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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

> This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using from 2022-2025.

Mostly an impact on software development - I'm not seeing broad automation and layoffs in industries like law, finance etc. It will gradually happen but due to issues with memory, reliability and long term planning of LLMs there are real barriers. Even in software development - while it has completely transformed the field I don't think many people still believe we won't need devs in 2027 or that their amount will shrink by 50%.

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I'm optimistic that coding agents will not obsolete software developers - my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased.

My ideal version of all of this is that nobody loses their job and everyone gets to take on more ambitious projects.

I'm not quite naïve enough to assume I'm right about that though!

> my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased

Likewise. I find the types of problems I need to tackle and the challenges they represent are actually quite exhausting, too. And the agents unblock me relentlessly so I’m constantly pressed to do relatively difficult things. Either that or code review. I’m hoping it’ll only be an adjustment phase but this is the most challenging my career has been in over a decade.

If by 50% you mean all juniors/mid-level engineers will not find work, then I agree.

I think other industries are late, but also will see less productivity gains. In software engineering agents have the benefit of very short feedback loops that provide extremely actionable insights which allows the agent to very quickly iterate towards the final solution. This is much less the case in other industries such as law and finance I think. The first pass of the agentic loop is usually something that barely works (you don't even get to see it with the latest models). If that first pass is the primary output in other fields with no tight feedback loops, then the productivity boost will be much lower than in software.

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