Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404753

It does seem like most of the American economy since factories left has been information asymmetry. The travel agents had the "special phone number" to call to get someone on a boat for half the price. Probably a little bit more than that. We're going to entering a time of crushing economic conditions.

FWIW I just did in four hours what would have taken me about two weeks for my side project.

The boring routine parts of software engineering are no more. My project is elixir phoenix and tailwind. The AI and I completely overhauled my sites UI and UX and implemented many bug fixes and effectively relaunched my website in four hours.

If you were an experienced dev coming into this, you should definitely learn how to work with AI tools.

When I book online, I receive the ticket. I don’t receive a ticket of an imaginary flight of a made up company with the notice “you should check the validity of the ticket yourself”.

while AI does lower the barrier to who can do software development it does not nullify their need only moves them into more complicated domains. Yes, if you're job as a SWE was building landing pages, you're pretty much cooked. But if you're working in complicated domains, or domains that require a level of technical awareness or social skills to create success, AI is just an amplifier and makes the boring/frustrating parts easier.

I am using claude to build a pretty complicated project. Technically, a lot of what i am prompting are things that other people could prompt. But I also do find myself leveraging a lot of knowledge in shaping what the code should do and how it should do it, and also needing to step in when claude reaches limits of it's training. I am confident that the number of people who could build what I am building is pretty small.

So I think the author is creating a narrative that is unfounded. There will always be software engineers. There will always be engineering challenges that it takes a human to resolve. Yes, always; no matter how "smart" the AI gets. For sure, AI will be taking some development jobs. But calling for a collapse is simply hyperbole, shortsighted and naive.

I really don't understand the fetishisizing of the demise of software engineers. Are other knowledge workers like doctors or lawyers going to be exterminated by AI? Or is there even a fantasizing of their demise? The only reason I can think of is shmchaudenfreud (it is relatively barrierless to get into and pays pretty well) and more importantly imo doesn't have cabals like other professions do.

Btw I love using my Claude code to crank out product but I don't get off looking for the day when engineers are a dead breed!

Typing arcane language into a computer has never been the hard part of programming. Getting a flight ticket was the hard part of making travel happen. No Silver Bullet is as valid today as it was back then.

The interesting question is how much more software we actually need. Will software be done one day, all built up, similar to railway networks? With LLMs, software engineering might get cheaper, but it can also lead to increased demand. Resource getting cheaper actually very often leads to demand skyrocketing, as it becomes accessible to new markets.