Ask HN: Engineers Focus Using AI

3 points·elchuzade··3 comments

Now that engineers are developing most of the code using AI at a rapid pace, I am curious if distractions from other non-technical people have increased? And is it easy to answer their requests while your coding agent is working?

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I don't believe they are, in the main. I think many folks are in a bubble and believe this to be the case, but the large employers don't have the majority of engineers working today. Think of all the small cap shops, less than 100 employees, with just a couple of folks looking after the on-prem dB. They've not migrated to the cloud. Will they? It's hard to tell.

But engineering is shifting my friend, that's for sure. The syntax master is dead, those who tied their worth to recalling obscure functions and producing the most beautiful code are gone. Engineers need to sit more with the business. We will become a BA/PO engineer hybrid, or the POs will take our jobs and just get agents to build it all.

Architecture is going to CALM. Ontology provides the business definitions. Data contracts form the semantic layer.

All of that can be automated via a GUI into a repo with bots merging, after CI passes.

The apocalypse won't be a revolution, it'll be an evolution. A slow war of attrition.

If you wanna stay ahead, I reckon you're going to have to get used to leaving your agents doing stuff whilst you're talking to the business.

sometimes it's easier, because you can handle some of their requests with a quick AI-vibecoded prototype instead of having endless discussions

on the other hand non-tech people now also expect devs to be insanely fast because they think "AI will do this for you" while ignoring SDLC reality

so I'd say it's the same in the end

Have your agent help answer questions from other people.

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