Ask HN: What is the current trajectory of a senior engineer?

11•guitarlimeo•56m ago

Been recently thinking about this more and more: When the need for a human in the design loop ceases?

Given that LLMs are RL'd to the max with everything that can be given a wrong/right answer (code/maths), what currently is stopping Anthropic, OpenAI et al. from internally building (and maybe buying) datasets of good and bad architecture, and RL'ing that?

Given that LLMs were a fancy autocomplete back in 2024, and now people are talking about building "software factories" with the agents, what in your mind is the stop to this development? Why software architecture would be hard for agents still in a year or two?

Just thinking because I see more and more examples of software developers ignoring this and saying "humans still have a place in guiding the agents and designing the architecture". I think (businesswise) the need for actual software programmer skills is 90% out in a few years I think, and product lead etc people will be favored more as they have more people skills.

it was a good run.

Comments

rvz•37m ago

This doesn't make any sense, unless you are just building low critical software such as games that assumes little to no liability.

What will happen is you will get less developers (including less seniors and staff-level) but there will always be expert humans that will check the code before release.

Maybe it was a good run for some here, but you need to look outside of the tech bubble. Do you want an LLM to autonomously fly a commercial plane without any pilots in 2030?

"Seniors" should already know this, but are quickly startled because they are unable to adapt since they based their entire identity and careers around the over-engineering of "clean code", "test driven development" and "architecture" too early on products that make no money, when the LLMs have now cheapened that and taken that role. Even Uncle Bob does not read the code Claude writes in 2026.

Instead, think like an owner.

guitarlimeo•29m ago

> I think (businesswise) the need for actual software programmer skills is 90% out in a few years I think, and product lead etc people will be favored more as they have also more people skills.

"Instead, think like an owner." exactly, the traditional software engineer role has ceased to exist and now you must think like an indie entrepreneur and own things. There will be less than 10% of current engineers checking the code in the near future.

> Do you want an LLM to autonomously fly a commercial plane without any pilots in 2030?

No but I also didn't want LLMs to make decisions for the defense department in USA yet here we are.

markus_zhang•18m ago

Sigh. I never want to be a product people or an owner. Fortunately I’m over 40 and don’t have to work for very long. Good luck folks. I’ll resort to recreational programming when I half retire.

smackeyacky•11m ago

I am a senior engineer. I adapted faster than most of the people I work with. It doesn’t matter that the tool can improve your productivity if you don’t know where to start which a lot of juniors don’t. They still need leaders to guide them and apportion the work.

AI still isn’t a magic bullet either. I spend some of my days undoing the unholy mess that generated code is.

Lwerewolf•2m ago

>Instead, think like an owner.

Exactly. LLMs make it, I'd say, _possible_, to own way more parts of the code than before, and understand even more.

Zealotux•12m ago

I've started looking into creating a pest control business, or maybe renovating furnitures I find on the street. Let me know if you have other ideas for senior engineers.