alt Hacker NewsAs someone else who is an IT consultant.
You need to run away from any client who thinks your primary purpose is to write code. You must run away from the business if YOU think your primary purpose is to write code.
You should be able to write code and do it well, But the AIs, and I'm not even talking about the ones on the frontier, have been able to write code faster than I have for quite some time.
What you need to explain to your customers is all the things around writing code: software architecture, performance, and so on. Also make sure you have some understanding of the customers business, so you can suggest additional ways to make their lives better/make more money.
Software developers have a chance. Code monkeys? None.
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bingo. to give an analogy in terms of law firms - you can either be a partner who brings in new business or the associate who does the grunt work of reviewing/writing contracts.
guess one which is valuable ?
That's a popular type of AI cope.
First, I am aware they have been able to write code for some time. I made my first LLM coding agent experiment the day after ChatGPT first blew up in November 2022.
I haven't been a "code monkey" in the last say 15 or 20 years of my programming. I would argue also that code money was never really a thing, it was just an excuse that pretentious overpaid developers used for the existence of underpaid exploited programmers. 95% of programmers have to do requirements analysis and design regardless of their pay grade. I learned a long time ago how important requirements analysis and good design is. And the jobs I am applying to largely specify architecture and requirements analysis in the description. Employers are aware of code generation tools.
But also, the premise that writing the code is not the hard part is just nonsense. Sure requirements analysis is harder than people realize, good design is hard and so is understanding things about proper and closed iteration. But that stuff is not, in the aggregate, harder than the code.
And also, frontier models can absolutely do requirements analysis and architecture. And the sheer speed of implementation means that there is a huge built-in advantage for iterating more effectively.
The problem is Claude Fable is now better than most programmers I know at software architecture and performance optimization as well.