Looks like something AI would say. Regardless of how it really was written

I see the post is even flagged now.

Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom.

I’ve been programming for 30+ years and leading teams for the last 20 - and I found the essay deeply insightful.

I realise I’m a sample size of 1, but just figured I’d comment here to advocate against this post being flagged. Surprised that it is.

A surgeon (no coding experience) used Claude to write a web app to track certain things about procedures he had done. He deployed the app on a web hosting provided (PHP LAMP stack). He wanted to share it with other doctors, but wasn't sure if it was 'secure' or not. He asked me to read the code and visit the site and provide my opinion.

The code was pretty reasonable. The DB schema was good. And it worked as expected. However, he routinely zipped up the entire project and placed the zip files in the web root and he had no index file. So anyone who navigated to the website saw the backups named Jan-2026.backup, etc. and could download them.

The backups contained the entire DB, all the project secrets, DB connection strings, API credentials, AWS keys, etc.

He had no idea what an 'index' file was and why that was important. Last I heard he was going to ask Claude how to secure it.

1) I guess I am not included in the set named "most software engineers."

2) If the title is "Software Engineer," I think I should be engineering, not coding.

This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?"

Of course I don't think it's a binary decision.

Although I more more motivated by building things, I do somewhat miss the programmer flow state I used to get more often.

One concrete example of this realization was when I was researching how to optimize my claude code environment with agents, skills, etc. I read a lot of technical documents on how these supplemental plugins work and how to create them. After an hour of reading through all this, I realized I could just ask Claude to optimize the environment for me given the project context. So I did, and it was able to point out plugins, skills, agents that I can install or create. I gave it permission to create them and it all worked out.

This was a case of where I should not think more technically deeper, but at a more "meta" level to define the project enough for Claude to figure out how to optimize the environment. Whether that gave real gains is another question of course. But I have anecdotally observed faster results and less token usage due context caching and slightly more tools-directed prompts.

No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level.

An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

I don't think this is true. I'm pretty sure most of them do it because it pays good salary.

These, surely, are the skills they always needed? Anyone who didn't have these skills was little more than a human chatgpt already, receiving prompts and simply presenting the results to someone for evaluation.

What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added. For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.

Prompt: "The text of the blog article is copy-pasted below. Please summarize it in one parargaph."

Result: "The blog article explores the paradox that while AI has made coding easier by automating many tasks, it has also made the role of software engineers significantly harder. AI tools have raised expectations for productivity, leading to increased workloads and burnout without corresponding support or recognition. Engineers, especially juniors, are now expected to take on broader responsibilities—ranging from product thinking to deployment—while the hands-on act of writing code has diminished. This shift in roles and expectations is often unacknowledged by leadership, creating a disconnect between those who use AI tools and those who manage the work. The article emphasizes the growing complexity of the engineer's job, the burnout that results from unrealistic demands, and the identity crisis many engineers face as their core role changes. It calls for better leadership, structured training, and realistic expectations to avoid the erosion of trust and talent in the industry."

Whatever. Blog posts about AI that dance around the topic are not that valuable. For a project, you'll hire somebody, not some AI (as bcachefs' author does). What matters is that you trust a person to do the job, and expecting them to churn code is useless. The real benefits of someone appear on their CV (experience, known technologies, human abilities -- communication, empathy, understanding).

AI generated content is an existential threat to human knowledge.

I'd say this -- if you really want to be a real engineer, you should avoid many career paths out there. Potentially ANY positions DIRECTLY facing business stakeholders is at best not a good choice, and at worst deprive your already remote chance to be a good engineer. The lower level you move into, the better, because the environment FORCES you to be a true engineer -- either you don't and fail, or you do and keep the job.

The scenario I'm somewhat worried about is that instead of 1 PM, 1 designer and 5 developers, there will be 1 PM, 1 designer and 1 developer. Even if tech employment stays stable or even slightly increases due to Jevons paradox, the share of software developers in tech employment will shrink.

I was always a mediocre engineer, and stopping out on a personal usually happened bc "feature XYZ is way too hard to build and I won't spend another three weeks on it". Nowadays anything can be built in a couple of days, scope creep plus "would be cool if it could also do XYZ" makes it harder to walk away from a project and call it done.

But ofc these are personal projects, and I use them daily (like a personal workout system and tracker which I run w/ Claude Code, which love to call Claude Co-Workout). It doesn't "work" as a standalone app. It's mostly a "display system" for whatever CC outputs to me, so I can take the daily workout to the gym.

I got into software bc I liked to put out fun products and projects; I never really liked the process of writing software itself. But either way I'm still running into the "it's harder to put projects out than ever" dilemma, even though the projects are way easier to make, and higher quality than ever.

I'm wondering if it'd be fun to have a "Ask HN: Show us what you've build with (mostly) AI" thread?

This resonates somewhat, but for a different reason. My mental model is that there are two kinds of developers, the craftsmen and the artists.

The artist considers the act of writing code their actual fulfillment. They thrive on beautifully written code. They are often attached to their code to a point where they will be hurt if someone criticizes (or even deletes) it.

The craftsman understands that code exists to serve a purpose and that is to make someone's life easier. This can be a totally non-technical customer/user that now can get their work done better. It could be another developer that benefits from using a library we wrote.

The artist hates LLMs as it takes away their work and replaces their works of beauty with generic, templatized code.

The craftsman acknowledges that LLMs are another tool in the toolbelt and using them will make them create more benefits for their customers.

Interestingly, most jobs don't incentivize working harder or smarter, because it just leads to more work, and then burn-out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automati...

In the past, I would give them an assignment and they would take a few days to return with the implementation. I was able to see them struggling, they would learn, they would communicate and get frustrated by their own solution, then iterate.

Today, there are two kinds: 1) the ones who take a marginally smaller amount of time because they’re busy learning, testing and self reviewing, and 2) the ones who watch Twitch or Youtube videos while Claude does the job and come to me after two hours with “done, what’s next” while someone has to comb through the mess.

Leadership might see #2 and think they’re better, faster. But they are just a fucking boat anchor that drags down the whole team while providing nothing more than a shitty interface to an LLM in return.

I think there's a big split between those who derive meaning and enjoyment from the act of writing code or the code itself vs. those who derive it from solving problems (for which the code is often a necessary byproduct). I've worked with many across both of these groups throughout my career.

I am much more in the latter group, and the past 12mo are the most fun I've had writing software in over a decade. For those in the first group, it's easy to see how this can be an existential crisis.

If you give an AI a very general prompt to make an app that does X, it could build that in any imaginable way. Someone who doesn't know how these things are done wouldn't understand what way was chosen and the trade-offs involved. If they don't even look at the code, they have no idea how it works at all. This is dangerous because they are entirely dependant on the AI to make good decisions and to make any changes in the future.

Someone who practices engineering by researching, considering their options, planning and designing, and creating a specification, leaves nothing up to chance. When the prompt is detailed, the outcome is constrained to the engineer's intent. If they then review the work by seeing that it wrote what they had in mind, they know that it worked and they know that the system design matches their own design. They know how it works because they designed it and they can modify that design. They can and have read the code so they can modify it without the help of the AI.

If you know what code you want generated, reviewing it is easy - just look and see if it's what you expected. If you didn't think ahead about what the code would look like, reviewing is hard because you have to start by figuring out what the codebase even does.

This goes the same for working in small iterations rather than prompting am entire application into existence. We all know how difficult it is to review large changes and why we prefer small changes. Those same rules apply for iterations regardless of whether it was written by a person or an AI.

AI code generation can be helpful if the engineer continues acting as an engineer. It's only when someone who isn't an engineer or when an engineer abdicates their responsibilities to the AI that we end up with an unmaintainable mess. It's no different than amateurs writing scripts and spreadsheets without a full understanding of the implications of their implementation. Good software comes from good engineering, not just generating code; the code is merely the language by which we express our ideas.

I stopped here. Was this written by an an LLM? This sentence in particular reads exactly like the author supplied said essay as context and this sentence is the LLM's summarization of it. Nowhere is the original article linked, either, further decreasing trust. Moreover, there's an ad at the bottom for some BS "talent" platform to hire the author. This article is probably an LLM generated ad.

My trust is vacated.

This makes me feel that the SWE work/identity crisis is less important than the digital trust crisis.

A. Measurably demonstrate that atleast 50% of code/tests are AI generated.

B. X% Faster delivery timelines due to improved productivity tools.

You can't expect to make a pizza in 50% less time just because you bought a faster doughmaker. Specially when you don't even know whether the dough comes out under kneaded, over kneaded or as plain lumps!

So for me being able to have AI wrote certain things extremely fast with me just doing voice to text with my specific approach, is amazing.

I am all in on everything AI and have a discord server just for openclaw and specialized per repo assistants. It really feels like when I'm busy I can throw it an issue tracker number for things.

Then I will ssh via vs code or regular ssh which forwards my ssh key from 1password. My agents have read only repo access and I can push only when I ssh in. Super secure. Sorry for the tangent to the article but I have always loved coding now I love it even more.

> That is not an upgrade. That is a career identity crisis.

This is not X. It is Y.

> The trap is ...

> This gap matters ...

> This is not empowerment ...

> This is not a minor adjustment...

Your typical AI slop rhetorical phrasing.

Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep"

These sound analytical but are lightly defined. They function as named concepts without rigorous definition or empirical grounding.

There might be some good arguments in the article, but AI slop remains AI slop.

In any case, I think we should start treating the majority of code as a commodity that will be thrown away sooner or later.

I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/most-code-deserves-to-die - it was inspired by another conversation on HN.

That can't be right?

LLMs Can accelerate you if you use best practices and focus on provability and quality, but if you produce slop LLMs will help you produce slop faster.

... most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day.

Actually surprised none of the other comments have picked up on this, as I don't think it's especially about AI. But the periods of my career when I've been actually writing code and solving complicated technical problems have been the most rewarding times in my life, and I'd frequently work on stuff outside work time just because I enjoyed it so much. But the other times when I was just maintaining other people's code, or working on really simple problems with cookie-cutter solutions, I get so demotivated that it's hard to even get started each day. 100%, I do this job for the challenges, not to just spend my days babysitting a fancy code generation tool.

Is this still true?

A SWE who bases their entire identity and career around only writing code is not an engineer - they are a code monkey.

The entire point of hiring a Software ENGINEER is to help translate business requirements into technical requirements, and then implement the technical requirements into a tangible feature or product.

The only reason companies buy software is because the alternative means building in-house, and for most industries software is a cost-center not a revenue generator.

I don't pay (US specific) 200K-400K TCs for code monkeys, I pay that TC for Engineers.

And this does a disservice to the large portion of SWEs and former SWEs (like me) who have been in the industry because we are customer-outcome driven (how do we use code to solve a tangible customer need) and not here to write pretty code.

it's all so fucking tiresome

"This is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental shift in professional identity. "

"That is not empowerment. That is scope creep without a corresponding increase in compensation"

Honestly, it's lazy. At least edit the bloody thing.

THE MARKET WILL FILL THAT VOID

IT DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE

Also, check out the dude's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanturkovic/

Another little thing that resonated was a tweet that said "some will use it to learn everything and some so that they don't have to learn anything ". Of course it's not really a hard truth. It's questionable how much you can learn without really getting your hands dirty. But I do think people looking at it as a tool that helps then and/or makes them better will profit more than people looking to cut corners.

> Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day.

> Now they are being told to stop.

Yeah, so what I've been realizing from witnessing the Rise of the Agents™ is that there are tons of developers that actually don't like writing code and were in it for the money all along. Nothing wrong with money --- I love the green stuff myself --- but it definitely sucks to have their ambivalence (at best) or disdain (at worst) for the craft imposed on the rest of us.

Feel free to replace `writing code` for most work functions that are enjoyable for some that are being steamrolled by Big AI atm (writing, graphic design, marketing copy, etc.).