I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way. This hand off is no longer necessary as that same senior can just kick off an agent and have it handle the implementation for them.<p>I've heard some refer to this as a "nature is healing" scenario for the industry where if you only signed up for a high paycheck and didn't care to think critically about any of the work you're doing then this will be painful because that previously manual process has been automated. The floor of what's necessary to be considered valuable has been raised.
>This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way.<p>This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice.<p>What tends to happen is that the EMs and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task. This means that sometimes you get a senior leading a simple project and sometimes you get a junior leading/designing a complex project (usually with help from a very minorly technical PM).<p>Then the senior/staff/principal (often on a different “special” team) gets pulled in at the last minute to rescue the project.<p>If your company is highly product driven, you’ll often find that the juniors end up leaving projects more often than not because they will tell the PM exactly what they want to hear.
> This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice.<p>I would have said the same thing for the first 15 years of my career across several jobs and acquisitions.<p>Then I took a job at a company that fit this description. They had so many managers and PMs that every task was talked about, broken down, and documented so much that every Jira ticket was a little piece of work that a junior could handle by Googling things.<p>The quirk was that they had started hiring a lot of experienced and staff level engineers, too, but then tried to force this same framework on to everyone. We spent more time discussing tasks than doing them by a factor of 2-50X. There are some situations where this is appropriate, but none of our work was actually high scale or difficult. Your day might be spent writing design docs and collective sign offs as you worked through committees until the tickets at the end were so simple that any junior could do them.<p>It didn’t lead to better software. It was one big cargo cult game of performative management. A frequent outcome was that someone would get into the micromanaged tickets and realize there was a better way to handle something, but it wasn’t worth doing all of the fighting and meetings involved to do the meeting and Jira ticket dance all over again.
I've never thought about it this way before but this definitely mirrors my experience
> but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice<p>I've seen a twist - not juniors but just offshore engineers.
<i>> I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years</i><p>Primarily in Silicon Valley or outside of it?<p>I worked most of my two decades in the Valley but also spent time outside of it. There is in many cases a vast gulf between the dev cultures. What the parent comment is describing I've seen many many times.
I think AI is getting pretty good at generating the tickets as well. Not amazing, but it feels like ticket generation today is where code generation was a year ago.<p>I wonder if there's an agent harness that would work well for requirements gathering.
I agree the time it takes to go from planning to deployed is condensing. I'm not sure the hand off is no longer necessary (though it admittedly often feels like it). Perhaps it means we need better ways of planning and collaborating faster and on larger features? So you still end up with a hand off, but it looks different, is maybe more detailed, or spans a wider implementation than we previously might?
Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs...<p>So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....
I think that smart companies (don't laugh, a few exist) will still hire juniors. Fewer, more carefully selected, but still some.
The StackOverflow devs being replaced were never going to become real senior developers no matter how much time was given to them. There is an entire cohort of people who were told to go to college for programming because it was an easy way to make good money, who did what they were told while having zero interesting in programming and never touching a line of code outside of work/school hours. Those people were never going to understand actual programming, all they were doing was copy-pasting code for a paycheck. Does it suck for them that they've been replaced by automated copypasting bots, yep. But frankly speaking nobody should've ever been paid 6-figure salaries to copy paste snippets from SO and jam JS library legos together in the first place.
... And Django and React removed ("stole the jobs from under") the engineers handcrafting html and jQuery web pages/apps.
> bad engineers were always a liability<p>This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_.<p>I am still a firm believer in garbage in -> garbage out, AI is only as good as the abstractions and contracts you put in place for it. I don't subscribe to the idea that AI generated code is fundamentally bad, just that people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code.<p>Earlier in the year I put together a talk for my company on what the future of architecture & design means for us in the career, I'm very proud of it and will share here in case folks have their own thoughts to share on the topic: <a href="https://youtu.be/SIZrt9Rt05Q?si=W57eirniWmoSFeBu" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/SIZrt9Rt05Q?si=W57eirniWmoSFeBu</a>
This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort).<p>We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences.<p>Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle. If the engineers would just think for a second, push back on Claude, even Claude would tell them this is bad. But they don't... Platform engineering is now 10x harder with terrible engineers and unlimited code machines.<p>Don't even get me started on ffmpeg usage, engineers act like the resources are unlimited.
I think this point gets lost on people. A frequent argument I see in favor of vibecoding is: “well there’s also bad engineers”. In other words, bad code is already being written, so who cares if the LLM is wrong sometimes?<p>The issue is that with no reins, the LLM is a fire hose of bad code compared to the garden hose of bad code orgs had before. A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse.
Ironically, AI mitigates bad developers quite a bit. The architecture/design is coming from above bad devs (in a functional org), and AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously.
Strong disagree. A lot of AI development still requires good engineers to keep tight leash on it so I'm seeing more bad developers create a feature until we need to iterate on said feature and we find AI did such a bad job that it becomes extremely difficult to do so.
AI is very good at making the bad dev's PR look plausible and be green in CI. And thus, merged.
Jury is still out here
> AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously<p>I've often had it test and benchmark against the wrong things = no test.<p>It also writes over-engineered code. So yes sort, maybe.
Maybe those engineers that don't care about making their solution _good_ are actually the good engineers, have you ever thought about that??? There are exceptions where quality really matters but most software shops build CRUD web apps where it's not really a good characteristic to obsess over the cleanest and most elegant details, instead you need to get the stuff the customer wants done!<p>I for one tend to care less about the minutiae of solutions implemented by AI as long as it gets the job done, I do care about architecture and design decisions and correctness and I have ways to steer and verify these when working with LLMs but I couldn't care less about it writing "good" code. Bad engineers also produce better results with AI at least when they're working in established frameworks, AI doesn't really need a lot of high level architecture input when designing or building a web app with a common stack, so as long as you're not working on something that's completely novel I don't think it will make a strong difference.<p>Maybe designers think the same way about the AI generated web designs I have Claude Code do for me but to be honest I don't care, I just know that before this tool existed it would have taken me weeks or months to come up with a good design and I would have to rely on prefabricated UI libraries and stuff like that or pay a designer tens of thousands of USD to make one for me, now I can get a (for me and my customers) perfectly acceptable and professional design within a few hours. So maybe I'm also a bad designer that amplifies my bad design taste 10x in my company, but the fact is the stuff ships and makes money and the customer is happy! And I can tell you customers or users don't give a shit about how good your code is, they only care if the software works and does what they want!
This is me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software.<p>The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with software engineering, and AI was the final nail in the coffin that caused me to leave the profession in later middle age. I thought software as a business had "lost its way" from building great products with attention to detail to "how do we addict as many people as possible as quickly as possible". Think about the degradation in Apple software from say the "it just works" era to now.<p>With respect to AI, I'm not really against it, and I find it extremely valuable in my personal projects. I just feel in a large group/enterprise context that it's replaced a lot of tasks I actually enjoy doing with becoming an editor for what feels like a slightly inebriated junior developer. Or maybe it's better to say a junior developer on a mild amount of meth, because as you say this developer can churn out semi-but-not-fully-working code at an astonishing rate, and then I feel like it's often my job to mop the slop off the floor. Pass, not interested.<p>I feel lucky to have had my career during what I consider the golden age of software engineering, but I'd note I don't think that golden age lasted even a full career of one person.
What is A&D? Shouldn't it have been defined in your comment?
Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job.<p>Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.
I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad.<p>Wages are certainly going down for most software roles
All fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure.
But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot.
Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.
Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?
Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.
I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.
ofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever
No one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.
In a few years, it just might.<p>If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.
> In a few years, it just might.<p>If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.
Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro<p>I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?
For some reason people never mention this, but aren't there also much more people graduating with CS degrees than ever before?
Pretty much no other engineering field made sense to go into for about a decade. Even kids who did go EE, Mech E, or even Chem E ended up taking software jobs. The pay, benefits, and work/life balance of SWE just absolutely obliterates everything else. Or did at least
And how do you think people go from fresh graduates to senior devs?
Degrees take 4 years. It's a very laggy indicator.
What if the new entry level is what we consider senior today? Isn't it possible today to obtain entry/mid level skills with LLMs? I wonder if things will shift more in that direction.
There are 100K H1-Bs a year and 4 million grads a year in the US. Anyone who thinks H1-Bs are actually contributing to their inability to find a job is a moron.
have you been inside a big tech company? there arent many american fresh grads working there, its mostly foreign
Spend some time processing tech job applications and you’ll realize you’re wrong
People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for years and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's.
Orrrrrr... it could be a complex combination of outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring, etc etc etc.<p>I was very fortunate to get a job in a NOC a little bit after high school where I learned things one'd expect to learn in an entry level job. The team I worked on was all about mentorship, learning, and building people to the next level.<p>Haven't seen that attitude elsewhere in my entire career except in the non-profit world where I reside these days. It blows me away that people are surprised that these industries have failed to build entry level positions.
My job was just taken by Cognizant, which is technically American, so I guess you're technically right!
have you been inside any big tech company? lots of orgs are > 80% foreign.
That's not actually true; people have been complaining about this for decades, and it's never been the zero-sum game that they claim it is.<p>I mean, I wrote this 12 years ago in response to similar discussions on this same site, and in the intervening years, we had a great market for software engineers: <a href="https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs/" rel="nofollow">https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...</a><p>What has changed is 1) the zero interest rate environment went away and 2) LLM's.
> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you.<p>I agree with most of this except this. Think there’s some rose tinted glasses here or I’ve got bad luck over time.<p>Life before ai was bad as well. There wasn’t any one to explain to you anything! You had to figure it out yourself. The people either already left or was busy with something else.<p>No one wrote tests (to my standard). Most of the ops works was skipped. Docs were just not there. Nobody linted properly. Just bad mannnn
>AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.<p>>There used to be a time when people sat down and talked about how they'd do something. Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR.<p>>The most tragic aspect of this way of working is that, to the untrained eye, it works.<p>>If you pull the branch and test it, you'll probably get something somewhat functional. So what do they do? They keep going. Again and again. Until the project reaches a point where no one knows how anything works.<p>Isn't this the opposite of failing faster, it lets people who would have never made it past the first few hurdles and give up get deep in and then the false hope that they can then prompt their way out of whatever mess resulting in deeper and deeper spaghetti.
But now they can now move so fast that nobody has a realistic chance to stop them before the damage compounds.
They get into a much deeper mess much faster.
> Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR.<p>Bruh..I haven't consistently sat at my computer for even a hour at a time to code for a decade..people spend that much time in Claude??
I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.<p>This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.<p>[0] <a href="https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-workers-return-india-us-jobs-245525" rel="nofollow">https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...</a>
This is really well written. I deal with the exact same issues almost daily. Senior engineers who want to guard quality are becoming a bottleneck.
> Fixing it would require such a colossal amount of work that it would be impossible to even start justifying it to anyone in management.<p>Bad news: by delegating the thinking to somebody else (Claude) you have become the management.
This is exactly how I feel about my job now. I'm the new manager. But honestly claude is better than any team of developers I've ever had working under me. It does exactly what I ask it to, in 10 minutes instead of 3 weeks. And apparently we can't afford a development team now anyway...<p>I'm not working at massive scale. I've not built any public-facing projects from scratch. But I have done years-worth of cleanup and improvement on projects that I'm very familiar with and have been in my backlog. It's not 100% success, but it's better than I could have done on my own, in the last few months anyway.
Nooo. But seriously, that does appear to be the end result on most of my recent sessions. The time I spend is on correcting, adjusting.. dare I say managing the process as opposed to actively editing every aspect of it.
It baffles me that someone can just send a PR without knowing the gist of how it works and why it’s done this way.<p>If you can’t answer this basic question then why tf do we even need you around?
Look, stupid companies who use A.I. to generate their code will simply fail. Companies that use bright engineers to engineer their product and write code (and pay them accordingly) will thrive and thrash the competition.<p>Darwinism in action.<p>I don't believe A.I. will change much, but it will lead to winners and losers, that's certain. Lessons will be learned, A.I. will remain but play a minor role, just like IntelliSense and ReSharper.<p>People need to understand that when things break management will hold <i>you</i> accountable, not the A.I. If you can't fix it you'll be out of a job. So you'd better make sure that you understand the generated code and clean it up before putting it in production because you'll be maintaining it.
So, blame the engineers now? Most likely they were forced by a manager to push more PRs faster else piped.
I saw close some companies getting completely lost with AI code
Economics would have always created this downward pressure on demand for software engineers regardless, either companies would replace the number of engineers they need with AI, or with low paid offshored workers.
It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You still had to have a competent developer review what they did, which was annoying, but ultimately a time saver over doing it themselves.<p>Now the competent developer can just run agents and do the same review process, except it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced).<p>So we've got a bimodal distribution going on where the bottom X% of developers have become essentially worthless while the top Y% of developers are now more valuable than ever.
Very good article.<p>But it does cover the case where someone makes it to the top if he/she is junior. Who experience is gained?<p>Maybe I ask too much from a short article.
AI generated code is the new "lines of code" metric used by middle management.
"There are also people who essentially make it harder for everyone else. And now anyone can produce more code in a day than they used to in a year."<p>That is the "democratization" that AI shills speak of:<p><a href="https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2087538364580835804#m" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2087538364580835804#m</a><p>Once a CEO with a snowboard-optimized brain gave you a board seat, there is no way back.
In the words of Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap".<p>Any apparent short term gain is really a prescription for long term pain.<p>Ignore what AI fanboys say and instead look at what they do.<p><a href="https://northeasttimes.com/2026/08/07/oracle-bans-ai-code-from-java-s-backbone-while-spending-billions-on-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://northeasttimes.com/2026/08/07/oracle-bans-ai-code-fr...</a>
Is it long term pain if a small startup in a very competitive vertical gets to market quicker with code gen and finds market fit? Whether that results in a rewrite or a refactor, that is still a huge win and one that a lot of people will gamble on.
Oracle banned AI code for copyright reasons, you cannot interpret that as a assessment of the practical output of the models.
That's only one of the three reasons in the article:
1) Reviewer burden - LLMs can produce a deluge plausible but incorrect code which can overwhelm human reviewers.
2) Safety and Security - Many corporations depend on the JDK so stability is a high priority.
3) Copyright/IP about who owns submissions generated by AI is not settled in law.<p>The article also goes on to compare the JDK teams policy to GraalVM, also in Oracle which is more similar to the Linux kernel policy, where AI submissions are allowed, but the human submitter is accountable to them, which is reasonable too.<p>It's not unreasonable, in my opinion, for the JDK team to limit AI contributions based on their stated priorities, just like how other teams might not require those same restrictions.
Oracle banned AI code from a public project they maintain and backport/share with a commercial product because they're a very litigious company, anticipating future legal cases.
It strongly argues against a position that many people including myself have taken, that all code will soon be AI code and the only people still writing code by hand are those who haven’t gotten the memo. (I don’t mean to rule out the possibility that Oracle, despite their involvement in AI infrastructure, is just being dumb and the lawyers made them create a policy that’s not compatible with the modern practice of software development.)
Just look at how they bragged for a year now about how AI built entire apps with a single prompt.<p>And now that code is being watermarked by AI, suddenly they’re artists, painstakingly prompting, crafting, to get just the right code; the watermark is unethical even!<p>AI psychosis is real, and even some of the smartest people I know how succumbed to it.
AI gives more leverage to exceptional people, its an amplifier not an extender
Right, it's a multiplier only if we define bad engineers as negative numbers, and "bad" as "most".
Maybe
That is true of all tools. AI is a tool. A tool provides leverage. It does not make a bad craftsperson good.
Ai is a tool in the same way an employee is a tool. very unlike a hammer.
I hate that framing because it glosses over what makes AI distinct from other technology. Pretty much anything can be used as a tool, that’s not an interesting aspect of AI. However standard tools do not take decisions on behalf of the user, they do not apply judgement. They come with assumptions and constraints that make some decisions more likely to be made. But the whole thing about LLMs is that they apply judgement and take decisions. When you use an LLM you delegate both aspects to it with very little overview or control.<p>I don’t think it’s “just a tool”, it’s something that directly compete with the role of humans in a system, by design
right but we have never seen a tool like this
I don't know what kind of company has got a large codebase and it's taking 20,000 loc pr's expecting that shit to be sustainable, but I work AI first and at the most PR's are touching 12 to 15 files, with the more radical ones sitting at 30. They are still human-reviewable. They are still the kind of change you can revert back to original without breaking all the rest... there are ways of doing this stuff, dear luddites.
I was wondering how anyone could reach the token limit of a 200$/month Claude subscription. I never did on a 20$ one, and I'm parallelizing Claude to the absolute limit of what I can reasonably keep in mind. And I do that day and night, on week-end too with open-source. Now I'm absolutely convinced that it's by doing crap architectures and design that require 200k token of context before adding a single checkbox. If you apply good design principle and course correct the AI in real time before it commits to really stupid way to fix things (i.e. you don't ask it or let it do things that would make zero sense if you had to do it yourself), then the vibe coding cost way less and is way faster and easier to reason about.