alt Hacker NewsOn social media, I saw the much more vulgar
“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”
And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
Replies
It's interesting to me, I have never once felt this. I have basically just been excited by using AI for coding. I've been a software engineer for 15 years and before that a physics PH.D. student (and 1 year professional scientist) who focused largely on computational work. I love programming and I've felt reinvigorated by the introduction of AI and developing systems around it.
I tend to think it's just different personality types. There are a lot of different type in engineering. There's a significant set of people that really love to just be given detailed, well described set of work and crank it out, they don't really want to be involved in much outside of just implementing the plan. That is not all engineers but certainly a chunk of them. I could see that group feeling a bit sidelined by AI. But that's not me, so I am just speculating.
We once interviewed a candidate for a senior engineering position and when asked what his primary role was at his current job, he said "I mostly make sure that nobody changes the software".
He wasn't wrong, and his role was still valuable to the company.
The mental model I like to use is something along the lines of the LLM is a firehose and my brain is a mere straw and that we have to eventually get all the important parts to trickle through my straw sized brain. Or another way, the LLM is all the dough shoved into a pasta extruder and all the dough needs to eventually extrude out of my brain into prod-pasta.
A whole new meaning to penetration testing
Describes how I feel.
>"what are we even (left) doing"
Maybe that's you. In my case, it's going better than ever.
With the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed and pushed.
I have been doing daily agentic coding myself since last November, but lately Im having concerns. We are on the verge of becoming Warhammer 40k Tech-Priests: chanting sacred prompts to appease the machine spirit, praying for a good result. The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.