Nah man. I understand the frustration, but this is a glass is half empty view.

You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but its inevitable.

Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new world.

And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't changed, and won't change. It's not even about writing the code, the language, the style, the clever tricks. What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years. This game is a long game. And not just how well does the computer run the code, but how well can the humans work with the code.

Use your experience to generate the value from the LLMs, cuase they aren't going to generate anything by themselves.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way.

I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.

Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because:

- book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia

- web content publication and production were democratized away from academia and corporations

- OSes/software/software libraries were all democratized away from corporations through open-source projects

- computer hardware was democratized away from corporations and universities

Each of the above must have cost some gatekeepers some revenue and opportunities. You were not really an idiot just because you benefited from any of them. Analogously, when someone else benefits at some cost to you, that doesn't make them an idiot either.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as a result, I'll want to (and be able to) do even more.

I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Any "idiot" can build their own software tailored to how their brains think, without having to assemble gobs of money to hire expensive software people. Most of them were never going to hire a programmer anyway. Those ideas would've died in their heads.

This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief.

My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me.

Where my concern about LLM generated software comes in is much more existential: how do we train people who know the difference between bad software and good software in the future? What I've seen is a pattern where experienced engineers are excellent at steering AI to make themselves multiples more effective, and junior engineers are replacing their previous sloppy output with ten times their previous sloppy output.

For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term, and overall, many organizations strategically think they are pointed in the right direction doing this and are happy to downsize blaming "AI." And, for places where this never really mattered (like "make my small business landing page,") this is an complete upheaval, without a doubt.

My concern is basically: what will we do long term to get people from one end to another without the organic learning process that comes from having sloppy output curated and improved with a human touch by more senior engineers, and without an economic structure which allows "junior" engineers to subsidize themselves with low-end work while they learn? I worry greatly that in 5-10 years many organizations will end up with 10x larger balls of "legacy" garbage and 10x fewer knowledgeable people to fix it. For an experienced engineer I actually think this is a great career outlook and I can't understand the rug pull take at all; I think that today's strong and experienced engineer will be command a high amount of money and prestige in five years as the bottom drops out of software. From a "global outcomes" perspective this seems terrible, though, and I'm not quite sure what the solution is.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No, it can't. I use claude code and AMP a lot, and yet, unless I pay attention, it easily generate bad code, introduces regressions while trying to fix bugs, get stuck in suboptimal ideas. Modularity is usually terrible, 50 year ideas like cohesion and coupling are, by the very nature of it, mostly ignored except in the most formal rigid ways of mimicry introduced by post-training.

Coding agents are wonderful tools, but people who think they can create and mantain complex systems by themselves are not using them in an optmal way. They are being lazy, or they lack software engineering knowledge and can't see the issues, and in that case they should be using the time saved by coding agents to read hard stuff and elevate their technique.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

It may look the same, but it isn't the same.

In fact if you took the time to truly learn how to do pure agentic coding (not vibe coding) you would realize as a principal engineer you have an advantage over engineers with less experience.

The more war stories, the more generalist experience, the more you can help shape the llm to make really good code and while retaining control of every line.

This is an unprecedented opportunity for experienced devs to use their hard won experience to level themselves up to the equivalence of a full team of google devs.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No they can't. They think they can, but they will still need to put in the elbow grease to get it done right.

But, in my case (also decades of experience), I have had to reconcile with the fact that I'll need to put down the quill pen, and learn to use a typewriter. The creativity, ideas, and obsession with Quality are still all mine, but the execution is something that I can delegate.

I’m with you here.

I grew up without a mentor and my understanding of software stalled at certain points. When I couldn’t get a particular os API to work, in Google and stack overflow didn’t exist, and I had no one around me to ask. I wrote programs for years by just working around it.

After decades writing software I have done my best to be a mentor to those new to the field. My specialty is the ability to help people understand the technology they’re using, I’ve helped juniors understand and fix linker errors, engineers understand ARP poisoning, high school kids debug their robots. I’ve really enjoyed giving back.

But today, pretty much anyone except for a middle schooler could type their problems into a ChatGPT and get a more direct answer that I would be able to give. No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly.

It's not black/white. There's are scales of complexity and innovation, and at the moment, the LLMs are mostly good (with obvious caveats) at helping with the lower end of the complexity scale, and arguably almost nowhere on the innovation scale.

If, as a principal engineer, you were performing basic work that can easily be replicated by an LLM, then you were wasted and mistasked.

Firstly, high-end engineers should be working on the hard work underlying advances in operating systems, compilers, databases, etc. Claude currently couldn't write competitive versions of Linux, GCC (as recently demonstrated), BigQuery, or Postgres.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, LLMs are good at doing work in fields already discovered and demonstrated by humans, but there's little evidence of them being able to make intuitive or innovative leaps forwards. (You can't just prompt Claude to "create a super-intelligent general AI"). To see the need for advances (in almost any field) and to make the leaps of innovation or understanding needed to achieve those advances still takes smart (+/- experienced) humans in 2026. And it's humans, not LLMs, that will make LLMs (or whatever comes after) better.

Thought experiment: imagine training a version of Claude, only all information (history, myriad research, tutorials, YouTube takes and videos, code for v1, v2, etc.) related to LLMs is removed from the training data. Then take that version and prompt it to create an LLM. What would happen?

Short answer: use your expertise in complex project.

Story: I'm dev for about 20 years. First time I had totally the same felling when desktop ui fading away in favor of html. I missed beauty of c# winforms controls with all their alignment and properties. My experience felt irrelevant anymore. Asp.net (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers") looked like evil joke.

Next time it have happened with the raise of clouds. So were all my lovely crafted bash scripts and notes about unix command irrelevant? This time however that was not that personal for me.

Next time - fall of scala as a primary language in big data and its replacement with python. This time it was pretty routine.

Oh and data bases... how many times I heard that rdbms is obsolete and everybody should use mongo/redis/clickhouse?

So learn new things and carry on. Understanding how "obsolete" things works helps a lot to avoid silly mistake especially in situation when world literally reinvent bicycle

I'm surprised that as a principal engineer, you view your greatest skill set as your expertise in programming. While that is certainly an enormous asset, I have never met a principal engineer that hadn't also mastered how to work within the organization to align the right resources to achieve big goals. Working with execs and line managers and engineers directly to bring people together to chase something complex and difficult: that skill is not going to be replaced by LLMs and remains extremely valuable.

I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding feels even more valuable now.

It was never about writing the code—anyone can do that, students in college, junior engineers…

Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well structured (and well-organized) framework… Keeping it as simple as possible that just gets the job done. Designing the code-base in a way that anticipates expansion…

I've never felt the least bit threatened by LLMs.

Now if management sees it differently and experienced engineers are losing their jobs to LLMs, that's a tragedy. (Myself, I just retired a few years ago so I confess to no longer having a dog I this race.)

As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff.

I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same skill. Making good technical decisions.

And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins a hair.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

My experience is the opposite. Those with a passion for the field and the ability to dig deeply into systems are really excited right now (literally all that power just waiting to be guided to do good...and oh does it need guidance!). Those who were just going through the motions and punching a clock are pretty unmotivated and getting ready to exit.

Sometimes I dream about being laid off from my FAANG job so I have some time to use this power in more interesting than I'm doing at work (although I already get to use it in fairly interesting ways in my job).

I consider myself very good at writing software. I built and shipped many projects. I built systems from zero. Embedded, distributed, SaaS- you name it.

I'm having a lot of fun with AI. Any idiot can't prompt their way to the same software I can write. Not yet anyways.

With all due respect. If _any idiot_ can prompt their way to the _same_ software you’d have written, and your primary value proposition is to churn out code, then you’re… a bit of an outlier when it comes to principal engineers.

Good engineers are way more important than they’ve ever been and the job market tells the story. Engineering job posts are up 10% year over year. The work is changing but that’s what happens when a new technology wave comes ashore. Don’t give up, ride the new wave. You’re uniquely qualified.

I am sorry you feel that way but I feel professionally strongly insulted by your statement.

Specifically the implication high LLM affinity implies low professional competence.

"My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM."

Strong disagree.

I've earned my wings. 5 years realtime rendering in world class teams. 13 years in AEC CAD developing software to build the world around us. In the past two years I designed and architected a complex modeling component, plus led the initial productization and rendering efforts, to my employers map offering.

Now I've managed to build in my freetime the easy-to-use consumer/hobbyist CAD application I always wanted - in two years[0].

The hard parts, that are novel and value adding are specific, complex and hand written. But the amount on ungodly boilerplate needed to implement the vision would have taken either a) team and funding or b) 10 years.

It's still raw and alpha and it's coming together. Would have been totally impossible without Claude, Codex and Cursor.

I do agree I'm not an expert in several of the non-core technologies used - webview2 for .net for example, or xaml. But I don't have to be. They are commodity components, architected to their specific slot, replaceable and rewritable as needed.

As an example of component I _had_ professional competence 15 years ago - OpenGL - I don't need to re-learn. I can just spec quickly the renderpasses, stencil states, shader techniques etc etc and have the LLM generate most of that code in place. If you select old, decades old technlogies and techniques and know what you want the output is very usable most of the time (20 year old realtime rendering is practically already timeless and good enough for many, many things).

[0] https://www.adashape.com/

You don't know what you don't know.

Playing with Claude, if you tell it to do something, it'll produce something. Sometimes it's output is ok, sometimes it's not.

I find I need to iterate with Claude, tell it no, tell it how to improve it's solution or do something in a different way. It's kind of like speed running iterating over my ideas without spending a few hours doing it manually, writing lots of code then deleting it to end with my final solution.

If I had no prior coding knowledge i'd go with what ever the LLM gave me and end up with poor quality applications.

Knowing how to code gives you the advantage still using an LLM. Saying that, i'm pessimistic what my future holds as an older software engineer starting to find age/experince is an issue when an employer can pay someone less with less experience to churn out code with prompts when a lot of time the industry lives by "it's good enough".

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

You sound quite jaded. The people I see struggling _the most_ at prompting are people who have not learned to write elegantly. HOWEVER, a huge boon is that if you're a non-native English speaker and that got in your way before, you can now prompt in your native language. Chinese speakers in particular have an advantage since you use fewer tokens to say the same thing in a lot of situations.

> Talk about a rug pull!

Talk to product managers and people who write requirements for a living. A PM at MSFT spoke to me today about how panicked he and other PMs are right now. Smart senior engineers are absorbing the job responsibilities of multiple people around them since fewer layers of communication are needed to get the same results.

IMHO any idiot can create a piece of crap. It takes experience to create good software. Use your experience Luke! Now you have a team of programmers to create what ever you fancy! Its been great for me, but I have only been programming C++ for 36 years.

Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon.

What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!"

This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic but because of the way life goes he never really had opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super excited about it, used it a lot to make tons and tons of pictures for everything that his mind could think of. However, after awhile this excitement waned and he realized that he didn't actually learn anything at all. At that point he decided to find some time and spend more time practicing drawing to be able to make things by himself with his own skills, not by some chip on the other side of the world and he greatly improved in the past couple of years.

So, AI can certainly help create all the "fun!!!" projects for people who just want to see the end result, but in the end would they actually learn anything?

I might be wrong but this sounds like an ego issue more than anything. Twice you berated less skilled programmers. I’m skilled as well and it did sting when I realized that a relatively new technology could beat me. But there’s so much more to it, especially PMs. PMs find big high value problems and solve them. The coding should be the easy part. If your coding skills are such a big part of your identity and you enjoy the feeling of superiority, a good therapist (chatgpt maybe lol) could be useful.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

My greatest frustration with AI tools is along a similar line. I’ve found that people I work with who are mediocre use it constantly to sub in for real work. A new project comes in? Great, let me feed it to Copilot and send the output to the team to review. Look, I contributed!

When it comes time to meet with customers let’s show them an AI generated application rather than take the time to understand what their existing processes are.

There’s a person on my team who is more senior than I am and should be able to operate at a higher level than I can who routinely starts things in an AI tool but then asks me to take over when things get too technical.

In general I feel it’s all allowed organizations to promote mediocrity. Just so many distortions right now but I do think those days are numbered and there will be a reversion to the mean and teams will require technical excellence again.

Yes, the LLM can write it. No, the LLM cannot architect a complex system and weave it all together into a functioning, workable, tested system. I have a 400 table schema networked together with relationships, backrefs, services, well tested, nobody could vibe code their way to what I've built. That kind of software requires someone like yourself to steer the LLM.

Even as a principal engineer, there is an infinite number of things you don't know.

Suppose you get out of your comfort zone to do something entirely new; AI will be much more helpful for you than it is for people who spent years developing their skills.

AI is the great equalizer.

I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling.

However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy, and embrace life and the present moment as it is.

I am just finishing the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and your comment made me think about what is explained in it. Tolle talks about how much of our suffering comes from how deeply we (understandably) tie our core identity and self-worth to our external skills, our past achievements, and our status among peers.

He explains that our minds construct an ego, with which we identify. To exist, this ego needs to create and constantly feed an image of itself based on our past experiences and achievements. Normally we do this out of fear, in an attempt to protect ourselves, but the book explains that this never works. We actually build more suffering by identifying with our mind-constructed ego. Instead of living in the present and accepting the world as it is, we live in the past and resist reality in order to constantly feed an ego that feels menaced.

The deep expertise you built is real, but your identity is so much more than just being a 'principal engineer'. Your real self is not the mind-constructed ego or the image you built of yourself, and you don't need to identify with it.

The book also explores the Buddhist concept that all things are impermanent, and by clinging to them we are bound to suffer. We need to accept that things come and go, and live in the present moment without being attached to things that are by their nature impermanent.

I suggest you might take this distress you are feeling right now as an opportunity to look at what is hurting inside you, and disidentify yourself from your ego. It may bring you joy in your life—I am trying to learn this myself!

> I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.

That remains to be seen. There's a huge difference between an experienced engineer using LLMs in a controlled way, reviewing their code, verifying security, and making sure the architecture makes sense, and a random person vibecoding a little app - at least for now.

Maybe that will change in a year or two or five or never, but today LLMs don't devalue expert knowledge. If anything, LLMs allow expert programmers to increase productivity at the same level of quality, which makes them even more valuable compared to entry-level programmers than they were before.

I am a principal engineer too. In the last 5 months I have been working on a project using the latest LLMs. 5 years ago that project would have required 30 engineers. Now I am alone but need at least 5 more months to have an MVP. You are just not working on projects that are complex and difficult enough. There are so many projects that I have in mind that feel within reach and I would have never considered 5 years ago.

very hard to feel sorry of you when countless professions experienced the same in the past - only that they were poor / working class and not overpaid software engineers at FAANG.

also very egocentric & pessimist way to look at things. humankind is much better off when anyone can produce software and skilled experts will always be needed, just maybe with a slightly different skillset.

> As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull!

Really?

The vibe coders are running into a dark forest with a bunch of lobsters (OpenClaw) getting lost and confused in their own tech debt and you're saying they can prompt their way to the same software?

Someone just ended up wiping their entire production database with Claude and you believe that your experience is for nothing, towards companies that need stable infrastructure and predictability.

Cognitive debt is a real thing and being unable to read / write code that is broken is going to be an increasing problem which experienced engineers can solve.

Do not fall for the AI agent hype.

Yes, anyone can generate code, but real engineering remains about judgment and structure. AI amplifies throughput, but the bottleneck is still problem framing, abstraction choice, and trade-off reasoning. Capabilities without these foundations produce fragile, short-lived results. Only those who anchor their work in proper abstractions are actually engineering, no matter who’s writing the code.

I feel it is about being disinterested than about being good. the ones who were not interested(whether good or bad) and were trapped in a job are liberated and happy to see it be automated.

The ones who are frustrated are the ones who were interested in doing(whether good or bad) but are being told by everyone that it is not worth it do it anymore.

I don't find the same, like you, principle/CTO engineer, there's a world of difference between simplistic prompt/vibe coding and building a properly architected/performant/maintainable system with agentic coding.

youre getting it backwards. anyone can get to something that looks alright in a browser... until you actually click something and it fails spectacularly, leaks secrets, doesn't scale beyond 10 users and is a swamp of a codebase that prevents clean ongoing extension = hard wall for non techies, suddenly the magical LLM stops producing results and makes things worse.

All this senior engineering experience is a critical advantage in these new times, you implicitly ask things slightly different and circumvent these showstoppers without even thinking if you are that experienced. You don't even need to read the code at all, just a glimpse in the folder and scrolling a few meters of files with inline "pragmatic" snippets measured in meters and you know its wrong without even stepping through it. even if the autogenerated vanity unit tests say all green.

Don't feel let down. Slightly related to when Google sprung into existence - everyone has access and can find stuff, but knowing how to search well is an art even today most people don't have, and makes dramatic differences in everyday usage. Amplified now with the AI search results even that often are just convincing nonsense but most people cannot see it. That intuitive feel from hard won experience about what is "wrong" even without having an instant answer what would be "right" is getting more and more the differentiator.

Anyone can force their vibe coded app into some shape thats sufficient for their own daily use and they're used to avoiding their own pitfalls of the tool they created and know are there, but as soon as there's some kind of scaling (scope, users, revenue, ...) involved, true experts are needed.

Even the new agent tools like Claude for X products at the end perform dramatically different in the hands of someone who knows the domain in depth.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

Not only it would be good if true, but it is also not true. Good programmers learn how to build things, for the most part, since they know what to build, and have a general architectural idea of what they are going to build. Without that, you are like the average person in the 90s with Corel Draw in their hands, or the average person with an image diffusion model today: the output will be terrible because of lack of taste and ideas.

Same level of engineer here - I feel that the importance of expertise has only increased, just that the language has changed. Think about the engineer who was an expert in Cobol and Fortran but didn't catch the C++ / Java wave. What would you say to them?

LLMs goof up, hallucinate, make many mistakes - especially in design or architecting phase. That's where the experience truly shines.

Plus, it let's you integrate things that you aren't good at (UI for me).

Nah - I've also spent decades trying to become the best software developer I can and now it is giving me enormous power. What used to take me 5 days is now taking me a day, and my output is now higher quality. I now finish things properly with the docs, and the nooks and crannies before moving on.

What used to take incompetent developers 5 days - it is still taking them 5 days.

I fancy myself pretty good at writing software, and here's my path in:

All the tools I passed up building earlier in my career because they were too laborious to build, are now quite easy to bang out with Claude Code and, say, an hour of careful spec writing...

The best programmers I know are the ones most excited about it.

The mediocre programmers who are toxic gate keepers seem to be the ones most upset by it.

I don't understand this sentiment at all.

For me it, feels more like a way integrate search results immediately into my code. Did you also feel threatened by stack overflow?

If you actually try it you'll find it's a multiplier of insight and knowledge.

As a senior engineer if your value add was "accumulated expert knowledge". Then yes, you are in a bad place.

If instead it was building and delivering products / business value. Good judgement, coordination and communication skills, intuition, etc… then you are now way way more leveraged than you ever were and it has never been greater.

You summed up my feelings pretty well, thanks for this counterpoint to usual comments in HN

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

They simply can't in my experience. Most people cannot prompt their way out of a wet paper sack. The HN community is bathed in thoughtful, high quality writing 24/7/365, so I could see how a perception to the contrary might develop.

For me this is a painting vs photography thing

Painting used to be the main way to make portraits, and photography massively democratized this activity. Now everyone can have as many portraits as they want

Photography became something so much larger

Painting didn't disappear though

That's how progress looks like! We need less to produce more. The less includes less skill and human capital.

For me, LLMs just help a lot with overcoming writer's block and other ADHD related issues.

I find fun in using opencode and Claude to create projects but I can't find the energy to run the project or read the code.

Watching this program do stuff is more enjoyable then using or looking at the stuff produced.

But it doesn't produce code that looks or is designed the way I would normally. And it can't do the difficult or novel things.

Based on your comment you’re probably not a very good principal engineer ;)

Hence, you are back in the group of those who should benefit from LLMs. Following your own logic :)

Ps: please don’t take it seriously

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

Well, this is not what the main value of software actually is? Its not about prompting a one shot app, sure there will be some millionaires making an app super successful by coincidence (flapp bird, eg.), but in most cases software & IT engineering is about the context, integration, processes, maintenance, future development etc.

So actually you are in perfect shape?

And no worries: The one who werent good at writing code, will now fail because of administration/uptime/maintenance/support. They will fail just one step later.