alt Hacker News> Give it a couple of years and the companies will not need senior software engineers. They will need someone to steer the AI, maybe. Why would anyone need senior software engineers?
Right, companies won't need software engineers. They'll just need someone who can use tools to produce source code and maintain the generated artifacts, plus make domain-specific technical decisions like "what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time" or "how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed".
We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.
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What makes you think the LLM won’t just handle that on its own, or ask the person doing the “development”?
I honestly don't think that these people will need to think in this level. `message in the queue` is an implementation detail..
I do not know or care what my if statement turned into in x86 assembly unless it becomes a performance problem and even then, I'm not profiling or debugging in machine language. Neither do most developers these days. A message in a queue becomes something akin to that in this era.
I see that I got downvoted there. This is not something I advocate or look forward to but I feel this is where it is going.
Exactly these people will be experts at typing this:
“ Claude! what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time, explain to me with full clarity”
or "Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".
If you think that there is no future where software engineers don’t matter then you are delusional. While the future is not set in stone the pace and trendline of AI point to this future as a MORE realistic future then the alternative.
Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it. Agents at my company already handle our infra.
> We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.
agent herder!
If that comes to pass, I will have to re-evaluate my career options