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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Having a machine that does most of the coding for you means you can have more of the collaborative, human input. You can focus on the UX, you can fix all bugs, you can experiment with new ideas faster than ever. There will be zero excuses for poorly done work - think of all the half-assed corporate apps you have had to use during your career. I think this is the start of a great era in software development.

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I am inclined to think this way in a commercial setting, but for open source contributors, where their work was done for the love of coding, I can understand feeling like the end has arrived. In my company, I'm building the mechanics of factory-coding and trying to get the team think in higher-level terms: what needs to be built, what does it need to do when it deploys, and how can we build the factory that gets that done repeatedly? To me, building the factory is an interesting problem and agentic coding does not eliminate the higher-level design that absolutely must be done, all of which is, to me, the interesting part of software dev.

But none of this is going to bring back actually writing code for the love of it. That will become a hobby kind of like knitting or sewing.

This is the end of software development and the beginning of software management. The problem is you don't need a lot of people to do the later. There are going to be a lot of devs out there vying for the same jobs in the future drastically driving down salaries.

Faster than ever is likely part of the problem. When everyone can go faster and faster, competition becomes fierce and what was once a thought provoking puzzle to solve becomes an exhausting, never ending LLM gogogo. Down time? Spin up 5 more LLMs and write some more prompts to prototype a new UI or something.

And when before iterating on a stupid web page layout might've taken weeks of back and forth - now it can be done during a single meeting.

Or during a sales meeting, an experienced engineer can have a quick prototype done to show the client.

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