alt Hacker NewsUp until about four months ago, the sentiment by so many programmers online (here, reddit, etc) was that LLMs were absolutely useless at coding. And yet, many of us were puzzled, because we were having success with them, at coding.
People were burying their heads.
Today, there are not many of those people left. Some, but not a lot. Because you can only deny reality for so long.
I don't know what the coding world is going to look like in 5-10 years, but everything has changed radically in the space of a year from maybe 10% of people using agents to code to probably 95% of people now. In about a YEAR.
I don't know, but my assumption is these things will get better to a point where they will be automating close to 100% of coding, and deploying, and verifying, etc. The old job we had will be completely changed well before 10 years. I still think us "engineers" will have a role to play, but I genuinely don't know what it will look like.
> I don't know what the coding world is going to look like in 5-10 years, but everything has changed radically in the space of a year from maybe 10% of people using agents to code to probably 95% of people now. In about a YEAR.
Last I saw about a week ago, the stats were about 35%. There may be some confusion around this:
1. The absolute number could have remained the same but the sheer volume of vibe-coders who never coded before raised the percentage. For example, if 100 out of a population of 1000 people uses AI then the percentage is 10%. If, over the next year 9k new vibers were created but none of the existing 1000 people changed their workflow, you will see 9100 people out of 10000 people using AI - that's now a 91% rate of people using AI to code even though none of the people since last year changed the way they work.
2. Last I checked, pre-AI, there were about 12m working developers in the world (SO survey extrapolated). As of February this year, CC, by itself, had 60k subscribers. Even if we err on the side of optimism and assume every single subscriber is running the agent, that's still not 95% of developers.
> I still think us "engineers" will have a role to play, but I genuinely don't know what it will look like.
??? We already know what it looks like - "Business Analyst" has bee a role since forever (at least since 1995, when I entered the workforce). If you wanted a role where you wrote no code but merely drew up specs for the programmers to code, you could have had it as a BA.
It's just that few of us wanted to do that as it paid half what an engineer made. Now with the supply of BAs potentially doubling, it will pay a quarter of what an engineer used to make.