they're not made second-class citizens (as is happening in Estonia, where they can no long vote [3]), Putin will not have any excuse to do that, and those countries would be wise to not provide such excuses! Anyway, I think that regardless of that, NATO will survive even without the USA (as something else, perhaps, but the union between European states is extremely important to maintain) and I really belive Article 5 will exist even if NATO evolves into a Europe-only alliance.
> I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
Not sure what you're referring to... I think I do appreciate it. The interview [4] Trump had with the American oil companies after the partial "annexation" of Venezuela couldn't be a better example of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...
[3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/russia/article/2025/03/26/estonia-...
By theshrike79 2026-01-1311:25 At one point there will be enough people with no job or no hope who will do the math of "there are 100 million of us and 3000 billionaires" and hopefully have read enough history to learn about the French Revolution and the tools they used.
The only way to prevent this is to guarantee that people without jobs will still have a roof over their heads and enough calories and micronutrients every day to survive - and some entertainment.
I do wonder what will come next, it seems very unlikely that modern states can effectively be toppled and replaced by revolutions but maybe the nature of revolutions will change themselves. After all, it's not like the neoliberal paradigm was always so, it was systematically planned by elites in the 1970s and we're now proudly living in the society they envisioned (elites have wealth while everyone else struggles). The neoliberal establishment was definitely a revolution that impacted and destroyed many lives but it wasn't treated as such.
I guess the next turning of the wheel will be similar too.
Or maybe we all just have poor imaginations.
By stanford_labrat 2026-01-1217:34 at the dissolution and decentralization of empires feudalism in it's many forms historically seems to be the most common outcome.
i would say that we firmly live in the American Empire with techno-feudalistic tendencies, but a historical event of such magnitude as the complete dissolution of the American state will probably see a reversal to a more traditional feudal system. Think Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates buying up and becoming the Dukes of the PNW.
personally though i don't think we are at this stage yet or even close to it. until the federal government becomes COMPLETELY inept and the average citizen cannot buy food, this won't happen. yes market conditions are currently not the best but we are nowhere near starvation.
By RivieraKid 2026-01-1214:451 reply It's been a cause of mild background anxiety for me for the past 3 years. One part is financial and the other is a potential loss of a comfortable and relatively high status job that I can get even with below average social and physical skills.
I need about 4.5 years until basic financial independence, I wonder how does it feel to be at that point.
By glemion43 2026-01-1214:49 I'm more worried about the global impact.
Will people still buy and sell houses?
Will house prices go down because no one can afford them?
Will house prices go up because so few will sell their assets?
I would like to buy a small farm today without debt and cheap energy (upfront investment in solar and storage) but I need a few years more.
Does the world can really change that fast? I don't know but the progress in AI is fast, very fast.
Fresh grads will be fine regardless. You're okay to start over from scratch at 25. 42 on the other hand is tough
I feel for the mid-career people with families to support. Can't imagine how stressful that would be
This is a fresh perspective for me. I'm around 25 and have been struggling with finding some kind of path towards making my career into something sustainable long-term, but never really considered the other side. I think the issue many have on my end is that they don't really have much of anything to stand on while they rebuild yet, whereas they might think that someone more experienced could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now. I know many people personally struggling to find work as it is right out of school, and many have student loans which exacerbate the situation. For a lot of people, starting from scratch is not realistically feasible in the near future unless they're content with being homeless for a while.
Of course labor jobs will always exist, and a 25 year old would (on average) be much more physically able for that than someone older, so it goes both ways.
Consider people in their 40s have..
A mortgage: if you were assuming a strong income that would continue, you very likely could be forced to sell your house and take a huge loss
A family, kids: people relying on you
Time: at this point you have retirement plans and financial deadlines you need to hit if it's to ever become a reality
God forbid you have any health issues that cost $$$ which tend to come as you age. Can you afford to lose health insurance?
If you think about re-skilling and starting off at entry level.. people don't really want to hire older beginners.
Of course that's absolute worst case scenario, but I guarantee there are a lot of people there.
I'd 100% choose living out of my car for a while. In your 20s you can upend everything and completely reinvent yourself. Time, minimal responsibilities and energy are priceless
> could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now
There's a reason that's really vague, right? Because who knows if it'll be available
I don't think AI is gunna reach this point but who knows. It's not off the table
By hackmack10 2026-01-1315:12 If enough people have nothing left to lose, the French Revolution will most likely be the outcome. Or a working UBI. If programmers aren't safe, I can't imagine most other professions won't be on the chopping block as well.
By throw1235435 2026-01-133:43 There's a lot of this forum in exactly that position. The fear is real; there is a real risk this AI destroys families and people's lives in the disruption.
By DrPimienta 2026-01-1316:28 I understand this perspective, but it's like... I would like to have a house and kids and all those things you mentioned, even if it was hard. That's not an option, financially, for a lot of young people
Work on becoming Financially Independent. The best time to start was when you started your career, the second best time to start is now.
By pepperball 2026-01-1213:011 reply Yeah really seems like the only way to win (or rather not lose) is simply not to play.
At this point I’ve realized I need to cast all other ambitions aside and work on getting some out of the way land that I own.
By skeeter2020 2026-01-1216:40 I'm older, aware, decently resourced and really trying NOT to play but it is still hard to accomplish. I'm married with 3 kids and even though I sit out much of the nonsense, your friends, family and community will keep pulling you back in. It's hard to do"not playing" without "not participating" and I don't think anybody should do that.
> TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point.
Honestly? It does and I feel completely hopeless. I'm very, very angry with the world/life at this point to put it mildly.
By block_dagger 2026-01-1217:47 I think we all need to respond by being very, very flexible and open minded about how to contribute to society going forward. I'm on the back end of my career but I imagine it's terrifying for newcomers. Stay agile! We're all in this together.
By Havoc 2026-01-1222:14 And not just SWE. If that falls then we're pretty close to societal upheaval because the difference vs other jobs is largely just better training data (github)
By Mountain_Skies 2026-01-1215:06 And yet the current administration, like every other administration since the mid 90s, still sets labor immigration policy on the testimony of the tech industry that there is still a critical shortage of tech labor so the doors must be remain open for the 30th year of the temporary program that's only going to be in place until the tech companies have time to train domestic talent. If you have a problem with this, you're a racist Nazi who should be excluded from society. Left, right, up, down, they all agree on this, as does the vast majority of posters here. Their defense for this is that little down arrow since they have no other legitimate defense for the 30th something year of the temporary program to give them time to train the talent they claim doesn't exist in the United States.
By babblingfish 2026-01-121:0213 reply My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but without having to look up library function calls and language specific syntax
> My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up.
This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs.
The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
By miki123211 2026-01-129:262 reply As a professional programmer, I think both are useful in different scenarios.
You're maintaining a large, professional codebase? You definitely shouldn't be vibe coding. The fact that some people are is a genuine problem. You want a simple app that you and your friends will use for a few weeks and throw away? Sure, you can probably vibe code something in 2 hours instead of paying for a SaaS. Both have their place.
I’m seeing vibe coding redefine what the product manager is doing. Specifically, adding solution execution to its existing strategy and decision making responsibilities. The PM puts solutions in front of a customer and sees what sticks, then hands over the concept to engineering to bake into the larger code base. The primary change here is no longer relying on interviews and research to make product decisions that engineering spends months building only to have flop when it hits market. The PM is being required to build and test dozens of solutions before anything makes its way to engineering resources. How engineering builds the overall solution is still under their control but the fit is validated before it hits their desk.
By sanderjd 2026-01-1216:51 Yes!
I think the next step is to realize that this kind of product manager role is one that more "engineers" should be willing to take on themselves. It's pretty clear why user interviews and research and product requirement docs are not obviously within the wheelhouse of technical people, but building lots of prototypes and getting feedback is a much better fit!
By phn 2026-01-1211:26 I think the problem starts with the name. I've been coding with LLMs for the past few months but most of it is far from "vibed", I am constantly reviewing the output and guiding it in the right direction, it's more like a turbo charged code editor than a "junior developer", imo.
> The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction
Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?
By spacebanana7 2026-01-1210:115 reply Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.
If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can absolutely consume twice as much CSS, try to play call of duty on our smart fridge or use a new SaaS to pay our taxes.
By zelphirkalt 2026-01-1213:13 Oh but we can absolutely let all that food go to waste! In many places unbelievable amounts of food go to waste.
Actually, most software either is garbage or goes to waste at some point too. Maybe that's too negative. Maybe one could call it rot or becoming obsolete or obscure.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-01-1214:371 reply I have been around for “the past few decades”. Then you saw the rapid growth of the internet, mobile and BigTech. Just from the law of large numbers, BigTech isn’t going to grow exponentially like it did post 2010.
It’s copium to think that with the combination of AI and oversupply of “good enough” developers, that it won’t be harder for developers to get jobs. We are seeing it now.
It wasn’t this bad after the dot com bust. Then if you were just an ordinary enterprise developer working “in the enterprise” in a 2nd tier city (raises hand), jobs were plentiful.
I think the better way to think of this is whether it will be harder for people who are good at using AI tools to accomplish things with computers to get jobs. Maybe, but I don't think so. I think this skill set will be useful in every line of work.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-01-1217:071 reply That doesn’t solve the problem. It’s easy enough to be “good enough” at AI tools just like it’s easy enough to be a decent enterprise CRUD full stack/back end/mobile developer. It will still be hard to stand out from the crowd.
I saw this coming on the enterprise dev side where most people work back in 2015. Not AI of course, but the commoditization of development.
I started moving closer to the “business”, got experience in leading projects, soft skills, requirements gathering, AWS architecture etc.
I’m not saying the answer is to “learn cloud”. I am saying that it’s important to learn people skills and be the person trusted with strategy and don’t just be a code monkey pulling well defined tickets off the board.
By sanderjd 2026-01-1217:19 My point is: I don't think there will be way more jobs for "AI developers", I think there will be plenty of jobs for people who are employed in an industry and adept with using AI tools to be effective at their job. These people would not be differentiating themselves from other "AI developers", but from other people who do their role in whatever industry they are in, but who aren't as adept with these tools.
By lelanthran 2026-01-1211:311 reply > Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.
I see this fallacy all the time but I don't know if there is a name for it.
I mean, we make used fun of MBAs for saying the same thing, but now we should be more receptive to the "Line Always Goes Up" argument?
By kasey_junk 2026-01-1211:441 reply Jevons paradox and it’s not a fallacy. It’s an observable behavior. The problem is it’s not predictive.
By lelanthran 2026-01-1211:493 reply > Jevons paradox and it’s not a fallacy. It’s an observable behavior. The problem is it’s not predictive.
I was referring specifically to this point, which, IMHO, is a fallacy:
>>> There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.
There is no way to use the word "infinite" in this context, even if qualified, that is representative of reality.
By ambicapter 2026-01-1214:33 As counter-anecdata, I have a family members that are growing businesses from scratch and they constantly talk to me about problems they want to solve with software. Administrative problems, product problems, market research problems, you name it. I'm sure they have other problems they don't talk to me about where they're not looking for software solutions, but the list of places they want software to automate things is never-ending.
There consumer internet is mostly cropped up by white collar people buying stuff online and clicking on ads. Once the cutting starts, the whole internet economy just becomes a money swapping machine between 7 VC groups.
The demand for paid software is decreasing cause these AI companies are saying "Oh dont buy that SAAS product because you can build it yourself now"
By dasil003 2026-01-1214:37 SaaS is not just software though, it’s operationalized software and data management. The value has increasingly been in the latter well before AI. How many open source packages have killed their SaaS competitors (or wrappers)?
By rowanajmarshall 2026-01-1212:26 As much as I appreciate the difference between literal infinity and consumers' demand for software, there's just so much bad software out there waiting to be improved that I can't see us hitting saturation soon.
This reasoning is flawed in my opinion, because at the end of the day, the software still has to be paid for (for the people that want/need to make a living out of it), and customers wallet are finite.
Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...
By jimbokun 2026-01-133:51 Most software is paid for by businesses, not consumers.
the demand for software has increased. The demand for software engineers has increased proportionally, because we were the only source of software. This correlation might no longer hold.
Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over.
Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my restaur1ant" kind, or the "I need to agregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind. Anything where you'd accept cheap and disposable. Perhaps even the traditional startup, if POCs are vibecoded and engineers are only introducer later.
Those are huge businesses, even if they are not present in the HN bubble.
> "I need a website for my restaurant" kind, or the "I need to aggregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind
I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015. There are no code website makers available since then and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point, its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that. If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website. This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects. Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store.
By wolpoli 2026-01-1214:49 Just to add to the point: no code web site makers have already incorporated AI to simplify marketing tasks like drafting copies/blogs/emails.
By csa 2026-01-1220:17 I wonder exactly what you do, because almost none of your comment jibes with my knowledge and experience.
Note that I own an agency that does a lot of what you say is “solved”, and I assure you that it’s not (at least in terms of being an efficient market).
SMBs with ARR up to $100m (or even many times more that in ag) struggle to find anyone good to do technical work for them either internally or externally on a consistent basis.
> I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015.
Conceptually, maybe. In practice, definitely not.
> There are no code website makers available since then
… that mostly make shit websites.
> and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point,
Also almost certainly a shit website at that price point, probably using the no-code tools mentioned above.
These websites have so many things wrong with them that demonstrably decrease engagement or lose revenue.
> its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that.
AI will be better very soon, as the best derivative AI tools will be trained on well-developed websites.
That said, AI will never have taste, and it will never have empathy for the end user. These things can only be emulated (at least for the time being).
> If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website
You can get an ok “brochure” website built for that. Maintaining it, if you have an agency that actually stays in business, will be about $100 minimum for the lowest effort touch, $200 for an actually one line change (like business hours), and up from there from anything substantial.
If you work with a decent, reputable agency, a $10k customer is the lowest on the totem pole amongst the agency’s customer list. The work is usually delegated to the least experienced devs, and these clients are usually merely tolerated rather than embraced.
It sucks to be the smallest customer of an agency, but it’s a common phenomenon amongst certain classes of SMBs.
> This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects.
This is actually true. Mainly because any decent small agency either turns into one that does larger contracts, or it gets absorbed by one.
That said, there is a growing market for mid-sized agencies (“lifestyle agencies”?).
> Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store
As mentioned above, you absolutely do not want to be a mom and pop store working with a web agency that works with any large, international brand like Adidas.
I appreciate your points from a conceptual level, but the human element of tech, software, and websites will continue to be a huge business for many decades, imho.
By skeeter2020 2026-01-1216:431 reply anecdotal at best but I have directly heard CTOs - and hear noise beyond my immediate bubble - talk about 10x improvements with a straight face. Seems ridiculous to me, and even if the coding gets 10x easier the act of defining & solving problems doesn't #nosilverbullet
By falloutx 2026-01-1218:38 It doesnt even have to work, it just need to show execs that it can be used to cut costs by firing employees.
By throwaway6734 2026-01-1212:451 reply I perform software engineering at a research oriented institution and there are some projects I can now prototype without writing a line of code. The productivity benefits are massive
By hnthrow0287345 2026-01-1214:431 reply Prototypes are always meant to be thrown away though, someone's going to have to redo it to comply with coding standards, scaling requirements, and existing patterns in the code base.
If the prototype can be just dropped in and clear a PR and comply with all the standards, you're just doing software engineering for less money!
By quest88 2026-01-1215:22 the reality is people will be shipping "prototype code" all the time, outpacing those that don't and winning.
> It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
What’s “the vibecoding strawman”? There are plenty of people on HN (and elsewhere) repeatedly saying they use LLMs by asking them to “produce full apps in hours instead of weeks” and confirming they don’t read the code.
Just because everyone you personally know does it one way, it doesn’t mean everyone else does it like that.
I'd assume the straw-man isn't that vibe-coding (vbc) doesn't exist, but that all/most ai-dev is vbc, or that it's ok to derail any discussion on ai-assisted dev with complaints applicable only/mainly to vbc.
Neither of those would be a strawman, though. One would be a faulty generalization and the other is airing a grievance (could maybe be a bad faith argument?).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
Though I get that these days people tend to use “strawman” for anything they see as a bad argument, so you could be right in your assessment. Would be nice to have clarification on what they mean.
Hmm, if the purpose of either is so an "easier" target can be made, I think it could still qualify as a straw-man; I think an accusation of straw-manning is in part a accusation of another's intent (or bad faith - not engaging with the argument).
By latexr 2026-01-1212:11 > Hmm, if the purpose of either is so an "easier" target can be made, I think it could still qualify as a straw-man
Good point.
> I think an accusation of straw-manning is in part a accusation of another's intent (or bad faith - not engaging with the argument).
There I partially disagree. Straw-manning is not engaging with the argument but it can be done accidentally. As in, one may genuinely misunderstand the nuance in an argument and respond to a straw man by mistake. Bad faith does require bad intent.
Half strawman -- a mudman, perhaps. Because we're seeing proper experts with credentials jump on the 'shit, AI can do all of this for me' realization blog post train.
By kylecazar 2026-01-1213:05 Well, I have a lot of respect for antirez (Redis), and at the time of my writing this comment he had a front page blog post in which we find:
"Writing code is no longer needed for the most part."
It was a great post and I don't disagree with him. But it's an example of why it isn't necessarily a strawman anymore, because it is being claimed/realized by more than just vibecoders and hobbyists.
When has he stated that he uses AI like that? The last I heard about him a month ago, he specifically stated that he was not interested in AI to write code: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-ai-tool-maintai...
3 days ago: https://github.com/torvalds/AudioNoise/blob/main/README.md
> Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.
By darkwater 2026-01-1212:01 For me there are two things notesworthy in that repo:
* the README was clearly not written by an LLM nor aided
* he still uses GPLv2 (not 3) as the license for his works
By quest88 2026-01-1215:20 the author of this post and Steve yegge come to mind
By eaurouge 2026-01-121:52 So another strawman?
By tech_tuna 2026-01-1615:37 There's a crazy amount of hype, fear and blatant lies in the mix. And the pace is absolutely bonkers. The pace of announcements is even more bonkers. Maybe things will settle down to a new normal at some point.
You might think that everyone has FOMO or is an anti-AI Luddite when of course there are a LOT of us somewhere in the middle, just trying to get our work done and trying to figure out what our careers will look like in 5-10 years.
One big thing that no one seems to talk about - GenAI is unlocking many new (and oftentimes "small") business ideas that were not practical just a few years ago. I have witnessed this firsthand. . . however, it will also take away jobs. How many, who knows?
tl;dr everyone is full of shit or selling something or terrified to the point where they can't think straight. And no one has a crystal ball.
By sanderjd 2026-01-1216:44 Yeah I also sense this disconnect between the reality and hype.
In part, I think what people are responding to is the trajectory of the tools. I would agree that they seem to be on an asymptote toward being able to do a lot more things on their own, with a lot less direction. But I also feel like the improvements in that direction are incremental at this point, and it's hard to predict when or if there will be a step change.
But yeah, I'm really not sure I buy this whole thing about orchestrating a symphony of agents or whatever. That isn't what my usage of AI is like, and I'm struggling to see how it would become like that.
But what I am starting to see, is "non-programmers" beginning to realize that they can use these tools to do things for their own work and interests, which they would have previously hired a programmer to do for them, or more likely, just decided it wasn't worth the effort. I think for those people, it does feel like a novel automation tool. It's just that we all already knew how to do this, by writing code. But most people didn't know how to do that. And now they can do a lot more.
And I think this is a genuine step change that will have a big effect on our industry. Personally, I think this is ultimately a very good thing! This is how computers should work, that anybody can use them to automate stuff they want to do. It is not a given that "automating tasks" is something that must be its own distinct (and high paying) career. But like any disruption, it is very reasonable to feel concerned and uncertain about the future when you're right in the thick of it.
By conartist6 2026-01-1212:481 reply The best advice to juniors is "do not use AI!"
Dunno why the author thinks an AI-enhanced junior can match the "output"of a whole team unless he means in generating lines of code, which is to say tech debt.
Being able to put a lot of words on screen is not the accomplishment in programming. It usually means you've gone completely out of your depth.
By iLoveOncall 2026-01-139:53 > Dunno why the author thinks an AI-enhanced junior can match the "output"of a whole team
Because the author has a vested interest in peddling this bullshit given he works on Gemini at Google.
By palata 2026-01-1217:10 I think it does both: you can have an LLM automate bad coding (that's the vibe coding part), and you can have an LLM speed up good coding.
Many times, bad code is sufficient. Actually too many times: IMHO that is the reason why the software industry produces lower quality software every year. Bad products are often more profitable than good products. But it's not always for making bad products: sometimes it's totally fine to vibe code a proof or concept or prototype, I would say.
Other times, we really need stable and maintainable code. I don't think we can or want to vibe code that.
LLMs make low-quality coding more accessible, but I don't think they remove the need for high-quality coding. Before LLMs, the fraction of low-quality code was growing already, just because it was already profitable.
An analogy could be buildings: everybody can build a bench that "does the job". Maybe that bench will be broken in 2 months, but right now it works; people can sit on it. But not everybody can build a dam. And if you risk going to jail if your dam collapses, that's a good incentive for not vibe coding it.
By jvans 2026-01-121:51 i notice a huge difference between working on large systems with lots of microservices and building small apps or tools for myself. The large system work is what you describe, but small apps or tools I resonate with the automate coding crowd.
I've built a few things end to end where I can verify the tool or app does what I want and I haven't seen a single line of the code the LLM wrote. It was a creepy feeling the first time it happened but it's not a workflow I can really use in a lot of my day to day work.
All I know is that firing half my employees and never hiring entry level people again nets me a bonus next quarter.
Not really sure why this article is talking about what happens 2 years from now since that’s 8 times longer than anything anyone with money or power cares about.
By Esophagus4 2026-01-1213:391 reply Hmmm I know this it’s true because if management only thought quarterly, no one would ever hire anyone. Hiring someone takes 6+ months to pay off as they get up to productivity.
But the management immediately gets street cred for increasing headcount and managing more resources.
By Esophagus4 2026-01-1214:25 I can't tell if we're doing like a sarcastic joking thing where we're making fun of management, or if you really believe this. If we're joking around, then haha. If you really believe this to be true, then you have a warped view of reality.
The street cred doesn't come from managing more resources, the street cred comes from delivering more.
What a benevolent bossman here, keeping 50% of the jockeys around this quarter. He is probably sacrificing one of his yachts for this.
By petesergeant 2026-01-122:08 I’m doing both. For production code that I care about, I’m reading every line the LLM writes, correcting it a lot, chatting with an observer LLM who’s checking the work the first LLM and I are writing. It’s speeding stuff up, it also reduces the friction on starting on things. Definitely a time saver.
Then I have some non-trivial side projects where I don’t really care about the code quality, and I’m just letting it run. If I dare look at the code, there’s a bunch of repetition. It rarely gets stuff right the first time, but that’s fine, because it’ll correct it when I tell it it doesn’t work right. Probably full of security holes, code is nasty, but it doesn’t matter for the use-cases I want. I have produced pieces of software here that are actively making my life better, and it’s been mostly unsupervised.
By noufalibrahim 2026-01-128:142 reply I'm somewhere in between myself. Before LLMs, I used to block a few sites that distracted me by adding entries in /etc/hosts file to mapping them to 127.0.0.1 on my work machine. I also made the file immutable so that it would take a few steps for me to unblock the sites.
The next step was for me to write a cron job that would reapply the chattr +1 and rewrite the file once in 5 minutes. Sort of an enforcer. I used Claude (web) to write this and cut/pasted it just because I didn't want to bother with bash syntax that I learned and forgot several times.
I then wanted something stronger and looked at publicly available things like pluckeye but they didn't really work the way I wanted. So I tried to write a quick version using Claude (web) and started running it (October 2025). It solved my problem for me.
I wanted a program to use aider on and I started with this. Every time, I needed a feature (e.g. temporary unblocks, prevent tampering and uninstalling, blocking in the browser, violation tracking etc.), I wrote out what I wanted and had the agent do it. OVer the months, it grew to around 4k lines (single file).
Around December, I moved to Claude code from aider and continued doing this. The big task I gave it was to refactor the code into smaller files so that I could manage context better. IT did this well and added tests too. (late December 2025).
I added a helper script to update URLs to block from various sources. Vibe-coded too. Worked fine.
Then, I found it hogging memory because of some crude mistakes I vibe-coded early on fixed that. Cost me around $2 to do so. (Jan 2026).
Then I added support to lock the screen when I crossed a violation threshold. This required some Xlib code to be written. I'm sure I could have written it but it's not really worth it. I know what to do and doing it by hand wouldn't really teach me anything except the innards of a few libraries. I added that.
So, in short, this is something that's 98% AI coded but it genuinely solves a problem for me and has helped me change my behaviour in front of a computer. There are no companies that my research revealed that offer this as a service for Linux. I know what to do but don't have the time write and debug it. With AI, my problem was solved and I have something which is quite valuable to me.
So, while I agree with you that it isn't an "automation tool", the speed and depth which it brings to the environment has opened up possibilities that didn't previously exist. That's the real value and the window through which I'm exploring the whole thing.
By falloutx 2026-01-1210:02 It seems alright, but I wonder if it crashes the economy for vast majority of internet businesses. I personally run some tool websites like ones to convert images, cut videos but the traffic for now seems stable, but my tools don't target devs. Most likely you didnt actually need it, but who am i to judge, I just find myself doing random projects because it "takes less time".
By lightning19 2026-01-1218:34 Interesting, I did something similar but with browser policies on my PC although I just got the LLM to write the json
By antonymoose 2026-01-121:191 reply It’s a better Google for me. Instead of searching AWS or StackOverflow it hallucinates a good enough output that I can refactor into an output.
By bryanrasmussen 2026-01-127:321 reply The reason why it is better is that with search you have to narrow your search down to a specific part of what you are trying to do, for example if you need a unique id generating function as part of what you are trying to do you first search for that, then if you need to make sure that whatever gets output is responsive 3 columns then you might search for that, and then do code to glue the things together to what you need, with AI you can ask for all of this together, get something that is about what the searched for results would have been, do your glue code and fixes you would normally have done.
It trims the time requirement of a bit of functionality that you might have searched for 4 examples down by the time requirement of 3 of those searches.
It does however remove the benefit of having done the search which might be that you see the various results, and find that a secondary result is better. You no longer get that benefit. Tradeoffs.
By thunspa 2026-01-1212:45 I resonate with the phrase: "You never learn to ask good questions"
By trueismywork 2026-01-127:333 reply You can think of LLMs as a higher level language for whatever programming language you are using, but informal with ambiguous grammar.
By noufalibrahim 2026-01-128:301 reply I don't think that works. The fact that it can produce different output for the same input, usage of tools etc. don't really fit into the analogy or mental model.
What has worked for me is treating it like an enthusiastic intern with his foot always on the accelerator pedal. I need to steer and manage the brakes otherwise, it'll code itself off a cliff and take my software with it. The most workable thing is a pair programmer. For trivial changes and repeatedly "trying stuff out", you don't need to babysit. For larger pieces, it's good to make each change small and review what it's trying.
By therealpygon 2026-01-1211:131 reply I feel like some of the frontier models are approaching run-of-the-mill engineer who does dumb stuff frequently. That said, with appropriate harnessing, it’s more like go-karts on a track; you can’t keep them out of the wall, but you can reset them and get them back on a path (when needed). Not every kart ends up in the wall, but all of them want to go fast, so the better defined the track is the more likely the karts will find a finish line. Certainly more likely than if you just stuck them in a field with no finish line and said “go!”.
By noufalibrahim 2026-01-1211:39 I don't really know if I agree with you but the analogy is really good. :)
By 334f905d22bc19 2026-01-1210:431 reply On the foolishness of "natural language programming". - prof.dr.Edsger W.Dijkstra
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
By djeastm 2026-01-1213:07 >We would need all the intellect in the world to get the interface narrow enough to be usable, and, in view of the history of mankind, it may not be overly pessimistic to guess that to do the job well enough would require again a few thousand years.
It seems it only took until about 2023 or so
By christophilus 2026-01-1213:49 And a buggy (non-deterministic) compiler that will occasionally do random things that break your security model, leak sessions, and the like.
By michalsustr 2026-01-1214:08 My experience (with minfx.ai) has been that it is very important to build a system which imposes lots of constraints on the code. The more constrained you can make it, the better. Rust helps a lot in this. Thanks to this, for the first time in my career, I feel like the bigger the system gets, /the easier/ it is to develop, because AI can discover and reuse common components. While human would struggle searching for these and how to use them in a large codebase. Very counter-intuitive!
By barrkel 2026-01-1215:35 If by block by block you mean you stop using an IDE and spend most of your time looking at diffs, sure. Because in a well structured project, that's all you need to do now: maintain a quality bar and ensure Claude doesn't drop the ball.
By Valord 2026-01-1218:18 This is how I use it for work-production code.
By osigurdson 2026-01-123:052 reply >> The skillset is shifting from implementing algorithms to knowing how to ask the AI the right questions and verify its output.
The question is, how much faster is verification only vs writing the code by hand? You gain a lot of understanding when you write the code yourself, and understanding is a prerequisite for verification. The idea seems to be a quick review is all that should be needed "LGTM". That's fine as long as you understand the tradeoffs you are making.
With today's AI you either trade speed for correctness or you have to accept a more modest (and highly project specific) productivity boost.
And there's a ton of human incentives here to take shortcuts in the review part. The process almost pushes you to drop your guard: you spend less physical time observing the code while you write, you get huge chunks of code dropped on you, iterations change a lot to keep a mind model, there's FOMO involved about the speed gain you're supposed to get... We're going to see worse review quality just by a mater of UX and friction of the tool.
Yes! It depends on the company, of course, but I think plenty of people are going to fall for the perverse incentives while reviewing AI output for tech debt.
The perverse incentives being that tech debt is non-obvious & therefore really easy to avoid responsibility for.
Meanwhile, velocity is highly obvious & usually tired directly to personal & team performance metrics.
The only way I see to resolve this is strict enforcement of a comprehensive QA process during both the planning & iteration of an AI-assisted development cycle.
But when even people working at Anthropic are talking about running multiple agents in parallel, I get the idea that CTO's are not taking this seriously.
By andrekandre 2026-01-130:30
and a new bottleneck appears...> enforcement of a comprehensive QA process during both the planning & iteration of an AI-assisted development cycle(i don't disagree with this take though, qa should be done from start to finish and integral every step of the way)
By beej71 2026-01-1614:31 In my experience (programmer since 1983), it's massively faster to leverage an LLM and obtain quality code when working with technology that I'm proficient in.
But when I don't have expertise, it's the same speed or even slower. The better I am at something, the faster the LLM coding goes.
I'm still trying to get better at Rust, and I'm past break-even now. So I could use LLMs for a speed boost. But I still hand-write all my code because I'm still gaining expertise. (Here I lean into LLMs in a student capacity, which is different.)
Related to this, I often ask LLMs for code reviews. The number of suggestions it makes that I think are good is inversely proportional to the experience I have with the particular tech used. The ability to discard bad suggestions is valuable.
This is why I think bring an excellent dev with the fundamentals is still important—critical, even—when coding with LLMs. If I were still in a hiring role, I'd hire people with good dev skills over people with poor dev skills every time, regardless of how adept they were at prompting.
