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Comment by evoluketion | Hacker News Reader

Except the problem with this is an engine designer doesnt want to pivot to designing a stronger driveshaft, or strengthening the gears of a gearbox, or designing more efficient brakes. They're an engine builder.

Same goes for software. 20 years ago I got into software development for the love and passion of solving problems and writing code. Now I've been forced to pivot to a glorified BA/Products Manager. It sucks.

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Bide your time. When the eventual hangover arrives your talents will be in short supply. AI providers are essentially making a long bet: that they will be able to improve faster than the messes that they make are growing. But that can't keep going forever. AI is an accelerator: it will accelerate you if you were careful before towards something better and it will accelerate you towards something much worse if you were not. Just like any other power tool.

I've recently talked about how it makes almost zero sense to ever delegate anything again at work. 3-6 months ago, that was not a thing. 12 months ago, that would have gotten me laughed out of the room. Wherever we are headed, we are not even close to the steady state

> Wherever we are headed, we are not even close to the steady state

That I agree with, but the messes are already catching up with some early adopters and I've been watching a couple of these up close with the roughly same level of interest that you'd bring to a road accident if you were part of the technical investigation team. It is more than a little interesting to me how the difference between the initial conditions seems to be a fairly good predictor of the outcome. Great teams are doing quite well with this new tech, others, not so much. And great teams were rare to begin with.

The never-delegate is silly. That would mean a CEO would just vibe-code the whole product alone, which in turn would mean anyone can do it. I haven't seen this happen at any reasonable scale yet.

The flip side of that is as someone who got into software development 20 years ago because I love to design and make products... Well this is pretty great. I feel for my colleagues, though. And it's not like the "coding problem" is solved, much to the dismay of the hype machine.

Engineering changes, but principles and skills still apply. Good engineers are able to switch languages, move from low to higher levels, and also move to AI-supported coding. A good software engineer is much more than a coding monkey. Although it's true that for many of them, the most fun part of the work is going away.

Exactly. For many of us, designing and writing code has always been the fun part; reviewing and whatnot, the parts that are still left for us meatbags, was more of a chore.

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