alt Hacker NewsI think we already know what we need to do: encourage people to do the work themselves, discourage beginners from immediately asking an LLM for help and re-introducing some kind of oral exam. As the article mentions, banning LLMs is impractical and what we really need are people who can tell when the LLM is confidently wrong; not people who don't know how to work with an LLM.
I hope it will encourage people to think more about what they get out of the work, what doing the work does for them; I think that's a good thing.
I think we'll get there. We need to get at least some AI bust going first though. It's impossible to talk sense into people who think AI is about to completely replace engineers, or even those who think that, while it might not replace engineers, it's going to be doing 100% of all coding within a year. Or even that it can do 100% of coding right now.
There's a couple unfortunate truths going on all at the same time:
- People with money are trying to build the "perfect" business: SaaS without software eng headcount. 100% margin. 0 Capex. And finally near-0 opex and R&D cost. Or at least, they're trying to sell the idea of this to anyone who will buy. And unfortunately this is exactly what most investors want to hear, so they believe every word and throw money at it. This of course then extends to many other business and not just SaaS, but those have worse margins to start with so are less prone to the wildfire.
- People who used to code 15 years ago but don't now, see claude generating very plausible looking code. Given their job is now "C suite" or "director", they don't perceive any direct personal risk, so the smell test is passed and they're all on board, happily wreaking destruction along the way.
- People who are nominally software engineers but are bad at it are truly elevated 100x by claude. Unfortunately, if their starting point was close to 0, this isn't saying a lot. And if it was negative, it's now 100x as negative.
- People who are adjacent to software engineering, like PMs, especially if they dabble in coding on the side, suddenly also see they "can code" now.
Now of course, not all capital owners, CTOs, PMs, etc exhibit this. Probably not even most. But I can already name like 4 example per category above from people I know. And they're all impossible to explain any kind of nuance to right now. There's too many people and articles and blog posts telling them they're absolutely right.
We need some bust cycle. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion of how we can leverage LLMs (we'll stop calling it "AI"...) to still do the team sport known as software engineering.
Because there's real productivity gains to be had here. Unfortunately, they don't replace everyone with AGI or allow people who don't know coding or software engineering to build actual working software, and they don't involve just letting claude code stochastically generate a startup for you.